Post-Rural Futures in an Urbanising World?

Accelerated urbanisation is increasingly extending, if unevenly, across the globe, challenging our ingrained notions of the ‘urban’. While global urbanisation processes are often elusive, they are driving fundamental economic, political, and environmental changes across places, territories, and scales. This includes the Alps, Europe’s second-largest biodiversity reservoir, where regions are shaped by long-standing traditions of autonomy and decentralised self-governance. Using the local wine industry in the Italian Alpine region of Vallagarina as a case study, this article illustrates the urban-regional transformation spurred by global urbanisation. Against this backdrop, it introduces local initiatives and their decentralised, community-driven design practices through the concept of community economies. On this basis, the article outlines concrete (post-)rural futures founded on eco-just modes of coexistence.