Ruralization as decolonization: Land,property,and possibilities in North America

Abstract

Recent scholarship in human geography has proposed the framework of geographies of ruralization to describe rural elements that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive amidst urbanization. This concept has primarily emerged through empirical studies in the Global South, where village-based societies have been rapidly transformed by megaregional urbanization. This commentary brings ruralization into the context of the Global North, specifically rural New England, where modern property regimes have profoundly shaped the rural landscape. Drawing on examples from Massachusetts – where colonial property regimes were first tested and codified – we argue that ruralization in the North today might be understood as an ongoing, processual challenge to the settler-colonial structures of land tenure that have historically defined rural space. We highlight three pathways toward this decolonizing ruralization in the region: autonomy, reparation, and rematriation. These efforts constitute an ‘ecosystem of possibilities’ in which rural actors reclaim embodied relations with the land against colonial enclosure and the ongoing financialization of rural land.

Introduction

In this essay, we seek to extend the ‘Geographies of Ruralization’ framework (Gillen et al., 2022) into the settler-colonial geographies of North America. In the original debate, the authors conceptualized ‘ruralization’ as ‘those elements of the rural that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive even in an urbanizing world’ (Gillen et al., 2022). They did so by explicitly drawing on geographically informed theoretical frameworks emerging from the Global South, such as the desakota region (Gillen et al., 2022; Mcgee, 1991), agrarian urbanism (Gillen et al., 2022; Gururani, 2020), or ‘deruralization’ (Araghi, 1995; Ghosh, 2022). We ask: what would it mean to think through ruralization in the United States, where rural space has been shaped by settler-colonial legacies of land privatization and ecological extraction? We take rural New England as a geographical opening for resituating ruralization in the Global North. This rural region was an early settler frontier and a testing ground for colonial enclosures that were later extended across the continent. Over four centuries, its rural landscape has been reshaped by private property regimes, land-use bureaucracies, and extractive developments tied to land financialization (Gunnoe, 2014). We reframe these changes as a historically constructed process of colonial ruralization. We then highlight localized initiatives that seek to challenge this historical trajectory in the present. We term these emergent sociospatial processes decolonizing ruralization: processual, ongoing transgressions of the extractive tendencies of settler-colonial land relations.

Property and ecology: Colonial ruralization in New England

Our proposition to conceptualize colonial ruralization follows Chen and Kong's (2022) invitation to think about ruralization both historically and ecologically. We take up this invitation by reframing the layered changes in the rural landscape of New England, particularly in the four centuries that followed the settlers’ occupation, as a historically constructed colonial form of ruralization. Private property regimes, unknown to the Nipmuc, Pocumtuc, and other tribes, were catalytic to these ecological changes across the region. The enclosure of commonly held land into the possession of single individuals or families subsequently subjected its ecology to the reductive judicial and theological logics of private property. These rationales drew on Locke's claim that the mixture of labor with land justified ownership and the biblical mandate that one must ‘subdue the soil’ (Cronon, 1983: 69), thus becoming anathema to existing ecological relationships. By 1700, rural space physically metamorphosed from a complex forest ecosystem into a ‘colonial ecology’ (Roberts, 2019: 11), a parcelized expanse of pasture and cropland that closely resembled the same English countryside early colonists were fleeing (Cronon, 1983).

Today, even with its relatively small scale of operations, agriculture in New England feeds into regional and national supply chains enabled by a totalizing colonization of the continent. Agricultural companies manage land and labor according to financial logics crafted by food distributors, whose pricing strategies necessitate the centralization of agribusiness operations and aggregation of parcels. These disembodied ecological relations, where land is treated like an asset rather than a living system, elicit ‘ecological violence’ (Bacon, 2019) through physical forces of dislocation, disruption, and destruction of native ecosystems and their kinship ties with Indigenous peoples.

Colonial ruralization, as we propose it here, interprets these violent relations as a unitary process of socioecological change set in motion by the colonial encounter and its property regimes, crystallized by federal and state bureaucracies, and exacerbated by neoliberal pathways of land financialization.

Crises and possibilities: Ruralization as decolonization

While the notion of colonial ruralization is aligned with top-down ideas of ruralization that other scholars identified in Global South contexts (Chen and Kong, 2022; Ghosh, 2022; Ortega, 2022; Santi, 2025), and settler-colonial land management in the Global North as we have described, we now turn to highlight forms of ruralization that act as possibilities to transgress the imposed colonial order. This decolonizing ruralization supports Gillen et al.'s initial proposition that ruralization can constitute resistance. However, we refrain from proposing a binary top-down versus bottom-up structure of change. Instead, we see colonial land regimes in New England as inherently porous, self-destructive, and prone to openings. Building on Gillen et al.'s (2022) previous typologies, we highlight three pathways that decolonizing ruralization has taken in New England.

