The countryside is a problem child for Europe. Large parts of it are becoming depopulated. And those who still live there feel more and more abandoned. By politics, by Europe, by fellow countrymen in the big cities.
But that rural exodus is not a new phenomenon. For more than a hundred years, people in Europe have been moving from the countryside to the city. As a result, three-quarters of Europe's population now lives in urban areas. At the end of the nineteenth century, this ratio was even reversed.
