okay good evening and thank you very
much TEDx for inviting me here now if
one of you here or if any of you all of
left immediately to go to Heathrow took
a plane to Latvia we landed there this
evening and then got on a bus and went
into a village any village in Latvia and
we wanted to speak to somebody we’d have
a problem first we’d have to look for a
house that was lit that would be a
problem then once we had found found a
house with a lit window and knocked on
the door the chances of the person
answering the door being old really
quite old would be very high and why
because they’re the only people left in
the village the younger generations
have already gone into the towns and the
chances they’ve gone from the towns out
to Western Europe or into the United
States the countryside is empty it’s the
same story in Russia west of the Urals
and the same story again I’m just
choosing three examples in Albania where
it’s where the people have moved in from
the countryside into the towns and then
if they’ve got the money and the
qualifications they leave the cities and
go elsewhere as well in Albania it’s
known as the great departure and the
population of the country is shrinking
noticeably and worryingly but it’s not
just Eastern Europe where you have these
problems for instance there is a large
area in northeastern Spain just in it’s
still Spain by the way folks just inland
from the coast which occupies maybe
about 15 to 20 percent of the total land
area of Spain which has known as the
Sarnia salt America or the the kalto
Iberian range of mountains the
depopulation there is so great that the
population density of this area is less
than that of Lapland in northern Finland
in fact it’s known as the Spanish
Lapland
because there is nobody there you go
there you’ll go to village
after a village which has been abandoned
and maybe you will meet one really quite
old person still living there because he
doesn’t want to leave or she doesn’t
want to leave their natal home place so
what’s happening in other words in rural
Europe in many areas the countryside is
being emptied people are leaving and
have been doing so for a decade from
this is the accumulated effect of
several decades leaving to an abandoned
countryside where fields are no longer
cultivated and the forests are beginning
to reclaim their ground providing a
perfect setting for wolves bears and
other animals which are now being seen
in greater in greater numbers so but
then some people think well that’s ok we
can convert it into a leisure tourist
space and the urbanites can go out to
see it but then the question really
becomes is are we converting ural your
rural Europe into a vast pleasure park
for disenchanted urbanites and that’s
what I want to talk about today I’ll do
it quite quickly now of course there are
lots of different responses that one can
make and a majority of them certainly
the ones you’ll know about them I know
about come from governments whether
international regional international
national regional and so on down some of
those succeed but I want to concentrate
on what I like to think of is the
unexpected low level initiatives and I’m
going to concentrate on two types and
the first is counter urbanization the
people who have deliberately left towns
for their own reasons and gone to live
in the countryside and it starts with
the people I did fieldwork with 15 years
ago in the West of Ireland who went out
there incomers what a locally known
rather pejoratively I think as blow ins
hippies about my age but then they were
of course in their 20s and 30s who wish
to follow their peace-loving
and established themselves and what they
saw as the magical Wonderland of the
West of Ireland they were followed about
ten years later by crust is much more
politicized products of the Thatcherite
UK and in the last 20 years by people
who the hippies of the crushes rather
dismissively called suburban eyes people
who want to go out and live in the
countryside but take a lot of the
benefits of the towns with them thanks
to the net and other sources now the
hippies when they first went out there
were able to make their own kitchen
Gardens live on the dole and perhaps
grow a bit of dope as well but after a
few years the Irish government rather
leant on that closed that Avenue for
them and so a number of them who wish to
stay turned into small businessman and
some succeeded and of course some didn’t
but what they did in that process was
they created and what I call an
alternative economy one bit one of
homeopaths masses yogurt teachers
biodynamic farmers producers of organic
foods aroma therapists cheese makers and
even an estate agent or two who realized
that the disjunction in the price of
housing in the UK and Ireland was so
great he could sell houses in the West
of Ireland to like-minded people such as
him in the UK for what the people in the
UK thought were very low prices but
which the Irish were extremely happy to
receive some of these hippies ex-hippies
are now surprisingly well-off because
they bought land at a time when it was
cheap held onto it worked it maybe
developed it maybe not and now found
that because of the the the rebirth of
the era of the Gaelic Tiger that their
property is quite valuable the other
