Exploring Sustainable Rural Materiality in Remote Areas: A Geographical Perspective of Ten Years of Research

Abstract

The scope of this research is to contribute, through qualitative bases and case studies, to the relevance of old and new materialities in the process of rural change and restructuring in remote rural areas. The research on rural materialities can be found in cultural studies of heritage, modern geographical history and postmodern rural geography, based on post-structural and Deleuzian geographies, mainly geographies of heterogeneous associations and experimental and vibrant materiality. Geographic materialities allow multiple approaches in rural geography. A first approximation allows us to distinguish between old and new materialities. In each old and new category, it is possible to use different approaches: qualities of place, more-than-human, rural change, assemblage theory, material design, emotional geographies and cultural heritage. The sustainability-related outcomes are the rural material styles reviewed. Styles of research on old materialism are based on (1) qualities on place, (2) heritage and its effects in place, and (3) rural restructuring. The new change in the conceptualization of the material world is based on reconstructed local materialism and dissolved traditional rural communities. The styles in new rural materialities in the rural geographical field are (1) rural restructuring processes and new materialities, (2) material values and sophisticated visions of the countryside, (3) ensembles and material lives, and (4) emotional negotiations and feelings.

1. Introduction

In modern rural geography, multiple academic orientations coexist, with varying relevance between regional and even national schools. As Cloke [1] suggests, rural geography is a multiplicity of options between a return to material (micro) spaces and places and continuity in terms of sociocultural orientation, or even possible relational approaches.

The research hypothesis of this contribution is that the incorporation of new materialism into geographical analysis can offer (and revitalize) an interesting study option for remote rural areas. The strengthening of new materialism in rural geographic studies can give new energy to sociocultural options and lend a voice to materiality. The term ‘remote rural areas’ is dispute in the ongoing geographical literature. Traditionally, it is related to the distance from urban centers, the small marginal population, and scarce services and equipment for daily life. Currently, the approach to remote rural areas is turning towards spaces far from the city, where another lifestyle can be lived within the framework of plural and reconstituted micro-societies, with adequate comfort in rural houses. Remote rural areas have consolidated their revitalization process in the post-pandemic era due to health and well-being issues and the spread of information technologies and teleworking. An operational definition of a remote rural area is a location far from relevant population centers, with a very low population density, notable infrastructural gaps and limited access to essential services, an economy based on agriculture, forestry or natural resources, and poor connectivity.

The main academic sources on this renewed rural materiality have their roots in cultural heritage, historical geography and rural geography, with different orientations. Materiality(ies) in rural geography are a renewed force for an adequate reconstruction of the discipline, serving to amalgamate diverse geographical approaches in their orientation of study: historical, cultural, architecture and design, heritage, ruralism, social, and spatial. The main recent academic antecedents can be located in the argument of Halfacree [2], who proposes—following more general guidelines of human geography—that spatial materiality acquires value and recognition in the interaction with social identity through daily practice. Woods [3] for his part points out that a return to materiality has diverse points of view in rural geography linked to material and discursive conditions of lives in rural localities; a statistical and functional materiality of rural areas; and the rural relational hybridization between human and non-humans. Other relevant contributions in the orientation of re-materializing rural geographic studies come from Wheeler [4], associated with memories of the past in local histories, or the recent concept of the ‘lived landscape’ [5], based on processes of social change in rural villages.

Rural materiality refers to the tangible things and places in rural areas, encompassing both artifacts from the past and new objects and structures. It is a key concept for revitalizing the study of rural spaces by focusing on how these material objects interact with people and shape the local environment. According to their essence, materialities enable multiple approaches in rural and human geography. This orientation moves away from the mainstream of material culture studies based on the relationship between people and things or the main approaches in rural sustainability studies, which explore the resilience of the physical and more tangible dimensions of rural life and its socioeconomic systems. A first division can be established between old and new materialities. Old materialities can be defined as rural artifacts, that is, objects that were made by communities in the rural past for the management of the local countryside [6]. New materialities can be defined as the new experimental materiality, which has an individual dimension, the result of the multiple minor processes of destruction, revival and reconstruction of rural houses in a particular rural place, dominated by the material logic of resistance and the symbolical or functionality commoditization logic [7]. This is a formalist distinction but it helps to understand and amalgamate the multiple options of materialities as artifacts, evidence of lost materialities in the process of transformation of rural areas and the renovated materialities reincorporated into the process of transformation of rural areas. In any case, the old and new categories appear asymmetrical in territorial scale and public/private governance.

The research problem of this contribution is to assess, through qualitative bases and case studies, the relevance of old and new materialities in the process of rural change and restructuring in remote rural areas. The research question is to provide a range of analytical approaches to materialities in modern rural geography. This is a key issue in the social and landscape sustainability of rural areas and in the preservation of their identity. In sum, the purpose of this contribution is to analyze in a synthetic and comparative way old and new rural materialities based on some recent localized studies from between 2015 and 2024, from a micro and qualitative perspective within the framework of post-structural and Deleuzean theories: geographies of heterogeneous associations, vibrant materiality, vitality of non-human objects, everyday life and qualities of materialities, with the aim to establishing a range of possible academic approaches to styles of contemporary rural materialities. In sum, the main purpose of this paper is its contribution of scholarship around the ideas of materiality, and how they might be applied in human and rural geography and, in general, in the field of rural studies in a context of post-rural change. With this option, we want to show all the possible study routes of the materials associated with postmodernist approaches that currently coexist in rural geography. In other words, this research is grounded in post-structural and Deleuzian theories and aims to synthetically and comparatively analyze old and new rural materialities by drawing on recent localized studies.

