Rural-urban interfaces and changing forms of relational and planetary rurality

Abstract

This editorial introduction aims to frame the special issue entitled “Rural-urban interfaces and changing forms of relational and planetary rurality”. Problematising the dominant planetary urbanisation thesis, particularly its tendency in eliding alternative spaces, subjectivities, and politics to the global expansion of capitalist urban fabrics, this special issue seeks to rethink the rural-urban interface through the lenses of relationality and planetary rural geographies, highlighting the promiscuous interpenetration between the urban and the rural, the planetary significance of rurality, and, hence, the need to reassert the rural as a distinct spatial ontology and category. To move forward this theoretical agenda, this editorial situates our investigation of the rural-urban interface within a long pedigree of research on rural-urban interaction, coordination, or integration. However, such works are often leaned towards the dissemination of urban economic functions into rural places and often leave limited discursive space for a conceptual and theoretical rethinking of rurality per se. We advance the latter by building on a heuristic of “worlding” at the rural-urban interface, and bring this epistemology into a direct conversation with the six papers of this special issue.