The processes of socio-spatial marginalization in declining rural spaces

Abstract

Rurality has been associated with economic backwardness and social erosion in public discourses in Hungary since the early years of the transition, even though academic debates highlighted the diversity of historical trajectories and socio-cultural contexts of rural transformations. To contribute to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of major structural changes and their local consequences in rural spaces, we focus on marginalisation processes in four regions in Hungary that are labelled as ‘declining’ and ‘backward’ in political as well as academic discourses.

We consider marginalisation as a ‘product’ of changing social relations that become manifest in socio-spatial processes shaping all aspects of everyday life. This concept allows us to focus on daily practices of social groups (women, Roma, those who live with disability problems) and economic agents (entrepreneurs) living/operating in ‘declining’ rural spaces. In this way, we can explore the mechanisms that marginalise individuals, communities and spaces through various lenses, and reveal how marginality is ‘lived’ and responded to in various contexts. Our key arguments are the followings: 1. The diverse processes of social marginalisation and the accumulation of backwardness in rural spaces are linked intimately, in fact, reinforce one another; thus, marginalisation should be considered as a spatial process that manifests itself at and through various scales – from neighbourhood to global level. 2. Marginalised groups and individuals living in backward rural spaces are compelled to adopt practices that reproduce their own disadvantages, dependencies (and often, exclusion) within the existing structuralinstitutional frameworks.

The analysis rests both on the transdisciplinary review of concepts and discourses over marginality and on social and economic structures in rural spaces. The empirical tier of the paper contains extensive field work in four socio-economic crisis-hit rural regions in Hungary (the micro-regions of Lengyeltóti, Mezőkovácsháza, Sarkad and Sárospatak), completed in 2013. The empirical work based on qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews) by which we targeted marginalised social groups, local entrepreneurs and the institutions that shape – rather reinforce than counteract – everyday practices reproducing marginality.