2. Rural Materiality (Ies): A Geographical Approach for Emergent (Remote) Rural Areas in a Postmodern Orientation

As Forman [8] (p. 449) suggests, ‘Materiality is the quality of being material, or of being constituted by materials.’ Put simply, it describes the routes in which materials variously exert force upon human bodies and other possible forms of matter. Wen [9] (p. 2922) points out that ‘New materialism is an academic trend that emerged in the 1990s, along with ‘object-oriented philosophy’ and a ‘return to material objects’ research, which advocates for a new perspective for understanding human–land relations and social and cultural practices based on broad symmetry and ontological reconstruction’. The emergence of new materialism and the problems of ‘matter/discourse’ in poststructuralism as a double circuit are established. In this orientation, new materialism has become an innovative concept for rural cultural narratives.

In recent years, materiality has been a growing focus of interest in human geography in order to explore ‘the embeddedness of humans in a world that is constantly performed through complex sociomaterial relations’ [8] (p. 449). The materialist point of view in recent human geographies recognizes the hybrid character of relations between people and objects [10]. Lorimer [11] explains that materialities in the context of cultural geographies are related to vitalist and emotional material properties and changes in qualities of materiality—from spatial–physical composition to political–social relevance. Jackson [12] (p. 10) points out that ‘the revival of a ‘material culture’ perspective in social and cultural geography’ is a reaction to globalization and a suggestion for studying local powers. Daya [13] (p. 362) explores the vitality of material objects and practices and suggests that ‘A pivotal question now is what role textual and visual representations might play in deepening our understanding of matter’, mainly through selective individual stories. Hickey-Moody [14] suggests that the new agency of matter and the new materialism need qualitative methods based on affective relationships as constitutive features of the research assemblage.

New materialism has uneven theoretical and methodological guidelines in environmental, landscape and cultural approaches. (1) From environmental studies, the main argument of Nieuwenhuis [15] is how materiality is appropriated for particular politics in a process-space. Environmental disasters -as an example- occur in real places, and they alter through specific routes both animate and non-animate beings. In this theoretical approach, ‘New materialism offers an ontology that destabilizes many of our current limiting beliefs about humans and our place in the world’ [16] (p. 279). The new materialism approach recognizes that reality is relational and causality is therefore complex and reflective. In this sense, a more inclusive, relational approach to environmental governance in the Anthropocene is necessary. (2) Recently, Mason and Riding [17] affirmed that materiality is a notable option to renew studies on landscape research in human geography, with different visions for how that may occur. (3) From a cultural perspective, in a recent contribution based in a rural region of Australia, McNeil [18] explores how old ruin infrastructures are experienced in rural contexts and how rurality is (re)produced both materially and culturally. Johnson [19] shows that cultural geographers have not only considered buildings or villages but also incorporated events and artifacts within their analysis [19] (p. 41). These activities are performances with particular stories, and geographers must question them, not only based on texts or meanings but also considering the materialities and their spirits as stories. Particular studies have focused attention on specific groups, ‘activities and artefacts in the mutual consideration of space and these social groups’ [19] (p. 43).

Geography has had great thinkers like Henry Lefebvre, who argued that space is not a neutral container but a social product on the confluence of a perceived, conceived and lived space, Edward Soja, who introduced the concept of Thirdspace as a lived space that symbolizes new forms of resistance and culture, or the influence of Hegelian materialism, where matter is an abstraction of thought and idealism; materiality in rural geography has a notable Deleusian philosophical inspiration founded in geographies of heterogeneous associations, experimental and vibrant materiality, vital and individual orientations of non-human objects, everyday life and multiple (and even) infinite orientations in qualities of materialities [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. As Deleuze and Guatari [28] (p. 39) explain, there is a multiplicity of de-territorialized intensities, up to apparent, absolute or globalized multiplicity. It is possible to distinguish macro-multiplicities and micro-multiplicities from a geographical perspective. Macro-multiplicities—e.g., villages in a territory—are stable in space and time, and micro-multiplicities—e.g., houses in a village—are changing and molecular in time-space. In any case, there is always a distinction between the types of multiplicities that coexist in space. The emergence of material qualities linked to some types of multiplicities is what will define the macro-stability of a territory: The territory does not come before the qualitative brand; it is the brand that creates the territory [21]. In this theoretical framework, DeLanda [23] points out that history is not progress but rather the coexistence of accumulated materials. The nonlinear elements have valuable heterogeneity. But to incorporate heterogeneous elements requires managing local connections between them all: ‘I have argued that structures as different as sedimentary rock, animal species, and social classes may be viewed as historical projects of the same structure-generating processes’ [23] (p. 215).

In a postcolonial perspective from rural geography, Hetherington [29] points out the interesting concept of ‘frailty materiality’ in a review of land privatization processes in Paraguay, to indicate that it conditions the rights over the materiality of the agrarian population. A certain parallel can be found in the traditional villages swallowed up by urban growth in Latin America. Lueder [30] (p. 4) defines urban villages as ‘communities engulfed by rapid urbanization’. In this spatial context, the process of resistance is linked with abrupt change, and resilience is survival in the new urban environment or material reality. The traditional villages in towns add rustic character alongside new buildings with infinite combinations of histories/stories, symbols and significance. As Harvey suggests, ‘The history of territory as a concept provides a beautiful illustration of how absolute, relative, and relational conceptions of space and time get dialectically integrated in particular ways through material social practices’ [31] (p. 174).

