Abstract
The starting point of this chapter is the discussion around rurality reinvention discourses in Portugal, from a political, cultural, and promotional perspective, in a context of supposedly generalized crisis in rural territories. Our goal is to deconstruct the origin, motivations, and values behind this disseminated and powerful discourse and to identify the rurality project it conveys, always taking its urbanity into account. Empirically, this search takes us to the city, in order to study idyllic rurality thematization spaces, aiming at an identification of the reinvention project’s frames imposed to rural territories, that is, learn about desired landscapes (and thus the dominant expectations about real territories), through scenographic materialization for urban fruition. We have analyzed two small rurality niches recreated in the two urban parks in Oporto (Portugal), and we found an educative, patrimonial, purified, and comfortable rurality, adapted to urban comfort demands and deriving from the rural idyll.
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- 1.
It is important to say that the separation between nature and culture, as the opposition between city and countryside, only exists in theoretical terms to facilitate the analysis, since in reality territories are fluid and hybrid, and there are no purified categories values or concepts. However, as we speak about social discourses and representations, it is important to take into consideration that these dichotomic categories and concepts still influence the way we conceive, think, promote, and manage territories and territorial policies (Vandergeest 1996). And as we focus in discourses before analyzing spaces, these are important references that we have to consider.
- 2.
The so-called countryside ideal, as the set of romantic representations around the pastoral and wild rurality, as well as around the lifestyle and social environment which is associated with it works as important fuel to the reinvention discourse by being established in our cultures for centuries (Bunce 1994).
- 3.
Just to give an idea, the Serralves Foundation has the most visited museum with a paid entrance in Portugal. Only in 2010 it received 450,000 visitors, and following the growing tendency of the last decade, the number raised to 470,000 in 2011.
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Fernandes, A.M. (2013). The Rurality Reinvention Discourse: Urban Demands, Expectations and Representations in the Construction of an Urban Rurality Project. In: Silva, L., Figueiredo, E. (eds) Shaping Rural Areas in Europe. GeoJournal Library, vol 107. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6796-6_14
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