Urban discourses and rural settlements: Toward a documentary analysis of the effects of governmentality on the built environment in rural Galicia (Spain)

Abstract

Governmentality is a “key notion” needed to understand the path followed by territorial management in rural areas, and its effects on the landscape of the late modern period. Government refers to more or less systemic, regulated and reflected modes of power that go beyond the spontaneous exercise of power over others, following a specific form of reasoning (discourse). The modern nation-state as a ‘spatial framework’ characterized by the domination of a centralized administrative apparatus over a dispersed national territory that needs to face different contradictions. Rationality in planning is embodied in the complementarity of the concepts of discourse and power. Dispositifs, in the form of laws and academic institutions, are important in allowing and/or spreading certain discourses.