chain I want to just discuss a number of
the changes they made is they didn’t
just set up this alternative economy
they also created new styles of
education for instance the stein aryan
school that they establish in Skara Finn
County Clare is now
the largest in the country and about 40%
of its intake are not just the children
of these alternatives but the children
of farmers and local people as well
they also exemplified what we might call
new kinds of relations new ways of
living together which the up until then
really quite traditional heavily
Catholic way of life had forbidden or
had regarded as unthinkable on top of
that we could see them as innovators in
general whether they were being
enterprising or prepared to put their
head above the parapet as the locals
would put it and say something that time
had come for change there’s a lot of the
locals they themselves admit they
weren’t prepared to do that
on top of that they also built they also
provided a number of new house building
styles a lot of them when they started
came in their own vans caravans and so
on bought a small plot of land and then
proceeded either to renovate an
abandoned house or to build their own
here’s an example of one where the
carrot where the van was still in the in
a side area of the the land with their
house but in this particular house what
you can see if you look closely into the
left-hand window is they actually built
the house around the caravan or some of
these examples where this is a
particular cheese maker who decided to
indulge their their tastes in fairy tale
pterence or another house again which is
near which is of the same complex of the
cheese maker and one of their stores but
then there up there are people with
other skills for instance this house was
put up by a carpenter an English
carpenter on part of the borough which
is a cast limestone landscape where as
where if you look for the top window as
the locals say the next parish is Boston
ie you’re looking out across the
Atlantic and he told me the locals said
you’re gonna put up a house of wood it
will not last
ten years later the house is still there
was still there and the locals had
rather quietly come back and said can
you show us how you make one in the
garden he’s married to a Dutch artist he
also built a studio for her so you’re
looking at some very different housing
styles which they were using and which
some people have now began begun to
imitate on top of that these income as
these blow ins also revitalized local
life in a variety of different ways such
as local drama groups establishing film
clubs community cafeteras
or community coops for community
employment schemes as well as setting up
well-regarded whole food stores and tele
cottaging businesses perhaps they are
best known though again an example of
themselves putting their hands above the
parapet for their environmental activism
and the sustained campaign that some of
these people have been prepared to fight
entering a broad coalition with farmers
and with other people who were against
government initiatives which they
thought were environmentally very
damaging and finally they have also said
the way of life of these people and what
they’ve done
we served as a model for an organization
a very successful organization called
rurals resettlement Island a completely
volunteer-run organisation which raises
money to rebuild and renovate old
abandoned unwanted houses in the West of
Ireland and then rehouse families from
disadvantaged backgrounds in rundown
slums of Dublin to give them an
opportunity to raise their family and
what they see as a much as a much better
environment which offers their them and
their children a much better quality of
life and in the 10 years it closed down
about five years ago because it was for
various reasons but in the 10 years that
rural resettlement Ireland ran they were
able to resettle 800 fam
from Dublin and the example of that the
model of the example was so great that
the Irish government funded a number of
imitate Ori initiatives elsewhere and
then it was taken up by the EU as a
model again for attempting to resettle
families in rural areas in different EU
countries right so much for Ireland but
you can see similar but relation events
in France for instance in the parque
nationale de 7 in southern france what
you have there was a group of young
people exurban eins or anti counter over
lights called lay neo who’ve moved into
the area and then have captured the
moral terrain and the grudging
acceptance of the locals who were mainly
old men and women as the young had left
by what is known as their praxis of
belonging there their actions leading to
them becoming seen to be residents and
those actions include because that they
occupy the land they are the ones who
come to produce what has seen as
authentic local goods and they are the
ones who rebuild ruined farmed how
ruined farmhouses in what has seen as
authentic a manner and they are the ones
who have the education and thus to a
certain extent the confidence to
negotiate the local bureaucracy and the
administration and they are the ones who
carry the vision of patrimony in other
words of heritage held by both the
administrators who run the Parque
