The conference explores how rural and small-town societies are responding to challenges brought by policies, economies and shifting social values constituted mainly in urban centres. Themes include: changing roles of cultural heritage, making sense of social change, and sustainability discourses.

In today’s rapidly urbanising world, rural and small-town communities are often wrongly considered as peripheral to dominant urban centres, where the most meaningful activities in social, political, and economic life are considered to occur. This is nothing new in light of the trend towards so called ‘global cities’, strategic locales whose concentration of political, cultural, and financial capital have direct and tangible effect on global cultural, political, and economic activities. However, the impacts of such trends are not a closed loop, constrained within a global network of urban centres. What happens in urban centres also visibly – and in a no-simple way – affects local ways of life in still vibrant rural and small-town societies.

In many countries across the world, we see this in particular through the effects of a steady corrosion of social welfare – a phenomenon driven by an observable shift towards neoliberal policies preoccupied with entrepreneurship, the drift from small-scale rural economies to industrial agriculture, and the move from manufacturing-based economies to tourism and service-based ones. Although these shifts have stimulated local economies to a certain degree, they have also exposed local communities to increasing wealth gaps and socio-economic stress. In a world where a majority of resources are being concentrated in growing urban landscapes, a wave of protests is rising in these “peripheral” localities. As we have observed in recent years, these social turbulences are often directly related to – or exploited by – current national-conservative populist movements spreading across Europe and beyond. However, we believe that contemporary transformations in rural and small-town areas also establish a range of new possibilities, including locally grounded social enterprises, activism and many other creative responses to global pressures such as climate change. Further, these complex grassroot processes bring a new energy to local communities that powers the re-imagination of local history, heritage and identities.