PART 1: THE “URBAN”, THE “RURAL” AND THE “IN BETWEEN” (THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE)
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CHAPTER 2: The Urban – Rural Dichotomy
“In a sociological context the terms rural and urban are more remarkable for their ability to confuse than for their power to illuminate.” (Raymond Edward Pahl, The Rural-Urban Continuum, 1966).
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Perceptual Understandings of Urban and Rural Spaces
“Space is not a reflection of society, it is society” (Castell, 1983: 410), so as we become more and more aware of “ourselves as intrinsically spatial beings, we continuously engage in the collective activity of producing spaces and places, territories and regions, environments and habitats” (Soja, 2000: 6). Charting urban and rural territories as spatial productions of human life, requires acknowledging that structures at all levels: institutional, social, economic and environmental, coexist and are interdependent on each other, thus territorial dynamics and all the spatial features in which they are manifested, depend heavily on both, our understanding of space and our spatial behavior.
Figure 3: Complexity of Social Systems and their Spatial Behavior / Source: Author
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