Degradation, Restitution and the Elusive Culture of Rural-Urban Thinking
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Degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking MIREK DYMITROW Dymitrow, Mirek (2017). Degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking. Fennia 195: 1, pp. 36–60. ISSN 1798-5617. Despite fierce criticisms, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ still constitute powerful narratives around which we structure our society. The ‘formal reality’, however, frequently disregards the cultural nature of these concepts, elevating them to the role of objective spaces apt to serve as acceptable guiding perspectives. While the analytical inadequacy of rural-urban ideations is well-documented, the phenomenon of formal-cultural conflation remains much less explored. Acknowledging that ideational space of social representations can only exist through the practices of discursive interaction, this paper’s objective is to lay bare the phenomenon of rural-urban thinking when externalized through the little-known practices of ‘degradation’ and ‘restitution’ in Poland. Using conceptual methods, including discourse analysis and historical deconstruction, this paper assays the hidden architectures of formal-cultural conflation by means of a richly contextualized analysis. The findings, presented in four discursive openings, reveal embedded elements of hierarchy, loss, injustice and self-victimization, which may create a divisive culture spawned by elusive promises of development at the cost of misinterpretations of history, local disappointment and cultural segmentation. In conclusion, formal appropriation of historical concepts is likely to engender a cultural geography of discord spun around a largely insignificant division, especially when development-oriented aspects of urbanization become entwined with emotional issues. Keywords: rural-urban, cultural-formal, degradation, restitution, discourse analysis, Poland Mirek Dymitrow, Department of Economy and Society, Human Geography Unit, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, P.O. Box 630; SE-405 30 Göteborg, Sweden, E-mail: [email protected] Introduction With Poland as an example, this paper aims to lay bare the phenomenon of rural-urban thinking when externalized through the little-known practices of ‘degradation’ and ‘restitution’. As scholarly evidence suggests, the concepts ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are increasingly treated as a pair of social constructs rather than as sets of geographically bounded places or facticities (Champion & Hugo 2004; Cloke 2006a; Halfacree 2006; Scott et al. 2007; Hubbard 2006; Woods 2010a; Bosworth & Somerville 2014). Steady, fast-paced transformations in the environmental, economic and social dimensions (cf. Millward et al. 2003) have rendered simple spatial classifications inadequate to social theory, especially when rooted URN:NBN:fi:tsv-oa60462 © 2017 by the author. This open access article is licensed under DOI: 10.11143/fennia.60462 a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) Mirek Dymitrow 37 in a centuries-long dichotomous imaginary that defies contemporary reality of interconnectedness (Hoggart 1990; Halfacree 1993; Little 1999; Pile 1999). When external conditions change, older conceptualizations are usually being questioned (Jones 2009); the rural-urban dichotomy, however, is one discursive standard that has withstood similar devolution and is more and more in need of critical analysis (cf. Dymitrow & Stenseke 2016). To reflect this, the last decades have embraced non- essentialist approaches (including actor-network theory, assemblage philosophy, performativity, more-than-human approaches etc.) that eschew notions of a coherent social totality and of various conceptual binaries like human–nonhuman, modern–unmodern, material–immaterial, natural– cultural, or, indeed, rural–urban (Law & Urry 2004; Braun 2005; Bennett & Joyce 2010; Castree et al. 2010; Panelli 2010; Anderson et al. 2012; Latour 2013; Dahlberg 2015; Bawaka Country et al. 2016). This erasure has provided a foundation for more creative combinations that embrace relationality and hybridity more timely ways to approach and understand various concepts (cf. Murdoch 2003; Cloke & Johnston 2005; Leyshon 2008; Halfacree 2009a; Woods 2010b; Bukraba-Rylska & Burszta 2011; Gorman-Murray et al. 2012; Dymitrow & Stenseke 2016). This position, however, has not been equally adopted worldwide. In line with the notion that “ideational space of social representations can only exist through the practices of discur-sive interaction” (Halfacree 2006, 48), different countries have developed different understandings of the universal rural-urban distinction (Mihaylov 2014), leading up to intricate patterns of societal organization (Hall 1997; Halfacree 2009b). Accordingly, half of