Hidden Disparities in Rural Transition: Cosmopolitanism, Socioeconomic Decline and Accesibilities

Abstract

The characterization of the new rurality, as a category to differentiate the current rural life from the previous agrarian situations, is still an open debate. Despite the substantial changes that rural áreas currently experience it is not clear what it means sociologically. In the last decades there has been a continuous need to adjust the analytical categories to the changing realities of rural world. Some seminal works tried to explain the deagrarianization as a result of the restructuring of regional economies by new productive and territorial logics. The emphasis was placed on the economic relations. However, in the context of the postmodern societies, these analyses forgot the cultural change and new patterns of consumption that defined rurality as commodity. Later on, other issues have been included in the theorization of rural change such as globalization and social diversification. The paper explores this last transition of rural societies by looking at the Spanish case and focussing on three main processes: the demographic transfer of vital generations from rural areas to urban centers, the cosmopolitanism and social diversification, and the role of mobility for the articulation of rural life-modes. The findings show the disparities underlying these rural changes and the need to review the theoretical approaches.