Nacional and the children of the
remainders in other words the absent EES
who are seeing their homeland being
taken over and transformed or revived in
a slightly different fashion by these
incomers and the result some geographers
who studied this have Felicity
felicitous Lee phrased the chestnut
economy but the area is also well known
because just northwest of the park in
the larzac plateau in the 1970s
the government the French government
proposed to massively increase some
military and military encampment there
the protest reaction against this
massive rebuilding or extension of a
military camp took decades and it was
mainly led by politicized neros it was a
coalition of Maoists anarchists
socialists hippies ecologists
revolutionaries pacifists intellectuals
and members of the Catholic clergy and
the years they were there mounting these
protests led ultimately successfully led
to a number of them becoming permanent
residents and in fact the whole area the
larzac plateau to a great extent now is
seen as a beacon achieved enormous
semi-mythical status and is a beacon of
the anti-globalization movement and now
in fact the number of permanently based
activists out numbers the number of
native born and bred okay a more modern
variant of these hippies or Neos or
crushes are people known as lifestyle
migrants in other words people who are
who are taking advantage of cheap
flights and the net to go and live in
another part of Europe for the sake of a
better quality of life and as some of us
know there are large numbers in France
especially rural southwest France and
also there are the notorious very large
housing estates built just inland from
coastal Spain which act as as really to
a certain extent as little England’s
where you can have say thousands of
Brits who are able to live their whole
life in English and who maybe only leave
the estate in order to go to the beach
or go to the airport but rather in these
places and also in some southwest France
one can ask the question even though
they might occupy the same geographical
area as some of the local residents
it’s as though they’re living in
different spaces and they and they are
just in a sense gliding by one another
as opposed to productively interacting
now as well as movement from the cities
into the countryside
you also have incumbents as we well know
from beyond Europe and some of these can
be very well established but still
marginalized or ignored communities for
instance in parts of Bergerac the
wine-growing areas of Southwest France
there are now decades long-established
communities of Moroccans who worked in
the vineyards firstly the first
generation and their children with
education now have jobs in in local
towns and so on but these
well-established groups of resident
North Africans are not on the whole even
recognized by French people there in
fact when a colleague of mine and
anthropologist say to to locals that’s
what she was studying some people said
well what are you studying them for you
know they don’t have an identity who are
they they just a few workers off off in
different places or others would would
say I didn’t even know there were any
Moroccans out there more recent examples
of this kind of shift occur in places
like say Greece where Albanians who I
talked about at the very beginning have
moved into rural areas where they are
reviving the very successfully in some
cases the rural Greek economy providing
cheap labor and some of those who can
regularize their own status work in the
fields and in construction they hold two
jobs and then use the cash raised to buy
buildings to buy their own holdings
revive abandoned farms or set up their
own local businesses and most of it and
most Albanians as far as I understand in
Greek cities like Athens and
Thessaloniki have a rather bad image but
in the villages in the root Greek
countryside where they’ve established
themselves and shown themselves to be
hard work workers on the fields an
enterprising Bangor and holdings
putting up their own houses starting
their own businesses they are seen to be
making a positive contribution and
they’re valued as such and then
unsurprisingly some very local women and
that leads to the schools being able to
stay open but if we now shift to Italy
to the heel of Italy into the area known
as Calabria I want to look at one
particular village down there where in
the 1990s there were race riots by the
locals against the income of fruit
pickers well today if you go to that
same village you’ll find it very
different why because they mayor
courageously for stalled village decline
by welcoming migrants why did he do this
he did it because the village the
migrants coming off the boats from North
Africa he did it because the village
receives government subsidies for doing
so the village Palazzo is now a welcome
center orienting migrants setting
themselves up setting them up with jobs
teaching Italian to their children and
distributing free food tokens this makes
a lot of economic sense as the cost of
keeping italians of keeping Myron’s in
in these villages is four times less
than having them in than housing them in
for accommodation in a holding center
with all the difficulties and the