Key Methods Used in the Research Process Between 2015 and 2024

Old and new materialities are two sides of rural materialities in ongoing dialogue, since they translate different actions and reactions in a time-scale process of permanent transformation of rural spaces. Moreover, old and new materialities in rural areas are spatial expressions that are micro-territorially inscribed in the process of rural change in rural spaces at a global level. There are old materialities with lost representations and lost uses in space or lost uses but continuity in cartography and in graphical representation, mainly in historical maps and modern cartography. An intermediate category is lost in use and partially lost in representation. To study old materialities, it is necessary to rely on different theoretical orientations of the new rural geography: biographical landscapes, more-than-human, minor global restructuring and cultural heritage positions. In the case of new experimental materialities, mainly based on the new rhythm of rehabilitated rural houses linked to a new figure or style—where the limits of the human-object sensation overflow, and even run amok through conjugation of active and passive, opposable, binary or fluid rhythms—the academic approaches are different. The main theoretical–methodological orientations for the analysis of new rural materialities are rural restructuring processes, material design, assemblages and live materialities, and feelings and negotiations.

Research on old rural material sites has been based on the study of traditional paths and local traditional artifacts in the countryside. This research has required a remarkable variety of sources of information, such as archival and policy documents, reports, historical maps, individual stories of older people, old photographs, etc., analyzed sequentially. However, the main source of information is ongoing fieldwork to accurately locate the paths. In the case of new materials, the research has been based on the selection of rehabilitated traditional houses that are representative of the processes of rural change in the selected remote rural areas, based on the characteristics of the owners, the materials, the relevance of the construction, or the renovation process. Research on the renovation of traditional rural houses allows for the analysis of the value of materials in the processes of rural social change.

After a field research process between 2015 and 2024 [6,7,32,33,34,35,36,37,38], the purpose of this contribution is to establish in a synthetic way the joint and global bases of a renewed materiality in rural geography, founded on old and lost rural materialities and in new houses or experimental materialities. For this purpose, old and new materialities are compared through different research styles, which are identified to offer, in a synthetic way, multiple research possibilities. Styles of research on old materialism are mainly based on (1) qualities of place; (2) heritage, place and community; and (3) rural change and restructuring. The styles of research in the field of new rural materialities are (1) rural restructuring processes and new materialities, (2) material values and sophisticated visions of countryside, (3) micro-ensembles and material lives, and (4) emotional negotiations and feelings between materialities and humans. The decision to use a methodological approach in the research process of more than ten years has not been totally predetermined, but has progressed through the timeline of discovery. This fieldwork strategy has allowed the use of a wide range of approaches. The characteristics of each research episode have determined the methodological approach. In sum, this contribution compiles all possible research strategies and approaches on rural materialities developed in successive localized research episodes.

3. Old, Lost and Perhaps … Recovered: Stories of Material Resistances in Historical Processes of Change

The old and lost have an adequate micro-interpretation in the framework of rural, cultural and historical traditions in geography. Minor geographical histories and geographical stories is a field of study that has had growing interest in recent years. This orientation comes from a reconfiguration of two study traditions: (1) the contemporary and historical changes in rural landscapes, and (2) the pastoral traditions in the configuration of an ideal countryside. In this framework, a conservative rural idyll perspective [34] emerges based on a renewed interpretation that brings together three points of view: (1) landscape discourses, memories and visions; (2) landscape as a process of rural change; and (3) the mythological cultural landscapes of abandonment.

Usually, in cultural geography, heritage is used in the interpretation of the material past in the contemporary landscape. The fluid association between the cultural landscape, collective identity, and (material) heritage in contemporary rural spaces is the main perspective in the analysis of old and lost rural materialities. Small stories or micro-histories are a notable point of attention and connection in recent rural geographical history and also in the landscape biographies or cultural study of landscape. The past in a minor historical perspective is an active element in the configuration of rural place, associated with the local social history of the contemporary humanized spaces. In this methodological politics, we use (1) the document-oriented approach, mainly based in local archival argument politics, and (2) (a) the experimental approach based on ethno-geographical personal lives, mainly through continuous fieldwork extended over time, rediscovering and retracing lost paths or the layout of ancient irrigation canals, and (b) the lives of others, mainly biographical oral stories of people in place. The final purpose is to make live landscape biographies of cultural places a framework of heritage’s traditional elements.

Rural artifacts—as the combination of local materials and popular knowledge—in the context of lost rural materialities suggest two main approaches: cultural and functional.

(1)

The cultural nostalgia point of view is the most relevant in the process of definitive loss. Rural artifacts acquire a local or even regional mythological category. These objects (materials) are hidden in the territory, but remain in the spirit of the past. In this sense, the lost rural artifacts recover the myth of an architecture that interacts with the organizational principles of the natural–cultural rural environment [39]. A vision of the original vernacular rural constructions as the powerful forms that cultural nature offered in the conformation of micro-communities is the dominant perspective. The minor histories of rural architecture in the field are the history of a natural model with new ways to represent natural objects. Rural landscapes and natural monuments are adequate spatial contexts for sentimental recoveries and reconstructions of picturesque rural artifacts. The histories of old buildings as context and atmospheres of stories need a newly renovated interpretation of materials.

(2)

Recovery is a functionalist vision with variable implications for study: socioeconomic, emotional, heritage… From this perspective, we intend to analyze not the trajectories of people as usual, but the trajectories of rural artifacts, in order to place an emphasis on the materiality of spatial abodes. Recovering lost materialities is a relevant process in the countryside dynamics of rural change.

In this framework, ‘lost rural materialities’ is a powerful concept in the context of a re-materialization of rural geographical studies, which aims to suggest the new functionality of old rural artifacts in the contemporary countryside’ [6] (p. 7).

The interesting implications of lost, shadowed or latent rural heritage for the territorial management of rural areas and the permanence of their idealized (im) material culture require a detailed study of its role in contemporary rural change processes. In previous research, we have highlighted, through the analysis of three missing or shadowed road systems and a lost old irrigation system [6,32,33] (

Table 1. Old and lost materialities analyzed.

