Abstract
This paper proposes ‘ruralization’ as a concept that human geographers are well placed to develop across the rural-urban geography divide and in dialogue with scholars in cognate fields. We understand ruralization as the processual, more-than-residual, and geographically-variegated socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary human engagements with rural land, livelihoods, and lifestyles. Our approach comprises three prominent dynamics of ruralization experienced through residents’ entanglements with rural and urban Southeast Asia: in situ ruralization, extended ruralization, and rural returns. We argue in favor of a rural-urban relationality rather than urban-centered socio-spatial transformation and urge geographers to take seriously the lives and geographies of people in the Global South whose perspectives on urbanization are entangled with ongoing rural dynamics. Our contribution is intended as a corrective to notions of the urbanization of everywhere in a zero-sum relationship with a residual rural, and as a way of demonstrating the importance of human geographical experiences to wider debates, concerns, and conversations.
Keywords
Introduction
Rural and urban scholars continue to operate in largely separate worlds. In terms of academic structures and institutions, there are distinct theoretical traditions and associated models pertaining to each, reproduced in a circular manner through the specific operational units within which ruralists and urbanists are embedded, and the different outlets in which they publish. Historically, this structural and institutional separation mapped on to an empirical partitioning of what were understood as largely discrete rural and urban worlds, notwithstanding long traditions of scholarship on rural-urban interactions and the rural-urban ‘interface’. Processes associated with urbanization have been highly influential in shaping the theoretical trajectories of many subfields in geography and related social scientific disciplines, while work related to rural studies has largely not had this effect, instead being confined to scholars working in what are regarded as more esoteric and unfashionable corners of human geography, development sociology, and social anthropology. Urbanization has thus had a disproportionate impact on our conceptualization of space, with agglomeration economies, the creative class, gentrification, rent-gap, growth machine – even suburbization – becoming terms with wide currency and recognition.
Among the latest critical reconceptualization of space from the ‘urban side’ has been the pursuit of dismantling the separation between the rural and urban through the project of planetary urbanization. Indeed, highly influential work in urban studies over the past decade has profoundly unsettled this inherited spatial division of academic thinking and labour (Angelo and Goh, 2021; Brenner and Schmid, 2015), and there is a strong emerging corpus that is stimulating dialogue across the rural/urban scholarly divide (see Ghosh and Meer, 2021; Gururani, 2020; Paprocki, 2020; Connolly, 2019; Kanai and Schindler, 2019; Angelo, 2017; Ghosh, 2017; Arboleda, 2016; Roy, 2016). To be sure, planetary urbanization has provided social scientists with a productive vocabulary and toolkit for dissembling the entrenched rural-urban binary. By challenging ‘methodological cityism’ (Wachsmuth, 2014), and moving beyond the city as the default unit of urban analysis to consider the ‘extended’ and even ‘planetary’ reach of urban processes (Brenner, 2019), this new work has taken scholars of urbanization into empirical and geographical domains conventionally occupied by scholars of the rural. These contributions, however, have been more concerned to demonstrate the spatial ‘explosion’ of urbanization than to engage substantively with rural studies (though see Jazeel, 2018, and the aforementioned references). As a result, there is a tendency in such work for the ‘rural’ to be reduced to an obsolescent category (a historical starting point) or residual space (an unconsumed world). In this article, we focus our attention on ‘ruralization’, not out of a desire to be contrarian but because we believe it can serve to reveal those elements of the rural that are persistent, resonant, and pervasive even in an urbanizing world.
We draw upon research both in cities and sites of agrarian transformation in Southeast Asia to sketch geographically-varied ruralizing dynamics. To this end, we develop two interrelated points. First, we seek to uncover the persistent rural sensibilities in a range of practices and spaces, some of which would ordinarily be considered ‘urban’. In doing so, we are necessarily at risk of perpetuating the rural-urban binary in conceptual if not spatial terms. To address this, and second, we advocate a relational conception of ruralization and urbanization, seeing both as contemporaneously in evidence and at work in any given time-space. Thus, having decentered the urban in the reproduction and remaking of the world, we create an opportunity to think differently about urbanization and ruralization. We illustrate this using ideas and scholarship from Southeast Asia, demonstrating the entanglement of urban and rural dynamics through lived experience and spatial practice in the region.
Our intervention here is specifically from the rural side. This is a deliberate choice because while much has been made recently of the expansion of urban analyses into territories that might previously have been considered non- or extra-urban, scholars in rural studies are no less cognizant of the fact that it is becoming ever harder to maintain a dividing line between the rural and the urban, not least because people, processes, and activities refuse to stay put (Rigg, 2013). There are villages in agrarian regions – the (stereo)typical unit of analysis for rural research – that are recognized as having become ‘socially urban’ (Thompson, 2004), while households engaged in smallholder production are often reliant on remittances from cities (Parsons, 2017; 2016). As such, scholars working on rural places or agrarian change have long been attentive to the dangers of methodological villagism (even if they have not previously used such a term). No less than scholars of planetary urbanization, then, many rural scholars realize that ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ no longer do the work that they used to – that they are no longer fit for purpose – because the spatial units that they infer (‘village’, ‘rural’) fail to capture key processes or their socio-spatial effects. But at the same time, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ continue to be used as if they do these things: all manner of social, political, cultural, and economic processes continue to be defined according to territories, people, and institutions associated with either rural or urban. 1 This results in some uncomfortable twists of language and logic because we do not yet have the means to escape the conceptual straight jacket of urban and rural studies and the territorial markers they generate. Moving beyond methodological villagism, our own focus on ruralization is a counterpoint to planetary urbanization. As we seek to show, while ruralization is awkward on the tongue it is also a productive term for encapsulating the processual, more-than-residual, and geographically-variegated socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary human investments in and engagements with rural land, livelihoods, and lifestyles.
