Inventing the Rural

摘要

The history of modern architecture is generally understood to be a history of the modern city. It was the unprecedented industrialisation of the early 20th-century metropolis, for example, that catalysed most of the interconnected groups broadly categorised as the Modern Movement in Europe, from Futurism to De Stijl, to the Congres international d'architecture moderne (CIAM), among many others. Although Modernism is now understood as a broader, more geographically and culturally inclusive phenomenon shaped by a range of distinctive economic, political and social contexts beyond those existing in Europe, it is often against the backdrop of distinctly urbanised processes and environments that its origins, formations and physical production are still contextualised. These alignments obscure the role played by urban's longtime Other, namely, the rural.