„Landflucht“-Diskurs und territorialer Wettbewerb

The self-evident use of terms like ‘rural’ or ‘country’ strongly contrasts to the great difficulty to define them sociologically. All the more it is challenging to analyze spaces not substantially but as the ‘production’ oft spatial or territorial arrangements. Similarly, the term ‘rural exodus‘ (‘Landflucht’) can’t be derived from the concrete analysis of migration paths between rural and urban regions. In this article we argue that there is only an incoherently correlation between the discourse of ‘rural exodus’ and the empiricism of migration. The demography of rural regions is a semantic field that has been shaped by societal interpretations and constellations of interest since the end of the 19th century. Thus, in the recent renewing discussion of ‘rural exodus’ their discursive self-reliance has to be taken into consideration. Therefore, we aim to reveal the conceptual references and social interpretations attached to this meaning. Furthermore, it is suggested that the scheme ‘rural exodus’ are used in political und public renegotiation of new spatial arrangements.