Examining current problems of rural regions in Hungary, the author of the study calls the attention on the anachronism in the notion of traditional "rural society". Village societies have opened up due to the more common functionally differentiated extra-village relations, the widening tracks of mobility among the various settlements, because of the more specific life conduct aspects as well as the disintegration of local public sphere. The study deals with present-day issues of such defined "rural space", making use of the sociological, demographic and economic analyses of the past years and of the conclusions of programming experiments in smaller and larger regions.
