RURALISM
Jovis
The Relevance of Thinking Rural!
Vanessa Miriam Carlow
Photo Essay by The Pk. Odessa Co
Questioning the Urban–Rural Dichotomy
Ruralism and Periphery: The Concept of Ruralism and Discourses on Ruralism in Denmark
Jens Kvorning
Living in a Small Town: An Urban and a Rural Experience at Once
Annett Steinführer
Rurality in a Society of Cities
Claudia Oltmanns
The Rural as an Autonomous Narrative within the Hierarchy of Global Urbanization or What Kind of Stories Can the Rural Tell within the City?
Christiane Sörensen, Wiltrud Simbürger
(R)urban Landscapes. Navigating between the Urban and the Rural Perspective
Sigrun Langner
Rural Land(scapes). Lessons to Be Learned (?)
Jonna Majgaard Krarup
Networked Urbanism
Interview with Belinda Tato, ecosistema urbano, Madrid
Ruralism in the European Context
“Landungsprozesse.” Structural Development Policies and Their Effects towards Resilient Urban and Rural Regions
Andy Westner
Social Innovations in Rural Life Worlds
Ralph Richter
The Interrelation of Architecture and Territorial Character in Northern Germany
Ines Lüder
LandLust—The “Knowability” of Post-Pastoral Ruralism
Eckart Voigts
Key Projects: Combining Potentials from Urban Ecologies—A Swedish Perspective
Nils Björling
Academy of Future Rural Spaces in Lower Saxony
Verena Schmidt, Dirk Neumann, Olaf Mumm, Yeon Wha Hong, Marie Bruun Yde, Vanessa Miriam Carlow
The Hike to the Snøhetta: Learning from Landscape
Interview with Patrick Lüth, Snøhetta, Innsbruck
Ruralism—A Global Perspective
Urbanizing Shanghai‘s Suburban Farmland
Ruta Randelovic
The Urbanization of Rural Space in Latin America under Pressure from the Exploitation of Nature: The Case Study of Casanare in Colombia
Liliana Giraldo Arias
No Urban Desert! The Emergence and Transformation of Extended Urban Landscapes in Oman
Aurel von Richthofen
Hinterland
Interview with Stephan Petermann, OMA/AMO, Rotterdam
Authors
Picture Credits
Imprint
The Relevance of Thinking Rural!
According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world population will live in urban areas in the near future—that is in cities and urban regions.1 How will the other third live? This question alone suggests a simplistic dichotomy between urban and rural spaces that no longer exists. Alongside—not opposite—the transformation and drastic expansion of urban regions worldwide, rural space, too, has changed dramatically: after mechanization and industrialization, rural space has experienced mass out-migration of people. On the other hand, being a recreational landscape it temporarily receives a mass immigration of guests. Rural space has received waste and unwanted or outdated infrastructures from cities. It has served as extraction site for natural resources, creating manmade landscapes of an unseen scale. Rural space has seen a revolution in farming and the genetic modification of plants and animals to feed the world’s population. Its water dams, wind farms, cornfields, and solar parks are producing energy at an unprecedented scale. In light of this recent massive change, why are rural spaces often dismissed as declining or stagnating?
Throughout the last decades, the attention of architecture and planning has shifted to be more or less exclusively concerned with the city. Where villages and small towns have not been on the agenda, the city-centered discourse becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy with cities becoming larger and better, more interesting and beautiful, whereas villages and small towns are more or less left to their own devices. Few forward-looking strategies for developing villages and small towns exist—even though there are ample methods for how to manage their shrinkage. In contrast with shrinkage, there are many rural regions, villages, and small towns, which can prosper from establishing a good working economy in a rural network.
And alongside the cities, the grand societal challenges also leave their footprint in rural areas: climate change, resource shortage, the diversification of the population, the need to be more resilient, or the question of how to organize sustainable mobility and civic participation—not least of which is the question of identity. Rural areas and their landscapes oftentimes serve as a medium of collective identity and culture for entire regions—representing an image of Heimat and the longing for a wholesome world. Which strategies fit the needs of villages and small towns?
