Bridging the rural-urban dichotomy in land use science (original) (raw)
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Urban-Rural Linkages and Global Sustainable Land Use - GLOBALANDS Issue Paper
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Currently, more than half of the world´s population is living in cities, which has implications for land use and land use changes, use of natural resources, and the absorption of rural labor in cities. Economic development and respective resource use as well as livelihoods bind cities and rural areas together. Rural population is increasingly adopting urban behavior, or becoming socially urbanized. A growing inter-dependency of rural and urban dwellers on resources they offer to each other makes rural-urban linkages the more important for global land use and respective governance approaches. As rural-urban linkages increase and intensify, global land use faces changes and new opportunities in cities and the rural hinterlands. With increasing international and even global trade, traditional flows of (primary) goods - food, textiles and timber - from rural production areas to adjacent urban processing and consumption centers shift towards a spatial decoupling. Modern information and communication technologies and the digital revolution foster decentralization and delocalization so that dependencies of rural areas on urban centers as administrative, commercial and cultural hubs become less relevant, which also supports the spatial decoupling. GLOBALANDS identified urbanization trends as key drivers for future land use – both directly in terms of buildings and infrastructure footprints, and indirectly through the demand for agricultural and forest land to provide for sustenance, energy, and materials. Urbanization will be the defining trend over the next decades, especially in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where the bulk of extreme poverty is concentrated. Between 2010 and 2050, the urban population share will grow to 2/3 of the world’s population. Urbanization dynamics, urban population growth and rural population change, respectively, differ between urban-rural settings: there are regions with growing cities including their peri-urban and rural area, and growing cities surrounded by rural decline, and vice versa, i.e. urban decline plus rural growth, and urban plus rural decline. Rural areas still account for almost half the world’s population, but after 2020, it is expected that rural population begins to decline, especially in China and India. Migration and related remittance are key elements of urban-rural linkages which affect land use both within cities, and the rural areas. Rural out-migration implies urban population increase, diet transitions, and land use changes such as conversion of formerly cultivated land, forests, and wetlands. Urbanization and migration indeed offer options to improve both urban and rural livelihoods, if managed well. Urban and rural land use policies and respective planning have to become integrative and to improve in methods to not only address land tenure, but also ecosystem services. The functional and spatial decoupling of cities and their “hinterlands” needs to be considered as a challenge for governance to which – so far – no convincing approach can be identified on the UN level, although the problem has been taken up by UN-HABITAT. This problem requires a global approach, though, as local and regional governance is not able to deal with international competition, and the increasing translocal nature of urban-rural links. In response, a new “Global System of Cities and Rural Regions” may be required. How to further conceptualize, discuss and implement such an approach in an inclusive way should be seen as a key issue for future research on urban-rural linkages with regard to global sustainable land use. In parallel, the dynamics of the peri-urban need to be reflected. At this interface between the urban and the rural, a more integrated approach for planning and policy development is required to address sustainability challenges. The integrated landscape approach could transcend not only spatial scales but also separated knowledge realm, especially those of ecological and sociological views. The recently formed Global Landscapes Forum could be a platform to further this, and earlier work in the EU regarding urban and rural development could contribute a wealth of experience. Further exchanges with the US and especially Africa and Asia should be considered. The upcoming UN HABITAT III conference could be an excellent opportunity to share these first thoughts. Many rural areas reacted to globalization with innovative approaches such as the New Rural Economy and territorial cooperation. Fundamentally different from globalized, often vertically integrated competing businesses, these approaches follow the logic of “network” and collaborative economics to transcend rural disadvantages of remoteness through horizontal – often virtual - business linkages, and valuing elements of social (trust, cooperation etc.) and environmental capital. Such strategies could well fit into the integrated landscape approach suggested before, and should be seen as another key issue needing further attention.
Sustainable development studies tend to give urban areas a priority seat, with rural areas cast in an inferior role. Despite of the growing urbanization, rural areas still are homes of billions of people universally suffering from poverty, hunger, disease, poor education. The urbanized rural areas, where population, economy, and built-up land area are higher than urban areas, present the opportunities and challenges to sustainable development. Using large-scale and high-granular spatial data (e.g., population, economy, land-use) from Fujian Province of China, we identified 69, 123, and 213 urbanized rural areas in 1995, 2005, and 2015 from 14,136 village-level administrative units. Spatial agglomeration, proximity to well-developed urban centers, and transportation accessibility are the important spatial factors influencing the development of the urbanized rural areas. Furthermore, we investigated the socioeconomic characteristics of the urbanized rural areas based on the Point of I...