dreadful experiences of those areas on
top of that of course reviving the
population in this way keep schools open
means that abandoned houses are
reoccupied and traditional trades are
kept alive by migrants who learn them
and on top of that their residence
generates jobs in the social services
all of us will know all too well about
the ten about the hundreds of thousands
of migrants fleeing war-torn Syria or
government oppression and conflict in
Afghanistan and other areas around
we all know that a few very miserable if
you have come to England and that some
also have been accepted into Spain of
the ones who have gone and who’ve come
who went to Spain a few have become
shepherds in villages in this area which
is being a ban in las sarony adult
america which is otherwise virtually
abandoned and and start to look after a
very large flocks of sheep and goats and
other forms of livestock at first you
might think why would a person who came
sometimes from a relatively well-to-do
background in Syria or elsewhere choose
to put up with being a shepherd
the advantages are great in one sense is
if you look if you make if you regard
your job as an investment for the future
because you are provided with an income
you are provided with a house and the
beginnings of a community which you can
help establish and perhaps more
importantly your children will have an
opportunity of going to school in a
country which still remains one of the
major developed economies in the country
in that sense being prepared to become a
shepherd in a village is shall we say a
way of trying to guarantee a good future
for your children given the turmoil in
your home country but and I’m some up
now if we just try and look back over
this what I’ve been presenting really
very quickly is a range of what I call
alternative country sides and we don’t
have to think in terms of government
programs some do help but many
initiatives may be homegrown even
homespun and many may not even need any
external support sort of finish we have
to give up the idea because it’s the
reality of the countryside as one of
stable communities self-sustaining and
self reproducing that has long gone and
ever more so in rural Europe instead we
should think of rural populations as
much more
than they were in the past as a constant
flux of depopulation and of repopulation
where residents may not be permanent
simply long home but to be valued
nonetheless for that so that here these
villages and their surrounding land
becomes spaces which accommodate
multiple approaches multiple ways of
viewing the world and participating in
it thanks very much
[Applause]
much TEDx for inviting me here now if
one of you here or if any of you all of
left immediately to go to Heathrow took
a plane to Latvia we landed there this
evening and then got on a bus and went
into a village any village in Latvia and
we wanted to speak to somebody we’d have
a problem first we’d have to look for a
house that was lit that would be a
problem then once we had found found a
house with a lit window and knocked on
the door the chances of the person
answering the door being old really
quite old would be very high and why
because they’re the only people left in
the village the younger generations
have already gone into the towns and the
chances they’ve gone from the towns out
to Western Europe or into the United
States the countryside is empty it’s the
same story in Russia west of the Urals
and the same story again I’m just
choosing three examples in Albania where
it’s where the people have moved in from
the countryside into the towns and then
if they’ve got the money and the
qualifications they leave the cities and
go elsewhere as well in Albania it’s
known as the great departure and the
population of the country is shrinking
noticeably and worryingly but it’s not
just Eastern Europe where you have these
problems for instance there is a large
area in northeastern Spain just in it’s
still Spain by the way folks just inland
from the coast which occupies maybe
about 15 to 20 percent of the total land
area of Spain which has known as the
Sarnia salt America or the the kalto
Iberian range of mountains the
depopulation there is so great that the
population density of this area is less
than that of Lapland in northern Finland
in fact it’s known as the Spanish
Lapland
because there is nobody there you go
there you’ll go to village
after a village which has been abandoned
and maybe you will meet one really quite
old person still living there because he
doesn’t want to leave or she doesn’t
want to leave their natal home place so
what’s happening in other words in rural
Europe in many areas the countryside is
being emptied people are leaving and
have been doing so for a decade from
this is the accumulated effect of
several decades leaving to an abandoned
countryside where fields are no longer
cultivated and the forests are beginning
to reclaim their ground providing a
perfect setting for wolves bears and
other animals which are now being seen
in greater in greater numbers so but
then some people think well that’s ok we
can convert it into a leisure tourist
space and the urbanites can go out to
see it but then the question really
becomes is are we converting ural your
