Imagining Rurality in the New Europe and Dilemmas for Spatial Policy

In the discourse on European integration from the mid 1960s until the beginning of the 1990s, rural space and rurality have been traditionally associated with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), while little attention has been devoted to the spatial development of the countryside. These approaches and policies were associated with a 'geographical imagination' of rural space and rurality as a place of production, where the emphasis was on sectoral policies. In Europe today the discourse has changed dramatically. The current dominant geographical imagination of rurality is shifted to consumption and leisure, following both specific structural trends internally to rural areas and the more general post-modern trend away from production per se . These trends are discussed in a highly influential European document, the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) introduced in Leipzig in 1994 and formally adopted in 1999. In this document a new language and new policy guidelines are introduced, which openly support the consumption/leisure imagination, introducing at the same time spatial policies, which will deal more effectively with urban and rural spaces. Bearing this in mind, this article will try first to describe the two phases of imagining rurality in Europe (production versus consumption/leisure) and second their impact on southern European (SE) rural regions.