New Ruralities (NERU) is an Erasmus+ Cooperation partnerships program (2022-2025) that gathers six design units within the universities of ULB, POLITO, UDC, UMinho, UACEG, and ETHZ. It focuses on European rural territories, shielded by the new Rural Pact (EU, 2021) and intrigued by the recent trends that since the COVID-19 pandemic have shaken these territories. Indeed, the lockdown mainstreamed online working while exacerbating the longing for nature and a sense of belonging. People flocked to the countryside in search of the rural landscapes and the self-absorbed communities they had seen in the movies or remembered vaguely from their childhood. They discovered instead a dynamic and diverse space, an elusive new rurality yet recognisable in its big traits: an aging population living in isolation and lacking essential services, a dying economy being humbly reanimated by the growing dependence of cities upon the countryside (for energy, food, raw materials, cheap logistics, etc.), a massive abandonment of the built fabric leading to plummeting land prizes, yet a solid heritage in the form of buildings and anthropized landscapes, resulting from 7000 years of human–nature coevolution.
Our approach to this new rurality, or new ruralities (if we are to underline their diversity), wishes to be above all exploratory. Its aim, to generate a kind of knowledge that would be true to the diversity and dynamism of rural areas, and beyond the association of the rural and farming, or beyond outmoded rural–urban dualisms. Urbanization processes extend well beyond the realm of urban and metropolitan agglomerations, profoundly transforming cultivated fields, rainforests, deserts, and oceans... The scale of such processes has kept on increasing over the past fifty years. Cities have moved from being dependent on their immediate environment to drawing on increasingly extensive territories and networks, linked by intertwined and proliferating supply chains. This dependence, often asymmetrical, is ultimately altering the ecologies of the Earth.
The ability of architecture and urban planning to act on these challenges requires a precise and situated knowledge of the diversity of situations that manifest themselves outside agglomerations, in the out-of-town, within environments that are often far from our sight, but which directly support our lives. Can we still refer to them as “rural”, as being subordinate places, lagging progress-wise and haunted by a past that tends to boycott their Progress? Can we still push them aside while they are jostled by contemporary dynamics of global interconnectivity and exploitation? And above all, can the experience and study of some ‘rural’ places and livelihoods be fed back into the domains of architecture and urban design, engaging a new relationship with this “ignored realm”, teasing out the messy entanglements of the rural and the urban? And with what consequences?
Coordinator/contact:
Nadia Casabella: nadia.Casabella@ulb.be
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