Localization	Geographical Contexts	Artifacts/Years of Fieldwork	Represented	Current Socioeconomic Functionality
Rural route from Pinilla-Alameda to Bustarviejo	Different municipalities in Guadarrama Mountains. Madrid province.	Lost for traditional use. Partial survival in the shadow of topography/ 2015–2016	Lost in cartography	Lost for traditional use. Partially in traditional or sport uses
Najarra road system	Najarra site in Miraflores municipality. Guadarrama Mountains. Madrid province.	Lost for traditional use. Partial survival in the shadow of topography/ 2017–2019	Partiality represented in cartography	Lost for traditional use. Partially in new sport uses
Bustar road	Bustarviejo. Guadarrama Mountains. Madrid province.	Lost for traditional use/ 2020–2021	Represented in cartography	Lost for use
Berbedillo local’s irrigation channels	Ayllon mountains. North Guadalajara province. Cardoso de la Sierra.	Lost partially for traditional use and survival in the shadow of topography/2021	Represented in cartography	Lost for use

Source: fieldwork.

), the complexity of the responses of the old materialities to rural transformation processes. Through these micro-examples, some of the main characteristics of lost and old materialities are synthesized and compared. The fieldwork was carried out between 2015 and 2021. In all of this field research, a methodological approach was used based on (1) the review of historical and current cartography, (2) the analysis of documentary sources and local archives, and (3) very extensive geo-ethnographic field work over time in the selected areas, complete with key oral sources from thirteen ancient shepherds and ranchers from the Guadarrama mountains, old protagonists of the last days of traditional rural routes.

All these sources have been used sequentially, but the methodology is based primarily on fieldwork used to trace the publication of old materialities in detail. Definitive loss and recovery are two material processes of rural restructuring with different and multiple sides. It is possible to establish three ways of analyzing old rural materialities in the context of rural geography: (1) qualities of place, (2) heritage, place and community, and (3) the role of old materialities in rural change. In each approach, it is possible to distinguish two pathways between the values lost and recovered or simply lost in the way of being definitively lost. Besides each option, one may suggest particular methods of research and some possibilities of convergence between approaches [6,32,33]. The main strengths of this strategy of research are the complementarity of all partners and the detailed fieldwork and the main limitation is the concentration in some localized case studies.

3.1. Qualities of Place: Contextual Space in Created Space

We advocate for the study of particularities and qualities of materialities through biographies of minor landscapes and more-than-human micro-materialities, as two complementary visions in the analysis of old and lost materialities, based on minor spatial stories.

(a)

Study of landscape biographies of spatial stories in the form of biographical phases [40] with a notable humanist and emotional dimension, where the materials emulate from a human being and the past is related to the present. In this sense, trails are born, develop, reach a period of plenitude, decline and finally die or disappear, but also, in some cases, they recover and are reincarnated in the same material body, but with a different spirit or social utility [32,33]. This second life can be full and recover the layout of all its members or paths in all its extensions or can be limited to a part of the organism or system, with the other old rural routes remaining in the shadow or latent, in a permanent becoming. The traditional and formal textures or surfaces of the trails and hunts can remain, like a new heart in the arrangement of micro-materialities. On the contrary, they can be altered by losing the nostalgic and cultural vision of the past and recovering only a functional facet of the trails linked to walking and moving. As Deleuze suggests, ‘The form of representation expresses in the first place the organic life of man’… ‘The contour has ceased to be geometric and has become organic’ [22] (p. 127).

(b)

More-than-human materialities. The second approach is based on the recent insertion in the life cycle of animalities and materialities as live subjects of research. This orientation reflects the recent debate on the relationship between humans and non-humans under a new material–non-material association, mainly of a cultural nature. That is, it allows us to combine the change in the physical facts and change in the lives of landscape vision. In sum, it is a perspective of contested materialities in a context of created spaces. The ancestral rural routes are new urban life paths in natural or rural areas. Furthermore, this orientation suggests putting the emphasis on live materiality or on the live rural heritage, to offer a look focused on rural artifacts and their essential and main components and particularities. Only if the resilience stability of materialities and other properties of the whole emerge spontaneously is it possible to suggest nonlinear dynamics—in the words of DeLanda—in emergent properties. In short, it is the change from the political economy and functionalist perspectives of production to the perspective of consumption and recreation in the study of rural areas [32].

Trees and other vegetables are an intermediate materiality between animals and materialities or between objects and artifacts. Jones [41] points out in research located in a cemetery that it is possible to make out different spaces according to material flows, politics, culture and economy. In particular, trees give a style to the space and generate tree cultures/spaces, and new lively materialities and temporalities emerge in the places. In short, trees reconfigure and qualify material spaces. Jones [42] suggests that the rich materiality of trees allows the development of multiple identities in the form of lively materialities. Historical trees are lived fossil vegetable materials. Live materialities is a research concept not only with use in trees but also with a more general conceptualization that is based on material culture. Biocultural heritage places an emphasis on cultural trees as a product of the interaction between humans and the whole rural environment [43]. The trees are a good example of an intermediate element between humans and materiality. But, in any case, live materialities (vegetables) can devour (and even bury) the object of abandonment materialities. They can also have a friendly relationship and help keep lost materialities in the shadows waiting to revive.

3.2. Heritage, Place and Community

Rural heritage is a relevant element in the formation of community identities. It is possible to explore two major orientations: (1) Communal materiality. In this orientation, it is worth highlighting the materiality of the communal areas, which allows us to investigate the history of the community management of the country and the landscape for the collectivity of the locality and the artifacts in the countryside. The loss in the sense of community suggests a progressive loss in the collective heritage. (2) Heritage and local politics. The valuation and conservation of heritage suggest different styles in the local government: (a) heritage as key in rural development, because heritage is an immaterial key element in the everyday lives of the rural collectivity, (b) but also heritage may be a liability in the local process of modernization.