rural Europe into a vast pleasure park
for disenchanted urbanites and that’s
what I want to talk about today I’ll do
it quite quickly now of course there are
lots of different responses that one can
make and a majority of them certainly
the ones you’ll know about them I know
about come from governments whether
international regional international
national regional and so on down some of
those succeed but I want to concentrate
on what I like to think of is the
unexpected low level initiatives and I’m
going to concentrate on two types and
the first is counter urbanization the
people who have deliberately left towns
for their own reasons and gone to live
in the countryside and it starts with
the people I did fieldwork with 15 years
ago in the West of Ireland who went out
there incomers what a locally known
rather pejoratively I think as blow ins
hippies about my age but then they were
of course in their 20s and 30s who wish
to follow their peace-loving
and established themselves and what they
saw as the magical Wonderland of the
West of Ireland they were followed about
ten years later by crust is much more
politicized products of the Thatcherite
UK and in the last 20 years by people
who the hippies of the crushes rather
dismissively called suburban eyes people
who want to go out and live in the
countryside but take a lot of the
benefits of the towns with them thanks
to the net and other sources now the
hippies when they first went out there
were able to make their own kitchen
Gardens live on the dole and perhaps
grow a bit of dope as well but after a
few years the Irish government rather
leant on that closed that Avenue for
them and so a number of them who wish to
stay turned into small businessman and
some succeeded and of course some didn’t
but what they did in that process was
they created and what I call an
alternative economy one bit one of
homeopaths masses yogurt teachers
biodynamic farmers producers of organic
foods aroma therapists cheese makers and
even an estate agent or two who realized
that the disjunction in the price of
housing in the UK and Ireland was so
great he could sell houses in the West
of Ireland to like-minded people such as
him in the UK for what the people in the
UK thought were very low prices but
which the Irish were extremely happy to
receive some of these hippies ex-hippies
are now surprisingly well-off because
they bought land at a time when it was
cheap held onto it worked it maybe
developed it maybe not and now found
that because of the the the rebirth of
the era of the Gaelic Tiger that their
property is quite valuable the other
chain I want to just discuss a number of
the changes they made is they didn’t
just set up this alternative economy
they also created new styles of
education for instance the stein aryan
school that they establish in Skara Finn
County Clare is now
the largest in the country and about 40%
of its intake are not just the children
of these alternatives but the children
of farmers and local people as well
they also exemplified what we might call
new kinds of relations new ways of
living together which the up until then
really quite traditional heavily
Catholic way of life had forbidden or
had regarded as unthinkable on top of
that we could see them as innovators in
general whether they were being
enterprising or prepared to put their
head above the parapet as the locals
would put it and say something that time
had come for change there’s a lot of the
locals they themselves admit they
weren’t prepared to do that
on top of that they also built they also
provided a number of new house building
styles a lot of them when they started
came in their own vans caravans and so
on bought a small plot of land and then
proceeded either to renovate an
abandoned house or to build their own
here’s an example of one where the
carrot where the van was still in the in
a side area of the the land with their
house but in this particular house what
you can see if you look closely into the
left-hand window is they actually built
the house around the caravan or some of
these examples where this is a
particular cheese maker who decided to
indulge their their tastes in fairy tale
pterence or another house again which is
near which is of the same complex of the
cheese maker and one of their stores but
then there up there are people with
other skills for instance this house was
put up by a carpenter an English
carpenter on part of the borough which
is a cast limestone landscape where as
where if you look for the top window as
the locals say the next parish is Boston
ie you’re looking out across the
Atlantic and he told me the locals said
you’re gonna put up a house of wood it
will not last
ten years later the house is still there
was still there and the locals had
rather quietly come back and said can
you show us how you make one in the
garden he’s married to a Dutch artist he
also built a studio for her so you’re
looking at some very different housing
styles which they were using and which
some people have now began begun to
imitate on top of that these income as
these blow ins also revitalized local
life in a variety of different ways such
as local drama groups establishing film
clubs community cafeteras
or community coops for community
