ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Urban and rural are two of those taken-for-granted concepts we use all the time in an almost unthinking manner. Indeed, the everyday use of the terms betrays an almost self-evident acceptance of the distinction between them – we know what ‘rural’ means, we know what ‘urban’ means, and we know how they differ. Geography has played on this distinction and for much of its post-war history has tended to study the two as separate entities. It was able to do this, partly because the division between urban and rural was premised around a physical distinction, and partly because the rural became conflated with agriculture. But this physical reading of both urban and rural was increasingly challenged, and gradually replaced by an emphasis on process. As Harvey put it with reference to the urban,
“The study of urbanization is not the study of a legal political entity orof a physical artefact. It is concerned with processes of capital circulation; the shifting flows of labour power, commodities and money capital; the spatial organization of production and the transformation of space relations; movements of information and geopolitical conflicts … I prefer to … concentrate on urbanization as a process.”(Harvey, 1995: xvii)
Freed from the moorings of studying the urban and rural as somewhat fixed and distinct physical entities, the scope emerged for all kinds of research that explored the two in terms of process. For if urbanization could be studied as a process, so too could rurality. A number of key themes soon became prevalent in work on both – the role of economic restructuring in shaping town and country, and the influence of each on that restructuring; the social recomposition of each, sometimes as a response to economic restructuring and sometimes as a precursor to it; the role of the state and structures of governance, in both responding to economic and social change and trying to shape it. The cultural turn across the social sciences brought a concern with different sets of processes – those to do with the ways in which both ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ are key sociocultural constructs. Both act as signs, signifiers and referents, and have been increasingly interpreted as a set of social constructions that convey a host of social, moral and cultural values. Through these processes both urban and rural lose their geographical anchors – socio-cultural spaces of rurality do not necessarily coincide with the countryside, and sociocultural spaces of urbanism are not confined to the city. Instead each reaches out to pervade wider society. Indeed, some have claimed that with ever sharpening processes of counter-urbanization, migration and commuting, and increasing flows of goods, services and people between the two, the social and cultural views which are thought to be attached to
rural and urban provide clearer grounds for distinguishing between the two than do their geographic differences.
