Public Space: from the Urban to the Rural. Lefebvre and Since.

Public spaces have been and still are the central topic of a countless number of studies. Their significance is nowadays even more relevant than some decades ago as they are increasingly undergoing a process of redefinition of their identity, running parallel to a silent ‘violation’ of their status promoted by the cyberspace. Surprisingly, there has been hardly any professional and academic in-depth debate on what public spaces are outside the city walls and how they take part in this process of transformation. Nevertheless, ‘public space’ does not necessarily imply city settings. The purpose of the current study is to spark this debate, by staking out an alternative vision of public space centred on the peculiar local rhythms of a rural area and geared towards figuring out the complexity non-metropolitan frameworks can show. That is, one the one hand, local rural spaces can, sometimes, present all features of an abstract space for their high level of implications (public-private dialectics, quality-quantity contradiction, integration and differentiation, climate changes effects etc.) almost comparable to city ones. On the other hand, their character of ‘otherness’ allows them to find a shared ‘moderate’ response to global changes – here less manifest and rapid than in urban contexts.