Is Escape from the City Justified: Urri & Chayanov?

My report is devoted to the socio-cultural aspects of migration of urban residents to rural spaces, the prospects and risks of this process. The disurbanization migration in question gives rise to “anti-urbanites” who have left the city in search of new meanings, and it is important to understand their motives and internal conflicts. Do these people become villagers?

J. Urry in his work “What is the Future?” (2016) presented models of cities of the future – Urry associated the future with the life of cities. But 100 years before that, the Russian writer А. Chayanov, in his social utopia, which is called peasant, presented a model of the future as a return to life outside the city, life in the countryside with a rural way of life.

Chayanov’s novel today looks more like a negative utopia, since the writer debunks dreams of rural communism. In the author’s imagination, the world has turned upside down: before the reader is a village estate, a villager is an aristocrat, the new estate is a park, a sports field, a city cottage, technological advances allow the villagers to free up their time, who spend their leisure time talking about science, art, economics, and walking. Isn’t this the dream of today’s migrants fleeing from smoke-filled, from loneliness in the crowd? But just as Thomas More’s works did not help build communism in one particular country, Chayanov is not deceived by the prospect of deurbanization – in the project of the new village, he sees the foundations of a surveillance state. Will escape from the city save humanity? How to preserve the socio-cultural world?