employment schemes as well as setting up
well-regarded whole food stores and tele
cottaging businesses perhaps they are
best known though again an example of
themselves putting their hands above the
parapet for their environmental activism
and the sustained campaign that some of
these people have been prepared to fight
entering a broad coalition with farmers
and with other people who were against
government initiatives which they
thought were environmentally very
damaging and finally they have also said
the way of life of these people and what
they’ve done
we served as a model for an organization
a very successful organization called
rurals resettlement Island a completely
volunteer-run organisation which raises
money to rebuild and renovate old
abandoned unwanted houses in the West of
Ireland and then rehouse families from
disadvantaged backgrounds in rundown
slums of Dublin to give them an
opportunity to raise their family and
what they see as a much as a much better
environment which offers their them and
their children a much better quality of
life and in the 10 years it closed down
about five years ago because it was for
various reasons but in the 10 years that
rural resettlement Ireland ran they were
able to resettle 800 fam
from Dublin and the example of that the
model of the example was so great that
the Irish government funded a number of
imitate Ori initiatives elsewhere and
then it was taken up by the EU as a
model again for attempting to resettle
families in rural areas in different EU
countries right so much for Ireland but
you can see similar but relation events
in France for instance in the parque
nationale de 7 in southern france what
you have there was a group of young
people exurban eins or anti counter over
lights called lay neo who’ve moved into
the area and then have captured the
moral terrain and the grudging
acceptance of the locals who were mainly
old men and women as the young had left
by what is known as their praxis of
belonging there their actions leading to
them becoming seen to be residents and
those actions include because that they
occupy the land they are the ones who
come to produce what has seen as
authentic local goods and they are the
ones who rebuild ruined farmed how
ruined farmhouses in what has seen as
authentic a manner and they are the ones
who have the education and thus to a
certain extent the confidence to
negotiate the local bureaucracy and the
administration and they are the ones who
carry the vision of patrimony in other
words of heritage held by both the
administrators who run the Parque
Nacional and the children of the
remainders in other words the absent EES
who are seeing their homeland being
taken over and transformed or revived in
a slightly different fashion by these
incomers and the result some geographers
who studied this have Felicity
felicitous Lee phrased the chestnut
economy but the area is also well known
because just northwest of the park in
the larzac plateau in the 1970s
the government the French government
proposed to massively increase some
military and military encampment there
the protest reaction against this
massive rebuilding or extension of a
military camp took decades and it was
mainly led by politicized neros it was a
coalition of Maoists anarchists
socialists hippies ecologists
revolutionaries pacifists intellectuals
and members of the Catholic clergy and
the years they were there mounting these
protests led ultimately successfully led
to a number of them becoming permanent
residents and in fact the whole area the
larzac plateau to a great extent now is
seen as a beacon achieved enormous
semi-mythical status and is a beacon of
the anti-globalization movement and now
in fact the number of permanently based
activists out numbers the number of
native born and bred okay a more modern
variant of these hippies or Neos or
crushes are people known as lifestyle
migrants in other words people who are
who are taking advantage of cheap
flights and the net to go and live in
another part of Europe for the sake of a
better quality of life and as some of us
know there are large numbers in France
especially rural southwest France and
also there are the notorious very large
housing estates built just inland from
coastal Spain which act as as really to
a certain extent as little England’s
where you can have say thousands of
Brits who are able to live their whole
life in English and who maybe only leave
the estate in order to go to the beach
or go to the airport but rather in these
places and also in some southwest France
one can ask the question even though
they might occupy the same geographical
area as some of the local residents
it’s as though they’re living in
different spaces and they and they are
just in a sense gliding by one another
as opposed to productively interacting
now as well as movement from the cities
into the countryside
you also have incumbents as we well know
from beyond Europe and some of these can
be very well established but still
marginalized or ignored communities for
instance in parts of Bergerac the
wine-growing areas of Southwest France
there are now decades long-established
communities of Moroccans who worked in
the vineyards firstly the first