The #3 ISU Talks, held in November 2015 at TU Braunschweig, aimed at a discussion of the “Future of Villages and Small Towns in an Urbanizing World.” Along with the following questions, researchers from different fields including urban and landscape planning, architecture, geography, and social and cultural sciences discussed the future of rural spaces: How and with what human consequences are rural spaces being urbanized today? What are the existing and potential connections between urban and rural spaces? What new concepts for rural living are there? Do we need to formulate a (new) vision for ‘ruralism’? And what role can ‘urban design,’ architecture, and planning play in preparing rural life and space for the future? Which vocabulary do architects and planners, anthropologists, and natural scientists have to describe that massive change? Which strategies are employed to guide the development in space described as rural?
This book combines different disciplinary perspectives on the rural realm.
The articles are centered around three core themes. The first chapter looks at landscape as a defining element and physical representation of the rural. Some authors argue that the rural is in fact not disappearing, but rather being absorbed to the city to form strongholds there in terms of landscape and also cultural practices related to landscapes, like urban gardening.
The second chapter discusses ruralism and concepts for rural areas in European countries and regions from Austria, Sweden, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, and the North of Germany.
The third chapter looks at urbanization processes in fast-growing countries of the Middle East and Global South, as well as China, where the rural is under heavy pressure to disappear in favor of suburban, low-density development.
Interviews round off each chapter.
A photo essay by The Pk. Odessa Co of Lower Saxony taken in five of ISU’s partner municipalities provides a great introduction to this book.
A Rural State of Emergency
The urgency with which villages and small towns are searching for a liveable future in an urbanizing world was revealed during the “Academy of Future Rural Spaces” that the Institute for Sustainable Urbanism (ISU) launched in 2015 following an open call by our institute. With “Have Space. Want Ideas? Not afraid of students’ ideas?” we introduced ISU as a young collaborative team of architects, planners, and cultural scientists seeking to encourage our students to think boldly regarding real urban issues, and to work with actors from the urban arena. As a university institute, we want to put our expertise, as well as the creative talent and young energy of our students behind tackling real world problems! The response to our open call was massive. As a result, ISU conducted several cooperative projects with cities such as Berlin, Wolfsburg, Bremen, and Bremerhaven, but also with civic organizations and NGOs such as Gowanus by Design in Brooklyn, New York.
To our great surprise back then, numerous villages and small towns, in particular, were interested in a collaboration with us. Following the open call, we met with representatives from all of the respondents. For the villages, often the mayors themselves came, bringing along their chief planners! We realized the challenges that these rural places are facing display a broad spectrum—much like the cities: massive growth and massive shrinkage alike, the need to revitalize public spaces and vacant buildings, the conversion of brownfield sites, for example old stations or those barracks left by the allied forces, the aesthetic impact of energy production, the improvement of mobility and other regional networks, the provision of vital infrastructures such as health care, schools and kindergartens, or shops, but also how to deal with contamination or (radioactive) waste deposits—all of which have in common a large interest in the sustainable development of their settlement.
With the “Academy of Future Rural Spaces” we brought together students and the representatives and citizens of villages and small towns in Lower Saxony to formulate ideas for their future. The assignments given by the villages themselves were met by a vigorous response from our students, triggering their creativity and design skills. Some proposals went very far in suggesting entirely new landscapes, some were very fine and sensitive in suggesting small and careful interventions. One group made an actual intervention in the village of Brome that is marked by a massive decay of historic houses in its heart. Some of the projects were warmly welcomed by our partners who saw immediate benefits for their municipalities or felt inspired. Some of the most interesting results are presented in the article “Academy of Future Rural Spaces in Lower Saxony.” The project was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and TU Braunschweig’s Teach4TU program. Currently, we are exploring the possibility of realizing a few more interventions or small projects in our partner municipalities.
An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Rural Spaces
Based on the success of the “Academy of Future Rural Spaces,” we developed the teaching format of “Data Mining—Data Mapping.” In this interdisciplinary seminar, students from Environmental Sciences and Architecture and Sustainable Design jointly explored the possibility of eco-urban strategies in both urban and rural contexts. In the collaboration, the benefits of ecosystem servicethinking are combined with tools and strategies derived from urban design. That means that the environmental scientists share their expertise on the ecosystem services that open land can provide in relation to its connectivity, use, and design. The goal is to locate, dimension, and design open spaces with maximum benefit for communities.
In that quest, spatial data and the medium of the map function as the basis for discussions and as an important working tool in the dialogue between students and practice partners who are also involved.
