Binaries again! Revisiting the urban-rural question through geographies of discontent

Abstract

A decade ago, leading scholars suggested that the ‘extended’ and ‘planetary’ form contemporary urbanisation has taken blurred demarcations of urban and rural and rendered the urban-rural binary an obsolete conceptual category. Contrary to its alleged obsolescence, however, the conceptual pair emerged as an empirically salient and conceptually useful category that effectively encapsulated recent political issues like Brexit, Euroscepticism, and the rise of right-wing populism. This paper addresses this evident contradiction by offering a compendious review of the recent scholarship on ‘geographies of discontent’. Our review suggests that contrary to their alleged obsolescence, urban-rural dichotomies have in fact been both reinforced and remained alive as social reality and lived experience and rendered places open for abuse by divisive populist politicians. We draw on this evidence to highlight the urge to overcome inherently incongruous binaries that are susceptible to exploitation and to transcend untenable conceptual traps that have the potential to reinforce territorial stigmatizations and polarisations.