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rural geography The superstructure of
modern academicgeographywas thoroughly
metropolitan – London, Paris, Berlin,
Chicago – but its foundations were in the
countryside. Paul Vidal de la Blache devel-
oped hisregional geographythrough close
(though not exclusive) attention to the peasant
cultures of rural France, for example, while
Carl Ortwin Sauer’s vision ofcultural geo-
graphyfocused on the evolution of rural and
agrarianlandscapesin the Americas. Even
earlylocation theoryandspatial science
looked to the countryside for their origins:
von thU ̈nen’s model of agricultural land use
was based on records from his country estate,
Christaller’s central place theory was
rooted in a stable world of southern Bavarian
marketplaces rather than explosive urban–
industrial growth, and Torsten Ha ̈gerstrand’s
diffusiontheory grew out of his studies of
the Swedish countryside. But the distinction
betweencityand countryside is a culturally
constructed one (Williams, 1973), and there is
an important tradition of historical geo-
graphyin Europe and North America that
has long been concerned with reconstructing
its historical transformations (e.g. the work of
the Permanent European Conference for the
Study of the Rural Landscape, established in
1957: see http://www.pecsrl.org).
No less importantly, the distinction also var-
ies over space. In Europe, and particularly in
Britain, rural geography has recently been
revivified as a response to a series of political
and cultural concerns: the ‘threat to the coun-
tryside’ and to wildlife posed byurbanization,
the transformation of agriculture and the
aggressive rise ofagribusiness(see alsoagri-
cultural geography), the rise of new modes
ofrecreationand the development of ‘second
homes’ in the countryside, the changingclass
composition of rural communities, and the
ways in which all these issues are entangled in
wider debates about the politics andproduc-
tion of nature. These politico-intellectual
responses have challenged the concept of
rurality (Marsden, Murdoch, Lowe, Munton
and Flynn, 1993; Cloke, 2006) and increas-
ingly treated the rural as a series of cultural
constructs rather than a set of geographically
bounded spaces (Murdoch, 2003). In North
America there have been comparable, historic-
ally sensitive studies of the exploitations and
oppressions embedded in the production of
agrarian landscapes (Mitchell, 1996) and of
theimaginative geographiesthrough which
they have been domesticated, notably in
literature and film (Henderson, 1999),though probably few of those responsible
would situate their work within a distinctively
rural geography. Similarly, some of the most
exciting work inpolitical ecologyand envir-
onmental studies in America – Kosek’s (2006)
analysis of New Mexico’s forests, Sayre’s
(2002) accounts of ranching in the Southwest,
Hollander’s history of the Everglades (2008) –
has taken as its theatre of operations the rural
broadly construed.
Still more generally, the classicagrarian
questionhas directed attention to the differ-
entiation of rural producers, the contribution
of the rural sector to capitalist accumulation,
and the politics of class distinctions in the
countrysides of the globalsouth. Here, the
vast literature on peasants has rarely
attempted to theorize rurality but has instead
preferred to focus on social differentiation, the
organization of work and household dynamics
(Bassett, 2001; Gidwani, 2008). Analysis of
the so-called urban bias (Lipton, 1977) and
of rural–urban linkages has been especially
fruitful in generating new questions about
the formation of complex, hybrid urban–rural
spaces (McGee, 1991) and about power,
patronage politics and differential forms of
accumulation across space (Hart, 2002;
Chari, 2004). The World Bank’s World
Development Reportfor 2008 notes that ‘three
out of every four poor people in developing
countries live in rural areas – 2.1 billion living
on less than $2 a day, and 880 million on less
than $1 a day – and most depend on agricul-
ture for their livelihoods’. It also notes that
rural poverty has declined over the past
twenty years in East Asia and the Pacific,
largely the result of improving conditions in
the countryside rather than out-migration,
but that the number of rural poor has con-
tinued to rise in South Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa. A distinguishing characteristic of rural
poverty is its disproportionate toll on women
and the exposure of the rural workforce to
the fragmentation of labour markets, and the
impermanence and seasonality of labour con-
tracts. Indeed, one of the central findings of
theReportis the extent to which agricultural
populations are dependent upon off-farm
income, in which the structure of the rural,
non-agricultural economy is crucial. The
questions that dominate rural geographies
in these regions include drought, famine
and globalclimatechange (Watts, 1983a; see
global warming); the production offood
and access to water; dispossession and
the politics of development; the violence
of resource wars and other forms ofGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_R-new Final Proof page 659 2.4.2009 9:12pmRURAL GEOGRAPHY