Contemporary local government styles regarding their rural heritage respond, within other factors, to place discourses, among which we can highlight [32,33] (1) heritage as an option for rural development; (2) heritage as a key to the local rural past; and (3) the patrimonial value of local heritage, with new responsibilities for local councils that often exceed their limited management possibilities. The transformation of the landscape and the loss of traditional uses in an accelerated manner in the recent past have changed the current use of certain components of the rural premises’ materiality and their resistance. This new dimension of rural heritage and the loss of its traditional use affect conservation, in many cases traditionally carried out by local communities that have currently declined and lost capacity, and, consequently, their responsibility falls on local institutions or even becomes extra-local. From the point of view of the biocultural heritage landscape, processes of the overshadowing of the cultural material heritage take place [6].

In many cases, the meaning of rural artifacts changes in each phase in the process of rural transformation, but the materiality is fixed. Butler [44] (p. 466) states that ‘notions of nostalgia and authenticity are key in the Western heritage concepts’. Nostalgia is associated with the past as a refuge, and authenticity is associated with scientific proofs of artifacts and monuments based on their singularity and qualities. Territorialization as heritage suggests some forms of memorial approaches to alternative heritage and a renewed conceptualization of heritage as memory. Heritage as a site of contestation is a key for renewed strategies of geographical research in local areas. The governance implications are based on the local capacity and heritage development, which include community empowerment and participation in the management of their heritage, the development of local heritage plans into a broader socioeconomic strategies and the role of local regeneration.

3.3. Insertion of the Old Materiality in the Process of Rural Restructuring

Materiality and restructuring rural processes are associated with a functionalist vision of space in the context of the political economy. Its value is related to its use and utility. The process of rural change has three large phases in relation to rural heritage in historical landscapes [6,33]: (1) a first traditional phase, very extended in time, where the cultural landscape of the community is configured, and trails and other artifacts associated with the occupation and management of local space are created. Its beginning is usually located in the medieval human repopulation of the territory, and gradually a complex and hierarchical system of trails or canals—as key spatial examples—is built that allow the community to occupy and use the micro-rural space in an effective and organized territorial rural way; (2) a transition stage usually dominated by state intervention in the territory and extra-community regulation, while a nostalgic vision of rural heritage emerges. Traditional uses usually disappear with public and planned reforestation of the space. The gradual decline of the livestock farm complicated the opening of some trails [6,33]. The diminished local community loses control over the space and stops carrying out its daily and seasonal management, while reforestation and spontaneous vegetation partially occupy the space, leaving the rural artifacts in the shadows; and (3) a postmodernist stage that affects both uses and management as well as discourses, in which multiple uses compete for the management and appropriation of the space: (a) conservation, (b) traditional residual, (c) modernist (forest management) and (d) recreational and leisure. In this last stage, within the framework of a contested terrain, the roads partially acquire a new use and functionality, but without adequate management.

This process of new ruralization of all traditional animal paths, for transit, transport, communication, or leisure, individual or collective (animal and urban users), usually occurs in the context of a review of the functions of rural space and within the framework of a continued tension between materialism and immaterialism. For example, the use of rural routes usually disappears with reforestation, but its continuity is usually associated with the activity of ranchers. A decline of materialities with a decline of lives and traditional activities is a common point of reference. The local and popular knowledge of the trails can be extinguished by the disappearance of the last ranchers who used them [33] (p. 272).

But lost materialities mark a possible end to the process of rural restructuring. In this case, there is no conflict; it simply remains in the shadows, as a form of latent resistance of materialities. This option in many cases is favored by local councils to avoid conflicts or problems with its use, by exceeding its management possibilities. The genealogies of the rural landscape are an instrument for the study of macro- and micro-dynamics of historical processes of rural change. The rural materiality in the shadow represents specific narratives of the past and landscape values for the future in a reinterpretation of processes of rural decline.

4. New Materialities

The new rural materialism ‘is framed in the more-than-human-geographies and suggests a hybrid and inclusive character that includes the daily experience of people in the life of artifacts’ [7] (p. 2). It is possibly an (end) product of the process of rural change and the revitalization of traditional rural materialities, mainly through rural houses. As pointed out by Meehan and Rice [10], cases offer sites where objects and individuals redefine their relationship on a daily basis. In the words of Harvey, ‘Material space is, for us humans, the world of our sense perceptions, as these arise out of the material circumstances of our lives’ [31] (p. 142). Cloke [1] points out that current rural geography integrates many work approaches, among which are the sociocultural and the cultural landscape. This integrative vision dominates our analysis positioned in specific places. There are probably other material dimensions, such as infrastructure or energy systems dominated by the public sphere, that do not have implications for everyday individual decisions and power.

In the process of research, 13 houses were selected through real estate internet portals with different research approaches in successive qualitative micro-fieldwork research in specific rural environments [35,36,37,38]. Each house aims to be representative of a type of traditional house renovation in its territorial context. The fieldwork was carried out between 2021 and 2023, with three methodological phases in each rural house: contextual identification in its village, visit to the rural house inside and outside, and analysis of documentary and photographic material obtained in the preceding phases. In addition, a historical documentation of new buildings was carried out, mainly in local and provincial archives, exploring the formation and growth of new rural materialities, as well as their vital differences and similarities through the process of fieldwork [14].

The new materialities can have two orientations [7]: (1) public, and (2) private—expressed through experimental materiality with vital individual biography. In our research, we have focused on this second process, targeting experimental material change that brings together the intimacy of rural people and materialities. In the geographical field, the main styles of research in new rural experimental materialities are (1) rural restructuring processes associated with new materialities, (2) material values and sophisticated visions, (3) ensembles and material lives, and (4) other possible emotional negotiations and feelings.