We are not the first scholars to find the rural-urban binary a distraction when it comes to understanding the nature of transformation in Southeast Asia (see Rigg, 2013), or even the first to use the term ‘ruralization’. In 2013, sociologist Monika Krause proposed ruralization as a counter-weight to pronouncements of humanity having entered an ‘urban age’. For Krause, this suggestion was problematic not only in terms of a generalized ‘intellectual imperialism of the urban’ (2013: 234), but also because of the continued centrality of the city to urban studies thinking. The latter objection is much more difficult to uphold today given widespread recognition of the need for urban studies to move beyond methodological cityism since the publication of Krause’s (2013) ruralization article (Angelo, 2017; Wachsmuth, 2014). Krause's work is therefore a vital starting point for this article but we seek to extend both its theoretical value and analytical purchase, particularly in light of recent developments in urban studies on extended and planetary urbanization. However, de-centering the city in urban studies from scholars of planetary urbanization (Brenner, 2014) and those working from various ‘outsides’ (Ghosh and Meer, 2021; Oswin, 2018) has arguably only served to deepen the intellectual preponderance of the urban in human geographical research since Krause's original work on ruralization was published. This itself is a compelling reason to revisit and reinvigorate academic interest in the concept of ruralization. Another reason is that our observations of socio-spatial transformation in Southeast Asia bear out one of Krause's empirical claims: ‘dimensions of the rural enter more and more spaces and they enter in unlikely places’ (2013: 243).
We identify and exemplify three geographies of ruralization based on our shared interest in socio-spatial change in Southeast Asia. In terms of imagined conditions and lived practices the three dynamics presented here overlap significantly; parsing them out is a way to move ruralization forward conceptually but not an accurate depiction of the everyday milieu of life in Southeast Asia today. The first is in situ ruralization, or the processes that go into the ongoing (re)production of stereotypically rural spaces in the region: villages and landscapes of small-holder agriculture. For the purposes of this paper, we are interested in the economic diversification strategies of smallholders as they contribute to lives that span spaces which might conventionally be separated into rural and urban worlds, and in particular we identify how subsistence and commodity production entrench people in the ‘rural’ yet also act as bridges connecting and distinguishing rural and urban worlds.
The second geography of ruralization is what we call extended ruralization. The starting point here is historical recognition of how peasant livelihood strategies stretch into spaces that would ordinarily be considered to be urban(izing), including the city. Not only do stereotypically ‘rural’ livelihoods, land uses, and subjectivities persist in urbanizing Southeast Asia, but parts of its major cities are (inverting Thompson, 2004) socially rural in ways that inflect their ongoing remaking and contested future possibilities.
Our third and final geography of ruralization is rural returns. The notion of returns is meant in two senses. Returns are inscribed upon new urban migrants as a means of separating urban and rural prospects and identities. Returns is also used locationally to describe a return to the rural after a period of time away. These, in turn, inflect the relationship between rural and urban in ways that privilege distinctively rural imaginaries and ideals.
Before we elaborate and exemplify these three geographies in the main section of the paper, we first situate our contribution in wider scholarship on the rural/urban divide, review attempts to transcend that divide, and consider how attending to land, livelihood, and lifestyle can help further such human geographical work through the umbrella concept of ruralization.
From the rural/urban divide to entangled geographies of ruralization and urbanization
Rural/urban has been and remains one of the most consequential binaries delineating space in the West. ‘Country’, to denote the rural and in contradistinction to the urban and the city, is said to have come into widespread use in the English language in the sixteenth century, as society and space urbanized (Williams, 1976). Geographical thought centers on the assumption that humans create distinctive boundaries around spatial units within which they live, work, and draw meaning; these in turn become naturalized through territorial markers known as (among others) town and country, urban and rural, the city and the countryside. Reproduced through all manner of socio-spatial stereotypes, and in turn reflected in words such as ‘urbane’ and ‘metropolitan’ and pejorative expressions like ‘country bumpkin’ and ‘redneck’, the rural-urban binary has conceptually been less a porous relationality open to critical reflection than a division framing and shaping Western society. With few exceptions (e.g. Garreau, 1991), geography has historically been largely uninterested in troubling the rural-urban binary and instead has built its theoretical edifice along clear distinctions between ‘rural’ geography and ‘urban’ geography. Other scholarly fields such as rural sociology or urban studies have constructed themselves along similar lines, producing distinctive knowledges and scholarly practices that rarely intermingle. This partitioning is not limited to academia. It extends to policy and planning where rural and urban, and town and country, are also key binaries.
While powerful and persistent, there has been some piecemeal historical attention to critiquing the rural-urban binary, in geography and elsewhere. Unsettling the nexus of the urban and the rural has been important to Marxist-inspired accounts of space, from Williams’ (1973) work on the country and the city to Smith’s (1984) and Harvey’s (1997) research on nature and/in the city. Richard Walker brought a critical eye to the relationship between the city and the countryside (Walker, 2007) in the United States by illustrating how struggles between political organizations, community groups, and the environment undercut easy understandings of an urbanized San Francisco Bay area.
Scholars working in/on other world regions, perhaps less burdened and overshadowed by inherited disciplinary traditions in the West, have been more open to alternative socio-spatial arrangements. One prominent example in Southeast Asia is the work of Terry McGee and his notion of desakota regions where rural and urban are blurred (McGee, 1991; 1989, and see Ortega, 2020). The term brings together the Bahasa Indonesia words ‘desa’ (village) and ‘kota’ (town) to describe the rural/urban intertwinings that McGee is interested in capturing. What differentiates desakota from ‘peri-urbanization’, its English language cousin in the West, is that it puts forward the intermingling of rural and urban activities without linguistically prioritizing the urban side of this relationship or assuming – as ‘peri-urban’ does – that this is an advancing frontier of urbanization, enveloping rural space. For McGee, desakota regions ‘are a kind of ‘in between’ in the ‘rural–urban dichotomy’ that have become a prevailing form of land use’ in Southeast Asia (McGee, 2017: 1; also, see McGee, 1991). McGee coined the term desakota around the same time as geographers working in the West began conceptualizing ideas like ‘edge city’ and ‘peri-urbanization’ to describe similar ‘in-between’ spaces. 2 However, with only one recent exception (‘edginess’) in anthropology that we are aware of (Harms, 2011), an engagement between prevailing understandings of the rural-urban binary from the West and those developed in the Global South has not yet come to fruition.
