This paper attempts to reveal the opportunities that could arise from the revival of abandoned settlements rich in architecturally interesting buildings in the rural renaissance context. Concepts ...such as settlement abandonment, land abandonment, back to land movement, and rural renaissance are behind the need for the rural settlements' renaissance and are analyzed briefly herein. The paper focuses on the municipality of Prespes in Greece, a natural habitat with plenty of abandoned or declining settlements. The outstanding landscape, the deserted buildings that still have architectural interest and the area's rurality provide an interdisciplinary frame for looking into the renaissance of abandoned rural settlements from a new perspective. Area censuses reveal abandoned, sparsely populated or declining settlements, which could follow specially designed action plans for their revitalization; the land cover also indicates development opportunities for each settlement. Finally, the paper outlines proposals for the revitalization and sustainable development of the study area.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Digital technologies are changing how and where we live, work and socialize. Rural areas are distinctive spaces and places but in the current debates of new digital phenomena, digital spaces and ...practices risk not being contextualized with sensitivities to rural geographies. This study aims to map how digital has been examined to date in rural-focused studies, and accordingly present propositions for how rural-digital studies can be sensitive to the distinctive and diverse character of rural spaces and places. We conduct a two-stage/scale literature review, combining 1) computational topic modelling from a Global Dataset (459 article abstracts) with 2) qualitative content analysis from a sub-dataset focusing on the Nordic region (Nordic Sub-Dataset, 17 full articles). We begin with a topic modelling analysis generating ten major themes (topics) leading to an overview of how research areas are connected to the meaning of rural context. Turning to the Nordic region, as an in-depth example, we illustrate the complexity of rural digital geographies, through a qualitative content analysis. This demonstrates that digital in rural contexts are primarily positioned outwardly as social/regional development and business/economy, and less situated inwardly through individual experience and community building. Combined we show a wide spectrum of rural-digital relations but demonstrate that rural contexts in rural-digital relations need more attention. We propose three propositions to invite deeper rural contextualizations in future digital studies to uphold the importance of rural spaces and places through, by and with digital geography.
•Literature review combining topic modelling and qualitative content analysis.•Ten topics dominate the global rural-digital literature.•Digital situated outwardly as social/regional development and business/economy.•Digital situated inwardly through individual experience and community building.•Three propositions for deeper rural contextualizations in future digital research.
The direction, complexity and pace of rural change in affluent, western societies can be conceptualized as a multifunctional transition, in which a variable mix of consumption and protection values ...has emerged, contesting the former dominance of production values, and leading to greater complexity and heterogeneity in rural occupance at all scales. This transition is propelled by three dominant driving forces, namely: agricultural overcapacity; the emergence of market-driven amenity values; and growing societal awareness of sustainability and preservation issues. Australia's generous supply of land and sparse investment in agriculture has facilitated local transitions towards enhanced consumption and protection values, enabling a clearer delineation of emerging differentiated modes of rural occupance than in more contested locales. In Australia seven distinctive modes of occupance can be identified, according to the relative precedence given to production, consumption or protection values. These modes are described as: productivist agricultural; rural amenity; small farm (or pluriactive); peri-metropolitan; marginalized agricultural; conservation; and indigenous. Within these seven modes, alternative trajectories are identified, indicating variability in the intensity and type of resource use. Articulation of the transition concept may provide synergy between discrete discourses in rural research.
