AlterRurality
(see all rurality related pages)
Aim and rationale
Rurality is challenging in current times of climate change, biodiversity collapse, demographic change and migrations, and rising inequalities. The emerging anthropocene awareness upsets the general acceptance of rural space as a resource landscape for the production of food and industry, tourism, leisure, flora and fauna.
AlterRurality is a site for exploring the understanding of our place within the ecosystem. It is a renewed space of analysis, negociation and imagination, where local practices and lifestyles, social and natural sciences, technology, environment and imaginaries meet in different ways. It is about alternative futures, about alternative ways of inhabiting and thinking rural space. Exploring the rural in a contemporary setting of sustainability can help us rethink the human habitat.
AlterRurality can be defined as a body of economic, ecologic, societal and ethical attitudes, values and qualities. It is about community, subsistence and materiality (living soil, living beings, …). Understanding the rural today requires reaching beyond, or behind, often pejorative or restrictive current representations, connotations and feelings (ranging from culture/nature dichotomy, economically unsustainable agriculture or the “primitive” character of peasantry, to notions of aesthetic landscape, nostalgic nature, urban resource landscape, suburban dormitory, land to be urbanized, tourist attraction, and so on). While facing emerging economic, societal and cultural stakes, can we learn from rurality? Can we uncover its lost or hidden values and potentials? The village as a critically sized urban prototype; social equilibrium and moral economics; sustainable food production; proximity and recycling of resources; renewable energy management; mediation networking; reasonable mobility; rootedness in nature as an ongoing process of renewal, diversity, complexity, variety, intensity: these are only some of them. The – conscious or unconscious – importance of rurality relative to the construction of human identity is another one.
Rurality exists: we meet it everywhere, in ways of living and ethical attitudes that are technologically advanced but cannot be qualified as urban. It is an assemblage of different scales of operation: from local to global, from radical to conservative, from academic to practical, from community to geopolitical.
AlterRurality may then be a condition, phenomenon or value of contemporary renewal: can aspects of the rural re-inscribe themselves within our dwelling modes? A new, contemporary imaginary of rurality needs then to be constructed. By connecting researchers and inducing new trans-disciplinary leads and attitudes (from production to fertility, from building to caring, from planning to maieutics), the ARENA rurality network aims to explore new sensibilities for the future of human habitat.
Coordinator
Pieter Versteegh, PhD, head of Psychearchitecture.net, free-lance professor of architectural project and theory
Partners / scientific committee:
Sophia Meeres, lecturer at University College Dublin
Chris Younès, professor at ENSA Paris la Villette and at ESA
Dominic Stevens, architect and professor at Dublin Institute of Technology
Ben Stringer, architect and professor at University of Westminster, London
Anđelka Bnin-Bninski, lecturer at Univerity of Belgrade
Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag, Aarhuus School of Architecture
Jane McAllister, London Metropolitan University, London
Anna-Sofie Hvid, Ruralagentur, Jystrup Denmark
Anne Tietjen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Lea Holst Laursen, Aalborg University, Denmark
Publications
AlterRurality, exploring representations and ‘repeasantations’, Versteegh Pieter, Meeres Sophia (editors), ARENA, 2015.
Economic Transitions and New Ruralities, towards “metromilieux”? , Guillot Xavier et Versteegh Pieter (editors), ERPS vol 8, Publications de l’Université de Saint-Etienne, 2019
Events
The network organizes annual events hosted by different schools and countries:
Rurality. Seminar, Western Switzerland University of Applied Sciences, Fribourg, April 8-12, 2013 (organization Pieter Versteegh)
Re-imagining Rurality. Conference and exhibition, FABE, University of Westminster, February 27-28, 2015 (Organisation Ben Stringer)
Fieldwork. GMIT Letterfrack, Ireland, June 6th-9th, 2016 (organisation Sophia Meeres, Deirdre O’Mahony and Dominic Stevens)
Transforming economies. ENSAP Bordeaux, may 2017 (Organisation Xavier Guillot and Pieter Versteegh)
Metromilieux. University of Belgrade, spring 2019 (organisation Andelka Cirovic and Pieter Versteegh)
Contemporary ruralities // changing grounds, Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen and Rural Agentur, January 2020 (Organisation Anna Sofie Hvid and Pieter Versteegh)
The animal gaze reconstructed, London Metropolitan University, March 2020 (Organisation Jane McAllister)
Re-scaling the Rural, Aarhus School of Architecture in collaboration with Thisted Municipality and Rural Agentur, Denmark, forthcoming Spring 2022 (Organisation Mo Michelsen and Anna Sofie Hvid)
Image: Yannick Lodari, 2014 AlterRurality studio