Even McGee's notion of extended desakota regions leaves readers with a rural – and distinct – world that might be presented in contradistinction to the urban. In other words, it may unsettle binary mappings of rural/urban but it does not supplant them altogether. There are scholars of Asia, however, building in part on McGee's seminal work, who have sought to do just this, tracing urban influences in rural spaces, and vice versa. Demographer Jones (1997) suggested in the 1990s that East and Southeast Asia were experiencing a ‘thoroughgoing’ territorial urbanization. Jones argued that conventional demographic data on levels of urbanization overlooked the degree to which even populations depicted in prior decades as living in a condition of rural isolation had been incorporated, physically and ideationally, into Asia's urban milieu. Key here was the permeation of ‘urban facilities’ of communication (radio and television) and transportation (motorbikes and minibuses) which ended the ‘true isolation’ (Jones, 1997: 239) of villages that had been found up until the 1960s in Java (Indonesia) and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Anthropologist Thompson (2004) subsequently grounded Jones’ region-wide argument in detailed ethnographic work of kampung (village) life in Malaysia. For Thompson, ‘Urbanism has not been creeping. It has been leaping’ (2004: 2362). The kampung of Sungai Siputeh, while sparsely populated and rural, is described by Thompson as ‘a socially urban space…[where] the everyday social reality of its inhabitants is more akin to social life that is conceptually urban than not’ (2004: 2372). 3
Despite the fact that they preceded notions of the ‘Urban Age’ (Burdett and Sudjic, 2008) and currently burgeoning work on planetary urbanization, conceptions of the desakota region, ‘thoroughgoing urbanization’ and ‘socially urban’ villages in Asian studies have gained comparatively much less traction in human geography or urban studies. Some dialogue has recently been initiated (see Jones, 2018; Thompson, 2020), but much remains to be explored, especially at the nexus of work on ‘throughgoing urbanization’ and planetary urbanization. At one level, thoroughgoing urbanization appears to fit more readily into an academic and policy lineage that extends to United Nations-Habitat's proclamation of a ‘new urban millennium’ (UN-Habitat, 2006: iv) and formulation of a multilateral New Urban Agenda (UN-Habitat, 2016) than it speaks to critical political economy work on planetary urbanization. In his initial 1997 article on thoroughgoing urbanization, after all, Jones cites the mid-twentieth century work of Greek architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis whose theory of ‘ekistics’ (‘the science of human settlements’) helped pave the way for the first UN Habitat Conference in 1976 (Katsikis, 2014), but makes no reference to Henri Lefebvre (Jones, 1997), whose Marxian work has served as a platform for early iterations of planetary urbanization (Brenner and Schmid, 2015).
At another level – in terms of the spatiality of urbanization – Jones's insights were distinctly different from more recent UN and associated academic work around the urban age. In short: proclamation of half of humanity as ‘urban’ for the first time in 2007 was measured in terms of the proportion of the world's population living in cities and other more-or-less bounded settlements, and this city-centrism underpins both the UN's ‘urban SDG’ (Sustainable Development Goal #11) and its New Urban Agenda (Martinez et al., 2021). This contrasts sharply with Jones’ observations about the urbanization of even remote (‘rural’) villages in Java, and planetary urbanization work that decentres the city and towns from urban analysis.
The critical demographic observations of Jones in East and Southeast Asia, and the critical political economy urban theory of Brenner and Schmid overlap in their understanding of the urban as a process that extends into territories that would conventionally be considered rural. In advancing that line of thinking, these otherwise (intellectually and politically) rather different strands of research both also prepare a path for (re)consideration of ostensibly rural spaces in terms of wider processes and dynamics. Some of our own empirical work centring on smallholder production in Southeast Asia (Rigg, 2019; Nguyen, et al., 2020) shows how the reproduction of associated household formations, livelihoods, and in situ ways of life are often constitutively intertwined with distant people and places.
Conceptually, there is no shortage of existing resources in human geography for framing the spatial dynamics and effects of such intertwinings – a ‘global sense of place’ (Massey, 1991) and ‘relationality/territoriality’ (McCann and Ward, 2010), being just two of the best known examples – although, revealingly, the majority of such work has centred on cities. While process-oriented relational approaches may be applied to quintessentially ‘rural’ places too, when they are, the default tendency is to refer to any transformative effects as urbanization. In contrast, the inherited and ingrained understanding of a pre-existing rural space as that which is acted upon makes it much more difficult to imagine the rural in terms of transformative geographies. Yet, at the risk of continuing to place the rural on the side of stasis or as connoting the absence of change, even the perpetuation of existing socio-spatial formations – the smallholder village in Southeast Asia, for example – involves ongoing dynamics of reproduction. And precisely because those dynamics extend beyond stereotypically rural places, their effects may be evident in a wide variety of more or less distant localities, including cities. This points to one logical conclusion: just as urbanization may be found in the village as well as the city, the same is true of ‘ruralization’ – it leaves its mark in ostensibly urban spaces (Krause, 2013).