The collaboration with other disciplines made us more aware which critical role rural spaces play in sustainable development—as an inextricably linked counterpart, but also as a complement to the growing city. City and countryside are evermore increasingly mutually reliant. A closer look at the countryside unveils a set of dynamics overlaying and changing rural space, beyond trends of depopulation and the decommissioning of public facilities. The once remote and quiet countryside is now traversed by global and regional flows and dynamics, which are interrelating it with the larger urban system and perhaps even bringing it to the frontline of regional transformation and sustainability. A new set of criteria for understanding and appreciating the rural is required. With “METAPOLIS—an inter- and transdisciplinary platform for sustainable development of urban-rural relations in Lower Saxony,” ISU together with seven scientific partners and fourteen municipalities found a research approach for identifying strategies for the sustainable development of urban-rural linkages based on science and validated by participation. “METAPOLIS” is an ongoing research project within the Lower Saxony program “Science for Sustainability” financed by the Volkswagen Foundation “Niedersächsisches Vorab.” The notion of metapolis2 conceptualizes various settlement types—from small villages to large cities—embedded within the landscape matrix and connected via networks of traffic, goods, people, data, and everyday actions. Our approach aims to develop an integrated understanding of this metapolis and its inhabited spaces, landscapes, and residents as well as their mutual relationships at multiple scales. As a spatially, ecologically, socially, and economically structured continuum, metapolis embraces all urban-rural linkages—transgressing the dichotomy of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural.’
I want to thank the authors for their contributions to this book tackling so many questions that rural spaces face today. We at ISU believe rural spaces are on the design agenda again.
Notes
1 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 2014. World Urbanization Prospects. The 2014 Revision. New York. https://esa.un.org/unpd/wup/Publications/Files/WUP2014-Highlights.pdf. Accessed June 23, 2016.
2 The term “metapolis” is borrowed from Francoise Ascher (1995).
Questioning the Urban–Rural Dichotomy
Ruralism and Periphery: The Concept of Ruralism and Discourses on Ruralism in Denmark
The concept of ruralism comprises a number of different dimensions and forms part of various discourses. The original meaning of the term is associated entirely with life in the countryside, often regarded as more indigenous and rustic, and simpler than life in the town or city.1 But in current discourses, the concept of ruralism is associated with particular lifestyles. It applies to lifestyles characterized by substantial excess, where people wish to rediscover and re-utilize the qualities of country life—most frequently in areas located on the edges of the large urban regions. It also applies to movements in which people wish to develop a new form of life in the countryside, movements which show respect for nature and which seek to construct a new form of sustainable life in the countryside, incorporating social, environmental, and economic sustainability. There are elements of what can be called ruralism that are also associated with an ambition to introduce its way of thinking and practices as a transformational movement in towns and cities.2 The American New Ruralism movement has managed to formulate itself in such a way as to become a well-known player on the debate stage.3 Here, the interest lies in country life in close relationship to cities—most often big cities—and the movement is partly associated with the New Urbanism movement, referring back to the manifestos of the British garden city movement from around 1900.4 There are precise arguments for having a belt of small production lots surrounding the city to supply vegetables and other agricultural products directly to the city.
Similar movements, intentions, and practices can be found in most European countries. In the Copenhagen region and in the other metropolitan regions of Denmark, many agricultural enterprises operate in a way that is encompassed by the current understanding of ruralism: secluded luxury or ecological enthusiasm at work on the edge of the major urban regions, but closely integrated into the network and economy of those regions.
However, in its original meaning, ruralism is also included in discourses about the specific problems of the outskirts, where country life is often regarded as something underprivileged. In this context, ruralism emerges not as associated with specific opportunities and qualities, but as a form of modern impoverishment, characterized by forms of life imposed on people in which they do not have access to any number of the opportunities that otherwise characterize contemporary society. In this ruralism discourse, the periphery is seen as something that must be supported in various ways in order to achieve a different and more equal content in life outside the larger urban regions.
In this political debate in Denmark, people have traditionally referred to a balanced development in the countryside. But the support for what are considered exhausted peripheral regions became a dominant theme, in a new guise, in Danish political discussions leading up to the most recent parliamentary election in 2015. Demands to support the periphery were so strongly worded that it triggered new political briefings and promises of immediate support for the area, which was very imprecisely defined as the periphery. Promises of support were made in the form of relocating state jobs from the Central Administration, as a gesture to signal attention toward an understanding of the problems of the periphery and to increase the number of highly educated people in the peripheral regions. Promises were made of liberalizing the planning laws to facilitate more opportunities for building in open countryside or close to the coast, with the argument that it would lead to new settlements and strengthening of the local economies. Promises were also made to relax environmental regulations that affect agricultural production, with the argument that Danish regulations in this area were supposedly stricter than in other EU countries, thus weakening the competitiveness of Danish agriculture.
