‘The countryside starts here’: How the urban-rural divide continues to matter in post-urban Flanders

Contemporary scholarship has critically interrogated categorical distinctions of urban and rural settlement types, shifting attention to processes of urbanisation instead. Yet, in some cases, the urban-rural dichotomy still proves an indispensable category to understand the governance of urbanisation. In this article, we explore this apparent contradiction: why is it that a distinction which is clearly inadequate in capturing the actual reality of urbanisation in post-urban regions still strongly informs the way a variety of actors involved in spatial planning think and act? This question is explored through an in-depth qualitative study of spatial governance in the fragmented post-urban settlement structure of Flanders, Belgium. Central to the study is the spatial governance instrument of demarcating ‘urban areas’, which is based on a strict urban-rural dichotomy in an attempt to counter sprawl. Through its implementation in the agglomerations of Antwerp and Mechelen, we show how this distinction tends to activate and reproduce a morally charged symbolic urban-rural divide. Combined with anti-urban identities and interests the distinction is instrumentalised in strategic actions of politicians and residents to undermine the instrument’s effectiveness. We conclude that arguments about the need for ‘new epistemologies of the urban’ should take the symbolic power of the urban-rural dichotomy seriously, as declaring these categories obsolete does not in itself lead to their disappearance.