If planetary urbanization is critiqued for its unboundedness and lack of plurality (Derickson, 2018; Oswin, 2018; Ruddick et al., 2018; though see Brenner, 2018), then this paper is decidedly human in its treatment of ruralization. Indeed, outside our own longstanding research interests in Southeast Asia, our choice to develop ruralization following a lineage of scholarship from that region reflects a desire to concentrate the concept around a human-centred geography of ruralization. While planetary urbanization urges us to reflect on how the urban exceeds its traditional territorial markers, what it necessarily omits are how clear differences between spaces that continue to be labeled as rural and urban are perpetuated through grounded, everyday practices of place-making. In our own effort to reorient the terms of engagement between ruralization and (planetary) urbanization, we are foregrounding deep knowledge of scholarship from one region to prioritize the ‘bottom-up’ dimensions of ruralization. However, there is no doubt emerging work in other areas of the Global South that, without explicitly mentioning ruralization, makes like-minded claims on the human-centredeness of rural meaning-making and practice (see Gururani, 2020; Arboleda, 2016; Kanai, 2014).
Planetary urbanization, understandably, begins with the urban. In this paper, as we have noted, we begin with the rural. This requires a consideration of how the concept of agrarian fits in to our schematic. Ruralization is doubly marked in that it does not exhibit urban characteristics associated with agglomeration and knowledge economies and is conventionally understood to be frozen in an undeveloped, subsistence-driven reliance on agrarian production with slim and uncertain profit margins materialized through an unskilled workforce. Put differently, an agrarian economy is the production side of (a weaker) ruralization just as advanced capitalism forms the production component of (a more dominant) urbanization. Recent scholarship has sought to unsettle the separation of the rural as the setting for agrarian economies to be explored and exploited through the expansion of urban agglomeration economies. Gururani (2020), following Roy (2016), claims that ‘agrarian urbanism’ is a more coherent intellectual approach when studying rapidly transforming India because ‘only by charting how the urban and the rural are coproduced’ (Gururani, 2020: 973) can we understand the complex relationalities between rural and urban. She argues that agrarian urbanism is a critical conceptual site where the reproduction of ‘traditional caste-based authority’ (Gururani, 2020: 979) stands alongside rent-seeking typically found in peri-urban profiteering. Rather than see the values and practices of agrarian life as being subsumed under the spectre of urbanization, Gururani sees the two as intertwined, with forced urban-led dispossession also bringing with it opportunities for significant financial land-holding compensation, a retention of certain rural-based livelihood strategies, and (perhaps paradoxically) new possibilities for increased political participation introduced through an enhanced stake in rural-urban territorial changes (also see Harms, 2012).
Ghosh (2017), conversely, takes on the rural-urban relationship from the perspective of rurality in the city. His use of rurality re-situates agrarian production as ‘the operationalization of the countryside…as the ‘back-end’ or the ‘back-of-house’ of global supply chains and logistics infrastructure’ (Ghosh, 2017: 1). For the purposes of ruralization, what is intriguing about this orientation of the rural-agrarian nexus is its primacy in driving urbanization. Ghosh also posits that identities shaped by agrarian livelihoods are inseparable from any accounting of newly ‘urbanizing’ areas. Extending from Lefebvre's work on the rural-urban relationship, according to Ghosh, ‘rurality does not disappear’ in ‘new urban life’ but is reconstituted through ‘symbols and representations’ of rural identities and the politics and practices of ‘nature and the countryside’ (Ghosh, 2017: 10, quoting Lefebvre, 1996: 118). Ghosh also notes the belief that the binary between humans and nature developed through capitalist economies, thereby reducing the rural's value in its service to the urban, has been proven demonstrably false by scholars from across the social sciences (e.g. Smith, 1984; Agrawal and Sivaramakrishnan, 2000; Roy, 2016; Elden et al., 2003).
These strands of work illustrate how ruralization can be used as a generative proposition driven by the messy lived realities of people who transcend conventional rural-urban spatial partitions but who may also (and at the same time) create clear imaginative borders around the rural and the urban. We wish to consolidate a generalizable geographical concept – ruralization – that can be useful in reconsidering socio-spatial change in and beyond the region of our own empirical focus. The three geographies of ruralization that we detail in the next section maps broadly onto questions of land, livelihood, and lifestyle. First, rather than idling behind a rapidly changing ‘outside’ world, in situ ruralization reconstitutes land as a transformative force in the making of rural-urban relationalities. This recalibration moves land past its supporting role in rural-urban interactions and instead positions it in the making of rural-urban relations. Extended ruralization maps rural livelihoods, principles, and goals into the social-spatial dynamics of city and peri-urban transformation. Not only do longstanding hybridized concepts such as kotadesasi express the material persistence of rural dynamics, but rural ideals and imaginings extend over time and space, and form part of future-making strategies in urban Southeast Asia. Lastly, rural Southeast Asian lifestyles are expressed through the theme of rural returns, which casts the city as a site through which rural identities of home can be upheld and fostered. Here, the real or imagined provisionality of urban life is set against a purported rural permanence, with rural identities and lifestyles reproduced through urban-led socio-economic relations. Ruralization thus illustrates the expedience of the city's many challenges and possibilities to reinforce rural places and identities.
Three geographies of ruralization
To persist and subsist in the Southeast Asian countryside: Dissolving the rural/urban binary through in situ ruralization
Scholars of agrarian change, in Southeast Asia and beyond, often begin with Karl Kautsky's The Agrarian Question (1988 [1899]) in which he predicted, like Engels (1894), the end of the peasantry under the forces of industrialization, technological change, urbanization, and ‘progress’. 4 While Kautsky's treatise focused on Europe, it confounds simple assumptions about the rural present and urban future, thus providing a valuable starting point to think afresh about the rural and ruralization. In particular, his work addresses three matters that speak directly to this portion of the paper: the notion of the countryside as a site of statis; the need to look differently at the countryside – to scratch beneath the surface of the rural and the categories we use to exemplify and explain the rural; and the necessity to explore the connections between rural and urban, and farm and non-farm.
