During modernity metropolitan ruralities have been regarded as land reserves for urban expansion. However, there is a growing insight that there are limits to the urban expansion into rural areas. This volume discusses potential developments in urban (and rural) policy and planning which need to be considered.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (USDA/ERS) maintains four highly related but distinct geographic classification systems to designate areas by the degree to which they are rural. The original urban-rural code scheme was developed by the ERS in the 1970s. Rural America today is very different from the rural America of 1970 described in the first rural classification report. At that time migration to cities and poverty among the people left behind was a central concern. The more rural a residence, the more likely a person was to live in poverty, and this relationship held true regardless of age or race. Since the 1970s the interstate highway system was completed and broadband was developed. Services have become more consolidated into larger centers. Some of the traditional rural industries, farming and mining, have prospered, and there has been rural amenity-based in-migration. Many major structural and economic changes have occurred during this period. These factors have resulted in a quite different rural economy and society since 1970. In April 2015, the Committee on National Statistics convened a workshop to explore the data, estimation, and policy issues for rationalizing the multiple classifications of rural areas currently in use by the Economic Research Service (ERS). Participants aimed to help ERS make decisions regarding the generation of a county rural-urban scale for public use, taking into consideration the changed social and economic environment. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions from the workshop.

Rural people and communities continue to play important social, economic and environmental roles at a time in which societies are rapidly urbanizing, and the identities of local places are increasingly subsumed by flows of people, information and economic activity across global spaces. However, while the organization of rural life has been fundamentally transformed by institutional and social changes that have occurred since the mid-twentieth century, rural people and communities have proved resilient in the face of these transformations. This book examines the causes and consequences of major social and economic changes affecting rural communities and populations during the first decades of the twenty-first century, and explores policies developed to ameliorate problems or enhance opportunities. Primarily focused on the U.S. context, while also providing international comparative discussion, the book is organized into five sections each of which explores both socio-demographic and political economic aspects of rural transformation. It features an accessible and up-to-date blend of theory and empirical analysis, with each chapter's discussion grounded in real-life situations through the use of empirical case-study materials. Rural People and Communities in the 21st Century is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in rural sociology, community sociology, rural and/or population geography, community development, and population studies.

What is the urban–rural interface? Is it a visual phenomenon, a place where country gives way to neighborhoods and shopping areas in a startling way? Is it a simple factor of population density? There is nothing simple about the urban–rural interface—editors David Laband, Graeme Lockaby, and Wayne Zipperer present the broad spectrum of interdisciplinary complexities at play. Organized into three sections on changing ecosystems, changing human dimensions, and the dynamic integration of human and natural systems, this book is a must read for anyone who works in the real world, where natural and human systems are joined. This is the new sustainability science, an emerging discipline that integrates social and economic values with the physical, chemical, and ecological functions of ecosystems. The goal is optimal management, since our human impact is often significant and far-reaching in both space and time.

The English settlers who staked their claims in the Chesapeake Bay were drawn to it for a variety of reasons. Some sought wealth from the land, while others saw it as a place of trade, a political experiment, or a potential spiritual sanctuary. But like other European colonizers in the Americas, they all aspired to found, organize, and maintain functioning towns—an aspiration that met with varying degrees of success, but mostly failure. Yet this failure became critical to the economy and society that did arise there. As Urban Dreams, Rural Commonwealth reveals, the agrarian plantation society that eventually sprang up around the Chesapeake Bay was not preordained—rather, it was the necessary product of failed attempts to build cities. Paul Musselwhite details the unsuccessful urban development that defined the region from the seventeenth century through the Civil War, showing how places like Jamestown and Annapolis—despite their small size—were the products of ambitious and cutting-edge experiments in urbanization comparable to those in the largest port cities of the Atlantic world. These experiments, though, stoked ongoing debate about commerce, taxation, and self-government. Chesapeake planters responded to this debate by reinforcing the political, economic, and cultural authority of their private plantation estates, with profound consequences for the region’s laborers and the political ideology of the southern United States. As Musselwhite makes clear, the antebellum economy around this well-known waterway was built not in the absence of cities, but upon their aspirational wreckage.

This book sheds light on the effects of the financial and economic crisis in a diverse set of countries of Southern and Mediterranean Europe. Drawing on case studies from Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey, this book presents a broad and integrative perspective on the impact of the crisis in different rural territories, discussing the similarities and dissimilarities of those impacts together with the resilience strategies adopted in each context. The impacts of the crisis in rural restructuring processes are also taken in consideration in this volume. Based on diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, the book discusses the challenges presented by the new socioeconomic contexts emerging from the crisis, as well as the resilience strategies adopted in rural territories by old and new actors. The book compiles nine empirical chapters dealing with the different cases and a final chapter devoted to the discussion of the shared and dissimilar processes of rural change. This book is a useful and valuable resource for scholars and post-graduate students from different disciplines, such as rural sociology, geography, anthropology, regional planning and agricultural studies.