What is interesting and paradoxical about these promises is that they suggest quite different future scenarios for the peripheral regions. On one hand, these scenarios are dominated by highly industrialized, large-scale agriculture, operated using large quantities of chemicals. On the other hand, the scenarios focus on small-scale, local food production, and dense local networks.
Focus
In this article I will focus on ruralism as it is emerging and discussed in association with the peripheral regions of Denmark and investigate whether it makes any sense to couple the ruralism discourse, which relates to the opportunities at the periphery of the major urban regions, with the issues and attitudes that are present in the regions that do not include large towns and are generally characterized by stagnation or abandonment.
Framework for Analysis
I have characterized the changes in the periphery and country districts into three types of change processes:
A: Concerned with the overall structural development of society—modified forms of production and divisions of labor, the relative significance of agrarian production for the economy, increasing mobility in a broad sense of the word, etc.
B: Concerned with the political attempts to modify the effects of these structural changes.
C: Concerned with lifestyle dimensions and forms of culture.
How Did the Periphery Come into Being?
In the late nineteenth century, Danish agricultural production was reoriented so that the emphasis was on animal husbandry and associated processing industries. That meant an increase in the workforce in the countryside, and in the second half of the nineteenth century, rural districts and small towns experienced an increase in population, also helped by the new accessibility created by railways, the formation of new towns linked to the railways, and to a general liberalization (Wichmann Matthiessen 1985; Illeriis 2010). The start of the twentieth century witnessed the development of governmental policies to retain a large rural population. For example, legislation on state smallholdings to increase the proportion of small enterprises (Smidt 1999).5 Fundamentally, however, the size of the rural population must be regarded as a function of the basic structural conditions.
After World War II, there were significant structural changes in rural areas, and in the smaller and medium-sized towns, which were part of a close division of labor with agriculture. Actual agricultural production was mechanized and rationalized, thus greatly reducing the necessary workforce. The associated processing industries—dairies, abattoirs, farm supply businesses, etc.—were also subject to streamlining and centralization, which were seen, for example, in larger companies and geographical concentrations.6 At the same time, many of these companies changed from being dominated by local capital to being dominated by national and, in some cases, international capital, which were not tied to the local areas in the same way as before.
However, the substantial reduction of jobs associated with agricultural production, which was a consequence of this change, did not immediately prove to be a significant employment problem for rural districts and small towns because the new industrialization, and the emphasis on consumer goods that occurred after World War II spread throughout the country and, to a great extent, assimilated the workforce that was left over from agriculture.7 This industry was further supported by various regional planning schemes. Opinion is divided on the effect of these schemes, but they indicate the political interest in the periphery.
During the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, restructuring towards the post-industrial epoch made a major breakthrough. Industry remained in the peripheral areas, but the new jobs associated with the service and knowledge industries were concentrated in the major urban areas. The number of people receiving a higher education rose sharply and eventually led to shifts in terms of age and qualifications where highly educated people were increasingly concentrated in the major urban areas. Until approximately the turn of the Millennium, there were no dramatic regional shifts in population figures, but behind these figures one can detect regional shifts in the level of education. However, during the two-thousands and the current decade we see the beginning of quite large reductions in population figures in both rural areas and smaller towns and, for the first time, in medium-sized towns as well. There is also a concentration and centralization in both private services and public sector functions, which impair both employment opportunities and the provision of services in many small and medium-sized towns.
It is this new reality that must be regarded as the material basis for the reformulation of calls to support the periphery. But there is also a clear ideological dimension included in the explanation. The post-industrial reality concentrates much of the economic activity in the major urban areas, but it also weakens the opportunities and conditions of the less highly educated. Consequently, the periphery becomes, in a sense, both a geographical phenomenon and a social phenomenon, which, through certain parties, increasingly calls for improvements and changes. These demands are consolidated under a highly complex and multi-faceted concept of periphery. In Denmark, as a consequence of this development, many geographical peripheries have emerged. You can see a semicircle of enfeebled residential areas and municipalities with many poor people very close to central Copenhagen (►1, 2).
