Urban or Rural? Rethinking territories, discourses and practices outside the metropolis

Abstract

Throughout the 20th century, urban studies and sociology established a clear cut distinction between “urban” and “rural”; defining the later term as what is not yet urbanized. The distinction was based in a way of thinking (epistemology) favoring dichotomies and ideal types. Both, urban and rural, entailed different “ways of living” (Wirth, 1938); being the urban the one that would become completely hegemonic. However, capitalist industrialization of the countryside, the expansion of cities, and the increase in infrastructure and connectivity, made impossible to maintain this oppositional view of urban and rural. While the territory shows us a complex reality of hybridism, border spaces, and penetration of urban practices into the rural and vice versa, the conceptual toolkit of urban studies, and urban sociology remained inalterable, at least until the 1980’s. In the case of rural studies some advances were made, but never considering the urban as a central part of the phenomenon to be analyzed. The following paper aims at contributing to a debate about a new way of conceptualizing the non metropolitan city and the rural areas surrounding them, using the case of the Maule region in Chile as a case study. First, we describe the transformation in rural areas and the conceptualizations about them. After, we describe the new ways of thinking about cities that open up the door for eliminating the complete opposition between the rural and the urban. Then we proceed with an analysis of the transformation of the cities and rural areas of the Maule region. And finally, we propose –in a preliminary fashion-­‐ new ways of understanding territories whose economic base is dependent upon primary activities; including in the same analysis both urban and rural areas.