Wrong Side of the Ridge: Charting the Urban Fabric of the Countryside

Abstract: Echoing through the lecture theatres, conference halls and pages of the contemporary Urban Studies discourse is the oft-repeated refrain that today over half the world?s population live in urban areas, and that by 2050 this proportion is expected to be upwards of 70%. The place of the leftover 50% of people inhabiting a vast and seemingly forgotten 98% of the planet?s rural territory is externalised, apparently lying outside the purview of marching urbanisation. Yet the theory of ?Planetary Urbanisation? has emerged in recent years positing a contentious epistemological questioning of Urban Studies? focus sites, objects and processes. In this it argues for a reorientation of the field towards the ignored rural hinterlands of ?extended urbanity? falling under the influence of the fluid process of urbanisation which is transforming the countryside through processes of rationalisation, functionalisation and disintegration. Critiqued as overly abstract, empirically shallow and puritanically ignoring form, this paper investigates and experiments with the theory of planetary urbanisation in a grounded study of a corridor of the Swedish countryside and the village of R