As we have noted above, the rural/urban binary is highly persistent in scholarship, and this is consequential. Notwithstanding rapid economic growth and deep structural change in the economies of Asia, smallholders remain remarkably persistent (see Thompson et al., 2019, Rigg et al., 2016), as indeed they are around the world. Lowder et al. (2021) estimate that globally there are 510 million farms smaller than two hectares, some three-quarters of which are to be found in Asia (Lowder et al., 2016). Kautsky called such smallholdings ‘dwarf holdings’, whose owners were reliant on supplementary work to meet their basic needs; in today's parlance, they are ‘sub-livelihood holdings’, but equally requiring the farm household to engage with other work and means of making a living. This is the agrarian landholding context that impels this facet of our ruralization thesis. The fact that smallholdings do not deliver an adequate living, and yet also persist rather than being erased, necessarily leads to the interlacing of the rural and urban, so much so that the rural/urban binary dissolves, empirically and theoretically. It has also led scholars to perform a degree of conceptual gymnastics as they struggle to make terminologies fit experience – writing, for example, of ‘semi-proletarianization’ (Yan and Chen, 2015; He and Ye, 2014) and the ‘truncated agrarian transition’ (Rigg et al., 2018).
Agriculture may not be entirely in thrall to non-agriculture, a mere appendage, but lands of production are importantly shaped by forces that sit beyond the rural and the agricultural. The crops that farmers choose to grow, how they grow them, who grows them, and indeed whether they grow anything at all, have to be seen as an outcome of complex economic, social, and cultural forces that cross between ‘the’ rural and ‘the’ urban. This is sometimes couched in terms that are implicitly negative: land abandonment, disintensification, and idle land, for instance. Such valuations of the quality of change – which have at their core a productivist logic – can be challenged but, and more importantly for this paper, their sources revealed. 5 Just as planetary urbanization pays attention to the dispersed tendrils of the urban, so rural studies has its own terms to capture such spatially catholic effects from the ‘remittance landscapes’ of the Ifugao in the Philippines (McKay, 2005) to the ‘telecoupling’ between distant spaces in Laos and Cambodia (e.g. Marks and Zhang, 2019; Baird and Fox, 2015; Baird and Quastel, 2015). Indeed, a great many of the themes and processes that concern scholars of agrarian change, from food chains (Hung and Lien, 2020; Ehlert and Faltmann, 2019; Hansen, 2018) to the deployment of farm labour, from scale-appropriate mechanization (Rigg, 2019: 154–156) to ‘sleeping’ (tidur) land in Indonesia (Clendenning, 2020), from land degradation in the hills of Laos (Cole, 2020) to the ‘graying’ or ‘geriatrification’ of farming across Asia (Rigg et al., 2020), speak beyond the rural/urban binary.
The reason why households survive in the countryside when their farms are not sufficient for them to subsist is because these households are neither ‘rural’, in the sense of being co-located in the countryside, nor ‘farming’, in the sense of being dependent on agriculture. Indeed, nor are they even ‘households’, if we take a defining feature of the household to be its co-residential status.
Garment workers in peri-urban Phnom Penh, Cambodia, are intimately – emotionally and functionally – connected to their rural natal families (Parsons and Lawreniuk, 2017). Lawreniuk and Parsons (2020) write of ‘translocality’ to capture ‘the complex interconnection of social, cultural, and economic factors…situated inherently in multiple, linked, spaces, rather than moving from one to another’ (2020: 8). This requires that we view Cambodian society not as consisting of individuals-in-place but of ‘multiple people in multiple places simultaneously’ (Lawreniuk and Parsons, 2020: 8). With this in mind, workers do not make clear, full and neat transitions from agriculture to non-agriculture, let alone from rural to urban living (Rigg, et al., 2018). They combine subsistence and semi-subsistence household agricultural production with off-farm work, and may well continue to live lives understood as rural even while their aspirations are reflective of urban desires. Scratching the surface of the rural (and the urban) reveals these underlying textures of rural life and living. It is not just of empirical importance with policy implications; it also challenges us to think differently about our analytical categories (e.g. ‘rural’, ‘household’), our assumptions about transitions (e.g. urbanization), and our theoretical frameworks borne of particular historical experiences. This requires scholars and policy-makers to think not just between rural and urban spaces, and across farming and factory, but also at the intersections of production, work, and care.
Extended ruralization: Kotadesasi, the kampungkota, and cityscapes of the future
Human geographies and ‘households’ that span farm, peri-urban factory, and city-based livelihood pursuits mean that it is not only in the countryside that rural and urban forces coalesce. Research on rural-urban migration has long recognized the role of ‘rural’ people in the work of building cities, and as part of the labour force that enables their profitable functioning and growth. A relational or ‘translocal’ (Lawreniuk and Parsons, 2020) understanding of these people's lives and livelihoods provides a way into consideration of more enduring rural dynamics that we term extended ruralization. Just as work on planetary urbanization has recognized that urban dynamics manifest far outside the city, including in stereotypically ‘rural’ spaces, we contend that it is possible to conceive of ongoing ruralization dynamics extending far beyond agricultural smallholdings or the countryside. Writing in the context of postcolonial Tanzania, Mercer (2017) has shown that contemporary suburban landscapes may be understood in terms of ‘extended ruralization’ in that they are shaped by ‘economic and social ties to a rural home place’ (Mercer, 2017: 73). Similar dynamics have long been noted in Southeast Asia, with peri-urban zones resulting as much from changes in the countryside and the social action of rural people as from centrifugal processes of city expansion. We show in this section that there are ways of thinking about ruralization not only in peri-urban zones, but into the heart of cities in Southeast Asia. In addition, and significantly, we show that such dynamics are not just a residue of past or transitional household livelihood strategies, but part of ongoing contests over the contemporary city and aspirational futures.
