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CHAPTER 1: Urban- Rural Territorial Dynamics
1.1 The Oscillating Relation Between ‘Urban’ and ‘Rural’ By fact, more than half of the population today (an estimated 54.5%) lives in urban areas, and by 2030 it is projected to peak at a total of nearly 60% (UN Habitat, 2016). Although there are different features and expressions of this global phenomenon, the urbanization process and sprawling patters have had an overall leading role on transforming the landscape of human settlements. Population growth, migration, accessibility to infrastructure and knowledge, diffusion of innovation and technological improvements, have pushed and expanded urban limits into the hinterland, and on rural frontiers, often resulting in producing hybrid spatialities, which reside on dynamically changing territories, and manifest a creative alliance and the co-existence between various types of spaces of mixed urban and rural features, which share a series of interconnections and interdependencies. Especially on the conditions of the so called ‘capitalism 4.0’, followed by ‘the next economy’, which is centered around circular economy, new values based on the recycling processes of a new urban metabolism, are created. On these conditions, the shift towards a more open and collaborative circular society, requires that we pay particular attention to creating balanced urban-rural relationships, in order to avoid the prevailing of dominant hierarchical structures and stereotypes, and encourage the integration of peripheral and economically weaker areas in the processes of growth and innovation, nurturing the rise and development of a creative archipelago, where nodes and connections are equally important (Carta, 2017). Therefore, as researchers and planning professionals, it is our responsibility to ensure, not only politically correct, but especially, ethically correct practices of spatial and territorial development, as a response to the constantly shifting social, economic and political trends, and global changes. In 2016, urban-rural linkages were a main policy issue and source of debate in the preparations for the 3rd United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, being materialized the UN Habitat III Agenda, which emphasized that a paradigm shift needs to take place in terms of the ways we understand and address the territory as prime resource 31
