“Towards rural common practices”

Serifi Christina
Architect | Urbanist | Researcher
TiriLab

The imminent emergency of the climate crisis has turned our beliefs upside down. Since 2012, when
the United Nations Statistics Division proclaimed that mankind was equally divided between urban
and rural populations1 , there has been a massive focus on the city in terms of research, exhibitions,
discourse and an equally pervasive neglect on the countryside. Living between Berlin and a small
village in Greece, I began to realise that, through an accumulation of discrete individual changes, the
countryside is actually transforming more drastically than the city.

The current pandemic rendered many of the perks of living in a vibrant metropolis - rapid public
transport, endless supply of culture and entertainment, the bustling bars and restaurants - as too
dangerous to be enjoyed in their usual form. Learning from the history of urban development2, we can
clearly see how cities during 19th century were deeply transformed because of plagues. The more
public-health officials learned to deal with deceases, the more cities began to prioritise water
sanitation, sewing systems and general cleanliness. Although, it is still early to understand how
coronavirus will reshape our urban environments, there have been profound changes in how people
are choosing to live in them and they way people work. Working remotely is gradually becoming a
pattern which could prompt more people to move out of the cities. While it is impossible to predict
what the new normal will be, it may well be reverse urbanisation.

Through my recent work, I have started to question and frustrate this cultural hegemony of the urban,
moving away from the rural/urban dichotomy. The rural is not new. The rural is not static. The rural is
not disappearing. The rural is multitude and it is dynamic, it can be attached or detached from a
geography, it can be a mindset, a certain practice or a shared identity. I believe that it is even more
critical amidst the COVID-19 crisis, to understand how rural areas responded and pay
attention to their closer connections to knowledges of subsistence. This crisis demonstrates
the importance of investing in systemic resilience through systemic change3.

Around 95 percent of people with COVID-19 live in urban areas, which have been turned into “a
disorganised array of disconnected bedrooms and studios”4 . This has brought into light some of the
fundamental inequalities at the heart of out towns and cities. The most vulnerable are the ones hit the
hardest, including homeless, people with precarious work, people who live in densely populated
informal settlements and slabs. Having access to water and food supplies became even more
challenging in urban centres, highlighting how critical is the interconnection with the countryside
where the food is grown.

Spending the first four months of pandemic outbreak in a rural village in northwestern Greece, I
realised how urgent it has become to find new ways to inhabit our planet, learning from rural areas,
from their solidarities and their resilience. It is important to establish a newly de-urbanised and un-
nostalgic attention to the rural, a commitment to accepting similar complexities to those which are
acknowledged for the urban and taking an emancipatory step to undermine the preconceptions of the

1United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division (2019). World Urbanization Prospects: The
2018 Revision (ST/ESA/SER.A/420). New York: United Nations.

2 Mumford, L., 1961. The City In History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, And Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.

3 Wallace, D., and R. Wallace. 2008. Urban systems during disasters: factors for resilience. Ecology and Society 13(1): 18.
[online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol13/iss1/art18/

4 MARINAKI, T., MARINAKI, T., ARVANITI-POLLATOU, M. and ROIDOU, E., 2020. Lydia Kallipoliti | Jury Statement _ Pandemic
Architecture International Ideas Competition | Archisearch. [online] Archisearch. Available at: <https://www.archisearch.gr/
architecture/lydia-kallipoliti-jury-statement-_-pandemic-architecture-international-ideas-competition/> [Accessed 14 July 2020].
rural as backwater5. In many of these rural regions who face shared issues such as desertification,
underpopulated areas, unsustainable agricultural methods or migration crisis, we find local
communities promoting their own solutions to their needs, through a culture of commoning. Some
rural areas are pioneers in creating "third-places" that often mix work, cultural, gathering and social
spaces, offering collective services that often somehow replace public services6 . These places are
part of the commons, a "grey zone”7 between the public and private realm, promoting collaborative
and horizontal ways to manage them. It is important to highlight and empower such communities,
that may point to another way of organising: free and open source software and wikis, open design
and hardware, repair and re-localisation, community currencies and infrastructure8 .

It could be an opportunity during this crisis to examine deeper the close connections between the
urban and rural environments through shared experiences, knowledge, skills, stories, ideas and
resources of solidarity, especially outside mainstream public attention. We need to use our thinking
as architects, researchers and practitioners, to contribute to the ongoing discussion around
topics such as food production sovereignty, new exchanging forms, collective intelligence
and emergent crisis-resilient socio-technological systems, towards a post-growth
imaginary. Thus, we can approach the rural as a shared and common cultural space aiming to add a
plural voice to the urban-rural discourse, raising awareness of their interdependence by reorganising
relations and practices, through a culture of solidarity.

5 2019. The Rural. London: Whitechapel Gallery.

6 Naomi Klein, "Reclaiming the commons", The New Left Review, 2001. "At the same time there are oppositional threads, taking
form in many different campaigns and movements. The spirit they share is a radical reclaiming of the commons. As our
communal spaces-town squares, streets, schools, farms, plants-are displaced by the ballooning marketplace, a spirit of
resistance is taking hold around the world. People are reclaiming bits of nature and of culture, and saying {
“this is going to be public space”.

7 See Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press

8Foundation for Intentional Community. 2020. Peer To Peer: The Commons Manifesto. [online] Available at: <https://www.ic.org/
community-bookstore/product/peer-to-peer/> [Accessed 14 July 2020].