4.1. Restructuring the New Materialities as a Source of Rural Change

Classic works with a macro-global dimension of globalization processes in rural areas have assigned a new role to farmhouses to negotiate the rural in a renewed and dynamic residential context. In this dynamic of transformation, three types of renewed towns were generated [45]: (1) towns with essential rurality retained; (2) villages with eclipsed and shadowed rurality; and (3) contested community and conflictive ruralities in the villages. The usual process of rural change suggests a time-space dynamic articulated in three phases [36]: traditional rural, rural change and restructured rural. But in the post-urban period, a new question emerges: What is the new stage of renovated and restructured rural spaces?

Undoubtedly, there can and should be new academic responses or theoretical approaches based on delimited geographical contexts. In the study by Balest et al. [46], new uses of abandoned traditional buildings are identified in relation to engagement of the community at those places. Materiality has multiple meanings in the context of the local community, but individual, family and community identities also acquire meaning. ‘Natural and cultural heritage are important resources for engaging local communities in the promotion of a sustainable future, both for achieving energy targets and repopulating rural areas (…). Public engagement is an important factor particularly to preserve historic rural buildings and their landscapes’ [46].

From a post-colonial perspective, Pulgarin Osorio [47] suggests in his analysis that traditional vernacular houses in Colombia combine indigenous tradition and the contributions of Europeans after the conquest; in short, they combine the indigenous and colonial worlds. The abandonment of traditional construction systems is the result of migration and the aging of the population, the price of traditional materials and their forms of construction. In more recent times, there are forms of hybridization between traditional and modern materials (incorporating industrial materials). This process produces a mutation of social consciousness and memory and generates a disengagement from the rural community in the production or reproduction of new houses, and ultimately a loss of popular traditional knowledge. In this context, the construction of remote town houses by international Latin American emigrants also seems to have a biographical place to return to with the retirement event.

The recent relational approach to the dynamics of change in rural spaces in the form of assemblages points to the existence of [36] (1) simple pure encounters between old and new societies or between old and new materials in the form of direct relationships or mixed encounters between old materialities and new society, or between old society and new materialities; but also the emergence of (2) complex encounters as the sum of four categories—older societies, newer societies, older materialities, and newer materialities—in a place and a house. The encounters generate ‘puzzles of tensions or battles of tensions’ depending on their nature or characteristics [36]. In this perspective, the usual encounter in rural geography between people and place is replaced by the encounter between people and house.

An additional consideration is the insertion of the analysis of social classes into the analysis of new materialities. The analysis of social classes has a certain tradition in rural social geography due to the relevance of the new middle class in the processes of social change in rural areas. In the context of this research, the upper class is associated with the core of new middle class (professionals with high incomes) and the low class is associated with the classical working class, mainly in manual work. It is possible to establish two main types: upper-class materialities and lower-class materialities. The high-income class is more active in the use and domain of space and has more options to shape the ductility of materialities, while the lower class is more involved in a particular place where materiality grips and absorbs them. The upper class has more spatial freedom and de-territorializes the renovation processes of rural houses from their selection for reconstruction, while the lower class territorializes them. A hinge group should be considered: the middle class or creative new groups that have a predilection for rural areas due to their symbolic and material dimension, which supports the conditions of their professional life. For these groups, settling in a renovated rural house is a socioeconomic and prestige promotion. Upper- and lower-class analysis (geographical class analysis) is complementary to usual local and newcomer visions (place vision) in rural social geography. Undoubtedly, this is a simplification of the rich nuances of social class analysis in rural geography, but it serves to establish multiple combinations between five categories: upper class, middle class, lower class, local and newcomers, which have characterized social analysis in rural studies. A progression in this line of study could be to use intersectionality as an analytical tool of inequalities based on the superposition of social factors such as gender, ethnicity and social class.

4.2. Material Values, Design and in–out Qualities: Sophisticated Visions in the Emergence of New Rural (Im)Materialities

The old binary visions of space are becoming extinct in the world city [38], currently replaced by global cosmopolitan cultures [31]. In this new post-spatial vision, micro-cultural worlds emerge in renovated rural houses with external traditional appearances and cosmopolitan internal lives. The duplicity of home worlds around rusticity post-modernity reproduces the tensions in the qualities of the materials and the particular strategies of authenticity in a rural house [20]. In the words of Deleuze [48], this corresponds to the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’ (the opposite of fixity), where the signs of a person and an object are different from those of other people and objects. Each sign is subject to variability, associatively and equivocality; thus, the signs are impressions [48]. New rural houses generate both global cosmopolitan and place-popular heritage consumption. Each rural house is a singularity with two sides: internal and external. The new cultures of appearances in the process of change in rural areas [38] suggest the infinite spectrum of pleasures of renovated rural houses in a post-urban period. As pointed out by Deleuze [48], there are new ‘impressions signs’ of the countryside.

In the words of Delanda [24], the new rural houses are forms of ‘new image souvenirs’, mainly associated with the class of creative newcomers in rural areas, but also with a renovated old local rural bourgeoisie. ‘Houses reinforced the external territorial identities, but also reinforced the internal territorialized identities’ [38] (p. 271). In other words, the external appearance of the traditional spirit of the territory is combined with internal cosmopolitan design. The agrarian function has been lost from the houses, replaced by a renewed residential and recreational function. The old buildings used for animals are recovered with a similar external appearance but with a new heart. This permits a double reading: house and cyborg. Laist’s [49] cyborg point of view proposes that the organic part is improved through the technological material part. The encounter of human material/technology is an existential interface of individuality and objects. It is a technology with a human face, singularized and substantiated in successive moments of architecture through complex relationships between nature and artifacts. These are the cases, for example, of Ayllon and Piquera de San Esteban (

Table 2. New materialities in analyzed rural houses.