You see a periphery that contains an over-representation of disadvantaged people in West Zealand, immediately outside the greater Copenhagen region. You can also see clear indications of over-representations of poor and low-skilled people in what has traditionally been associated with the concept of periphery: the most peripheral geographical areas in Jutland and on Lolland.
But the new ideological briefings, which point away from the major urban regions, are not only related to hard-pressed social and economic groups. In recent history, there have been significant movements of resourceful groups who worked for what was called decentralization. There are organizations today that are working to develop close local relationships between food production and other economic activities. Without discussing it particularly explicitly, in elements of the Danish debate there is the same overlap with, and embrace of movements found in American discourse, such as slow food, new urbanism, and new ruralism, which are significantly associated with a prosperous middle class: equivalent to a definition which equates ruralism with “The Art of Country Life” (New Ruralism manifesto/www.farmlandinfo.org).
Periphery, Culture, and Economy
For many years, there has been a widely accepted point of view in the academic debate that it makes no sense to distinguish between town and country when it comes to culture in the widest sense of the word (e.g., Nielsen). The argument has been that modern media and communication opportunities, and a high degree of mobility, mean that, even though you reside outside what—from the point of view of physical and density-related criteria—is described as a town, you are nonetheless part of a comprehensive, modern urban culture. In tandem with this view, the American New Ruralism movement defines itself as a movement that is concerned with “rural land within urban influence” (www.farmlandinfo.org). The question is whether the shifts that have occurred and continue to evolve in terms of regional differences in income and education mean that this widely accepted assertion must be modified if we are to understand the current development and the political formulations. Do these shifts and increased regional differences call for the development of some more differentiated and complex concept of culture in order to detect and comprehend this new reality?8 Should one work on images of a kind of simultaneous presence of very different cultures and economies in the new peripheries—cultures and economies that absolutely do not, or only slightly interact? Should one also work on an image of the national territory that consists of specialized regions that operate industrial agriculture, and which communicate with global markets and develop specific economies and cultures and small pockets of areas that are oriented towards other markets and are part of other economic and cultural networks? And what consequences does this have on ruralism strategies, as they are developed in the larger urban areas, so that they can be transferred to the periphery?
Ruralism and Periphery
The question then is to what extent the peripheries, which appear in the Danish geographical and social landscape, can deploy the concept of ruralism and the strategies associated with it as an entry point and framework for developing strategies for change? We are faced with a situation in which the concept of ruralism, in the American sense of the word, is relevant and current in terms of the larger urban regions. If you reside in rural areas within these regions, then you, as a producer, have access to a differentiated market, which can absorb many special and luxury products. As a resident, you are part of a region where, equipped with an appropriate degree of mobility, you can access a comprehensive range of commercial and social services and to many cultural offerings. You are also resident in areas, nearly all of which offer many countryside features. So, in this context, ruralism denotes the ability to select a particular niche in which you can live a very comfortable everyday life. If you reside in one of the outer peripheries, agrarian production is dominated by industrialized, large-scale operation. The dominant political forces are seeking to open things up so that this industrialization can have an even better framework, one of the implications of which is that it is often difficult to get access to the open countryside. As a producer who wishes to provide specialist, quality products you will discover that, by virtue of the social geography, there are only limited markets for such products. You will also often discover that both the social and commercial services are at a low level and that distances are long. That means that the opportunity to lead a comfortable rural life as a metropolitan regional provider is rarely present.
Ruralism as Strategy
Is the access to ruralism as described so futile when it comes to the outer peripheries, and are they doomed to continued reduction and impoverishment? Ruralism as “The Art of Country Life” has no prospects as a general strategy in the outer regions. However, in my opinion, a number of the elements involved can be rethought and rephrased to make them relevant and practical in a strategy aimed at complementing and enhancing the opportunities for residence and commerce in the outer peripheries.
