Sustainable Geographical Changes in Rural Areas: Key Paths, Orientations and Limits

Abstract

Rural differentiation processes have formed the backbone of rural studies. Owing to the strength of rural–urban and local–global relationships, the theoretical approaches to rural restructuring in the Anglo-Saxon world and new rurality in Latin America only have a limited capacity to explain contemporary global phenomena of rural spaces. Due to this, transverse theoretical and methodological approaches have emerged to explain social, environmental and spatial (rural) processes. Here, a new approach is proposed called the individual–global field, based on the individual–global binary category to substitute the traditional relevance of the locality–community–globality association This new approach tries to reinvigorate rural geography in a more flexible way, based on minor theory, to adapt to all the phenomena that can occur globally. In any case, various spatial planes are proposed, dominated by specific socioeconomic processes on which the rural individual would move.