Urbanization and Counter-Urbanization in the Global and Russian Context

Over 100 years ago the urbanization and population booms in megalopolises throughout the world created highly concentrated population centers that were fraught with social problems. It was not a coincidence that the institutionalization of the discipline of Sociology in the 20th century was largely associated with the study of cities and urban life by the representatives of the Chicago School, Park, Burgess, Wirth, Thomas, and Znaniecki. owever, since the 1950s and, even more so in the last 20 years, social thinkers have been compelled to reconsider the ideas that were proposed by the Chicago School and have dominated the field of urban sociology for almost 100 years. However the modern trend of counterurbanization (or de-urbanization) is a social phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a single common denominator. This term has many components which include among other variables, the study of recurrent migration patterns from urban to rural areas. Jt is possible to detect modern forms of socialization that are the result of the counterurbanization phenomenon and have been super-imposed upon traditional rural infrastructures. In rural sociology studies, the transformation of rural life by the social forces of globalization has been defined as "cellular globalization" [Pokrovsky, 2014]. The global processes have penetrated all of the "cells" of previously purely rural communities. The globalization matrix has equally transformed both city and rural settlements. The paradigm shift in thinking about rural societies is a relatively new approach to understanding Russian village life. The culture and the way of life of Russian agriculturalists were, in previous eras, solely based upon agricultural practices. Today traditional agricultural production is preserving its relevance where it is economically profitable, but it has entered a mode of production which is developing in tandem with other factors, which includes for example, environmental, social and recreational ones.