Geographical Area	Municipality, Province	House Restoration/Year Visit	Type of Owner	Sales Process
North Caceres	Villar Plasencia. Caceres	Restored/2021	Local family	Private
Guadarrama Mountains	Canencia. Madrid	Restored/2021	Local family	Private
North Guadalajara	Medranda. Guadalajara	Restored/2022–2023	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
Alcarria	Castilblanco Henares. Guadalajara	Restored/2022	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
North West Soria	Piquera San Esteban. Soria	Restored/2021–2023	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
North West Soria	Atauta. Soria	Restored/2021	Urban newcomers	Private
High Besaya	Pesquera. Cantabria	Restored/2022	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
High Besaya	Pujayo. Cantabria	Restored/2022	Urban newcomers	Private
High Besaya	Santa Cruz Iguña. Cantabria	Restored/2022	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
Guadarrama Mountains	San Mames. Madrid	Partially restored/2023	Urban newcomers	Real estate agency
North mountains	Torrebeleña. Guadalajara	Partially restored/2023	Local Family	Real estate agency
Ayllon Mountains	Ayllon. Segovia	Restored/2023	Urban newcomers	Private
Ayllon Mountains	Cuevas Ayllon. Segovia	Restored/2023	Local Family	Real estate agency

Source: fieldwork.

).

4.3. Ensembles and Material Lives: Micro-Politics of Material Encounters, Dis-Encounters or Assemblages

The relational point of view is a mainstream in recent human and rural geographies. Anderson and Wilie [50] suggest a vision of materialities as turbulent and interrogative forms of relational materialism. Within the framework of post-modernism, they propose a materiality of the discourse between objective materiality and the roots of post-structuralism. Deleuze and Guattari [28] regard human bodies and all other material as relational, with an ontological status produced through their relationship with contingent and ephemeral materialities brought into assemblage [51]. Deleuze [48] (p. 253) states that ‘we are subjected to species of encounters with external bodies’. This new materialism is the textualization of the social world that simultaneously brings together social action, culture and power relations, but surpasses the classic materialism that, for example, in rural geography, was linked to the traditional landscape. Fox and Alldred [52] (p. 399) suggest that ‘New materialism de-privileges human agency, focusing instead upon how assemblages of the animate and inanimate together produce the world, with fundamental implications for social inquiry methodology and methods.’ There is a notion of research comprising a researcher, type of data, research methods and spatial contexts. The option for micro-political analysis revealed both the processes of territoriality and aggregation as complementary entities. The relevance of the micro-politics of research assemblages is the main contribution of social inquiry into new materialism.

The evolution of a rural artifacts can be established through ‘different processes of encounters and assemblages and disagreements and disassembles associated with the process of recovery’ [35] (p. 247). The process of recovery of a rural materiality, mainly rural houses, has three phases [35]: (1) The first phase begins with the experimental recovery—including the work itself—of the abandoned traditional house. (2) Adequation and hybridizing in the rehabilitated house. (3) Dis-assemblage—or not—between people and rural houses with different dimensions, expressions and emotions. The duration of this process is flexible for socioeconomic and emotional reasons.

In this perspective, it is possible to also view the concept of new materiality as a life cycle or life experience. Permanently unstable relations characterize the process of an encounter or assemblage or a dis-encounter or dis-assemblage. In the process of disassemble of a renovated rural house, it is possible to establish different phases [35]: (1) Intimate hybrid individual–rural material relations, dominated by the feeling of a rural idyll brought by the house and the rural context. This is a co-creative phase between people and houses in the making of new dwellings. (2) Breaking hybrid relations between human and non-human (material) relations. (3) Latent hybrid relations and finally abandonment of the house and rural place. This is the case for Piquera de San Esteban (Table 2).

It is possible to establish three main types [35]: Type 1, family house dedicated to tourism business that is sold due to family problems of different kinds or due to economic management problems of the tourism business. The sales process is carried out by the family group itself. This is the case for Villar de Plasencia. Type 2, newcomers who sell their property after having acquired and rehabilitated it, mainly due to a lack of use due to changes in working conditions or relocation of the work site or due to a lack of incentive to use the home or pleasure gained from its use. The cases of Medranda and Piquera de San Esteban are examples. Type 3, hereditary process of a family house that is sold due to a lack of agreement between the owners or due a lack of financial means to rehabilitate. This is the case for Cuevas de Ayllon (Table 2).

4.4. Negotiations, Feelings, Emotions, and Hereditary Processes

The negotiations are dominated by the notion of a rural idyll, in the form of idealized visions of rural areas for living in a beautiful landscape and friendly communities. Each house has multiple and successive processes of encounter and dis-encounter in the forms of successive sales and purchases, within the framework of global markets not subject to the dynamics of an expanded rural community [53]. These negotiations have an emotional dimension that distorts the usual real-estate buying and selling processes. The first process of encounter–disencounter occurs between the traditional local population and newcomers, and there is a complementary process of recovering the old rural house as a new materiality according to urban comforts. The second process is usually between newcomers, from the pioneers to the second mature generation of newcomers, and the third…; this is a process of replacements of new populations, not associated with displacement of traditional populations [36]. This is the case for Pesquera (Table 2).

Each biography of a rural house has its unique process. In some houses, it is in the first encounter, others in the second or successive ones, but also, in some cases, the process of conversion into a new rural materiality does not begin from its agrarian stage. It still belongs to the rural past, waiting to join the global–rural market. There are new latent and expectant materialities ready for their cosmopolitan recovery.

