Dr. Layne Hartsell calls for "re-villaging" in both the urban and rural setting that has three major aspects. Urban revillaging involves districts, blocks, perhaps buildings, depending upon size of the "village", integrated to a technosocial system involving metalocal production. The technical social systems of today can be innovative using metalocal production that combines design and knowledge from online communities into local productive systems. Rural revillaging is a neo-bucolic regeneration of rural life based on agroecology and metalocal production. Finally, rewilding is a scientific-based understanding for us to work with nature for the increase of wilderness areas.
Urbanization and bioregionalism are distinct overarching concepts with different approaches to how human beings relate to the natural environment.Bioregionalism is an environmental philosophy that emphasizes the importance of understanding and living within the natural boundaries and ecological systems of a particular region. Bioregionalists seek to build confederated, sustainable communities that are directly connected to the local ecosystem and that prioritize the health and well-being of both human and non-human inhabitants based on the land. This philosophy is often associated with a focus on local agroecology for food systems; clean, renewable energy; sustainable production; and conservation of natural resources.
Urbanization refers to the process of creating and developing cities. It involves the concentration of human populations and economic activities in urban areas based on extraction, processing, and transportation of natural resources for human use. Urbanization leads to environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity, and a range of social and economic problems such as traffic congestion, pollution, and social inequality.
Therefore, bioregionalism and urbanization represent two very different approaches to the relationship between humans and the environment. Bioregionalists seek to work with nature to create sustainable, locally-based communities that work in harmony with the natural world, while urbanization involves the building of urban areas that extract beyond the resources of the landbase leading to negative impacts on the environment and to existential crisis due to climate change or the Anthropocene.
Layne Hartsell, MSc., Ph.D.(hartsellmlh@gmail.com) is a research professor at the Asia Institute in Tokyo and Berlin. Former research professor at Sungkyunkwan University and the Advanced Institute for Nanotechnology and Sookmyung Women’s University in South Korea; at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand; and as a researcher at the University of Virginia Medical College in the United States.
