Mobilities, vulnerabilities and sustainabilities: Exploring pathways from denial to sustainable rural development

Abstract

Mobilities, vulnerabilities and sustainabilities represent three key and potentially divergent processes currently affecting rural Europe. Together they also set some key challenges and potentials for critical rural social science. This article, after first setting these processes in the global macro-context of growing environmental vulnerability and spatial uneven development, explores each of these processes in turn. It asks how rural areas can meet the challenges of these increasing mobilities in ways which reduce vulnerabilities and enhance sustainabilities. One answer, it is argued, concerns the critical understanding and dissemination of the sustainable rural development model. In the second part of the article some of the conceptual building blocks of such a model are proposed, suggesting the recasting of new rural-urban relationships based around new eco-economic principles. © Journal compilation © 2009 European Society for Rural Sociology.