Rural Space: Constructing a Three-Fold Architecture

Introduction

This chapter develops a framework for exploring the present day character and status of ‘rural space’. Reflecting the present era, where fragmentation within all aspects of life appears as a key leitmotif (Harvey, 1989), the chapter seeks to construct a heuristic device — a ‘map’ -with which to interrogate rural space. Such a strategy aims to bring together the dispersed elements of what we already know about rural space more than to reveal some hidden or ‘lost’ aspect of this space. As such — and as seems appropriate within a Handbook of rural studies — the chapter aims to provide a resource to be drawn upon by those in search of a better understanding of the character of rural space throughout the world today. Thus, whilst clearly written from a British vantage point, the chapter will hopefully resonate much further afield.

At the outset, the chapter is not going to rehearse yet again the debates that have raged within geography and social theory concerning the ontological and epistemological status of ‘space’ (cf. Crang and Thrift, 2000a; Gregory and Urry, 1985; Peet, 1998). Instead, it takes as a starting point the position that space — and anything that we might call ‘rural space’ — is not ‘a practico-inert container of action’ but ‘a socially produced set of manifolds’ (Crang and Thrift, 2000b: 2). Space does not somehow ‘just exist’, waiting passively to be discovered and mapped, but is something created in a whole series of forms and at a whole series of scales by social individuals. We thus have a great diversity of ‘species of space’ (2000b: 3) implicated in every aspect of life, some touched on within this chapter.

Much of what follows draws on the ideas of the late Henri Lefebvre. This material, not yet widely deployed within rural studies, seeks to broaden and to enrich our understanding of space, and to draw out both its mundane everyday significance and its highly abstract character under capitalism. Through developing a Lefebvrian model of (rural) space, the chapter argues that far from disappearing as a significant conceptual category, ‘rural space’ does indeed retain what Sarah Whatmore (1993: 605) termed an ‘unruly and intractable… significance’, both within everyday life and for us academics.

Although the issue of defining the rural has its own chapter in this collection (Cloke, Chapter 2 in this volume), it is with reference to this debate that we start. This is because the very idea of ‘rural space’ is pleonastic.1 The redundancy in the term comes from the fact that the concept ‘rural’ is inherently spatial, with ‘space’ understood in the broad sense implied above. Any attempt to separate rural from space runs the risk of reproducing the unhelpful dualism of society versus space. From the brief engagement with defining rural (space), the second section of the chapter develops a threefold understanding of space, and then of rural space. Finally, the third section illustrates an application of this model through a brief [Page 45]account of the two key phases of rural spatiality in post-1945 Britain.

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