The assertion on which the following considerations and proposals are based is that there will always be a group of individuals and families who would like to live in open areas, especially if a reasonable level of services, educational options, and social contacts exist. So it is not about achieving dramatic population shifts, but about creating breeding grounds for new settlements and economies. It must be about creating clusters and networks of settlement, commerce, and services, which are sufficiently large and powerful to survive and generate local environments and which can form the context for a substantial everyday life, lived to the full. It is about regarding the periphery as systems or networks of rural districts, villages, and service-providing towns, which together create opportunities for a comfortable, interesting daily life. Something like this cannot be created everywhere. It requires certain terms and conditions. These towns and settlements, and the landscapes they are part of, have different preconditions for supporting a substantial daily life and must be developed according to their capacity to accommodate services, local institutions, or simply local hubs, so that the overall system presents an attractive setting for daily life.
The Countryside
One of the preconditions is that the countryside should be accessible and attractive. You do not move to the country to be near a pig farm or close to gigantic fields with no vegetation other than corn or rapeseed. You move to the country to be close to nature, to have access to nature and to be part of a rhythm different from that which prevails in the city. That means that areas possessing special natural features also possess a special potential to attract new settlement and new types of business. But it is essential for these landscapes to be accessible and to contain great diversity and substantial features for activity. Protected zones along waterways, which have been one of the major sources of contention in recent policy in this area, are a good example of initiatives that can both support greater natural diversity and, in the long term, be used to create coherent access systems to the open countryside. This leads to a clear conflict zone between strategies and policies that want to develop rural districts as zones for large-scale, industrialized production, and strategies that attempt to support new settlement and new businesses linked to features of natural beauty.
In principle, one could imagine a zoning of the countryside into areas of industrialized agriculture, and areas for expanded recreational and settlement-related use, with an emphasis on rural experience and ecological diversity. But this will still need the natural processes and exchanges between the two zones to be respected in the form of relevant stipulations for each of these zones of production.
Active, Social Environments
General national policies can create preconditions for new developments, but they will only become a reality if local forces band together and exploit these opportunities. That is why it is crucial for local organizations to emerge to tackle projects and activities that are meaningful in the local context and that can develop locally funded potential for action. In Denmark, there are a number of examples of such local organizations, which have managed to generate changes and mobilizations, and have then been able to trigger broader and furtherreaching processes of change.
Local Institutions
A topical and relevant foundation for the creation of local organizations in terms of important local issues is to open up and develop the institutions so that they are given a bigger role in the local community than their primary function gives them. This strategy is particularly crucial if a town is so small that commercial services are on the point of disappearing. In this case, the environment, which can be created around the kindergarten, school or sports hall, can emerge as a social meeting and compression point, and can replace the role of the shop. But the fact that there is a local compression point can also help the shop to endure, precisely by virtue of the meeting point.
Creating a compression point consisting of a kindergarten and a sports hall can invest a village with a center and identity and, hence, the strength to survive. Opening up the school and its sports facilities can create an important center in a slightly larger town. These strategies have successfully been deployed in a number of small towns in Denmark, where they have been used in various combinations with a medical center, a municipal service center, a center where people can collect items they have bought online, etc. (►3–5).
Tourism
There are many empty agricultural properties in the peripheral regions, and there are many empty houses in the smaller towns. These buildings represent a potential for second homes and for more traditional countryside tourism. Many municipalities have been reluctant to facilitate such use because property prices would rise and make it more difficult for local first-time buyers to buy a house. However, there are so many empty houses that, in most places, this reservation is no longer particularly relevant. Many more of the empty houses require considerable investment in order to become decent homes. Some of the political indications and promises, which were made in the lead-up to the most recent parliamentary election, were about facilitating new settlement opportunities in the open countryside because it was considered an opportunity both for attracting new permanent residents and for generating more tourism. However, the effect of such opportunities for new settlement would be that the financial incentive to renovate existing buildings, or demolish them and build new ones on the same sites, would disappear and the risk of further slums developing would emerge. Therefore, making empty houses available for weekend and tourist use should be regarded as a promising strategy in areas that also have an attractive countryside.
Tourism and Business
Tourism always has a commercial dimension. Someone earns money by renting out the house while other people earn money by selling the goods and services that are used during the stay. But there are some Danish examples where the commercial dimension has been further developed. Some define this expanded context as leisure clusters: a geographical concentration of companies, associations, groups, and individuals (who interact in various ways). One of the examples, to which this definition refers, has been called Cold Hawaii.9 It is an environment that came about after a number of professional surfers settled in a highly traditional fishing village on the west coast of Jutland in Northern Denmark. After observing one another for a number of years, things ended up in a very productive working relationship between the traditional fishing population and the surfer incomers. This has changed the culture and the image of the village, making it, for example, much more attractive in the eyes of young people than in the past. But people also learned how to organize themselves and engage in fruitful cooperation with public authorities on a number of initiatives for change. That, in turn, meant that the village has been able to arrange various major events and has been able to deal with tourists and other visitors better than before, which has meant a significant contribution to its economic base.
