The Interaction between Urban and Rural Areas: An Updated Paradigmatic, Methodological and Bibliographic Review

Carmen Delgado-Viñas () and María-Luisa Gómez-Moreno
Additional contact information
Carmen Delgado-Viñas: Department of Geography, Urban and Regional Planning, University of Cantabria, 39005 Santander, Spain
María-Luisa Gómez-Moreno: Department of Geography, University of Málaga, 29070 Málaga, Spain

Land, 2022, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-21

Abstract: The relationships and interactions between rural and urban spaces have long been of interest in the territorial sciences. However, the approaches taken to these questions have evolved in line with the changing characteristics of the two types of territories, reflecting new relationships and structures. From these premises, we update the concept of rural–urban interaction by means of an extensive bibliographic review, which, among other results, highlights: (1) the profound change that has taken place in recent years in rural–urban interaction through processes such as de-agrarianisation, the tertiarisation of the economy and improvements in transport and communication infrastructures; (2) the resulting obsolescence of earlier typologies and procedures focused on discrimination between rural and urban environments, rather than on the interaction between them; (3) the difficulty of establishing valid, widely applicable typologies, given the profound differences in terms of (a) the scale and content of the statistics available in each country and (b) the territorial background in terms of economic functions and the characteristics, ancient and modern, of human settlement; (4) the predominance of an urban-centric approach, to the detriment of more traditional rural functions, such as agriculture, the importance of which is diluted by its low relative weight in terms of employed population and contribution to GDP. Consideration of these findings leads us to propose a new approach to the question of rural–urban interaction, reflecting the multifunctionality of rural spaces, and we identify useful areas for future research.

Keywords: urban sprawl; rural–urban integration; countryside urbanisation; deagrarianisation; land use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q15 Q2 Q24 Q28 Q5 R14 R52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/8/1298/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/11/8/1298/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jlands:v:11:y:2022:i:8:p:1298-:d:885892

Access Statistics for this article

Land is currently edited by Ms. Carol Ma

More articles in Land from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().