NEWCOMERS IN AGRICULTURE: NEW IDEAS, NEW DYNAMICS?

In recent years, rural areas have been viewed as attractive places that combine the best living conditions with interesting employment opportunities, especially in the services sector compared to the urban areas (rural ideal). Indeed, in Western societies a counter-urbanization movement has been recorded for decades, first observed in the USA and later in Western European countries (Woods, 2011). This trend involved either movements of people from urban areas installing in rural areas for the first time, or returnees who once “took a pass” from the city and then decided to return to their place of origin. Consequently, although in the first phase of the counter-urbanization phenomenon people were motivated by the pursuit of a better life and work framework (oriented to the tertiary sector), recently these phenomena seem to be more intense under the pressure of the crisis, as returnees expect to achieve livelihood through more traditional or entrepreneurial agricultural forms. The agricultural sector, previously underestimated (from a sociocultural and an economical point of view), is actually rediscovered for multiple beneficial roles and acquires a foothold in public discourse (Halfacree, 2006, 2008).