Afterlives of depopulated places

Abstract Emptiness appears as a condition of possibility of two common visions of rural development in Serbia—extractivism and rural tourism. This article investigates the underlying sociocultural mechanisms of this relationship. It compares two mountainous villages in Serbia that were depopulated during modernization of Yugoslavia and included in hydropower investment schemes during the current energy transition yet ended up within different models of development and contrasting articulations of emptiness. In Rakita, emptiness takes the form of yearning for defective or absent infrastructure and serves as an asset in extractive projects. In Dojkinci, rural tourism has emerged as an alternative to extractivism. While both local communities and institutions take it as the last hope for depopulated but naturally exceptional localities, tourism brings commodification and increasing social differentiations.