Periurban spaces and other outer zones of metropolitan regions in Southeast Asia have almost always been cast in terms of extended urbanization rather than extended ruralization. The reason for this is not to do with expansion of the accepted units of analysis in urban studies since the zones concerned often far exceed city boundaries, and are spatial peripheries, interfaces, and edges where ‘rural’ land uses and livelihoods retain a visible presence. Rather, attention needs to be drawn to prevailing spatio-temporal assumptions around the rural/urban dichotomy, whereby ‘rural’ elements are assumed to be inherited from the past, and to continue on borrowed time, while change is understood to be driven by the urban ‘side’. There are critical corrective possibilities here in longstanding scholarly contributions. As we have already noted, McGee (1991) is perhaps best known in human geography for the term ‘desakota’ which he used to characterize areas around Southeast Asian cities as an ‘interface’ of village (desa) and city (kota) land uses and livelihood patterns. 6 Importantly, however, in an earlier publication, McGee (1989) had foregrounded social process rather than spatial patterns or morphology, and referred to that process as ‘kotadesasi’. Here, desa (village) retains a role in ongoing dynamics, rather than appearing merely as a residual component of space (or social practices) subject to urbanization (urbanisasi).
While McGee's intention was to cast the kotadesasi process in hybrid terms (unsettling the dichotomy of rural vs. urban altogether), there are compelling reasons to separate ruralization and urbanization heuristically. Above all, in Southeast Asia today, as much as during the time when McGee first proposed kotadesasi, ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ are entrenched types and ideals – not only in the schemes of planners and policy-makers, but also in the minds of the people whose lives and livelihood strategies drive the transformation of desakota regions. This is exemplified in anthropologist Harms’ (2011) ethnographic work in a district at ‘Saigon's edge’. Harms frames the district of Hóc Môn as an ‘edge’ that cuts both ways across a range of dimensions; and although he does not use the term ‘ruralization’, Harms details how people in Hóc Môn continue to act, perform, and strive to make a living in ways animated by rural as well as urban imaginaries. Our point is not that there is a need to parse out who, what, or where is ‘rural’ and/or ‘urban’, but rather to recognize that both drive transformations that are conventionally cast merely as urbanization, a one-way street.
Just as desakota provides a starting-point for thinking about the role of rural dynamics in ongoing processes (re)shaping peri-urban Southeast Asia – i.e. kotadesasi rather than merely urbanisasi – so ‘kampungkota’ (Kusno, 2019: 80) provides a way into examining the city proper at least partly in terms of ruralization. In Indonesia and neighbouring parts of Malay-speaking Southeast Asia, ‘kampung’ historically meant village or rural settlement, in much the same way as desa. However, within Jakarta and the territorial boundaries of other large Indonesian cities, kampung has come to refer to areas of informal settlement. Urbanist Abidin Kusno coined ‘kampungkota’ not so much to denote the presence of kampung in the city, but as a way of expressing the intertwined, even ‘symbiotic’ relationship between kampung and the (formal) city (kota). Kusno sees this ‘hybrid formation in the urban core of the city’ as evidence of ‘semi-urbanism’ (2019: 75). What is important to us in this paper is that city kampung spaces, people, and livelihood practices are kampungan (rural-like) in ways that extend beyond mere historical association of the word ‘kampung’ with rurality. If, as Kusno notes, the kampung is a space of arrival for migrants from the countryside, then it is surely a nexus of (re)ruralization as much as it facilitates incorporation of country folk into city life and labour markets (which, in any case, have long been recognized as involving ‘lower circuit’ or ‘urban peasant’ livelihood activities – see McGee, 1973). With their building code-defying and zoning-confounding flexible use of land, their cultures of self-reliance, and their networks of mutual assistance, pooling, and sharing of resources, city kampung might be understood as ‘socially rural’ spaces (cf. Thompson, 2004). As such, kampungkota expresses contradictory relations between ruralization and urbanization: on the one hand, kampungan parts of the city enable the growth and functioning of aspects of the urban economy ‘on the cheap’; on the other hand, these spaces often stand in the way of land being put to its most profitable capitalist uses, or refashioned according to state ideals of aesthetic cityness. Either way, the kampung is an undeniably significant component of what the city is – in the ruralizing as well as urbanizing now – and in the politics of what it can and should become. Furthermore, while we have focused here on work from Indonesia, not least because of the geographical roots of McGee's seminal work, 7 we see parallel stories and experiences etched across the region, some of which we have referenced in other parts of the paper.
The contested position of kampung spaces and kampungan people and practices in the city in Southeast Asia connects to a final set of points about extended ruralization in explicitly temporal terms. In short, not only do rural dynamics extend spatially beyond village and countryside to metropolitan edges and even into central parts of cities, but rural imaginings feed idealized futures that drive action – from the practical and mundane to the normative and (big P) political – in the city of the present. Harms (2011) shows that while the promise of development is conventionally built around ‘the assumption that urban space is modern and rural space somehow belongs to the past’ (114), there is also ‘social-temporal oscillation’ (116) in the relative social value afforded to rural and urban. Importantly, inversion of the hierarchy is not only a matter of ‘exaltation of the past’ (Harms, 2011: 118) but also about claims in the present and to the future. This can be exemplified from work on resistance to kampung evictions in Kuala Lumpur (Bunnell, 2002). Central to narratives of one group of self-defined ‘urban pioneers’ (peneroka bandar), there in the 1990s was that the kampung they had developed was a preferable – even superior – form of social and spatial organization to the kinds of private (re)development planned to replace them (or to the high-rise flats in which kampung residents would be resettled, outside the central city). Kampung thus becomes not just an entry point for rural people arriving in the city (as in Kusno's kampungkota), but a normative model for the city. Such claims have traction, in part, because they resonate with a wider oscillation in hierarchies of social and spatial value in Malaysia that extend to the realms of policy and law (Bunnell and Nah, 2004). And so kampung qua rural ideals and norms inflect the contested re-making of the city – sometimes from the top-down as well in terms of bottom-up tactics of resistance – even as kampung are erased from the cityscape, or pushed to its territorial margins (e.g. Elinoff, 2021).