5. Conclusions and Suggestions

Lost and new materialities have multiple theoretical–methodological frameworks of analysis within rural geography. Each approach requires a particular adjustment of the object of study. In this contribution, we have synthesized a long period of research on rural materialities to offer possible options or alternatives for analysis within the framework of current trends in rural and human geography. All the cases studied are located in remote rural areas with revitalization processes—reconstruction of rural houses and population increase—and consequently are suitable examples of areas with historical depopulation processes under reconstitution, which mainly characterize Western Europe. In this sense, the text undoubtedly suffers from a certain Eurocentrism, although it also has notable possibilities of application in postcolonial realities of the Global South. All cases involve rural materials integrated into a particular place owing to its nature, but this characteristic is in some way universal in spaces where there has been a historical process of settlement of the rural space. Consequently, this perspective can clearly have a global dimension that is realized in a differential way and with multiple forms in each regional or even local space. Cosmopolitanism affects the urban taste for vernacular architectures, but with particular reconstruction processes. Context-specific insights come from the intensity and orientation of rural revitalization processes and the role given to the sustainability of traditional materials. This contribution amalgamates the research possibilities of old materialities and new materialities, progressing previous studies.

As quoted in previous research, the loss of rural routes and rural channels is a product of post-productivism transitions in the context of great processes of rural change, with a similar pathway: decline of traditional society, changes in the use of space—mainly associated with reforestation, loss of rural artifacts and material or spiritual re-emergence for new uses associated with recreational and outdoor activities [6,32]. The residual traditional activities have permanent micro-conflicts with new urban users of the countryside. In some cases, the disappearance of spatial materiality remains in the cartographic representation and in the memory of the local community [6]; in other cases, the loss of materiality and the disappearance of the representation coincide, which contributes to the forgotten collective memory [32,33]. A landscape is a cultural image, but this is not to say that landscape is immaterial. Post-modernity revitalizes the old symbolic codes [54]. Styles of research of old materialities are based on (1) qualities of place in the context of particularities of minor cultural landscapes, with two main orientations: study of landscape biographies of spatial stories and more-than-human immaterialities. (2) Heritage and its effects on place and rural community local governance. (3) Rural restructuring and renovation of functionalist old materiality.

The new materialisms have transformed the way we conceive of the material world, but how can they be applied to traditional rural culture? Furthermore, this is a new path of progress in the analysis of the renewed materialities associated with the daily life of rural communities and individuals in the wider context of the rural change process, with a new end product: reconstructed local materialities and dissolved rural communities, and towns where no person lives daily but all the houses have been rehabilitated. But each town is a unique case and undoubtedly there are multiple orientations in each particular rural territory. Postmodernism as the disorganization of capitalism suggests a class conflict associated with a cultural conflict in the core of rural areas. The role of new materialism as an expression of complex aspirations of ruralities of newcomers in the revitalized countryside [55] is key in the future research of rural geography. Styles of research in new materialities are mainly (1) the role of new materiality in the process of rural change, (2) the design and sophisticated visions of new materiality values, (3) ensembles and material lives in the continuity of encounters and dis-encounters, and (4) feelings and emotions in the context of materiality’s negotiations. These research styles are not closed boxes but rather open views towards the future possibilities of focusing the object of study of rural geography on rural materiality. All approaches have notable opportunities of ensemble among them. In the framework of this contribution, they are associated with rural areas with historical and contemporary processes of rural transformation and change. Undoubtedly, there may be different options between countries with recent settlement processes (e.g., Australia) and countries with old settlement (e.g., Europe), and a third way may arise in countries with emerging socioeconomies in rural areas or in the postcolonial period. How can we begin research into new materialities in different locations? We can do so by locating villages with a specific history and heritage value and locating unique houses within them that have recently been renovated. Which approach do we use? The answer is the result of a dialogue between the geographer and the house, in the context of more-than-human research. The practical applications of old and new materials can be used both for rural development and for the preservation of certain unique materials. In short, the new/old materialities can be studied from various approaches that can be used in a complementary way for the investigation of histories or stories of material multiplicities. These multiplicities can be discrete or continuous. In this sense, multiplicities can be numerical or external, or they can be qualitative multiplicities of duration. In any case, old and new materialities are subjective categories; it is always possible to transit from old to new through recovery processes. Space is political and ideological, and it is a product of historical and natural elements [56]. In sum, this paper connects old and new materialities to the wider process of rural change. It highlights how old artifacts, like forgotten paths or irrigation canals, can resist change, while new materialities reflect and drive contemporary transformations, such as teleworking and new lifestyles in remote rural areas. In addition, this paper re-evaluates lost heritage, arguing that this comprises not just relics but a powerful element in the re-materialization of rural studies. This approach highlights how materials themselves can be agents of change and have their own biographies.

New materialities currently offer diverse and complex approaches in the field of human and rural geography: (1) They promote new study optics on the landscape from the Global South [17]. (2) New materialism promotes new approaches from the Global South associated with decolonization or based on the idea of materialism and indigenous culture in a renewed post-colonial new materialism [57]. (3) There are renewed conversations between eco-feminism and materialism based on rapid environmental changes [58]. (4) There is an influence of new materialism in new social research designs based on new assemblages [59]. (5) There are alternative approaches to neo-colonialism and new materialism in the context of qualitative encounters [58]. All of these approaches can constitute work options in the future, based on robust contributions that aim to find meeting points between more classic social and cultural orientations of postmodern rural geography and new materiality.

In any case, this contribution has some limitations stemming from its reliance on the case study approach and the generalization of its conclusions. For this reason, further research is needed to explore the options presented from the perspective of private–public involvement in the generation of new materialities or the incorporation of old materialities into rural change processes as an active element of the countryside. The research styles analyzed offer an opportunity to articulate a sustainability-oriented agenda based on the goals of sustainable development: material resilience and impact, financial resources, adequate framework of local governance, social inclusion, energy efficiency and context integration.