Re-exploring the rural/urban dichotomy: farm shops in urban settings

The division between rural and urban values and practices is a classic theme in disciplines such as European ethnology. During the last decades, the urban/rural divide seem to be renegotiated. Traditional, small scale agriculture and food production encapsulates values on display at many dinner tables of the upper middle urban class. This has lead to new business opportunities for rural actors, of which some has tried to take the idea of the farm shop to the city. But what happens when the products enter new contexts? The material for the paper is observations and interviews with retailers in southern Sweden who have established “farm shops” in urban areas. The theoretical perspective is the life mode analysis developed in the 1970s to investigate its relevance for the 21st century in combination with the “good farmer” concept and heritagization. The article concludes that farm shops in urban settings may offer local and traditional food, but it is the offering of an emotional space in which to dwell and to decelerate, while, at the same time, being a potential place in which to counteract the distance between urban and rural life modes and values, that is the unique features of the settings.