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Both growth-based accounts of urban modernisation and critical assessments of an allegedly planetary process of capitalist urbanisation afford the rural no place in the future. This paper responds to the marginalization of the rural. Conceptually based on insights from the diverse economies agenda and post-colonial and feminist urban theory, it studies how the rural is an agent in the performance of the future, and, in fact, in the construction of more just and desirable futures. It introduces ‘rural futurism’ as a lens to capture these rural performances. Thenotion of ‘rural futurism’ is chosen to not reproduce a spatiotemporal externalisation of the rural, too easily done in the term ‘rural utopia’. To illustrate the power of this perspective, the paper studies the "Ferme de la Mhotte", a collective in the French countryside. The collective's performance of rural futurism is both based on a transformation of the rural towards being heterogeneous and horizontally connected; and on a re-discovery of the rural as diverse and vertically connected (to, among others, the territory)—providing valuable tools for the construction of more desirable futures. The paper ends on an exploration of the disruptions within the performance of rural futurisms, also interrogating the tension between political engagement towards change and a retreat into the rural off-world.

Dedicating a PTP Interface to spaces of refuge, migration and border enforcement is a very timely decision. The six pieces collected here set out a truly global picture of the nexus of human mobility, politics of citizenship and planning amid turbulent processes of capitalist urbanisation – or, to put it with Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, ‘planetary’ urbanisation. I particularly appreciate the way the contributors were able to open up the ‘immigration and refugee crisis’. For one, the authors indirectly expose the pathetic cry of Western politicians and media for the tiny fraction of the world refugee population their wealthy countries have to deal with. More importantly, the six pieces also provide a clear picture of the real ‘crises’ at stake: crises of housing, urban development, dispossession and extraction, imperialist war – the latest, and most hideous, crisis of capitalism-as-urbanisation (cf. Rossi, 2017), in short.