What role do villages and smaller towns have in a world in which the majority lives in cities? Rural space is about to change: After mechanization and industrialization, rural space has experienced mass out-migration. It has received waste and unwanted or out-dated infrastructures from cities. It has fed the world's population and served as the scenery for movie plots or as a recreational landscape for temporary guests. But in the near future, rural space will step out of the shadow of the cities and become appreciated as an important actor in sustainable development in its own right. In the current city-centred discourse, rural spaces are often dismissed as declining or stagnating. However, rural spaces also play a critical role in sustainable development, as an inextricably linked counterpart, but also as a complement to the growing city, as extraction sites, natural reservoirs or leisure spaces. Yet, the city and the countryside are evermore increasingly mutually reliant. A closer look at the countryside unveils a set of dynamics overlaying and changing rural space, beyond trends of depopulation and shutdown of public facilities.The once remote and quiet countryside is now traversed by global and regional flows of people, goods, waste, energy and information, interrelating it with the larger urban system, and perhaps even bringing it to the frontlines of regional transformation and sustainability. publiarq.com
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