The founding myth of rural sociology established an opposition between countryside and cities, classifying these notions as separate spatial and social realities. In the last two decades, an idyllic and divinized image of the rural has been constructed, especially in countries from the European Union. What reasons have conspired to foster this new appreciation of the rural? Is there a mutually accepted, recurring meaning between the way this new discourse about the rural is created in Europe and in other countries? This study aims to explore some of the contradictions associated with what the authors call the emergence of a rural “made to measure” in a context marked by post-productivism and the increasing weight of post-materialist values, taking social representations of the rural as the focus of the analysis.
rural; social representations; new rurality; rural development