Abstract

The European countryside has undergone a deep transformation. The ‘national farm’ put in place in the post-war period has given way to a ‘differentiated countryside’, which alludes to the ever growing diversity, dynamics and complexity of the contemporary countryside emerging from as a double rural restructuring process of de-assembling and re-assembling. The de-assembling process concerns with the shattering of the national agricultural based structures of the post-war period countryside, while the construction of hybrid networks (material and immaterial, human and non human, rural and non-rural, local and non-local) is the process through which rural territories are being re-assembled. Indeed, the countryside socio-economic structures encased within strong nation-states has been displaced by heterogeneous constellations of networks. Rural territories are increasingly moving along distinct and diverse development trajectories and these trajectories are driven by a differing constellations of networks now to be found in the new rural spaces. Therefore, instead of thinking of rural places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, they can be imagined as rural webs: ‘meeting place’ of hybrid networks. Introducing the theoretical category of “rural web” and adopting the rural web category to the analysis of the experience of Lunigiana – a rural territory located in the extreme north of Tuscany (Italy) – the author aims at explaining the new trajectories of development of the emerging contemporary differentiated-networked rurality.