Culture and Empowerment
The Cold Hawaii example mentioned above makes it clear that a policy of ruralism is very much about developing local cultures, enabling the local community to take initiatives and act, and to fruitfully interact with and absorb the cultures associated with tourism and second homes (Zukin 1993).10 These aspects are covered both by discourses on locality cultures and by discourses on empowerment.
Ruralism and Periphery: Conclusion
The basis for this article was the question of whether the current discourse on ruralism is in any way relevant in terms of the way the problems of rural districts emerge in what can be defined as the periphery or peripheries. In its American version, ruralism or new ruralism is associated with major urban regions and also most closely linked to areas and lifestyles that are financially comfortable. Consequently, the relevance seems to be limited in relation to areas defined by the fact that part of the population is financially hard-pressed and the services required to support both settlement and commerce are scarce. However, there are major overlaps with the strategies that are often promoted by ecological movements or organizations that are directly concerned with the problems of the peripheries, and you can also see slowfood movements and many other proposals to deal with the problems of agriculture and fringe areas catching on to strategies that very much resemble the ruralism movement; strategies that combine sustainability in both the environmental and the social sense with local food production and food of high quality and a high degree of processing.11 But throughout the country you can also see an increasing number of farm shops, which can be regarded as living exponents of such a strategy. So there is not necessarily any contradiction between the periphery and the content of the ruralism strategy, but the different contexts mean that the strategies must be tackled differently—not only because the economic potential is weaker in the periphery, but also because local cultures are not immediately oriented towards strategies of this kind. Consequently, the question of whether it is possible to build up a local potential for action is absolutely crucial. We must basically acknowledge that strategies of this kind work most easily in areas with major nature-related features. Thus, it should also be said that there are probably villages that must be abandoned and demolished, and rural districts that must remain very sparsely populated.
References
Farmland Information Center. New Ruralism manifesto. http://www.farmlandinfo.org.
Howard, Ebenezer. 1898/1902. Garden Cities of Tomorrow. London.
Illeriis, Sven. 2010. Regional Udvikling. Forlaget Bogværket.
Matthiessen, Christian Wichmann. 1985. Danske byers vækst. København.
Smidt, Torben. 1999. Vi vil rejse nye huse. Denmark.
Zukin, Sharon. 1993. Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney Land. University of California.
Zukin, Sharon. 1995. Cultures of Cities. Blackwell/Oxford.
Notes
1 Both the Oxford English Dictionary and most online dictionaries define the word as: “That, which relates to, or characterizes life in the country.” Several, including dictionary.com, expand upon the term with meanings such as “unsophisticated, rough, rustic, unpolished etc.”
2 Some of the organizations categorize ‘urban gardening’ with the term ruralism to describe their activities. E.g. Landlife in Liverpool—but also many others.
3 The Institute of Urban & Regional Development at Berkeley University has formed a Department of New Ruralism, which has produced one of the best-known manifestos for New Ruralism.
4 They refer both to Ebenezer Howard’s two versions of Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1898 and 1902) and to the many additional manifestos that came from national garden city companies.
5 The first State Smallholdings Act was adopted in 1899. As a consequence of this and subsequent legislation, 28,000 smallholdings were established according to Torben Smidt’s: Vi vil rejse nye huse.
6 For example, there were approximately 1,800 dairies around 1930. Today, there are approximately seventy production units (see Danmarkshistorien.dk).
7 If you regard rural areas and smaller towns as one, we are not seeing greater reductions in the population in what can be described as the functional rural areas. Statistics Denmark.
8 Increased regional differences do not cover dramatic changes in amounts, but different experiences in living conditions and accessibility to cultural and social services.
9 In Denmark, the concept and strategy of the “leisure cluster” has been described and developed in particular by the Danish Centre for Rural Research at the University of Southern Denmark.
10 In many of her books (including Landscapes of Power and Cultures of Cities), the American sociologist Sharon Zukin has dealt with the significance of local cultures for an urban community’s capacity to aim towards new conditions.
