Rural society in Balisca

Rural society in Balisca, often referred to as detached areas (Baliscano: áreas separadas), consists of approximately 60% of Balisca's land area. An estimated 12 million people, or less than one-in-ten residents (approximately 8.6% of the total Baliscan population in the 2020 census) live in rural Balisca. Definitions vary from different parts of society as to what constitutes these areas.

Rural areas tend to be less built up and closer to their natural state. Contrasting with rural populations of typical advanced economies, Balisca has a comparatively young rural population that has been consistently becoming younger thanks to free migration policies, relocation of NEET individuals from urban areas, accelerating automation which has encouraged a leisure society and widespread cultural re-evaluation of the concept of work.

Counterurbanization and environmentalism

The resurgence of popular folk practices and beliefs after 1970s and 80s was largely due to the lack of economic advances in most of rural Balisca and increasing economic instability. Following the October 73 events, as many as 3 million people, mostly young people sporting decreixement fashions of dress, behavior and ideologies left the cities and moved to rural communes. More broadly, this period encompassed the rise of house and psychedelic music, hallucinogenic drugs, renewed anti-statism, and the free-love scene throughout the Confederation.

Many of these individuals suspicious of the government, rejected consumerist values, and generally rejected Accelerationist growth and opposed urban sprawl which was having detrimental effects on the Baliscan environment. A significant number were interested in politics, leading to the establishment of Ecological Action and the first Zones to Defend; others were concerned more with art (music, painting, poetry in particular) or spiritual and meditative practices, resulting in surges in deep ecological views, ecospirituality, gaianism and other nature religions.

Progressively, this anti-urban vision has changed its goal, turning from simple opposition to urban expansion, to the promotion of degrowth, compact cities, restoration ecology and rewilding to halt and eventually reverse degradation of the environment. In Balisca, the politics of the city rest on a libertine and utopian vision of urbanism, and on an enchantment with the city center. For a long time, rural Baliscan society has remained preoccupied with a sentiment of hostility to the city stemming from their encroachment on the environment and the altering of the natural ecosystem. The country and the rural society are perceived as holding and conserving "authentic" Baliscan values—notably with regard to the environment— including communalism, opposition to authority, connection with land, and sense of responsibility to the common good.

To prevent these ills and counterurbanization, rural Balisca embraced free and cooperative transit and increased population density to prevent sprawl and car dependency, and active and healthy communities to ensure high quality of life and sharing of economic resources. Additionally, it is largely responsible for the lack of lower density suburban development around Baliscan cities throughout the country. Paradoxically, this influential environmentally-oriented outlook then gave rise to widespread rural–urban fringe and wildland–urban interface across the country.