The impact of the global financial crisis and the economic recession on Southern European countries has threatened the rural welfare of many regions. The loss by emigration of the young population, austerity policies, and the territorial concentration of essential services have led many of rural areas into a spiral of decline. The growth of regional disparities, even among rural areas, is confirmed by the European official reports. Depopulation and rural decline are highly associated with remoteness. Accessibility is one key issue to mitigating this erosion of socio-territorial cohesion; another is mobility, which is the usual way to confront the scarce opportunities and limited services in deeply rural territories. This paper pays attention to socio-territorial inequalities and considers as working hypothesis that social rights are differentiated by the habitat structure; as a result, territory determines different degrees of citizenship. Traditional perspectives focused on the access to productive resources and material opportunities as the source of disadvantages, but we suggest that a more comprehensive approach is needed to address the rural gap: the difference between living conditions and living expectations in rural areas in contrast with urban ones. We address two main processes involved on it. On the one hand, there are strong interconnections between physical and social mobility, such as commuting to distant labor markets and educative centers, which could increase the social mobility of rural youth. On the other hand, the maps of the provision of services, infrastructures networks and investments not only reshape the territories but also their sociological morphologies. Accessibility and mobility are strongly linked with rural well-being and social sustainability. We explore and illustrate these questions with examples from the Spanish case. The text is structured into four issues regarding the rural gap: the territorial imbalance and social cohesion, the demographic imbalance and rural welfare as the product of the inter-generational equilibrium, the rural disparities in accessibility and the challenges of mobility transition. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the rural policies and governance required for achieving social and territorial balance.
This article considers the social aspects of daily mobility, which is studied as a social product, based on significant family strategies and social practices. Our analysis shows the importance of variables such as the lifecycle of households, class trends and family networks as well as class, gender and generational sub-cultures. The different forms of daily mobility are seen to be linked to other social strategies (residential, labour, sociability, etc.) that create a varying range of social situations. Urban and mobility policies, urban dispersion, greater automobile use and new trends in the socio-technical organization of cities exert a great influence on these unequal social positions, promoting new forms of exclusion and social risks. Based on the study of a medium-sized city in Southern Europe (Pamplona-Iruñea, the regional capital of Navarra), which is developing fast from a concentrated pattern to one of residential dispersion based on greater automobile use, an analysis is carried out into how family mobility strategies tie in with different sociological profiles. The study aims to provide interesting theoretical and methodological reflections on mobility that will be of use to professionals, institutions and civil movements working in the field of mobility regulation. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2008 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
<div data-canvas-width="529.2655333333335">The arrival of foreign immigrants has been considered as an opportunity to stop the depopulation and decline of some rural areas in Spain. Previous research has suggested that the ability of the rural environment to retain population depends both on the characteristics of the rural settlements and on the new residents’ profiles. In the context of the impact of the economic crisis of 2008, we explored the role played by rural places as a destination in the migratory strategies of foreign immigrants and the territorial and social factors that may favor their settlement.</div>
The issue of the resilience of rural areas has again emerged as a result of the economic recession, particularly in the countries of Southern Europe, which have been especially hard hit by cuts in the provision of services. In this paper we focus on the Spanish case to explore the role that mobility plays in the central age groups of the age pyramid in rural sustainability. Based on the results obtained from a representative survey of the population and in-depth interviews carried out between 2008 and 2012, we show how demographic composition and mobility strategies are two central factors in considering the future of rural areas. Their medium and long-term effects have been considered separately, but in this article, their inter-relationship is analysed in the context of the sustainability of Spanish rurality. The conclusions point to the dual effect of mobility: on the one hand, it regulates the actual subsistence of rural populations to the point of making them highly dependent on cars; on the other hand, it transmits social inequalities in the social structure, such as those related to gender.
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