Rural geography III Woods, Michael
Progress in Human Geography,
02/2012, Letnik:
36, Številka:
1
Book Review, Journal Article
Recenzirano
Global concerns such as climate change and food security have focused renewed attention on the future of rural space. Although the direct engagement of rural geographers with climate change and food ...security has been limited to date, recent research in rural geography holds a number of lessons on these issues, highlighting, for example, spatial and social differentiation in the development of alternative food networks and the challenge of contested discourses of rurality to technocratic solutions to both food security and climate change. Through such perspectives, rural geography has a strong and distinctive contribution to make to research on both issues.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
CEKLJ, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
An indicator system is constructed and applied for comprehensive measurement of rural vulnerability in China’s counties. Through the selection of five representative transects we explore regional ...differences in, and driving forces of, China’s rural vulnerability. The results show that (1) The rural vulnerability of counties in China is generally within the threshold range of low to medium, and exhibits obvious spatial differences. Along the “Bole-Taipei Line”, there is a spatial pattern of north-south differentiation. Villages in the northeast part of the counties have low vulnerability, while those in the southwest are relatively vulnerable (2) External environmental phenomena are the leading factors that induce rural vulnerability. Specifically, the rural ecological subsystem composed of ecological exposure, ecological sensitivity, and ecological adaptation is the principal determinant of rural vulnerability. The rural economic subsystem composed of economic exposure, economic sensitivity, and economic adaptation is also a core determinant of rural vulnerability. The social subsystem composed of social exposure, social sensitivity, and social adaptation is also an important determinant of rural vulnerability. (3) According to the principle of adapting measures to local conditions, different regions should seek to reduce regional embeddedness and path dependence. We should strengthen the prediction and monitoring of sources of disturbance in rural areas, and scientifically control the sensitivity of the system itself. Then the adaptive capacity of the rural system can be improved pursuant of promoting sustainable development.
: While critical geographers have addressed how place politics impacts rural landscapes, less attention has been paid to the particular ways in which rural landscape identities are being impacted by ...the new energy economy. The nascent US wind energy opposition movement is evidence of broad, organized resistance to the landscape impacts associated with the re‐sculpting of rural energy geographies. Drawing from cultural landscape and place theory, this article examines the shifting terrain of wind opposition in the “New American West”. The article argues that wind energy opposition is fundamentally about who speaks for and negotiates conflicting social commitments to technology, economic values and an imagined American pastoral identity. By examining a case study of wind development in Nevada, this article considers how renewable energy development can constructively acknowledge the important role the “middle landscape” continues to play in American constructions of rural space.
The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have ...converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the ‘school wars’ as emotional and irrational participants who want to turn back time and who fail or refuse to understand and accept what is alleged to be the inevitable transformation of rural space. We then analyse the political strategy and tactics engaged in by school governance officials and community agents in these struggles over the meaning and future of rural space. We argue that the confrontational politics that ensues do not support strong rural development conversations and that the unilateral search for what we call ‘trump cards’ to settle arguments with data and rational or emotional ‘appeals’ has led to ongoing tension in rural communities.
This article examines the ways in which educated yet unemployed young people attempt to configure ways of being productive in a small hill town in North India. Young people who do not migrate to ...large urban centres from this township are the subject of contradictory discourses: in some moments they are seen as an antidote to the ‘problem of migration’, but in other moments they are ridiculed for not making good use of their time. Both discourses suggest a present wherein young people are not productive. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over a ten-month period, this article frames youth sociality as a mode registering a sense of productivity and navigating unemployment. I argue that while hanging out at a computer shop, young men were distancing themselves from notions of idling and creating masculine youth cultures in which they sought to situate themselves as productive young people. I make this argument by unpacking exchanges between these young men and by analysing the tangible ways they helped the shop function. I also draw debates about youth sociality into dialogue with theoretical insights from rural geography to illuminate how educated youth attempt to imbue rural and peri-urban space with new possibilities. I show how educated youth attempt to reanimate rural space and forge affirmative rural futures by emphasizing their connections with Indian modernity. Attending to the ways in which educated yet unemployed youth attempt to situate themselves within productive relations is set to become of increasing importance given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Rainbow is a global community that emerged with the hippie movement in the 1960s. Although it originated and largely developed in the USA, it soon expanded to Europe. Due to the political context ...in Spain, the Rainbow was weak there until the reestablishment of democracy in 1975, when it was spurred by the creation of various communes throughout the country. This paper explores the issue of heritage in one of the earliest and most iconic Rainbow villages in Spain, Matavenero, asking whether notions of heritage emerge in Rainbow contexts. In doing so, it contributes to critical geography of heritage and intentional communities by inquiring into the narratives about the past developed by the community and their use of space and material culture in ways that reproduce forms of segmentarity. Drawing on ethnographic methods and long-term ethnography, the paper demonstrates the absence of the notion of heritage as generally understood in Western capitalist culture and develops the concept of “a-patrimonial” processes to explain this phenomenon.
