We undertake action research projects that
fufill our aims in partnership with others, with communities
and through the power of art.
and through the power of art.
But
why "ruralrecreation" ?
[skip to the point]
The relationship between subject, space and society usually takes the urban paradigm as a point of departure. For example Guy de Bord’s vociferous rejection of the city’s society of spectacle and Michel de Certeau’s small scale resistances to the urban hegemony of corporations and planning authorities.
Rural space in the UK plays out this tendency as a space for the urban majority. From a purely
geographical perspective 90% of the UK’s population live in urban environments, even if 80% of the land is rural (Jenkins, 2002)
Historically the countryside has been the site of agricultural production but is now equally the site of the production of amenity, holding a symbolic position in a British culture grounded in 19th century Romantic literature and landscape imagery and now interwoven into a global idea of the Romantic, Sublime and Picturesque. Textual readings of landscape such as Anne Whiston Spirin’s The Language of landscape (1998), regularly refer to English landscape in attempting to deconstruct the mythological, narrative and symbolic meanings of contemporary modes of landscape production:
“The English landscape style spread throughout the British Empire and beyond. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century garden suburbs in England and North America adopted it, and so, more recently, have corporate office parks, asserting the power of property, the status of the owner, and alluding to the continuity of Western culture.” (Whiston Spirin, 1998).
It is largely due to this symbolic attribution of power and the continuing cultural and religious investment of the spiritual in nature, that the rural retains its political and social potency. It is also regaining significance as a contested political space as, for the first time since the industrial revolution, migration from the countryside the city has been reversed. As sociologist Tony Champion states in Flight from the City; “Very consistently… it seems that the more rural an area is, the more it gains migrants…the ‘quest’ for a rural idyll is stronger than the negative aspects of urban life.” (Champion, 2000)
Another major 20th century theorist of the urban is Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist philosopher who has had a major impact on thinking about art in the public realm, as it relates to his theories of the production, or commodification, of social spaces by capitalism in order to reproduce hegemonic structures. Lefebvre does extend his thinking to the rural in so far as it is characterised by the agricultural production necessary to supply expanding cities and as it serves as a space of leisure. He observes that leisure appears to offer a counter-space where people can escape work through play, even if heavily structured by the capitalist system:
“The space of leisure tends – but is no more than a tendency, a tension, a transgression of ‘users’ in search of a way forward – to surmount divisions: the division between social and mental, the division between sensory and intellectual, and also the division between the everyday and the out-of –the-ordinary (festival).” (Lefevre, 1991)