After Suburbia presents a cross-section of state-of-the-art scholarship in critical global suburban research and provides an in-depth study of the planet's urban peripheries to grasp the forms of urbanization in the twenty-first century. Based on cutting-edge conceptual thought and steeped in richly detailed empirical work conducted over the past decade, After Suburbia draws on research from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas to showcase comprehensive global scholarship on the urban periphery. Contributors explicitly reject the traditional centre-periphery dichotomy and the prioritization of epistemologies that favour the Global North, especially North American cases, over other experiences. In doing so, the book strongly advances the notion of a post-suburban reality in which traditional dynamics of urban extension outward from the centre are replaced by a set of complex contradictory developments. After Suburbia examines multiple centralities and diverse peripheries which mesh to produce a surprisingly contradictory and diverse metropolitan landscape.

New urban forms characterizing contemporary metropolises reflect a certain continuity with the patterns of the past. They also include unexpected forms of settlement and design that have emerged in response to social and economic needs and as a way of leveraging new technologies. Politics of the Periphery sets out to explore sub/urban governance in diverse contexts in order to better understand how materiality and space are shaped by the possibilities and constraints of confronting actors. This collection, edited by Pierre Hamel, examines the empirical aspects of collective action and planning in eight urban regions around the world – across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and reveals the impacts and consequences of various structures of suburban governance. The case studies feature a diverse range of local actors facing both the specificity of their respective milieus and the broader context of extended urbanization as metropolitan regions cope with new territorial challenges. The book focuses on suburbanization processes that characterize most of these post-metropolitan regions and questions whether it is possible to improve suburban governance in the face of growing uncertainties arising from structural and subjective transformations. Paying close attention to the relationship between the local and the global, Politics of the Periphery challenges the planning processes of evolving metropolitan regions.

Access to power and electricity is a vital resource for businesses and for sustaining the livelihood of consumers. However, producing reliable and renewable energy and distributing it in rural areas can be challenging. Such activities require special technical support measures for organizing a highly efficient and cost-effective production process. Renewable Energy and Power Supply Challenges for Rural Regions provides innovative insights into energy production, consumption, and distribution in rural regions and examines sustainable and renewable power sources. The content within this publication explores such topics as renewable energy, electrical network, and thermal energy storage. It is designed for electricians, policymakers, state officials, professionals, researchers, and academicians.

Promoting rural entrepreneurship is a necessary step to limit the negative effects of classical agricultural policy based on a linear process and attracting secondary resources to the economic process. The analysis of agricultural policy and rural development in conjunction to entrepreneurship in terms of production may represent a further step in understanding the role and importance of diversifying the rural potentials in contemporary economies. The Handbook of Research on Agricultural Policy, Rural Development, and Entrepreneurship in Contemporary Economies is an essential publication of academic research that examines agricultural policy and its impact on shaping future resilient economy in rural areas and identifies green business models and new business patterns in rural communities. Covering a range of topics such as entrepreneurship, product management, and marketing, this book is ideal for researchers, policymakers, academicians, economists, agriculture professionals, rural developers, business investors, and students.

Chen provides an analysis of the political economy of rural development in China during the reform era. Revolving around the central theme of statecraft, Chen's study gives a concise and comprehensive treatment of the interaction of ideology and politics with central policy and economic growth. He examines China's economic reform in historical perspective, characterizes China's economic and political transformation since the reform, and proposes that the Chinese Communist Party is being transformed into a party of economics while China's ideology is becoming market-oriented communal socialism.

In addressing the issue of the Chinese path of development, Chen discusses the role of local party organizations in China's modernization drive and the microform of market-oriented communal socialism in the newly emerged village conglomerate, highlights the challenges that China faces at the turn of the new century after 20 years of economic reform, and analyzes the context of the introduction of village elections in 1990, and the establishment of Deng Xiaoping's Theory as a new ideological discourse at the 15th National Congress as well as the rationale behind them. In examining the connection between the two goals of statecraft --improving people's welfare and strengthening the state--and between central policies and local initiatives, Chen provides a study that will be of great interest to scholars, students, and other researchers involved with contemporary Chinese politics and development.