11 For example, see diverse manifestos from the Association of Danish Small Islands and similar organizations.
Living in a Small Town: An Urban and a Rural Experience at Once
Introduction
Germany is a highly urbanized country. The estimated share of urban population is dependent upon definitions of rural and urban and thus ranges in relevant statistics from between forty-eight and eighty-two percent. Yet, less than one third of inhabitants actually live in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Small towns—with 5,000 to 20,000 inhabitants and, usually, a lower centrality function for their surroundings—are home to about thirty percent of the population. Yet, their residential experience is structurally ignored, as urban studies focus on cities and metropolises, while rural studies are traditionally interested in the village as the seemingly predominant type of rural settlement. For centuries, small towns used to be the centers of rural areas. They provided economic, administrative, and cultural functions for their surroundings and possessed a level of self-esteem for being urban. As settlements with specific legal privileges, they have often persisted since the Middle Ages, and they do so even when facing severe economic and population decline as many rural regions in Germany have since the nineteen-nineties. These processes were caused by structural economic problems and also have an impact on the functions and functioning of small towns. Marginalization and peripheralization are prominent concepts currently applied in regional studies to explain small-town development in disadvantaged regions. This paper goes beyond these conceptualizations and argues that ruralization and above-average aging are further trends to be considered. All of these tendencies will continue to influence the simultaneous urban-rural character of small towns.
Defining the Small Town
Everyone who is dealing with small towns time and again faces the question about the population size of these settlements. As simple—or even banal—as this problem might seem, there is no standard solution to it. Interestingly, the search for the answer leads back to the heyday of European urbanization in the late nineteenth century. In 1887, the first session of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) defined three categories of settlement. Based on a decision already taken during the ISI founding meeting in 1885, the lowest limit set was a population of 2,000. All settlements with fewer residents were called countryside (campagne). The upper boundary of 100,000 inhabitants was reserved for a newly denominated urban form: the cities (grandes villes). The settlements and social realities between these two poles were simply called towns (villes) (Körösi 1887, 212). About ten years earlier, the official statistics of the newly founded (1871) German Empire had already made use of the new statistical conceptualization of urban settlements. At that time, such an “increasingly positivist” definition (Matzerath 1985, 241) had become necessary as the traditional legal concept of the town was fading away with the fundamental societal changes in the course of industrialization and political turmoil. As early as 1877, the German Statistics Agency applied the same size range as used today (Matzerath 1985, 246): The smallest urban form was designated as a range of 5,000 to 20,000 inhabitants and called Kleinstadt (small town). The number of 100,000 inhabitants was used as the upper limit, and 2,000 as the lower limit. Interestingly, while Kleinstadt found its way into daily German language, the denomination Mittelstadt (medium-sized town) for the next category in size—above a population of 20,000 but below 100,000—remains a term used until today only in statistics and planning documents.
The nineteenth-century statistical definition that aimed at replacing the old legal term of town has never been entirely convincing. In Central Europe, the settlement type of interest to this paper is usually characterized by an urban fabric with a market square at the center, a town hall, and the remains of the medieval fortification (also in persistent form of a ring street or a promenade) around this center (Hannemann 2004, 21; see also ►1). These physical structures provided built evidence of the borough rights (Stadtrecht) granted to these settlements by an emperor. Thus, small towns in Central Europe often have a century-long nonagrarian—i.e., urban—history with a local bourgeoisie, a developed division of labor, and socio-spatial differentiation. Also today, their economic basis differs and ranges from commerce, handicraft, and industry to tourism. Only as an exception does agriculture play a decisive role. Historically, small towns might be further differentiated according to their predominant character, be it a rural town (e.g., Ackerbürgerstadt), a spa town, a white-collar town (e.g., Beamtenstadt), an ex-urban residential area, or a military center. Today, such one-dimensional categorizations rarely contribute to an adequate description.
Yet, the type of settlement of interest to this paper is not only characterized by a certain size (or smallness), architectural fabric, or historical and socio-economic features. Rather, “excess importance” (Christaller 2006/1933, 26) needs to be considered in order to define rural small towns. This relates to some economic, administrative, and/or cultural relevance not only for the immediate small-town population, but also for its surroundings. The German planning system reinforces this role in most states by attributing the lowest rank of the planning hierarchy (Grundzentrum