Rurality

Rurality—the condition of not being urban—has been affected by global forces throughout history, and in the 21st century, the concept of the rural is transported globally even as rural areas themselves are increasingly a part of the global economy. Rurality is the term that designates territories that lie outside towns and cities and that describes the landscapes, cultures, social and economic formations, and ways of life that are commonly associated with these areas. Approximately half of the world's population live in rural areas, and rural areas comprise most of the Earth's land surface and provide most of its food and natural resources. As such, the concept of rurality—and its opposition to the urban—is an important device for the ordering and regulation of space and society to ensure the supply of key resources and the protection of environmentally and culturally significant landscapes and environments, and it serves as a basis on which residents of rural areas can express their collective identity. Yet, rurality is also an extremely difficult term to define and delimit.

Most countries have an official classification of rural and urban areas, usually based on population size and/or population density, but in some cases, they also incorporate other factors such as accessibility and economic structure. However, quantitative descriptive definitions of rurality are problematic for several reasons. First, the [Page 1497]thresholds used in such definitions are necessarily arbitrary. There is no objective reason why a particular settlement or territory should become “urban” at a particular population figure or level of population density, and the thresholds used in official definitions vary considerably among countries, and even among indicators used by different agencies in the same country (more than 50 different definitions of rurality have been identified in use by different federal agencies in the United States). Second, statistical definitions in themselves do not reveal causal relationships that explain differences in social and economic outcomes between urban and rural areas. In other words, variations in wage levels, for instance, between two districts cannot be explained by one being statistically classified as rural and the other as urban. Third, the simple classification of territories as urban or rural overemphasizes the differences between city and country and underemphasizes the diversity of rural areas. Rural and urban areas are tightly interconnected and are subject to the same broader scale social and economic processes, while localized conditions in so-called rural areas can diverge significantly between, for example, a peri-urban commuter village, a peripheral mining community, and a remote farmstead.

Although quantitative-based classifications of urban and rural are still commonly used by government agencies, and in some academic studies, most rural researchers now conceptualize rurality as a social construct, that is, as something that is brought into being through the representations and practices produced and reproduced by people and institutions. In other words, rurality exists insofar as people perceive it to exist, and its characteristics are those attributed to it through representations. As such, there is no one essential, objective rural, but there are many different and sometimes conflicting rurals imagined and socially constructed by different people from different perspectives. For example, the rural might be socially constructed as an agricultural space, the main function of which is to produce food, or conversely, it might be socially constructed as a fragile natural environment that is home to diverse fauna and flora. These two ways of seeing rurality may coexist so long as farming works in tune with nature, but once agriculture starts to threaten wildlife (through poisoning or the destruction of habitats), they become incompatible and conflicts develop.

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