Scholars are increasingly rethinking the urban, the rural, and the urban–rural binary. This article advances understanding of rural and urban imaginaries through examining how young people in a village in north India develop practices that they regard as “urban” to protect rural futures. Young adults (aged eighteen to thirty) in the village of Bemni, Uttarakhand, develop urban-style educational facilities and agricultural practices as well as performances of gender empowerment imagined as urban with a view to improving the functioning of their village and preventing migration to cities. Through analyzing these practices of “selective urbanism,” we point to the production of ideas of urbanism and rurality beyond the metropolitan and large city regions usually studied and the importance especially of the performance of urban fragments in people’s conceptions of rural futures. We also examine how value is attached to ideas of the rural and urban and how people deploy as well as problematize the rural–urban binary.

学者们越来越多地重新思考城市、农村和城乡二元。本文通过研究印度北部一个村庄的年轻人如何发展他们认为是“城市”的实践来保护农村的未来，从而加深对农村和城市想象的理解。北阿坎德邦 Bemni 村的年轻人（18 至 30 岁）发展城市式的教育设施和农业实践，以及被认为是城市的性别赋权表演，以期改善村庄的运作并防止迁移到城市. 通过分析这些“选择性城市主义”的实践，” 我们指出城市主义和乡村观念的产生超出了通常研究的大都市和大城市地区，特别是城市碎片的表现在人们对乡村未来的概念中的重要性。我们还研究了农村和城市的想法是如何附加价值的，以及人们如何部署以及解决农村-城市二元的问题。