Resumen de Introduction: Women and Migration in Rural Europe — Explanations and Implications
Globalisation, the advent of communication technologies and the transfer to service economies have fundamentally modified the relations that constitute rurality in contemporary Europe (Woods 2007). In conjunction, a simple categorisation of places as urban or rural does not adequately reflect social reality. Urbanisation characterised by the growth of the metropolitan population and the spread of urban lifestyles has often been related to the blurring of the dichotomy between city and countryside (Woods 2009, Zenner 2010). On the other hand social and economic disparities between urban and rural areas are rising. While capital city regions in Europe have had the fastest population growth over the last twenty years, the population development of rural Europe reveals huge discrepancies between growing and shrinking regions (ESPON and BBSR 2014). Since the outcomes of globalisation affect rural areas in many different ways, various social realities are discernible, ranging from: prosperous areas being able to attract people and capital to the countryside, focused on the tourism industry; to remote places characterised by unfavourable accessibility, or areas with persistent infrastructure problems, unable to tackle negative demographic and economic development. In the ‘globalised countryside’ gender and class relations are altering and shaping the new rural realities (Pini and Leach 2011).