Technology has always played a decisive role in humanity's progress. Throughout history, it has not only strengthened economic development but has become a powerful tool for human development. Nevertheless, the positive impact technology has on human development may become tainted by the risks it entails.ICT Influences on Human Development, Interaction, and Collaboration creates awareness on how ICTs contribute to human development in multiple areas. This publication describes the link between ICTs and human development, which includes economic, social, and political development. It identifies potential applications for the development of human beings and provides insightful analysis about those factors (also contextual and institutional ones) that affect ICTs for human development initiatives. This book addresses future challenges, proposing strategies to both governments and international cooperation organizations for moving forward.

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. Signs of a new position are the awakened interest in the nature, the authentic and the simple way of living among an urban, academically educated middle class, an actual instance of which is the interest in local food but which also is manifested in rural gentrification. However, a more hardcore turn to nature is also discernible in the renewed interest for green lungs and for eco-services more broadly. In the future, local post-fossil energy may be a main concern regarding rural eco-services utilised by urban areas. We can here imagine flows and exchanges that may demand heavy societal regulation and thus be one of the main objects of future democracy. However, despite these developments urban (and rural) policy and planning is still tightly connected to the modern expansion of the urban into the rural. There are signs of new developments and paradigm shifts but these have to be strengthened to lay the ground for rural-urban resilience.

For over a century, Yellowstone National Park has been a monument to wildness in America. But long before flames swept through Yellowstone in 1988, that wildness had come under fire from encroachments that were making the park one of our nation's most commodified pieces of real estate.

For as long as they've existed, parks like Yellowstone have been the scene of some of the most intensive commercial activity in the American West. Selling Yellowstone recounts the story of such activities in our oldest park from the 1870s through the 1960s. It is the first book to examine critically the place of business in the development of America's national parks, demonstrating the prominent role played by profit-driven entrepreneurs in shaping the physical landscape of what is generally perceived as unaltered wilderness.

Challenging popular perceptions that our national parks are protected from commercialism, Mark Barringer reveals how businessmen, with the support of the National Park Service, marketed Yellowstone as a museum of mythology: a landscape created to look like what Americans wanted to believe the Old West once was. Together, the NPS and the concessionaires--particularly Harry W. Child's Yellowstone Park Company--altered the park repeatedly to fit a desired image and then creatively promoted it for mass consumption. As a result, the concessionaires virtually owned Yellowstone, selling it piecemeal to receptive customers as if it were an inexhaustible commodity.

First marketed as a nature museum to be viewed from the comfort of stagecoach seats or hotel room windows, the park was transformed from a wilderness preserve to a series of roadside attractions. Roads were built to geysers and waterfalls; wolves were eliminated and bison were bred; visitors were given a choice between comfortable hotels and more rustic lodges and camps. The Yellowstone Park Company sought to meet all of the public's expectations, reaping the profits from satisfying American idealizations.

Contemporary environmental attitudes eventually forced significant policy changes in the parks, but shifting political winds continue to determine such matters as snowmobile access to Yellowstone. Barringer's book contributes to the ongoing debate over the character and limits of the social construction of nature as it raises important questions about what our national parks represent, why so many people continue to feel so strongly about them, and what must be done to protect them.

This important text book is the first to be written about infrastructure planning in Britain. Written by an experienced author, the book reviews the rapid rise in the use of infrastructure delivery planning at national and neighbourhood level. The key components of infrastructure delivery are set out and analysed, including the development of government policy, planning regulation, funding, environmental processes and legal challenges. Situating this within international, European and domestic economic, territorial and social policy, the author draws on a variety of practical examples to discuss the role of different institutions in the delivery of infrastructure and to illustrate the various issues and merits of each approach. This is a key text for those engaged in the study and application of infrastructure delivery planning including planners, engineers, public administrators and policy advisers.

Population shifts and an increase in the number of natural (and man-made) disasters are having a profound effect on urban and rural habitats globally. This book brings together for the first time the experiences and knowledge of international contributors from academia, research, policy and practice to discuss the role of spatial planning after significant disasters. It highlights on-going efforts to improve spatial resilience across the globe and predicts future trends. Comparisons from five countries including Japan, the US, Indonesia, Slovakia and Germany, highlight the influence of significant disasters on spatial planning and spatial resiliency under different legal-administrative and cultural frameworks.

