Reconfiguring rurality

Abstract

The concept of planetary rural geographies is an antithesis of planetary urbanization's erasure of the ‘rural’. Rather than push the compartmentalization of development spaces or processes, planetary rural geographies provide a framework of analyses that valorizes epistemic plurality, and which can help to better understand emerging complex problems in an ever-evolving world. The three rural space spectra of crisis, conflict, and hope, which are embedded within the geographies of rurality, serve as a new configuration and units of analyses for reestablishing the enduring nature of rurality itself. While the propositions in the thesis are plausible, some critiques are, however, offered to further shed light on the complexities and unique attributes of rural places.

Introduction

In their forum article, Wang et al. (2025) deemphasize the ‘planetary urbanization’ thesis and propose ‘planetary rural geographies’ within the context of rural–urban relations. That urbanization has diffused across time and space and can no longer be limited to the city (Brenner, 2014; Lefebvre, 1970) is a positionality that receives no approbation from the school of thought that sees the ‘rural’ as uniquely differentiated from the urban, and which cannot be wished away or eroded (Gillen et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2023) in terms of structures and functions. The need to uphold metanarratives that seek multiple ways of knowing instead of the much-touted Grand narrative, which adopts a unilinear approach to the understanding of societal progress and development (see, Wallerstein, 2007) finds relevance in the proposed ‘planetary rural geographies’ (Wang et al., 2025). The authors’ emphasis on the complexity associated with the vertical and horizontal interactions between all constituents of the Earth, both living and nonliving, and above the Earth's surface and beneath its surface, offers an entirely unique dimension to analyzing rural places within the context of Gillen et al. (2022) ‘geographies of ruralization’. Wang et al. (2025) opine that new epistemologies that find a comprehensive pathway to understanding planetary rural geographies must transcend the parochial thinking of the geographies of ruralization that is only fixated on the human dimension of the universe.

The notion that power exclusively resides in the city and from where all ‘transforming’ benefits flow to other places including the periphery is the sticking point in the debate on planetary urbanization. This standpoint constitutes an impediment to a better understanding of the uniqueness and perpetuity of rural places. Wang and his colleagues vehemently repel the idea of planetary urbanization and rejoin ‘ … that agency is dispersed and that rural-urban relations may be initiated from the rural as well as from the urban’ (Wang et al., 2025). To be sure, both the rural and urban are mutually inclusive and interdependent of each other – the rural, which serves as the primordial phase of the urban, feeds into the latter and vice versa. Thus, rural identities and cultures, which are strongly associated with rural livelihood activities, norms, and practices, have implications for rural–urban relations.

The indispensability of rural places and people in the development process cannot be gainsaid. First, the rural populace serves as the pool from which the urban societies primarily draw their socioeconomic strength; rural places provide cheap labor for factories and manufacturing companies. Two, rural societies form the bulk of the places where agricultural activities take place, thereby enhancing food security and the production of raw materials for driving industrial growth and economic development. Three, several well-meaning individuals, most especially in the Global South, had their formative years in rural places and through cultural and ethical orientations were socialized into acceptable mode of behaviors in the larger society. Regardless of the influence of modernity and modernization, rules of conduct and piety continue to receive approbation and are preserved in today's most rural societies. Fourth, rural places are naturally inclined to nature preservation and the Indigenous knowledge systems associated with them provide support for societal sustenance and identity preservation. As such, the sustenance of the planetary system in its entirety could be jeopardized if these benefits were to be completely wiped out by the engulfment of the rural by the urban.

