Resurrecting the Village: A New Role in Local Rural Development?

The European countryside and its peasantry have undergone radical transformations in the last two centuries under pressures from changing agricultural practices, industrialization, urbanization, and the EU Common Agricultural Policy ambition, which have altered rural livelihoods to extinction and rural landscapes to the point of no-return. This paper examines a transnational associative network which proposes that the future of rural Europe lies in the local through the preservation and “resurrection” of village life, cultural identities, and architectural patrimony. The Association of the Most Beautiful Villages of France model has been diffused and adopted in 450 localities across four European nations - Italy, Spain, Romania, and Belgium- as an effective response to shared challenges of rural decline.

One element of Europe’s rural past remains consistently relevant in Europeans’ consciousness: the notion of “village”. Idealized as the embodiment of bygone living, it has become a refuge from the excesses of cities and the cultural and economic anxieties they produce. As heritage tourism intensifies, the village now also concretizes as a node where rural identities and economic development meet. By reinventing places through heritage-making processes, the network brings Europeans together, beyond nostalgia and past nationalist ideologies, to develop dynamic local economies while attempting “to restore life around the fountain”. The network answers questions about the nature of neo-rural reanimation and tests whether the European village, pueblo, borgo, or satul may transform into a catalyst for the future of rural territories, or if the village, as some assert, is in fact sighing its last breath.