IV Annual Cycle Young Social Scientists
2008-2009

April 15th, 2009, 17:00 CES Seminar Room (1st Floor)
 
Ana Matos Fernandes

The urban discourse of reinvention of rurality – from crisis to construction of a consumable ideal

 
Abstract: Presently, we note that a transversal and almost consensual discourse of romanticization of rurality and nearly everything associated to it, gains pressing significance. Values, landscape, practices, flavours, images, distilled and purified, create a set of expectations for a reinvented rurality and a new future for “old” territories. Rural development strategies, in face of a “crisis” reversion, apparently also transversal, sustained by a battery of idyllic and bucolic representations, secularly embedded in western cultures, promote territories, resources, products and virtualities, in what constitutes a framework of patrimonial solutions to functional, demographical and economically profound problems. What matters is the deconstruction of the strategic, cultural and commercial discourse that, surrounding the rural, strengthens itself and demands to the city its origin, since it is in the course of its interests and concerns that this project of rurality seems to gain sense.

 
Biographic note: Ana Matos Fernandes holds a degree in Sociology at ISCTE. She has collaborated in some ICS projects within the Permanent Observatory for Youth. Presently is a doctoral student in Applied Geography at the School of Geography and History, University of Barcelona, where she attended the Official Master of Territorial Planning and Environmental Management. She has for main research object the discourses of reinvention and valorization of rurality and its promotion whilst loci for urban consumption.