ABSTRACT
The purpose of this book has been to explore the production and reproduction of the rural. In so doing it started with the assertion that the rural is an imagined space; the dichotomy of the city and the country, the urban and the rural, may be one of the oldest and most resilient geographical dualisms, but it is nonetheless an artifi cial construction, as geographers, planners, sociologists and others have found when they have attempted to delineate rural space or to defi ne the essence of rural society (Chapters 1 and 2). The discursive construction of the rural has involved not only the imagined division of space, but also the fi lling of rural space with characteristics and meaning. These in turn have been enacted through performances that articulate rurality in everyday practice (Chapter 7), regulated and developed through the legislation, policies and activities of the state (Chapters 6 and 8), and converted into a material countryside that is embodied in the rural landscape, the biodiversity of rural areas, the structure of the rural economy, the pattern and form of rural settlements, and the composition and living standards of the rural population.
