The politics of place: Official, intermediate and community discourses in depopulated rural areas of Central Spain. The case of the Riaza river valley (Segovia, Spain)

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“…There are several reasons for this, one being socio-economic transformations in which an economy based on agricultural production is turned into a service-based economy, including a view of landscapes as consumable (Marsden 1990;Cloke 2006;Fløysand & Jakobsen 2007;Conradson & Pawson 2009). Another reason is spatial complexity as a consequence of time-space compression -fuelled by communication technology (Cloke 2006;Paniagua 2009). This paper anchors these sometimes rather sweeping theoretical statements in an empirical case study of a rural village.…”

Conceptualising ‘shadow landscape’ in political ecology and rural studies

“…Further, depopulation issues have retained relative prominence in some European countries as well as in Australasia (e.g. Pinilla et al, 2008;Paniagua, 2009;Smailes et al, 2002). Nonetheless, this work does not represent a thorough exploration of in-between places marked by historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation -nor does it attempt a wider conceptualisation, as essayed in this paper.…”

“…Part of the reason why shadow landscapes are contingent and fluid places (Paniagua, 2009) -and hence, can never be taken as fixed or self-evident entities -is related to the ways in which they are influenced by questions of scale and scalar politics (Swygnedouw, 1999;Di Mauro, 2009). Here, too, general advances in knowledge in academe, reflected too to a greater or lesser extent in both political ecology and rural studies, play a hand in sharpening how we seek to understand these particular landscapes.…”

“…Such variability in how historical depopulation and cultural marginalisation come together to shape a specific locale is clear from work in particular on rural areas around the northern rim of the Mediterranean (e.g. Black, 1992;Buller, 2008;Paniagua, 2009;Kizos et al, 2009), in northern Japan (Palmer, 1988), and the UK's 'peripheral' regions like Wales (Cloke et al, 1998;Clout, 1972) and highland Scotland (Stockdale et al, 2000;Turnock, 1995).…”

Provincial Globalization: The Local Struggle of Place-Making

“…There are several reasons for this, one being socio-economic transformations in which an economy based on agricultural production is turned into a service-based economy, including a view of landscapes as consumable (Marsden 1990;Cloke 2006;Fløysand & Jakobsen 2007;Halfacree 2007;Conradson & Pawson 2009). Another reason is spatial complexity as a consequence of time-space compression -fuelled by communication technology (Cloke 2006;Woods 2007;Paniagua 2009). This paper anchors these sometimes rather sweeping theoretical statements in an empirical case study of a rural village.…”