In these terms, ruralization even extends to Southeast Asia's kampung-less kota, Singapore. Although Singapore has no remaining kampung of the kinds found in Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur, and no national agricultural hinterland, ‘kampung’ continues to shape policy concerning community interaction and neighbourhood design in the city-state. ‘Kampung’ also featured prominently in idealized depictions of the cityscape of Singapore of 2065 that formed part of the 50th anniversary of independence celebrations held in 2015. 8 Rural dynamics, then, are not confined to memories of the kampung past in Singapore, or to imaginings of its developmentally lagging neighbouring countries, but remain part of the aspirational work of a self-styled and widely emulated city of the future.
Ruralization returns: From ‘leaving the rural behind’ to the contested rootedness of the rural home
If the first theme in our set is concerned with debunking the myth of an inert countryside in favor of ‘in situ’ ruralization dynamics, and the second, extended ruralization, shows the processes by which rural livelihoods circulate through multiple aspirational elsewheres (including the city), then ruralization's returns, the act of putting people and their practices and ideas back to their ‘rightful’ place, is a way to think about how rural practices unseat the rural-urban binary by presenting rural characteristics that inhabit both the countryside and the city (and often both at once). Ruralization returns mobilizes the disputed political currency of the rural by showing how rootedness and a sense of community spirit are often imagined to be a core part of rural dweller identity. Ruralization returns encapsulates how Southeast Asia's rising urban middle-class population asserts control over rural spaces by enhancing their stability, quality of life, and spiritual elements through monetary investment. Spatializing perceptions of quality of life as we are doing is not a way to glamorize variegated rural belongings but rather to integrate rural returns into the politics of rural-urban relations. A geography of ‘rural returns’ in this section is a more accurate depiction of ruralization than ‘return migration’ or ‘rural migration’ because returns signals the orientation to somewhere more stable and enduring rather than emphasizing movement, in-betweenness, or translocalities inherent in the idea of migration (Lawreniuk and Parsons, 2020).
There are thus two senses of returns at play in this section: in contestations over where rural identity should be expressed and who controls the act of return; and in the physical return to the countryside idyll after a variously timed period away. The latter invokes a period of disconnection that can range from time away to ancestral perceptions of rural return among urban residents who may have never experienced rural life themselves. As we show below, these two senses of return do not settle easily into either rural or urban categories and instead must be seen for their ability to harness the complexities of a transcendent and evolving rural-urban world in both material and discursive terms. The politics of ruralization also becomes all-too-clear in these returns.
In his research in Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand, Elinoff (2021; 2012) presents a world where tensions over urban and rural identities are constructed by middle and upper-class urban elites whose judgements of rural people (khon baan nok) – whether they reside in cities or not – are captured to identify them as genuine symbols of the Thai lifeworld, at once ‘in need of improvement’ to regain their rural-based community values, but also ‘not yet’ urban in their collective citizenship status. The complicated identities of ‘rural’ people, in other words, are laid upon the urban poor in order to deprive them of access to certain resources, amenities, and political representation only available to wealthy urbanites.
The poor (whether living in the city or the country) are thus placed in a double-bind of being frozen in a romanticized notion of a ‘sufficiency economy’ (setthakit phorpiang) that is purported to be a core facet of rural people's collectivity and (as a result) they are unable to fulfill the modernist notions of neoliberal autonomous subjects occupied by the country's urban classes (Elinoff, 2012: 389). Because imaginings of authentically rural forms of resistance involve utilizing a collective rather than individual voice, Elinoff explains that resources and expertise are drawn up by the political leadership in Khon Kaen to train rural and urban people on how to activate their claims in ‘rural’ ways. Here we see that harnessing the power of a ‘return to the rural’ is a means for the ruling classes to isolate certain members of society engrained with a ‘rural’ mindset from becoming equal citizens to middle class city dwellers. The long-running political conflict in Thailand between ‘Yellow Shirts’ and ‘Red Shirts’ has been couched by some scholars and commentators as also a conflict of rural and urban worldviews, aspirations, and imaginaries. While at a general level this may be true, it is equally the case that ‘rural’ politics is to be found in urban contexts, and vice versa. As Elinoff (2021: 21) writes, just as ‘idealized visions of rural goodness have taken root in the city, Bangkok middle-class and elite animus target urban migrants by marking them as out of place, ignorant, crude hillbillies’, even though they may have long been residents in the city, such as the migrants arriving in Bangkok from northeastern Thailand mentioned earlier. These arguments point to different degrees and kinds of ruralization (as they do urbanization), demonstrating the provisionality and fluidity of both processes and signaling that their relationship with each other is as important a project as emphasizing one over the other.
In urban Vietnam, there are other rural returns at play in cities that encourage middle-class residents to reimagine their relationship to the countryside. In his work in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Harms argues that ‘the Vietnamese notion of leaving the homeland necessarily implies a return; in spoken Vietnamese one never simply says that one is ‘going’ (đi) to one's ancestral home but always says that one is “returning to the homeland (về nhà)”’ (Harms, 2019: 33). This phrasing implies a temporary living arrangement for virtually every Vietnamese person who does not reside in the place of their parents’ or grandparents’ birth (quê), a significant number of people given the country's rapid urbanization in the 30 years since the advent of national-level market reforms (also see Harms, 2012). Thus Vietnamese cities are for many primarily a place to make money, build a career, offer their children better educational opportunities, and enjoy some of the modern conveniences of urban life (Hansen, 2018). But the city is not home, thus necessitating or even demanding rightful return.
