Deprivation and the Rural‐Urban Trap

Abstract

Departing from the idea that cultural mechanisms are capable of allowing for conceptual dichotomies to create oppression, this paper challenges the engrained tradition of using 'urban/rural' as guiding labels in societal organisation when seen through the prism of deprivation. Two Polish deprivation-ridden estates --one 'urban' and one 'rural' --were investigated. Having taken account of the residents' everyday lives in the socio-economic, material and discursive dimensions, our findings indicate that the notions of rurality and urbanity imbricate and leapfrog meaningful territories at the local level. Realising the danger of deploying stereotypes as beacons in governance, from this richly contextualised account we draw that many problems today are space-independent and cannot be attenuated by following development paths reinvented in the name of empirically questionable yet culturally sustained and politically ontologised spatialities. This, then, calls for rethinking both the discursivity and the elusiveness of rural-urban thinking in the context of deprivation.

Degradation, restitution and the elusive culture of rural-urban thinking

“…Likewise, rural-urban conceptualizations as used and implemented by Polish researchers, policy-makers and "lay people" alike form a consequential blend of philosophical, psychological, epistemological, sociological, political, and historical contingencies (cf. Dymitrow et al 2017), whereby a meta-theoretical, synthetical method of approaching them allows for a fuller elaboration of the Polish notion of 'rural' and 'urban'. Adopting such an analytical scheme, the data underlying the presented arguments and counterarguments on the nature of degradation were acquired from archival documents, including original legislation, and from the most reliable historical studies.…”

“…Szymańska 2013). Even with the more 'open-ended' programs (such as those subsidized by the EU), national distribution of resources is likely to be channeled through domestically engrained spatial (here: rural-urban) conceptualizations (Halamska 2013;Dymitrow et al 2017;Krzysztofik et al 2017b).…”

“…However, although the negative effects of rural-urban labeling are beginning to be noticed, the way this rural-urban fissure is construed in the first place is rarely addressed, and almost never critically (but see Kubicki 2011;Wójcik 2013). Because the distinction between formal urbanity and cultural urbanity is neither sufficiently differentiated nor problematized (Dymitrow 2014), confusion arises with regard to the purpose of 'rural/urban' in Poland, making societal actions that depart from such a distinction contentious and difficult to successfully operationalize (Feltynowski et al 2015;Biegańska et al 2016;Dymitrow et al 2017).…”

“…Another groundbreaking trademark of this era was the State Agricultural Farm (PGR). Built in the effigy of small cities with modern infrastructure galore, the PGRs eradicated all traditional rural-urban difference there was (Biegańska et al 2016;Dymitrow et al 2017).…”

Where Have All the Rural Poor Gone? Explaining the Rural–Urban Poverty Gap in European Countries

“…They lost their jobs and, in many cases, access to a number of other non‐economic opportunities as a result of plant closures and a rapid rationalisation, especially in areas with difficult access to employment opportunities in cities (Greif ; Petrick and Weingarten ; Bock et al . ; Dymitrow et al ., ). Other vulnerable groups include farmers operating on very small farms.…”