Maria LOPEZ SANDOVAL, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, FLACSO Ecuador, Ecuador
Territorial Rural Development (TRD) has emerged in the past 30 years in the agenda of spatial planners, rural sociologists, and geographers as an approach to understand rurality in Latin America; TDR has also been used as a framework to design development interventions either from the State or international cooperation, that relay upon a place-based approach. As such, TRD has been substantial to keep main debates of Rural Geography in universities or national planning institutions, such as those related to globalization in rural territories, planning of rural landscape, the fundaments of central places and hinterlands, coined with terms such as the rural-urban continuum or countryside–city relations (relaciones campo ciudad). Under the foregoing and considering one the triggers questions proposed for this session: Are rural development, rural planning and/or rural sustainability specific issues that contributed to the emergence of Rural Geography as a sub-discipline?, this contribution introduces a counter-view of the question. I consider the regional context of Latin America and the development of rural studies in this region in the past three decades to argue that the view of rural development or planning has contributed to maintaining core geographical concepts and debates in academic contexts or higher education teaching of Rural Geography. Under this view, an important question to the future of Latin American Rural Geography is presented: can applied understandings of Rural Geography such as that of territorial rural development innovate the discipline or are competing with it?
Mots clés : Latin America |applied rural geography|development |rural studies
A105609ML