Autonomy as ‘in-situ ruralization’

In alignment with Gillen et al.'s concept of in-situ ruralization, many small farmers in New England strive to meet most of their needs on their own land. Living off-grid has a long history in New England and can be traced back to the early colonial period (Cronon, 1983). Today, however, off-grid farming represents a strive to reclaim autonomy from market-driven, extractive agricultural regimes. Autonomy is not an attainable condition but a continuous struggle to resist the reduction of farming to calculable efficiency. It entails thinking relationally about the interaction of plant, animal, and human lives on the farm, thus gradually reversing the disembodied land relations promoted by colonial ruralization.

A small household farm in the Hilltowns region of Massachusetts, for instance, has sought to live off-grid by creating a self-sustaining agricultural system that centers on nut-producing trees. Requiring years of care before they can deliver substantial yield and inherently storing nutrients in the soil, these species are anathema to profit-driven land tenure. By growing a storage crop kept on site at a small scale through embodied farming, including scythe, sheep, duck, and terraced land formations, their labor produces a relationship with the land that ensures independent survival of the household and the ecosystem. Such practices do not explicitly transgress the colonial logic of privatization, yet they begin to imagine ecology otherwise, seeking to disentangle the land from the interlocked systems of efficient production that dominate the surrounding properties.

Reparation as ‘extended ruralization’

Processes of undoing colonial ecology also unfold transnationally, as an extended ruralization. Particularly, in Central Massachusetts, a network of nonprofits assists Puerto Rican migrants and farmers displaced by climate change. They enable farmers to reterritorialize in the mainland by regaining access to agricultural land and a network of local grassroots food distributors, recognizing that climate disasters are produced by colonial relations (‘disaster colonialism’, Rivera, 2022).

At one such organization, small farmland parcels are rented at no or little cost to Puerto Rican farmers forced from their homeland. This land-based reparative economy enables migrant farmers to grow commercial crops and trade them with Caribbean people that have migrated to the region. The farm system acts as a common for those with a shared, displaced cultural identity. They invert the logic of a colonial ecology serving only the economic demands of settler-colonialism, instead practicing a rural identity as a means to reconnect to the land. By restituting farmers both access to land and an embodied connection to ancestral Puerto Rican crops, these ecologies begin to recognize and repair the damages caused by colonial relations between the US mainland and its annexed territories.

Rematriation as ‘rural return’

Finally, in New England, Gillen et al.'s idea of rural return aligns with indigenous efforts to ‘rematriate’ the land and to re-establish a present-day version of precolonial ecology (Gray, 2022; Herrighty and Hill, 2024). In recent years, rematriation has taken shape in several land back efforts led by Indigenous groups, often materialized through governmental agreements, individual donations, or land trust transfers. These initiatives seek to reclaim kinship ties that are rooted in embodied and ancestral relationships with land, although often they must operate through the very bureaucratic and economic mechanisms originally responsible for dispossession.

The largest instance of rematriation in the region is the land restitution project at Monument Mountain in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. There, over 350 acres of formerly state-owned farm and timberland were returned to Mohican stewardship through state grant programs. Although the state bureaus justified the transfer in terms of climate action and sustainability (Bassman, 2023), the rematriation extends beyond this technical language. It seeks to establish a new approach to agroforestry and land stewardship grounded in indigenous practices (Barger et al., 2025) on a site of ancestral value to the group. This large project is part of a broader constellation of smaller rematriation practices which often occur for pragmatic, more so than ethical, reasons. With rising financial and environmental challenges in making New England land profitable, farmers increasingly consider donations to indigenous organizations to be the most feasible option.

Toward rural political ecologies of possibilities

In a geography that is struggling to continue supporting extraction and accumulation, and where emergent practices work within, but erode, colonial systems, decolonizing ruralization is incrementally challenging the disembodied ecologies of a colonial landscape. With this argument, we are not suggesting that New England has embarked on a linear trajectory toward decolonization. Yet we emphasize the importance of recognizing emergent transgressions to the colonial norm, and to advance theoretical tools to interpret them. In a similar spirit to Gillen et al.'s notion of ruralization shedding light on forms of resistance, we bring ruralization North to foreground emerging, dispersed, at times imperfect practices that begin to challenge the capitalist colonization of rural North America. Together, these efforts reposition rural space as a ‘space of hope’ (Wang et al., 2025) and ruralization as ‘ecosystems of possibilities’ (Ortega, 2022), where practices of rural resistance are eroding the oppressive regimes that have historically transformed the region.