Habituating urbanity through practice: The production of “rurban” in collaborative workspaces

Abstract

Against the backcloth of global urbanization, this paper investigates how urbanity is habituated through practices in rural places, reproducing and constituting “Rurban” habitus beyond the conventional urban-rural dichotomy.

The divide between urban and rural has been perforated. This can be observed not only in macro-scale socioeconomic changes in rural places, but also in daily practices that reflect micro-processes and micro-politics of negotiation between global trends and local conditions. Theoretically, this paper deploys “global countryside” (Woods, 2007) to construct a relational understanding of the (re)production of rural space under globalization, and “habitual urbanity” (Dirksmeier, 2006) to specify how urbanity is experienced as the ability to coop with strangeness and contingencies in changing rural places.

A review on the emergence of collaborative workspaces (CWS) in rural places, preliminarily in Europe, is conducted to contextualize this complexity. The focus is on how visual and textual materials from such space (re)produce their representations of “Rurban”. Typically understood as an urban intervention for more flexible employment conditions nowadays, CWSs also start to appear in rural places along with rising societal interest in remote working, digital nomadism, and lifestyle migration. “Rurban” habitus is therefore constituted by both cosmopolitan and place-based practices in CWSs, or more precisely, a constructed set of “rural” practices (re)produced by global urbanization.

This research aims to look at global urbanization in rural places beyond a subordinate process, but as a ground to critically discuss the heterogeneity and possibilities of urban-rural relationships. Further place-based research shall be followed up to illustrate more micro-scale details of the generative dispositions and processes of the “Rurban” habitus.