Rural Areas in Estonia and Germany

Dr. Bianka Plüschke-Altof | Tallinn University

In recent decades, growing socio-spatial polarisation has been prevalent in Central and Eastern European countries. Also in Estonia, regional inequalities have increased due to the rapid urbanisation, and large parts of the Estonian settlement system that were once economically and socially vital small towns and rural villages have become peripheral within the country – in material as well as in discursive terms. As a consequence they do not only suffer from economic downturn, out-migration and a lack in service provision, but are also subjected to territorial stigmatization and invisibility in times where regional competitiveness and place promotion have become a central pillar of Estonian regional policy. In the light of the recent emphasis on agency-based concepts in regional polarisation debates (e.g. leadership, image-making, smart villagers), it is crucial to reflect upon the complexities of coping with a self-reinforcing peripheralisation process.  In the IRS Seminar, Bianka Plüschke-Altof analyses the dynamics of rural peripheralisation in the Estonian context and explore the possibilities and limits of acting in structurally disadvantaged places.

Vita
Bianka Plüschke-Altof is Researcher in Environmental Sociology at the School of Natural Sciences and Health at Tallinn University in Estonia. A dominant theme in her research relates to questions of socio-spatial and environmental justice, with specific focus on Central-Eastern Europe. She has finished her undergraduate studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany and the University of Warsaw in Poland and her graduate studies at the University of Tartu in Estonia and the Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava. In 2014 she received a Marie Curie fellowship as Early Career Researcher as part of the ITN “Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe” coordinated by the Leibniz-Institute for Regional Geography in Leipzig, Germany. In 2017 she defended her PhD thesis, which analysed spatial inequalities and territorial stigmatization in Estonian rural areas. Currently, she is investigating space-making practices and discourses on the case of urban gardening and green spaces in Tallinn as part of the research group “Human-Nature interactions in the city”, funded by the Tallinn University fund.

Dr. Kadri Leetmaa | University of Tartu

In her presentation Kadri Leetmaa concludes the main results of Estonian Human Development Report 2019 in the field of rurality, based on contributions of Estonian leading researchers in the field of urban and regional planning. The main take-away messages are as follows:

(1) The lower levels of the settlement system of Estonia become more and more depopulated. Peripheral rural areas and small towns, but also regional centers lose population. Providing basic services in peripheral districts is a key challenge for the next decades. Estonian peripheral regions are so-called double-peripheries. Besides being located far from Estonian major centers, these regions also locate in European periphery.

(2) The official Leitbild according to the Estonian National Spatial Plan is “a dispersed city”, meaning that Estonian disperse settlement system should capitalize from good connections, enabling people to choose among diverse residential environments. In reality, even when some districts are able to attract the “new rural” residents, these people only rarely have direct connection with rural living and landscapes. Around major cities suburban sprawl wastes the valuable landscapes and agricultural land, these trends also spread into periphery. Thus the “rurality” and “dispersed city” needs to be redefined and reinvented, this also would inform strategies to cope with shrinking processes.

(3) Accessibility in peripheral districts but also in growing suburbs is increasingly enabled through private cars, this however, isolates some population groups (e.g. elderly, children). Also, there is no answer how the major and costly planned international infrastructure projects support the connectivity of peripheral districts. New “rural” settlements are built without any public space and with very prove connectivity.

Vita
Kadri Leetmaa [F] is the Senior Researcher in human geography and the Head of the Centre for Migration and Urban Studies, Department of Geography, University of Tartu. She defended her PhD in human geography in 2008 at the same institution. Kadri Leetmaa is a recognized scholar in the fields of urban social geography, socio-economic and ethnic segregation, residential mobility, housing, and urban policies and planning. She has been the PI in the Estonian Science Foundation and European Social Fund funded research projects in the period 2009-2015. Currently she is the PI in ERA.Net RUS Plus project “Estates After Transition” (2018-21). Since 2017 Kadri Leetmaa is holding the position of National Contact Point of EU URBACT programme. She has published 23 high-level research papers for international audience, many of them in the leading journals in the field (Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Urban Studies, Energy Policy, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Demographic Research, etc.).