Racializing the Urban-Rural Divide: A Critical Examination of Whiteness, Migration, and Spatial Imaginaries in Belgium.

Several studies in Whiteness literature have showed how the rural-urban divide becomes racialized in Western European countries. In countries like France, Germany, and the UK, rural areas are often racialized as spaces of White populations, while cities are seen as spaces of racial diversity due to migration. However, in Belgium, urbanization has blurred the traditional rural-urban divide, particularly as suburbanization expands the reach of major cities like Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels. Yet, narratives in public discourses about a growing divide between ‘cosmopolitan cities’ and ‘nationalist countryside’ reproduce this imagined rural-urban divide, where residents of urban areas are portrayed as holding more progressive views on migration and multiculturalism than in rural areas. This raises questions about what racialized spatial imaginaries residents of Belgian urban and suburban areas hold of the rural-urban divide as well as to what extent these spatial imaginaries are linked to narratives of the ‘cosmopolitan city’ and the ‘nationalist countryside’. Drawing on 80 in-depth interviews with residents of (what are considered) urban and rural areas, our research extends literatures on the racialization of the urban-rural divide by centering spatial imaginaries that highlight the complex intersection of race, space and narratives in public discourse. We find that the rural is often imagined as a nationalistic and racially homogeneous, predominantly White space, that is historically insulated from exogenous changes like migration – whilst demographically these areas are becoming increasingly diverse. In contrast, cities are frequently perceived as cosmopolitan, multicultural and non-White spaces, despite the presence of White communities. We argue that, by (re)producing the narrative of the ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘nationalist’ divide, residents in both cities and rural areas racialize the urban as an imagined multicultural space—and therefore as non-White—and the rural as homogeneously White.