Beyond binaries? Spatial possibilities in Southeast Asia

Introduction

How do scholars interested in developing a novel spatial vocabulary capture the richness and complexity of lived experience in Southeast Asia without falling back on the rural–urban binary? This is the challenge we have spent four years and 25 drafts – and occasionally a little disagreement – seeking to address (Gillen et al., 2022). What has resulted is, as we put it, ‘some uncomfortable twists of logic’, and we continue to regard our article as a work in progress. It is with this in mind that we welcome the five commentaries and the manner that each author has engaged with our paper.

Reflecting on the commentary set in toto, it is indicative of a rural–urban ‘impasse’ that cannot be straightforwardly ‘addressed’ or ‘solved’. Baird (2022), for example, asks us to go further in breaking down the rural–urban binary; Ghosh (2022) calls upon us to cast our net wider to include further consideration of the agrarian; Lawreniuk and Parsons (2022) aim to pluralize ruralities in shaping present and future; Ortega (2022) draws attention to the discursive power of rural–urban classification as a form of spatial politicization; and Chen and Kong (2022) highlight the state drivers of ruralization. Of course, we all have our hobby horses, but this range of responses – while also being generally supportive of our paper – is indicative of something more profound than just different viewpoints. The commentators all agree that the rural–urban binary needs addressing, but differ in terms of why and how.

In what follows, we think through the commentaries to reflect on and pose further questions about the rural–urban binary. What we find is that as exciting as the prospects for moving beyond the binary are in a region like Southeast Asia, there is also an intractable stickiness to the distinction between the rural and urban that must be grappled with in any spatial research. Our conclusion maintains that there are ongoing challenges and possibilities inherent to thinking through human geographical lifeworlds in Southeast Asia and the global South.

Beyond binaries

In ‘Geographies of ruralization’, we reveal the ways that Southeast Asians have dismantled the rural–urban duality in their everyday lives by pursuing patterns of living that go beyond the binary. Chen and Kong, drawing on the experience of China, ask that we look afresh at how the binary is invigorated from the rural side, and ask: how has the Chinese state through its policies of rural revitalization produced the hybrid ruralities that we discuss? ¹ Although we focus on everyday human geographies, Chen and Kong see a need to read, understand, and critique the rural–urban binary through the top-down projects of the Chinese state. The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to address rural–urban inequalities from above are in line with its efforts in many other arenas, from managing the COVID-19 pandemic to clipping the wings of the country’s tech billionaires. This is redolent of Ortega’s point, drawing on the work of Ananya Roy (2016), that rural and urban might be best viewed as ‘categories of government’. What forms ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ might take becomes less important than the fact that governments continue to treat them as if they are distinctive spaces, with different needs, that in turn demand different policy interventions. Rural and urban are made real by and through policies and associated targets, such as the imposition of urban-inflected growth goals leading to the all-encompassing capitalization of the countryside in China.

Ghosh believes that a missing component in our evaluation of ruralization as a force that exceeds the conventional spatial binary is a consideration of rural capitalism, and in particular, the historical-material dynamics of agrarian work and production as they play out in the agribusiness political economies of the present. He asks two fundamental questions: what does it mean to ‘ruralize’ the global political economy? And, could our treatment of ruralization equally be captured as deruralization (Araghi, 2009)? Ghosh’s commentary made us think of processes of global land grabbing and myriad other ways that (urban) capital has infiltrated rural spaces, from contract farming to the promotion of hybrid seeds and the establishment of rural retirement communities. Ghosh is quite right to point out that such developments are just as likely to result in forms of household ‘deruralization’ as in any of the three constitutive dynamics of ruralization that we sketched. We also agree with Ghosh that analysis of associated socio-spatial transformations – whether deruralization or forms of ruralization, or both – can draw productively upon insights from urban studies as well as from agrarian, peasant, or rural studies.

Ghosh pushes us to go further than spanning urban/rural divisions of academic labour in order to elevate ruralization to a similar meta-theoretical level as planetary urbanization. A key motivation for our piece was, of course, to redress the intellectual preponderance of the urban – arising from the traction of ‘urban age’ discourse (see also Krause, 2013) as well as the more recent burgeoning of planetary urbanization – based on our knowledge and expertise of both urban and rural studies in Southeast Asia. However, it is partly our regional situatedness, and knowledge of intra-regional variegation, that makes us cautious about the level of geohistorical generalization that Ghosh seeks. Ghosh’s own coverage of the relation between agribusiness in Southeast Asia and the globe-spanning historical specificity of planetary urbanization affirms our belief in the need for caution. On the one hand, as Ghosh notes (citing Cramb and McCarthy, 2016), the globalizing agrarian political economy in Malaysia (and Indonesia) has been ‘emblematized by the dramatic expansion of agribusiness-led monocrop plantations since the 1980s’. On the other hand, Malaya saw a dramatic expansion of plantation estates almost a century earlier. Perhaps it is possible to accommodate such historical economic developments within some (very) ‘long-1980s’ conception of proto-planetary urbanization. Yet British plantation colonialism in Malaya also gave rise to an enduring form of racialized ruralization, with Malays legally confined to food crop-producing small-holdings (Lim, 1977). Other ruralizing chronologies surely apply elsewhere, even within what is today Malaysia, let alone in Southeast Asia more widely (see Mahanty, 2022). We stop some way short of casting ruralization as a counter-totalization to planetary urbanization (also, see Ortega, 2022).

