Rural geography III: Marketing, mobilities, measurement and metanarratives

This report focuses on the individual and collective capacities of rural people to develop innovative and entrepreneurial approaches to local development (e.g. via place marketing) and to create music, art, prose and other cultural forms in place which in themselves serve to promote rural localities and regions to non-local people. In addition, it considers people’s propensities to move to new places on a permanent or temporary basis, and how this mobility affects individuals and host and sending communities. Rural geographers are also taking advantage of new sophisticated geostatistical databases to produce more precise measurements of mobility and migration relevant to rural population geography research. However, in reviewing these two major research fields I also pay attention to the relative mobility of concepts and metanarratives developed in particular national and cultural contexts and the degree to which they successfully travel and ‘take root’ – in the sense of helpfully explaining empirical circumstances – in other places. Far from being a remote outpost of the broader discipline, rural geography, through its practitioners, continues to pose vital normative questions regarding the current and future directions of rural society, economy, population and environment across the globe, and developing the intellectual and practical tools to address those questions