ЗЕМЛЯ [ZEMLIA] | THE LAND IS ONE OF THE FIRST CONNOTATIONS COMING TO MIND WHEN ONE THINKS ABOUT RURAL REALMS AND ITS INHABITANTS. IT IS STILL A VALUABLE PART OF THE VILLAGE AND SMALL-TOWN CITIZENS LIFESTYLE WITH TRADITIONS OF HOUSEHOLD FARMING AND GARDENING. 

RURAL POPULATIONS OF POST-SOVIET BLOC COUNTRIES FOR CENTURIES HAVE BEEN DRAMATICALLY INFLUENCED BY THE SHIFTS OF ZEMLIA OWNERSHIP MODELS AND TECHNOLOGIES OF CULTIVATION. THEY WENT THROUGH INTENSIVE MODIFICATIONS AFTER SOVIET COLLECTIVE FARMS DISINTEGRATED IN 1991. 

THE LARGE AGRICULTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF POST-SOCIALIST STATES FADED IN THE BACKGROUND. THE ECONOMY GRADUALLY SHIFTED TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND THEIR INDUSTRIES SUPPORTED THE NEW "PROGRESSIVE" FUTURE OF THE POST-SOCIALIST CITIES IN THE GLOBALIZATION PROCESSES. 

The wave of fiscal decentralization and administrative-territorial reforms after the Soviet collapse brought new life to rural territories of post-socialist bloc, such as Poland (1990 and 1999), Slovakia (2002), Ukraine (2014). With that in mind we want to ask, what do we know about this new life? How do these territories and its inhabitants function today? How global challenges affect these territories and how they response to them? 

We want to apply general questions to specific territories. Is countryside our past or, maybe, also our future, as Rem Koolhaas seems to hint, pointing out that the most drastic transformations are happening there these days. Is it a source of our civilization and economy or, as Jane Jacobs suggested in "The Economy of Cities", just a product of a city? Is it a refuge, as once was Ebenezer Howard's "Garden City" for the industrial XIX century industrial metropolis, or an exile, as the current patterns of rural-urban migration suggest? 

Does it even exist? If we are to believe Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, we currently witness a new scale of urbanization that makes the city-countryside dichotomy obsolete and leaves no room for non-urban spaces (or those not affected by the urban). 

CANactions Magazine Edition 02 is meant to explore "LAND" and its inhabitants to collect and share with the world the most actual and relevant portrait of contemporary post-socialist states countryside.