generation and their children with
education now have jobs in in local
towns and so on but these
well-established groups of resident
North Africans are not on the whole even
recognized by French people there in
fact when a colleague of mine and
anthropologist say to to locals that’s
what she was studying some people said
well what are you studying them for you
know they don’t have an identity who are
they they just a few workers off off in
different places or others would would
say I didn’t even know there were any
Moroccans out there more recent examples
of this kind of shift occur in places
like say Greece where Albanians who I
talked about at the very beginning have
moved into rural areas where they are
reviving the very successfully in some
cases the rural Greek economy providing
cheap labor and some of those who can
regularize their own status work in the
fields and in construction they hold two
jobs and then use the cash raised to buy
buildings to buy their own holdings
revive abandoned farms or set up their
own local businesses and most of it and
most Albanians as far as I understand in
Greek cities like Athens and
Thessaloniki have a rather bad image but
in the villages in the root Greek
countryside where they’ve established
themselves and shown themselves to be
hard work workers on the fields an
enterprising Bangor and holdings
putting up their own houses starting
their own businesses they are seen to be
making a positive contribution and
they’re valued as such and then
unsurprisingly some very local women and
that leads to the schools being able to
stay open but if we now shift to Italy
to the heel of Italy into the area known
as Calabria I want to look at one
particular village down there where in
the 1990s there were race riots by the
locals against the income of fruit
pickers well today if you go to that
same village you’ll find it very
different why because they mayor
courageously for stalled village decline
by welcoming migrants why did he do this
he did it because the village the
migrants coming off the boats from North
Africa he did it because the village
receives government subsidies for doing
so the village Palazzo is now a welcome
center orienting migrants setting
themselves up setting them up with jobs
teaching Italian to their children and
distributing free food tokens this makes
a lot of economic sense as the cost of
keeping italians of keeping Myron’s in
in these villages is four times less
than having them in than housing them in
for accommodation in a holding center
with all the difficulties and the
dreadful experiences of those areas on
top of that of course reviving the
population in this way keep schools open
means that abandoned houses are
reoccupied and traditional trades are
kept alive by migrants who learn them
and on top of that their residence
generates jobs in the social services
all of us will know all too well about
the ten about the hundreds of thousands
of migrants fleeing war-torn Syria or
government oppression and conflict in
Afghanistan and other areas around
we all know that a few very miserable if
you have come to England and that some
also have been accepted into Spain of
the ones who have gone and who’ve come
who went to Spain a few have become
shepherds in villages in this area which
is being a ban in las sarony adult
america which is otherwise virtually
abandoned and and start to look after a
very large flocks of sheep and goats and
other forms of livestock at first you
might think why would a person who came
sometimes from a relatively well-to-do
background in Syria or elsewhere choose
to put up with being a shepherd
the advantages are great in one sense is
if you look if you make if you regard
your job as an investment for the future
because you are provided with an income
you are provided with a house and the
beginnings of a community which you can
help establish and perhaps more
importantly your children will have an
opportunity of going to school in a
country which still remains one of the
major developed economies in the country
in that sense being prepared to become a
shepherd in a village is shall we say a
way of trying to guarantee a good future
for your children given the turmoil in
your home country but and I’m some up
now if we just try and look back over
this what I’ve been presenting really
very quickly is a range of what I call
alternative country sides and we don’t
have to think in terms of government
programs some do help but many
initiatives may be homegrown even
homespun and many may not even need any
external support sort of finish we have
to give up the idea because it’s the
reality of the countryside as one of
stable communities self-sustaining and
self reproducing that has long gone and
ever more so in rural Europe instead we
should think of rural populations as
much more
than they were in the past as a constant
flux of depopulation and of repopulation
where residents may not be permanent
simply long home but to be valued
nonetheless for that so that here these
villages and their surrounding land
becomes spaces which accommodate
multiple approaches multiple ways of
viewing the world and participating in
it thanks very much
[Applause]
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