The persistence of the ‘rural’

The entropy generated through the interaction between the urban and rural naturally perpetuates both urbanity and rurality (see, Krause, 2013). Examples abound in Europe and Asia where, through ‘rurality-as-a-choice’, urbanizing societies are once again ruralizing (see, Chigbu, 2013: 818). This standpoint partly follows, among others, Pareto's (1963) evolutionary model that suggests a cyclical societal change in which societies first evolve as simple communities and then develop into complex structures, which in the course of time, would decline or come to ruins. Here, the emphasis is not on the ruins but on the simple structure that a community might acquire. Sympathetic towards the ‘protection of rural areas’, Chigbu (2013: 822) provides examples of several campaign organizations in rural England, Scotland, Wales, and Germany, which create awareness on the ‘ …preservation of rural areas’ by ‘ …keeping [them] more natural and making them a better place for future generations’. Rurality-as-a-choice proposed by Chigbu (2013) underscores a well-thought, (infrastructural) development planning that is cognizant of nature and cultural heritage preservation in rural communities, which in turn might offer sustainable livelihoods to local communities. This buttresses Elands and Wiersum's (2001) conceptualization of rural progress as the enhancement of people's live-ability in rural areas and Moseley's (2003) proposition of equitable distribution of resources between the rural and urban, and minimizing the socioeconomic disparities that exist between them.

The ‘never complete’ agenda of the urbanization of rural areas (Walker, 2015) finds relevance even within the context of the urban space where a discerning eye could easily spot a tinge of rurality. Gillen et al. (2022) configurations of ruralization as in situ ruralization, extended ruralization and rural returns affirm the ubiquitousness of rurality everywhere. Of interest is rural returns that exude the reenactment of rurality among nostalgic city-dwellers whose origin stemmed from the rural, and who strive to relive and perpetuate their cultural identities within the urban space (see also, Kolawole, 2015). Regardless of the degree to which they are exposed to urbanity, several peripheral and ultra-peripheral rural places will not urbanize either by choice or compulsion at least in the foreseeable future because of the strong attachment they have with their cultural heritage and due to regulatory conservation policies implemented by national governments to retain the pristine nature of certain designated natural environments where those communities are situated. Examples are readily drawn from tourist destination settlements located in and around protected areas such as Game Reserves and UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Sites like the Okavango Delta in northwestern Botswana.

The erroneous categorization of ‘rural and urban’ based on wealth and other similar socioeconomic yardsticks by the colonial authorities as depicted in Nolan's (2018) ‘villagization of Kenya’ is tantamount to inviting the rural African to see their rural space from the lens of the European. Most certainly, there is a tinge of rurality in certain urban spaces both in the Global North and Global South where it is even extremely difficult for some categories of individuals to enjoy the benefits of city life. The favelas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Cañada Real in Madrid, Spain, are typical examples of shanty settlements situated within cities. If urban space is equated with progress and fortune, how then do we categorize those who live in squalor and experience extreme deprivation within that space? Patronizing rural spaces through the precolonial lens of the European as those which lack vitality and are associated with unproductive, peasant agriculture might further create a schism in the rural–urban socioeconomic and political relations.

New pathways for analyzing ‘rural’ as a differentiated, geographical entity

As earlier indicated, Wang and colleagues’ seminal proposition finds uniqueness in their emphasis on the need to engage in vertical and horizontal analyses of both biotic and abiotic elements within ecosystems, which comprise the rural space as a differentiated, geographical entity. To resolve the bourgeoning planetary crises, Wang et al. (2025) rejoin that ‘ … the configuration of human-environment interactions at the “rural” end of urban-rural relations…’ is worth reconsidering within the context of the ever-present challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, food, and energy (in)security. The authors’ concept of planetary rural geographies, which they also coined as ‘geographies of planetary rurality’, finds relevance within three rural spectra – the space of crisis, conflict, and hope. I refer to this as the ‘CCH-space of planetary rural geographies’. If politically well-directed, the rural space is conceived as an arena where order eventually emerges from a chaotic situation. It thus remains an interactive flux in which veritable and holistic analyses of the three spectra identified by the authors are conducted.

