The rural-urban dichotomy is one of the most influential figures of thought in history, laying the foundation for academic disciplines such as rural and urban sociology. The dichotomy rests on the assumption that rural and urban areas differ fundamentally. This book deals with this topic.

In recent years, the growing disparities between rural and urban areas in developing countries have been a cause of major concern. The rural-urban gap remains the single most well-documented development and welfare disparity in the developing world. This gap can be seen in the low economic activities, higher poverty levels, and lower quality infrastructure and services in rural areas as opposed to urban areas. While the magnitude of this rural-urban divide is well-documented, very little has been documented about its impact on inclusive and sustainable urban development. The Handbook of Research on Managing the Urban-Rural Divide Through an Inclusive Framework aims to capture the spatial and socio-economic divide between rural and urban areas and provides a road map to revamping the discussion that surrounds the urban-rural sphere. Covering key topics such as development, food security, and rural regions, this premier reference source is ideal for policymakers, government officials, industry professionals, researchers, academicians, practitioners, scholars, instructors, and students.

This book critically examines different forms of urban-rural links for sustainable development in different countries. As intertwined processes of globalization, digitalization, environmental challenges and the search for sustainable development continue, rural and urban areas around the world become increasingly interconnected and interdependent. This book contributes to understanding the role of this growing interconnectedness from an economic geographical perspective. It does so by theoretically and empirically addressing the various existing linkages, such as food networks, value chains, and regional governance at local, regional, national and international levels. In doing so, contributions extend and contrast existing approaches dealing with urban and rural areas separately by considering the interplay between these two as well as their consequences for sustainability transition pathways. This edited volume adds to the academic and policy debate by bringing together a variety of concepts and themes in order to shift the research and policy agenda away from simple dichotomy to different notions of rural-urban linkages. Offering multidisciplinary insights into rural-urban linkages, the book will be of interest to decision-makers, practitioners and researchers in the fields of economic geography, regional planning, food studies and economics.

Sustaining the rural and urban populations of the developing world has been identified as a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World is an introduction to the relationships between rural and urban places in the developing world and shows that not all their aspects are as obvious as migration from country to city. There is now a growing realization that rural-urban relations are far more complex. Using a wealth of student-friendly features including boxed case studies, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading, this innovative book places rural-urban interactions within a broader context, thus promoting a clearer understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that rural-urban interactions represent.

This edited book brings together in one place new studies of rural–urban interactions and their implications for regional growth and development in different regions within Asia. Specifically, the individual chapters in the book shed light on the different kinds of rural–urban interactions that we witness in Asian regions, particularly those that are based on migration, poverty, inequality, education, economic dependence, and the flow of goods and services. The book departs from the existing literature in three ways. First, it explicitly recognizes that different kinds of rural–urban interactions have dissimilar impacts on the lives and hence on the welfare of the residents of rural and urban regions. Second, the book emphasizes the varied spatial and temporal dimensions of the interactions and the ways in which these dimensions influence rural and urban societies. Third, this book demonstrates the ways in which an understanding of the preceding two points contributes to our knowledge about economic growth and development. Because Asia is the fastest-growing and most dynamic continent in the world today, the research delineated in the individual chapters of the book provides practical guidance concerning two salient questions. First, how do we effectively address the economic development challenges stemming from the interactions between alternate rural and urban regions within Asia? Second, how do we ensure that the policies we design to address these challenges give rise to broad-based economic growth and development that is sustainable?

Asia, the location of the world’s fastest-growing economies, is also home to some of the fastest rates of urbanization humanity has ever seen, a process whose speed renders long-term outcomes highly unpredictable. This volume contrasts with much published work on the rural/urban divide, which has tended to focus on single case studies. It provides empirical perspectives from four Asian countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, and includes a wealth of insights that both critique and expand popular notions of the rural-urban divide. The volume is relevant not just to Asian contexts but to social scientific research on population dynamics more generally. Rather than deploying a single study to chart national trends, three chapters on each country make possible much more complex perspectives. As a result, this volume does more than extend our understanding of the interplay between cities and hinterlands within Asia. It enhances our notions of rural/urban cleavages, connections and conflicts more generally, with data and analysis ready for application to other contexts. Of interest to diverse scholars across the social sciences and Asian studies, this work includes accounts ranging from rural youth real estate entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, India, to social development in Aceh province in Indonesia, devastated by the 2004 tsunami, to the relationship between urban space and commonly held notions of the supernatural in Thailand’s northern city of Chiang Mai.

More than 2.6 billion people in the developing world lack access to safe water and sanitation service. The Millennium Development Goal’s (MDG) target is to halve the number of people without access to a sustainable source of water supply and connection to a sewer network by 2015. That target is unlikely to be met. If there is anything that can be learnt from European experience it is that institutional reform occurs incrementally when politically enfranchised urban populations perceive a threat to their material well-being due to contamination of water sources.

Urban and regional development in the Baltic States and other Central and Eastern European countries has experienced rapid changes since their re-independence at the beginning of the 1990s. Meanwhile, urban and regional planning institutions and organizational cultures in the Baltic States have only changed rather incrementally, despite various national and European pressures for reform. As a consequence, the effects of European cohesion and structural policy measures have been quite modest, and the ability of the planning systems in the Baltic states to manage contemporary trends in urban and regional development has become increasingly limited. This book focuses on these issues and tensions of spatial planning and development in the Baltic States and their distinctiveness compared to other European countries. It provides an overview of the historical and cultural context of spatial development, a discussion of the processes of Europeanization of spatial planning in the specific context of the Baltic States, and an analysis of whether these processes may be leading to policy convergence in the region. This book was published as a special issue of European Planning Studies.