AR April 2018 on Rethinking the rural
- 15 March 2018
- London EMAP Publishing Limited 2018
As more and more people migrate to our world cities, this month the AR is rethinking the rural. In the opening keynote, Adam Sutherland argues that the illusion of the rural idyll is increasingly in tension with its hardworking, messy reality.
From the depopulating Japanese hillsides of Koshirakura, to the tropical Marshall Islands exposed to radiation following nuclear tests in the ’50s and now threatened by rising sea levels, rural landscapes across the world are under various urgent pressures.
An abandoned mine in the backwaters of Charleroi in Belgium has been prepared for a future urbanity that may never come to fruition, and Plan:b arquitectos’s new series of schools in the jungles of Colombia offer an environment for learning in some of the most isolated rural communities.