Rural development: a new microdistrict between the city and the village. Part 1. Theoretical analysis of social and territorial spaces of cities and villages

Abstract

The first part of the work is devoted to the analysis of socio-territorial transforming one of the desolate rural lands from the perspective of an approach to phenomenological sociology. The goal is, from a theoretical point of view, to deepen the social construction scientific approach of locality, based on the study of the topological perspective between the city and the village according to such space properties as orientability, compactness and connectivity, when they remain invariant during construction changes in the working site of the territory. The methodology of structural and genetic operationalization of social space is used in terms of P. Bourdieu, rethinking the production of space by A. Lefebvre’s paradigm, its verification in terms of the phenomenology of A. Appadurai, the production of place as a center of meaning created by experience from interpretations of humanistic geography. The used combination of several paradigms provides a theoretically powerful basis for understanding how interlocal social relations, lifeworlds, and the found out identities of the territory inhabitants between the city and the village are interconnected. The theoretical object of research is local communities in rural and suburban areas. General hypothesis of the research: at present, a new modification of the concept of “rural” has emerged, especially to the extent that it is typical for any country in the world, while global trends in the suburbanization (isolation) of individual rural areas as various forms of peripheral urban development acquire a special (priority) value, challenging A. Lefebvre’s “urban revolution” paradigm in the sense that the space of the modern world is becoming totally urbanized. This article confirms the hypothesis about the spread of the global suburbanization of Roger Cale’s theory, which is becoming more widespread and more significant phenomenon in different countries and regions of the world. This is also evidenced by the ever-expanding geography of suburban research in post-socialist countries, as well as criticism of the derived meaning concept of suburbs in relation to urban centers. The empirical evidence of this article confirms the growing importance of peripheral urban development in various forms and, in a more general context, leads to an understanding of the need to revise urban social theory in the spread context of global suburbanization. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the author’s rethinking of the reproduction concept of space both at the symbolic level of local subjectivity and in specific ties to the life worlds of the new territories inhabitants of spatial development, with the author’s empirical confirmation of the proposed approaches, conclusions and presented databases.