A related way to look at how the idea of returns reacquaints middle-class urban residents in Vietnam with their ancestral villages is through rural lifestyle investments. Pagodas, family homes, public spaces, and even infrastructure works are frequently investment targets for city dwellers whose contributions are closer to celestial offerings than monetary contributions to home (see Schlecker, 2005; Small, 2019). These symbolic gestures have deep, multifaceted meanings and attend to the second dimension of lifestyle returns; that of upending the centrality of the urban in society by instead tying human aspirations to an imagined rural longevity. While city dwellers may not be able to physically live in the countryside, their donations – which come in the form of funding rituals, feasts, charity contributions, pagoda renovations, and second-home construction – establish themselves as residents of the family home in the countryside, thereby creating a permanency to their eventual rural arrival that is only available to them through their temporary and self-serving financial successes in the city. The usefulness of internet connectivities between previously rural and urban worlds deserves mention as well, as the ubiquity of instant messaging, social media platforms, and financial technologies allow quick and reliable transfer of images, ideas, and money across disparate spaces, in addition to emotional support for migrants separated from their families, to say nothing of ‘urban nomads’ who move between urban and rural areas to work remotely, maximize quality of life, avoid the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, live more affordably, and/or have better access to their professions and cultural activities. Further intensive investments in infrastructure, particularly in bridges and highways throughout many parts of Southeast Asia, present people with multiple residential options. In these examples, rural returns is pluralized because it connotes ruralization as a set of multiple belongings, and in particular of simultaneous, overlapping, and relational ideas of home in the city and the countryside.
For a more ruralizing world
In a recent explanation of his thesis (with Brenner) on planetary urbanization, Schmid writes that ‘adopting a planetary orientation means first of all decentering the focus of analysis, looking from an ex-centric position, one that looks from the periphery and asks where to find “the urban”’ (Schmid, 2018: 592). We share this motivation to demystify conventional understandings of urban processes and their origins by rethinking urbanization from the periphery. We can think of no spatial periphery more in service to the transformative impact of the urban than the rural. Ruralization is aligned with planetary urbanization's challenge to the valorization of the city in the reproduction of the world, and associated intellectual efforts to render the rural-urban binary obsolete while at the same time making use of the rural-urban distinction to achieve this obsolescence (Wachsmuth, 2014). Ruralization takes the rural-urban binary not as a set of oppositional categories but a relationality; this approach respects how the binary is reproduced in spatial thinking yet also attends to the blurred and sometimes contradictory ways it unfolds in everyday life in Southeast Asia. As intellectually productive as work on planetary urbanization and critiques of it have been for human geographers working in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, a robust corrective to the relative absence of rural places, people, and scholarship is required.
At the outset, we made the case that the rural, as a set of spatial practices and imaginations, has of late been left on the margins of theorization in human geography and cognate fields. We have sought to show that appreciation of our changing world demands consideration of ongoing rural dynamics as well as urbanization. This does not make ruralization either a straightforward mirror image of planetary urbanization, or its ‘outside’. While planetary urbanization's point of departure was to trace the historical-material conditions of a universalizing neoliberal political economy that accepts various forms of social, financial, ecological, and cultural destruction as necessary for capitalism's operational landscapes (Brenner and Schmid, 2015), our starting point has been people in/across places. All three components of ruralization that we have sketched emerge from consideration of human spatial practices, identities and aspirations in Southeast Asia, and all three entail everyday engagement with urbanization. These encompass rural dynamics associated with the reproduction of smallholder spaces (stereotyped as the ‘countryside’, or in situ ruralization), which remain a constitutive presence in city and peri-urban life (extended ruralization), and that emerge out of ‘translocal’ arrangements between the rural and the urban (ruralization returns). Our point is not that these human geographies entirely dismantle a rural versus urban partitioning of the world, but that people experience and effect relational entanglements of ongoing ruralization and urbanization, demanding further theoretical attention in and beyond Southeast Asia.
Our attempt to catalyse that agenda has included revisiting and extending some longstanding conceptual resources from scholarship on Southeast Asia. In particular, McGee's desakota thesis, based on observations of changing patterns of life and landscape in Indonesia, not only pushed beyond inherited binary assumptions of rural versus urban, but forms the basis for conceptualizing ongoing dynamics of ruralization. These conceptual origins are worthy of note in part because they demonstrate what might be gained in an era of planetary urbanization and ongoing ruralization from looking back at historical work with fresh eyes. Planetary urbanization provides evidence of that in its own right, having been built from a reinvigoration of Lefebvre's mid-twentieth century observations and anticipation of the ‘complete urbanization’ of society. One difference between Lefebvre-inspired planetary urbanization work and the desakota thesis is that the latter arises from geographical work in Southeast Asia, not Western Europe. It is not, however, just where this work emerges, but how. McGee was intent on understanding why rural people, activities, and sensibilities persisted in the context of thoroughgoing urbanization, a motivation we share in the current context of the urban everywhere.
At another level, the non-Western origins of desakota and our regional framing of ruralization contrasts with the explicitly planetary ambition of recent work on urbanization. Yet this is not to say that ruralization is without wider scope or application; it signals possibilities for trans-regional comparativism in the Global South and for a genuinely two-way dialogue about presumed pathways and prospects for socio-spatial transformation between scholars working in Southeast Asia – and other regions – and the West. It is important to recognize that planetary urbanization both revives and exceeds Lefebvrian concepts to critically interrogate the urban's planetary reach in ways that are not dominated by the regional contexts or traditions in which Lefebvre himself worked, and that are open to transformative engagement with novel formulations, imaginations, and trajectories from other regions. Nonetheless, ruralization is distinct as an example of how work on/from the Global South can not merely enable the localization or regionalization of existing Euro-American derived ideas and theses, but form the foundation for new dialogues and ways of thinking in human geography.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to feedback from audiences at the 2018 New Zealand Geographical Society/Institute of Australian Geographers meeting, the University of Sydney's Urban Geography seminar series, the University of Wollongong's ACCESS seminar series, and the University of Auckland's Critical Theory Network seminar series. Sarah Rogers, Yuan Zhenjie, and Vanessa Lamb organized the first and Tom Baker facilitated the latter three; thank you in particular to them. We are grateful to Reuben Rose-Redwood and the anonymous reviewers for their patient and thoughtful treatment of the paper.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
