Composing the rural as a common ground: Bedsted as Critical Zone Observatory

As a reaction to the demographic challenges facing rural communities in Denmark, the Danish government has initiated widespread strategic and subsidized demolition projects. Based on the authors' engagement in the current transformation of the declining station town Bedsted, Thy, this paper uses a landscape-based approach to argue for a radical re-imagining of how to engage rural towns facing abandonment.

In so doing, the paper calls for a cross-scalar exploration of how to compose the rural as a common world (Latour, 2014).

In this exploration the notion of Critical Zone (CZ) plays a critical role. Here, CZ is understood as the near surface layer of the Earth, where the complex interplay of nature and culture has been unfolding (Latour, 2006) and where all living things reside and are hard, even impossible, to disentangle (Szweszynski, 2020).

Seen through the lense of CZ, composing the rural as a common world, seems to be of key importance, as one of the problems researchers currently face in picturing CZ is precisely to give it a shape (Arenes, Latour & Gaillardet, 2018).

Where Latour argues that commonality has to be composed by "piecing together, element after element, through many travails and conflicts" (2014) this paper introduces a series of landscape-based projects from the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which in different ways and through different material compositions introduce dismantling, sorting and stacking in their engagement with time-based processes.

In the context of this paper, such Critical Zone Observatories (CZO's) are crucial in exploring how to compose the rural as a common world, as they seem to point out a possible direction for where to begin; by parsing into much smaller pieces – some as small as a garden – the idea of the living planet (Latour, 2014).