For the past century, governments have been compelled, time and again, to return to the search for solutions to the housing and economic challenges posed by a restructuring countryside. The rural housing question is an analysis of the complexity of housing and development tensions in the rural areas of England, Wales and Scotland. It analyses a range of topics: from attitudes to rural development, economic change, land use, planning and counter-urbanisation; through retirement and ageing, leisure consumption, lifestyle shifts and homelessness; to public and private house building, private and public renting and community initiatives. Across this spectrum of concerns, it attempts to isolate the fundamental tensions that give the rural housing question an intractable quality. The book is aimed at policy makers, researchers, students and anyone with an interest in the future of the British countryside.

This edited book contains salient papers presented at the XII World Congress of Rural Sociology held in South Korea in 2008. These papers have been selected for their quality and have undergone a peer review process. The rationale behind this book rests on the desire to share the wealth of research presented at the World Congress with interested individuals who could not attend the event and it reflects the empirical work and thinking characterizing contemporary rural sociology. As this sociological sub-discipline evolves along with society and the rural world, it appears of paramount importance to make available ground-breaking research to the international scientific community. Rural sociology is changing and this volume testifies of this change by documenting the introduction of new themes of research as well as the evolution of established ones. In this regard, it provides a unique and uniquely international view of the most recent advanced production in rural sociology. The volume consists of eighteen chapters representing original pieces of research and an introduction that frames them in the context of the evolution of the discipline.

Sustainable development and rural policies have pursued strategies where farming has been often regarded as a factor deteriorating the ecosystem. But the current economic, social and environmental problems of the Earth probably call for examples of a positive integration between human society and nature. This research work presents more than a hundred case studies where the historical relationships between man and nature have generated, not deterioration, but cultural, environmental, social and economic values. The results show that is not only the economic face of globalization that is negatively affecting the landscape, but also inappropriate environmental policies. The CBD-UNESCO program on biocultural diversity, the FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems and several projects of the International Union of Forest Research Organizations, as well as European rural policies acknowledge the importance of cultural values associated to landscape. This research intends to support these efforts.

Planning is a battleground of ideas and interests, perhaps more visibly and continuously than ever before in the UK. These battles play out nationally and at every level, from cities to the smallest neighbourhoods. Marshall goes to the root of current planning models and exposes who is acting for what purposes across these battlegrounds. He examines the ideological structuring of planning and the interplay of political forces which act out conflicting interest positions. This book discusses how structures of planning can be improved and explores how we can generate more effective political engagements in the future.

This book draws on preeminent planning theorist Patsy Healey's personal experiences as a resident of a small rural town in England, to explore what place and community mean in a particular context, and how different initiatives struggle to get a stake in the wider governance relations while maintaining their own focus and ways of working. Throughout the book, Healey assesses the public value generated by community initiatives and the impact of such activity on wider governance dynamics. Healey explores the power which small communities are able to mobilise through self-organisation and grassroots activism. Through the lens of Wooler and Glendale as a micro-society, the book centres on a community experiencing an economic and demographic transition. It focuses on three initiatives developed and led by local people - a small community development trust, an informal attentionmobilising network, and a Neighbourhood Plan project which uses an opportunity provided within the formal planning system. It examines how, in such civil society activism, people came together to promote local development in a place and community neglected by the dominant political economy. The book details the power and force of community initiative and its potential for transforming both the future possibilities for the place and community itself, as well as wider governance relations. Overall, it seeks to enrich academic and policy discussion about how the relations between formal government and civil society energy could evolve in more productive and progressive directions.

This book, first published in 1985, provides an overview of resource management, together with a geographical treatment of physical, landscape and social resources. Drawing on British, European and North American material, the book has three main objectives: to offer an integrated review of the rural resource system, to isolate potential and actual conflicts between resources in the countryside with the aid of detailed case studies, and to explore various broad management techniques and their applicability to differing types of resource use and resource conflict. This title will provide important insight for students of geography, resource management, environmental planning and conservation.

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. By the mid-twentieth century, scholars had observed that many rural areas displayed a blend of rural and urban features. Since then, counter urbanisation, urban sprawl and ever-increasing flows of people, goods and ideas between rural and urban areas have blurred the distinctions even further. Attempts to create new rural-urban classification systems, whether based on factors such as population size, density or distances, have largely failed. Clearly, new classification systems must use the meaning of observed changes in rural-urban systems as their point of departure rather than simple measurements of these changes. These meanings can, despite the interdependencies of our global world, be explored only in their political, cultural and economic settings.

