Re-scaling the Rural: Some Reflections from Europe

Existing as it does on the brink of being overrun, urbanized or abandoned, rurality is contested. Even in the field of academia, it is often questioned or considered a minor subordinate appendix to urbanity.

Since the ancient Greeks, conceptions of the rural have praised it as an idyllic and tranquil place where humans were closer to nature. Nowadays however, notions of the countryside are more complex, it is also a place in constant flux, a place defined and controlled by the urban. Can rurality continue to depend on the urban? Or will future scenarios recognize it for its potential to live truly ‘closer to nature’ and as the place to be? What can we learn from current counter-urbanization movements that have sprung up in the wake of changing geopolitical circumstances as well as geographical and social inequality?

Re-scaling the Rural aims to generate a broader understanding of contemporary rurality as it exists in different countries, seen by different disciplines in the context of different scales in space and time. Rurality may become the place that answers to the Anthropocene and its crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars and rising inequalities. The publication combines conceptual and practical explorations, from the outside-in (urban viewpoints) and inside-out (departing from an unknown rurality).

Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag is an architect with specialization in adaptive reuse, rural transformation, radical preservation, and research by design. His special research focus is radical preservation of the rural built environment in Denmark.

Sophia Meeres is a landscape architect specialized in urban forestry and policymaking. Member of ARENA and the alterRurality network, she teaches at University College Dublin, her focus is on the design of a future woodland network, in towns and villages across Ireland.

Ben Stringer teaches architecture at the University of Westminster where he also contributes to the Emerging Territories research group. He is a member of ARENA and the AlterRurality network. His publications include the book ‘Rurality Re-Imagined’.