Nonetheless, a few issues remain. First, Wang et al. (2025) conceptualization of the ‘planetary rural’ as a space of crisis, where the rural is central to emerging planetary crises sounds disparaging and restrictive – most human crises emanate from the restive nature of the city elite and their unnecessary poke-nosing into nonobtrusive phenomena that reside within the rural space. A sweeping labeling of the ‘rural’ as a space of crisis in the context of planetary rural geographies would simply suggest that rural crises are internally self-induced and self-made problems. Instead, the disturbance of the rural space through the urban incursion of commerce and wanderlust warrants a destabilizing effect on the entire system – both rural and urban. It is, however, noteworthy that the mutual inclusivity of both the urban and rural in a geographic configuration engenders crises that transcend boundaries whether from urban to rural or vice versa. To be sure, most extreme weather conditions that rural communities currently witness are largely induced by carbon emissions in industrial megacities. Second, Monbiot's (2022) juxtaposition of ‘traditional extensive livestock farming’ with ‘industrial intensive agriculture’ in terms of the equally damaging effect they have on nature is contestable. This is because traditional extensive system of animal husbandry has always been practiced at a low scale in rural communities except in areas where the more powerful, urban industrialists have made an incursion into the rural space for commercial agriculture. Third, contrary to Wang and colleagues’ claim that positioned industrial-intensive agriculture including solid minerals and other natural resource extractions as not ‘ … urban incursion into the rural, but as part of the constant re-assembling of rural places…’, large-scale resource extractions and intensive mode of agriculture is indeed an invasion of the rural space where locals naturally mimic the environment to achieve their livelihood objectives. The degradation of the Niger Delta's terrestrial and aquatic environments in Nigeria, which resulted from several decades of crude oil extractions and gas flaring by multinational oil companies and the illegal gold mining activities of one Chinese company in a Ghanaian communal area will suffice. These activities have led to irreversible environmental damage that continues to impact significantly on poor people's livelihoods and well-being. And to portray their protests as reactionary and unwillingness to embrace progressive change as van der Ploeg (2020) put it is grossly condescending. Rather than see them as the problem, locals should be seen as the solution because they are well knowledgeable about their geographic terrains and aware of what is good for them and the environment. Often, local communities and their associated Indigenous practices are cognizant of the need to always protect nature. Even the features of regenerative agriculture (such as crop rotation, shifting cultivation, agro-forestry, bush fallow, zero tillage, cover cropping, etc.) that are currently touted by scientists as new innovations and environmental-friendly strategies for addressing planetary challenges by rural actors are age-long farming practices that traditional farmers used to mimic their environment. Left undisturbed, the ‘rural’ has the innate capacity to regulate its ecosystem dynamics without necessarily jeopardizing the well-being of the urban. Most certainly, the rural space will perpetually remain a conflict zone if the urban elite, in pursuit of access to natural resources and in connivance with government agencies, continue to wield power over and above the poor, hapless rural people.

That rural space offers hope for the planet underscores its important role in the sustainability of the Universe. To discard fatalism and engage in practical actions that help to ‘re-make’ the planet is to eschew complacency and take leadership (by consensus) in finding logical solutions to the myriads of environmental and other challenges confronting the present world. Latour's (2004) ‘parliament of things’, and Wang et al. (2025) ‘planetary geographies of knowing’ recognizes the importance of counter-expertise (Williams and Moore, 2019) and knowledge hybridization that offers a holistic solution to complex problems facing the contemporary world (Kolawole, 2019; Wallerstein, 2007). We must, however, not lose sight of the fact that rurality is contextual. In their conceptualization of the role of the ‘rural’ in wielding high-tech but relatively cheap technological initiatives to decarbonize the environment, Wang et al. (2025) may have broadly viewed ‘rural’ through the Western lens. Societies that are categorized as rural in the Global North are generally not conceived as rural in developing countries. Thus, the characters of rural places and people's sociocultural attributes could influence the application of rural bioeconomy technology devised as an alternative to animal protein and as a means of decarbonizing the environment. The authors’ sweeping consideration for ‘precision fermentation and synthetic proteins’ as a cheap and easy-to-be-adopted initiative might not receive approbation from many rural African societies where habitus and adherence to cultural symbols and traits are a big deal.

Ultimately, the positionality of Wang et al. (2025) and their thesis on planetary rural geographies offers a fresh perspective on how to analyze the dynamics of both urbanization and ruralization. And the need to pay close attention to the ever-evolving rural–urban relations from a broad-based perspective and through epistemic pluralism could be the pathfinder for a holistic understanding of some pertinent planetary crises.