Pokrovsky N.E., Nikulin A.M. “There is and there will be territorial reformatting of rural spaces” // The Russian Peasant Studies. 2023. V.8. №2. P. 140-158.

DOI: 10.22394/2500-1809-2023-8-2-140-158

Annotation

In the interview, Professor N. E. Pokrovsky describes his scientific path related to the issues of rural-urban development. Based on his experience as originally a city dweller, Pokrovsky considers how and why city-dwellers move to the countryside with their projects and plans to change the rural reality; identifies the life trajectories of different social strata of city dwellers in their rural searches; focuses on the essential characteristics of rural changes in recent decades, including those identified on the basis of his long-term observations in the Ugorsk rural development project in the Kostroma Region. As a sociologist-Americanist, Pokrovsky refers to the American roots of the rural lifestyle — ideas of T. Jefferson and H. Thoreau — and to his personal impressions of rural regions of the United States. Pokrovsky also mentions the spatial rethinking of rural-urban development as related, on the one hand, to the criticism of life in large cities, and, on the other hand, to the new economic-technological, culturalhistorical and recreational-environmental practices in rural areas. In conclusion, he considers the possibility of a new mapping of rural spaces in order to assess the development of local territories. 

Keywords

City, village, suburbanization, deurbanization/counterurbanization, migration, dachas, ecology, Henry Thoreau, Ugor project.

About the authors

Pokrovsky Nikita E., DSc (Sociology), Chief Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Professor, National Research University Higher School of Economics. Myasnitskaya St., 20, Moscow, 101000.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 
Nikulin Alexander M., PhD (Economics), Head of the Center for Agrarian Studies, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration; Vice-Rector for Research, Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. Prosp. Vernadskogo, 82, Moscow, 119571.
E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.