The rationalization of rural life

the article seeks to establish the conceptual distinction between territorial and traditional approaches to rural development in the social sciences. based on the emergence of what has come to be known as "the new rurality," there has been a shift in social content and in the quality of the relationship among its three fundamental defining dimensions: rural-urban relations, proximity to nature, and interpersonal ties. the more important implications of this change are, on the one hand, erosion of the agrarian paradigm that sustained the dominant perspectives of rurality throughout the entire past century and, on the other, an intensification of a long and heterogeneous process of rationalization of rural life.