During the confinement of the past 2020, rurality was looked at with utilitarian purposes that, in a renewed form, recovered the still existing stereotypes. Motivated by this concern, we considered the need to open the debate between geographers and also between initiatives in the Catalan rural region to discuss what role the rural world plays today in an increasingly urban society. The result was the publication of a non academic book written in choral form that collects contexts, experiences and conversations about a kind of rurality that is often not taken into account. This book focuses on an “other” rural world, an emerging rurality far from the retrograde stereotype, which deals with innovation, equal rights and creativity since long before the pandemic. In fact, today, many of the most cutting-edge, environmentally friendly and socially committed proposals come from and are located in rural areas. And it is not a coincidence, but causality: the basis of their deep-rooted values, their structural resilience and the sense of place are decisive, while endowing them with originality, potential and their own discourse. The book has also served to activate, based on its presentations with many different gents of the territory, an activist methodology of involvement in order to face the challenges and contradictions of models observed in the Catalan rural territory. In this presentation we want to emphasize the need to give a voice to the rural particularities and attend to the reflections and initiatives that are developed there. At the same time, we will show how debates generated by the presentations of the book throughout the territory (some forty sessions in just one year) have represented an extraordinary return and a methodological exercise of enormous value._x000D_

Cerarols, Rosa; Nogué, Joan
UPF, UdG

---

 
ID Abstract: 335