Reimagining Rural Spaces in Europe
Symposium Shifting ruralities
Earlier this month we organised a successful symposium, with great keynote speeches by Katy Fox, Fernando Garcia-Dory, Michael Woods and Guida Marques. The necessity to get the new rurality on the agenda and the need for further explorative research was emphasized in the introduction by Pascale Van Dooren from the EU Rural Pact Support Office. In 6 parallel sessions over 50 original contributions were presented and discussed, from ‘back to rural’ to ‘beyond the rural frontier’, with excursions to representing, revitalizing, decolonizing and liveability or rural places and territories.
Two very interesting days were packed with a display of poster contributions at ULB and CIVA, the results of the student architecture competition ‘Alpeggio Bouça Lissewege’, the exhibition ‘In media res’ of three years of studio work in the six architecture and urban design units, and ‘It was all fields once’, an exhibition at CIVA and Track that continued during the weeks after the symposium. All this was topped with more inspiring discussions during lunch and coffee breaks. At the CIVA library we had the very poetic gathering ‘Whispering books’, an intimate experience of polyphonic reading, where excerpts of texts in different languages were shared, giving voice to multiple landscapes and imaginaries.
Shifting Ruralities urges us all to continue the search for the ever-evolving meaning and role of the rural, leaving behind the common bias to look at rural territories from an urban (or suburban) perspective. We all felt the need to figure out what we could do next to forward the discussion in the coming years.
By Jan Zaman
Senior expert Territorial Development and Urban and Rural Economy at IdeaConsult — NERU external expert