Although Ghosh invites conceptualization of planetary ruralization, Baird is the commentator who pushes most forcefully for moving beyond urban–rural binaries, conceptually and empirically. For him, although the rural–urban binary has ‘a lot of traction in society, including outside of academia’, the dualism limits other more interesting and even accurate representations of space. Forging ahead with a post-binary analytic framing is (in Southeast Asia at least) challenging not least because the region’s linguistic structures reproduce rural–urban distinctions, even as people’s human geographies unsettle them.

For example, in Cambodia, rural peasants are naek sre, or rice people. They call themselves by this label and urban dwellers know farmers as naek sre. The pejorative term used by Vietnam’s urban bourgeoisie for unrefined rural people is nhà quê, a country bumpkin or hillbilly. This term is most often used to describe ‘confused’ rural-to-urban migrants making a tentative move into the city in search of a better life. Rural Thais are also stereotyped as khon ban nok – country bumpkins – by urbanites, and for similar reasons. These labels and categorizations, pejorative and reductionist, need to be set against the realities of rural living. For Keyes (2012), Thailand’s rural north-easterners, archetypal khon ban nok, are no longer traditional rice farmers but ‘cosmopolitan villagers’ because they have become workers in a global system of labour, and aware of their place in this system. Even China and Vietnam’s household registration systems, which codified families according to rural or urban citizenship – inscribing meaning, resources, and distinctive spatial parameters around all citizens – have had to be reworked or discarded altogether following pressure from below (e.g. those living and working in multiple sites) and above (e.g. bureaucratic inefficiencies). Perhaps one way to engage with Baird’s call to drop the binary is to challenge commonplace, stereotypical rural labels through a reading of the highly differentiated livelihoods transcending the rural and urban as they are activated throughout Southeast Asia today.

In sum, drawing on languages outside of English involves consideration of as many terms that reinforce urban versus rural ways of seeing as it does terms that exceed the binary. Ortega points (as we do in our paper) to desakota as an established concept that depicts ‘in-between spaces’, and does so on the basis of linguistic resources and social-spatial experiences from a ‘non-Anglo-American context’ (i.e. originally Indonesia). Although we share Ortega’s commitment to retheorizing from beyond the global North and recognize the political as well as scholarly potential in ‘worlding’ concepts such as desakota, it is worth reiterating that the rural–urban binary remains alive and transformative in Southeast Asia. Indeed, while desakota remains a lynchpin regional concept of analysis, in practice planners and policy makers in Indonesia itself continue to work through fairly rigid spatial distinctions between desa and kota. At the same time, desakota does not go quite far enough in capturing and describing the tendrils of economic and emotional connection that enfold Southeast Asian space.

In seeking a balance between moving forward from the binary’s limitations and appreciating the lived realities of people in Southeast Asia for whom the categories of rural and urban are vital, Lawreniuk and Parsons offer an answer sympathetic to our struggles in the initial article. They argue for pluralities of the rural, or ruralities, where ‘the binary is not eliminated as such, but superseded by patterns of mutual interaction’ such that ‘the examination of one side alone’ would be ‘incomplete’. Ortega’s call for new languages is drawn out of a postcolonial ‘worlding’ treatment of ruralization where ‘what is needed is a detailed discussion of the discursive politics of rurality, its nature, and deployment’ links to Lawreniuk and Parsons’ vision of ruralities. From a conceptual development point of view, attending to dialogues between the rural and urban using a ruralities lens does not provide a singular terminological solution but perhaps a more modest and indeed relational means of recognizing how spatial engagement in Southeast Asia complicates easy divisions between the rural and urban, yet also reproduces the binary through cemented narratives of space. Using the language of mobilities, Lawreniuk and Parsons’ offering of the rural as a ‘site of multiple, evolving meanings, a dynamic and evolving multi-scalar category’ resonates with one of our main intentions behind the development of ruralization as a concept.

And yet in agreeing with Lawreniuk and Parsons, we cannot help but revisit one of the points we made at the outset of our paper: there is a great deal of extant scholarship demonstrating the rich tapestries of varied regional ruralities in their own right, as well as in relation to the urban and urbanization. The difficulty, at least in the current incarnations of urban studies and human geography, is convincing scholars of the value of this work in their own urban explorations.

Conclusion

As a means of concluding, we return to the central issue our paper raises, one that each commentary thoughtfully pushes us to engage further. At the meta/global level, the utility of rendering spaces rural or urban may indeed be unproductive or misleading, but at the level of human lives, the spatial imaginary of the rural and urban continues to offer people a reliable if flawed spatial logic that is applicable throughout Southeast Asia (and beyond). In our view, this issue – particularly from the position of rural-centred scholarship – remains an important one to acknowledge if not overcome in current human geographical theorizing.