Counterurbanization

The concept of counterurbanization, as opposed to suburbanization, is relatively recent in international academic literature; nevertheless, the process to which it refers is not so recent, since counterurbanization was already noticeable in 19th-century English settlements. Counterurbanization can be defined as the deconcentration of people and economic activity from urban to rural areas. It first appeared in the 1960s in the United States, giving a name to the opposite of the classic urbanization process, which involves centralizing population and economic flows in the main cities and large metropolitan areas. A process in the opposite direction began, with movement outward from large cities to smaller urban and rural settlements. This marked a step forward from traditional theories based on a hierarchical organization of settlements and the demographic and economic prominence of cities over towns and villages.

Counterurbanization represents a reversal of demographic and economic flows from larger to smaller settlements. The flows of urban population to rural areas have a varied social mix, such as retired people looking for quiet places with a healthy environment, emigrants returning to their origins after working in the city, social groups looking for different forms of life related to green philosophies (“alternative counterurbanization”), and even liberal medical, administrative, or education professionals practicing as much in public service as in private. Counterurbanization can be planned or spontaneous; regional policies may contribute to the economic development and population of rural areas, and individual people or families may change their place of residence of their own will.

France now distinguishes between different forms of demographic deconcentration processes depending on the urban or rural viewpoint; from the urban viewpoint, counterurbanization is also called exurbanization and from the rural viewpoint, rurbanization or peri-urbanization. These terms mean essentially the same thing, as they are nothing more than expansion processes away from cities caused by the spread of rapid transportation, the rejection of collective housing, antiurban tastes in the ownership of individual properties based on green philosophies, and so on. The concept of counterurbanization is part of the transition from an industrial to a postindustrial society, bringing with it new processes for which social scientists need to define new concepts. The decline of large industrial cities and the rural resurgence bring with them a demographic [Page 597]deconcentration and a change in direction from the classic country-to-city migratory flows to city-to-country flows.