This book investigates urbanormativity—a concept that privileges urban normalcy and desirability over rural deviance and undesirability. The “reality” section outlines its foundations—urbanization, urban-rural systems, and urban dependency. The “representation” section explores urbanormative culture by considering cultural capital, media, and identity. The last section, “everyday life,” examines urban-rural disparities in law and politics and in life within different communities. It concludes by calling for a rural justice approach that will revalue the rural.

The world has been witnessing a long unfolding process of urbanization that not only has altered the structural basis of society in terms of political economy, but has also symbolically relegated rural people and life to a secondary or deviant status through an ideology of urbanormativity. Both structural and cultural changes rooted in urbanization are connected in complex ways to spatial arrangements that can be described in terms of inequality and uneven development. Through a focus on localities, Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society examines the implications of urbanization and its corresponding ideology. Urbanormativity justifies rural domination by holding urban life as the standard against which rural forms are compared and deemed to be irregular, inferior, or deviant. Urban production, as conceptualized in this book, is inherently exploitative of rural resources—natural, social, cultural, and symbolic. As this exploitation advances, a wake of entropic conditions is left behind in the forms of degraded landscapes, broken social institutions, and denigrated communities, cultures and identities. Edited by Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, Studies in Urbanormativity engages a topic on which scholars have been surprisingly silent. Designed for advancing theory and practice, the chapters provide new theoretical tools for understanding the complex relationship between the urban and rural. While primarily intended for scholars and practitioners interested in rural life, rural policy, and community development, the insights of this book will also be of interest to scholars studying various forms of cultural and social domination, as well as identity politics.

Gregory M. Fulkerson offers a complete portrait of what communities are, how they work, and how they are embedded in urban–rural systems at regional, national, and global scales. After explaining the concept of urban–rural systems, Fulkerson walks through the central dynamics of environmental demography, political economy, culture, social interaction, the built environment, and community connections. His focus on urban–rural systems ensures that communities are understood as nodes within a network, overcoming the tendency to view them as self-contained. Each chapter in Community in Urban–Rural Systems: Theory, Planning, and Development offers a blend of classical and contemporary theories and concludes with relevant planning considerations. An additional chapter on community development provides strategies for translating planning considerations into action. The conclusion offers insights into long-term principles of community sustainability and justice.

Urban Dependency investigates the risks of urban populations that cannot survive without the massive consumption of basic rural products like food, textiles, fossil fuels, and other energy-rich goods that are harvested by a shrinking rural base. Thomas and Fulkerson argue that though essential, rural workers and communities are poorly compensated for their labor that is both dangerous and highly exploitative. While the rural population is already shrinking, the authors predict that harsh political-economic conditions will only fuel further rural-urban migration, worsening the problem of urban dependency. The authors apply their theory of the energy economy to explore a balance between the supply and demand of energy resources that promotes rural justice.

In this interdisciplinary volume, sociolinguists and sociologists explore the intersections of language, culture, and identity for rural populations around the world. Challenging stereotypical views of rural backwardness and urban progress, the contributors reveal how language is a key mechanism for constructing the meaning of places and the people who identify with them. With research that spans numerous countries and several continents, the chapters in this volume add broadly to knowledge about status and prestige, authenticity and belonging, rural-urban relations, and innovation and change among rural peoples and in rural communities across the globe.

City and Country: The Historical Evolution of Urban-Rural Systems begins with a simple assumption: every human requires, on average, two-thousand calories per day to stay alive. Tracing the ramifications of this insight leads to the caloric well: the caloric demand at one point in the environment. As population increases, the depth of the caloric well reflects this increased demand and requires a population to go further afield for resources, a condition called urban dependency. City and Country traces the structural ramifications of these dynamics as the population increased from the Paleolithic to today. We can understand urban dependency as the product of the caloric demands a population puts on a given environment, and when those demands outstrip the carry capacity of the environment, a caloric well develops that forces a community to look beyond its immediate area for resources. As the well deepens, the horizon from which resources are gathered is pushed further afield, often resulting in conflict with neighboring groups. Prior to settled villages, increases in population resulted in cultural (technological) innovations that allowed for greater use of existing resources: the broad-spectrum revolution circa 20 thousand years ago, the birth of agricultural villages 11 thousand years ago, and hierarchically organized systems of multiple settlements working together to produce enough food during the Ubaid period in Mesopotamia seven-thousand years ago—the first urban-rural systems. As cities developed, increasing population resulted in an ever-deepening morass of urban dependency that required expansion of urban-rural systems. These urban-rural dynamics today serve as an underlying logic upon which modern capitalism is built. The culmination of two decades of research into the nature of urban-rural dynamics, City and Country argues that at the heart of the logic of capitalism is an even deeper logic: urbanization is based on urban dependency.

Following on from the preceding volume in this series that focused on innovation and implementation in the context of school-university-community collaborations in rural places, this volume explores the positive impact of such collaborations in rural places, focusing specifically on the change agency of such collaborations. The relentless demand of urban places in general for the food and resources (e.g., mineral and energy resources) originating in rural places tends to overshadow the impact of the inevitable changes wrought by increasing efficiency in the supply chain. Youth brought-up in rural places tend to gravitate to urban places for higher education and employment, social interaction and cultural affordances, and only some of them return to enrich their places of origin. On one hand, the outcome of the arguable predominance of more populated areas in the national consciousness has been described as “urbanormativity”—a sense that what happens in urban areas is the norm. By implication, rural areas strive to approach the norm. On the other hand, a mythology of rural places as repositories of traditional values, while flattering, fails to take into account the inherent complexities of the rural context. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four parts—the first three of which explore, in turn, collaborations that target instructional leadership, increase opportunities for underserved people, and target wicked problems. The fourth part consists of four chapters that showcase international perspectives on school-university-community collaborations between countries (Australia and the United States), within China, within Africa, and within Australia. The overwhelming sense of the chapters in this volume is that the most compelling evidence of impact of school-university community collaborations in rural places emanates from collaborations brokered by schools-communities to which universities bring pertinent resources.