Re-scaling the Rural: Essays on ruralities across disciplines and scales - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1966515057 ISBN 13: 9781966515050

Publisher: ORO Editions, 2026

Synopsis

• Re-scaling the Rural offers students, academics and practitioners alike, a multidisciplinary snapshot of some of the latest and most innovative contemporary design and thinking relating to rural terrains and issues
• Re-scaling the Rural draws on material from the international conference of the same name held in Thy, Denmark, the latest in the series of conferences, events and publications initiated by the AlterRurality Network
• Re-scaling the Rural offers critical readings of contemporary rurality as seen from different disciplines and in the contexts of different scales in space and time and when rurality is becoming more and more central in the awareness of the Anthropocene crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars and rising inequalities

Existing as it does on the brink of being overrun, urbanised or abandoned, rurality is contested. Even in the field of academia, it is often questioned or considered a minor subordinate appendix to urbanity.

Since the ancient Greeks, conceptions of the rural have praised it as an idyllic and tranquil place where humans were closer to nature. Nowadays however, notions of the countryside are more complex, it is also a place in constant flux, a place defined and controlled by the urban. Can rurality continue to depend on the urban? Or will future scenarios recognise it for its potential to live truly 'closer to nature' and as the place to be? What can we learn from current counter-urbanisation movements that have sprung up in the wake of changing geopolitical circumstances as well as geographical and social inequality?

Re-scaling the Rural aims to generate a broader understanding of contemporary rurality as it exists in different countries, seen by different disciplines in the context of different scales in space and time. Rurality may become the place that answers to the Anthropocene and its crises of pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, wars and rising inequalities.

The publication combines conceptual and practical explorations, from the outside-in (urban viewpoints) and inside-out (departing from an unknown rurality).

About this title

About the Author

Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag is an architect with specialisation in adaptive reuse, rural transformation, radical preservation, and research by design. His special research focus is radical preservation of the rural built environment in Denmark. Sophia Meeres is a landscape architect specialised in urban forestry and policymaking. Member of ARENA and the alterRurality network, she teaches at University College Dublin, her focus is on the design of a future woodland network, in towns and villages across Ireland. Ben Stringer teaches architecture at the University of Westminster where he also contributes to the Emerging Territories research group. He is a member of ARENA and the AlterRurality network. His publications include the book Rurality Re-Imagined.

All Credited Contributors: Stefan Darlan Boris, Morten Daugaard, Corinna Dean, Anne Mette Frandsen, Keith Halfacree, Marie-Laure Garnier, Sabine Girard, Eric Guibert, Knud Aarup Kappel, Mathilde Kirkegaard, Cæcilie Kildahl Kramer, Ditte Bendix Lanng, Jane Mcallister, Tom Nielsen, Karen Olesen, Tina Vestermann Olsen, Jens Christian Pasgaard, Pieter Versteegh, and Katrina Wiberg.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

•Precision-farming, renewable energy plants, data centers, biodiversity zones, home offices and increasing connectivity: new forms of rurality are emerging physically and conceptually, and new dynamics are at play between ‘human’, ‘extra human’ and ‘non-human’ scales. (Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag).•Is ‘country’ still ‘contra (against, opposite)’ the city in any active sense or should it really be seen largely as a relic of the past? (Keith Halfacree)•In an increasingly digtitalized world, where more and more aspects of life (understood, in the broadest sense, as the life of humans, flora and fauna, etc.) is recorded, analyzed and organized, where do we find space for what is not organized and optimized? Where do we find unsmart landscapes? (Jens Christian Pasgaard, Karen Olesen, Tom Nielsen, and Morten Daugaard)

Edition details

• Publisher: ORO Editions
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1966515057
• ISBN 13: 9781966515050
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252
• Editor: Meeres Sophia, Stringer Ben, Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag