Rurality, frugality and small living communities

The upheavals of 2020 have increased the attraction of the countryside. While this attraction has continued to grow, the problems of today’s villages and small towns* are also growing: car dependency, urban encroachment, loss of attractiveness, devitalisation, impoverishment, development of retail parks that compete with village and town centres, failure to improve legacy qualities and public spaces, demographic and commercial decline of town and village centres, domination of artificial surfaces.

The countryside is vehicular. Easy access to the car fragments and disperses rural space, its services and shops, then devitalises town centres and dissolves social relations.

A living, ecological and social approach is needed in the construction of rural space. Sustainable urbanism means frugal urbanism: repairing with resilience, reactivating by using the resources in place, making places friendly, lively, desirable, joyful, being economical and creative, ecological and social, overturning dependencies, reactivating the local, focusing above all on the living world, the animal world, the human world, the plant world.

Frugality is a contemporary priority, a methodological tool for making rural communities living communities. Frugality is an economic strategy that supports creativity in the quest for an ethic and an aesthetic of the project. It is a way to build upon existing qualities and practices, a way to pursue economic uses of resources and land that prioritise comfort, fluidity and pleasure. Thinking rural and frugal means adopting a non-standardised approach to development and planning, it means adopting a coherent socio-ecological perspective emphasising detail, simplicity, sobriety, minimalism. How can we do more with less while developing an innovative economic strategy and project vision?

Frugality is a multiscale standpoint which needs, above all, to be applied at the territorial and landscape level.

Revitalising communities begins with embeddedness in the fabric of buildings and landscape. Changes should be undertaken from the bottom, by imagining extensions to the topographical lines, the natural and agricultural spaces central to the construction or rehabilitation of communities and their public and built spaces. The construction of historic centres already reflects strategic and obvious geographical characteristics. The development of towns and villages, the creation of new spaces, the planning of public spaces should take into account this dual link with the landscape and with the urban centre. Continuity with both is needed to accommodate new programmes. If the central feature of a place is the road, it signals the loss of connection with the landscape. Development projects need to be rooted in geography together with living uses. They need to be frugal in their architectural, urbanistic and landscape approaches, drawing their inspiration from what is already there. In an approach where scales are linked and the landscape and geographical context connects to the urban, social and architectural context, it is possible to find the foundations of urban morphology and give solid structure to changing spaces. As a result, geography, the legacy fabric and the landscape combine to create urban conditions characterised by quality of life, urban pleasure, fluidity and functionality. The framework that derives from the context becomes a tool for urban structure and production, a way to interpret, reorganise and distribute surfaces and practices, to manage the transitions between town and countryside and build a lasting pattern. Rural communities need to be built around frugality and reflect the need to create connections and coherence.

The connection with the landscape, the establishment of patterns and continuity with the agricultural and landscape context signals the necessity of developing an urban ecology at community scale. The need for ecology in public spaces and spatial planning is not restricted to dense urban centres. Promoting ecology within a contemporary urban project in a rural environment is both necessary and frugal. The development of the notion of an ecosystem that fosters living public space is characterised by permeable ground surfaces, rainwater management, better quality of life, the development of active travel modes, greater biodiversity, a strong and contextualised presence of the living world, open land surfaces. Opening up areas of land for vegetation is a way to bring life into public space, to structure it, to evoke landscapes, to provide places for relaxation, leisure, socialising, gardening, pleasure, and comfort. Vegetation changes the atmosphere and the climate. Open land surfaces provide a break from the hard minerality of the urban environment and offer a new perspective on urban design, greater connections with nature and is a signal of diversity. Vegetation is not an object or an ornament, it is the ecosystemic tool for towns and villages. Biodiversity develops at the larger territorial scale and varies according to local contexts. The living world can be instantiated and staged in a rural milieu through the planting of vegetation that provides services, uses and comfort. An urban woodland, a line of fruit trees, a living hedge, shared gardens, a section of orchard, an area of meadowland, a plant-covered hill bring shade and cool, alter the atmosphere while supporting biodiversity and farming and forestry production. The living world can be wild, the living world can be edible, the living world changes with seasons and practices. We can imagine multiple ways to introduce the living world into urban communities, combining vegetation and space, shade and cool, education and practice, pattern and structure, pleasure and practicality, fertility, permeability and water management. Nature abhors a vacuum. Wilding an open area creates resources for the future. Exploiting natural dynamics, letting nature have its way, using the resources already in place can be an innovative way of managing public spaces, a way to cultivate the living resources present. Children are curious and love to eat. Making the playground or the walk to school edible creates a new relationship with the living world. Including dedicated plots for different farming activities in urban development, for example market gardening, is away to provide services for residents, to shorten supply routes, and to reintroduce diversity into the countryside, where production often consists of monocultures within a system that demands long-distance transport and travel. It is useful to reintroduce agricultural production, even into the centre of towns, because everywhere the link between farming and food is being lost. Farming, in particular market gardening, which can also be supported by public policies and take place on municipal land, contributes to the vitality of towns and town centres. Similarly, workshops with schools, the teaching of new vegetable growing techniques, encourages local sharing and production. The town becomes edible, educational and productive. Frugality is also about reducing dependency, in particular food dependency. Water resources are limited, the time assigned to managing public spaces is restricted, the drains, grilles and gutters used to manage rainwater lead to cluttered and standardised public spaces. The alternative, virtuous way of managing run-off water is ecological and frugal. Managing rainwater naturally, allowing rain to drain through permeable surfaces, in hills, at the foot of trees, in planted areas, should be a priority in all projects. Elements and environments interact for simplified and natural rain management. This method of management can be incorporated into folds in the landscape and into the topography, support networks of vegetation and resonate with the local environment.

The standardisation of urban planning, whether in cities or the countryside, with its forms, materials and objects, has a negative impact on the attractiveness and coherence of local environments, be it heritage features, historical fabric or landscape. Proposing a minimalistic, frugal aesthetic and a new vernacular is unquestionably a tool for small towns that are living, vital and situated. A project whose vocabulary is inspired by the context, by the vernacular of architecture and landscape, offers the possibility of developing a new language anchored in the local, rural, village aesthetic. Existing conditions are enhanced by a frugal project endowed with its own distinct aesthetic, which does more with less, using materials in ways that connect with local landscape, architecture and resources. It is a contemporary approach, consistent with the spirit of the countryside, which nevertheless connects nature with urban qualities for a project that stands at the interface between landscape, construction, ecology, the village setting and rurality. The idea is to reinterpret the vernacular in clear, raw, simple forms in order to become one with the landscape, to mark the connection between the natural rural and agricultural environment and the urban conditions of the town or village by taking advantage of this juxtaposition of forms, vegetation and materials.

Geology is a solid foundation for defining the vocabulary of spatial planning for a new vernacular. The variations on limestone, volcanic or granite rock in spatial planning set the basis of materiality, morphology, spatiality, uses and the living world, maintain communication and back-and-forth between scales, embrace the wider landscape and focus on detail.

Reuse needs to be key factor in defining this minimalist aesthetic. The resources already in place have minimum ecological impact, give meaning and integrate the project into a narrative of landscape, heritage or history. The resources to be reused need to be identified, classified, drawn.

Placing the citizen, the inhabitant, the user at the heart of urban transformation in order to turn the site into a laboratory, to turn change into a community project, a process of social ecology. The project design process should be accompanied by continuous workshops and consultation meetings in order to arrive at the same goal: (re)activating the project site. Involving stakeholders from the very start of the operation in a phase of consultation, collaboration and participation gives a strong foundation to the project process. This approach also serves to immerse the designer in the character of the territory and to make public space the crucible of social life, turning design into a community act. The site becomes a laboratory, a place of experiment: working, thinking, discussing and designing in situ. Workshops are tools of perception, creating a sense of ownership and planning for public spaces. This approach instigates a productive exchange between the designer with the expert’s perspective, and local people informed by their intimate and subjective knowledge of the place where they live. Communication with the project site is about communication with the stakeholders, an interaction that entails a variety of media: maps, models, sketches, collections, inventories, mind mapping, scale 1 drawings, etc.

Frugality brings an ecological, social, economic and cultural dimension to the process of building, in a contemporary way, sustainable urban and rural spaces that reconcile needs and resources, uses, quality and beauty. Developing rurality and frugality is a way to respond to contemporary ecological challenges, social aspirations, a way to forge a different relationship with the car, using the territory as a laboratory, maximising the use of existing resources and drawing on the landscape. Frugality is a standpoint, the foundation of an innovative, adaptive and distinctive response. It is a tool for innovation, the instrument of a high quality and economical project, which gives space to all users and mobilities, to vegetation, to conviviality, to pleasure.