the world’s countries use administrative definitions of “urban”, 51 use size/density, 39 use functional characteristics, 22 have no such definition, while eight define all or none of their population as “urban” (Vlahov & Galea 2002, 52). Different countries have also very different official definitions of “rural areas”, ranging from population dispersion to agricultural-based economy, distance from major urban centers, or lack of access to various services (European Commission 2008). While formalization of domestic understandings of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are implicitly “cultural”, i.e. they are in one way or another thought to reflect the local context – geographies, customs, practices – there are several obstacles standing in the way of obtaining a satisfactory cultural-formal symmetry. Here I will only touch upon three: institutional inertia, imposition of standards and ulterior motives. The first problem lies in the fact that the society evolves faster than do institutional structures (Kegan & Lahey 2009). Institutional lock-ins, hence, may be detrimental to society, because not only may old structures no longer reciprocate with a changing world but the concepts upon which those structures are based often give rise to new ill-devised structures (cf. Essebo 2013). Secondly, formal representations of ‘rural/urban’ may sometimes poorly, if not at all, reflect the local context because of complex histories of occupation, annexation and colonialism, whereupon imposed systems of governance may continue to be cultivated after independence (Schaffer 1978). Lastly, formal representations are often “expressed by capitalist interests or politicians, which refer to the ways in which the rural [or urban] is framed within capitalist processes of production and exchange” (Halfacree 2006, 51), and may have little in common with the real needs of the citizens. While problems inherent of formal-cultural disruption can be found in most countries (cf. Szymańska 2013, appendix), they are likely to be the greatest when all of the aforementioned factors interplay. Expectedly, in those cultural settings where ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ have historically come to comprise more powerful narratives and conversational realities, they are less likely to be used as neutral classifiers but as expressions of old value systems that have “survived the onslaught of material transformations and philosophical repositioning” (Cloke & Johnston 2005, 10). However, while uncovering the causes behind such conflations often requires going back in history (Gorlach & Foryś 2003), those largely historical factors typically remain hidden when ‘rural/urban’ imaginaries are allowed to shape contemporary geographies. Since ‘rural/urban’ are seen foremost as historically shaped spatialities (Bosworth & Somerville 2014, 278), they are likely to become a much overused lens in those contexts (planning, governance, research) which adopt spatially based, rather than problem-based, categorizations for various societal actions. This mode of knowledge production brings forth questions of how spatial characterizations not only create spatialities (‘rural’ and ‘urban’ areas) but spatialities with “expected” problems. When spatial perspectivism – the repeated resorting to synthetic ‘foreground perspective-optics’ (Nietzsche [1878] 1996) – is applied a priori to various societal problems, it is likely to distort the results (cf. Law 38 Research paper FENNIA 195: 1 (2017) 2004, 5–6). Hence, while ‘spatial thinking’ is not limited to ‘rural-urban thinking’, the mere act of deploying a spatial analysis in certain contexts may be problematic because many phenomena, like deprivation, unemployment or discrimination, occur independently of some overarching spatial matrix. This in turn creates geosophical environments (Wright 1947) under the guise of geographic demarcation. What this does is create tacit acknowledgment of the importance of the spatial dimension, when no (or little) such importance is warranted and may smack of the much critiqued spatial fetishism. This then may tacitly reaffirm their implied neutrality and provide justification for governmental bodies, policy makers and planners to use ‘rural/urban’ as if they were spatially neutral categories (cf. Hoggart 1990). Effectively, when culture is conflated with normative perspectives the outcome becomes internalized as objective truths, which may consolidate an image that is largely disingenuous to a changed reality (cf. Freibach-Heifetz & Stopler 2008). Similar reflexivity regarding the articulation of rural-urban ideations is disconcertingly absent in Poland (cf. Wójcik 2013; Krzysztofik & Dymitrow 2015a). There, “becoming urban” is considered an exclusive achievement, one that can only be accomplished by a convoluted and heavily bureaucratized process,