This book analyses the key forces affecting the affordability of rural homes in Britain and the changing shape of housing markets. It takes as its starting point, demographic trends impacting upon rural communities and upon market dynamics. From this point, it explores consequent patterns of housing affordability, examining changing opportunities in the rental and sale markets, at different spatial scales. The book also focuses on how markets are analysed, and how data are selectively used to demonstrate low levels of affordability, or a lack of need for additional housing in small village locations. Building on the demographic theme, the book considers the housing implications of an aging population, before the focus finally shifts to community initiative in the face of housing undersupply and planning's future role in delivering and procuring a more constant and predictable supply of affordable homes. In a speculative conclusion, the book ends by examining the current political trajectory in England, and the prospects for housing in the countryside in the context of localism and neighbourhood planning at a village level. This book was published as a special issue of Planning Practice and Research.

First published in 1965, this reissue is a report on the Second Rehovoth Conference of August 1963, convened by the then Deputy Prime Minister of Israel, Mr Abba Eban, in order to enable the scientists and political leaders of developing countries to establish meaningful communication on the overall topic of comprehensive planning of agriculture in developing countries. Conference discussions centred on the three main topics of; agricultural planning and rural development; the human factor in agricultural development; and agricultural research, extension, and education.

The aim of this book is to explore the challenges facing rural communities and economies and to demonstrate the potential of spatial microsimulation for policy and analysis in a rural context. This is done by providing a comprehensive overview of a particular spatial microsimulation model called SMILE (Simulation Model of the Irish Local Economy). The model has been developed over a ten year period for applied policy analyis in Ireland which is seen as an ideal study area given its large percentage of population living in rural areas. The book reviews the policy context and the state of the art in spatial microsimulation against which SMILE was developed, describes in detail its model design and calibration, and presents example of outputs showing what new information the model provides using a spatial matching process. The second part of the book explores a series of rural issues or problems, including the impacts of new or changing government or EU policies, and examines the contribution that spatial microsimulation can provide in each area.

This book presents selected papers from the 8th International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies in Agriculture, Food and Environment (HAICTA 2017) which examine sustainable rural development in the context of environmental, economic, and the socio-cultural dimension. This book raises awareness of the importance of sustainable management in agriculture using examples of actual industry cases, sustainable management practices, new forms of rural cooperation and entrepreneurship.

Not since the 19th century has the future of the countryside been such a focus of political and public attention, nor of profound uncertainty and anguished debate. A watershed has now been reached, and in this time of unprecedented change, new tools are needed for planning and managing the countryside. Increasingly the 'drivers' of countryside management and conservation are European and international. They aim to provide comprehensive new frameworks for the whole countryside, and encourage community-driven planning and protection. There have been numerous responses at the country and local levels within the UK. In this book, a broad range of scholars and practitioners review the international drivers affecting countryside policy and practice, and - through a variety of case studies - they assess the value of country and local responses. The result is a powerful and coherent volume that provides a fully up-to-date review and analysis of the pressures on the countryside, the policies for the future and the keys to successful implementation. Countryside Planning is essential reading for planners, local authorities and rural organizations, conservationists and environmental groups, as well as academics and students in planning, rural studies, environmental studies and geography.

Not since the 19th century has the future of the countryside been such a focus of political and public attention, nor of profound uncertainty and anguished debate. A watershed has now been reached, and in this time of unprecedented change, new tools are needed for planning and managing the countryside. Increasingly the 'drivers' of countryside management and conservation are European and international. They aim to provide comprehensive new frameworks for the whole countryside, and encourage community-driven planning and protection. There have been numerous responses at the country and local levels within the UK. In this book, a broad range of scholars and practitioners review the international drivers affecting countryside policy and practice, and - through a variety of case studies - they assess the value of country and local responses. The result is a powerful and coherent volume that provides a fully up-to-date review and analysis of the pressures on the countryside, the policies for the future and the keys to successful implementation. Countryside Planning is essential reading for planners, local authorities and rural organizations, conservationists and environmental groups, as well as academics and students in planning, rural studies, environmental studies and geography.

With trust in top-down government faltering, community-based groups around the world are displaying an ever-greater appetite to take control of their own lives and neighbourhoods. Government, for its part, is keen to embrace the projects and the planning undertaken at this level, attempting to regularise it and use it as a means of reconnecting to citizens and localising democracy. This unique book analyses the contexts, drivers and outcomes of community action and planning in a selection of case studies in the global north: from emergent neighbourhood planning in England to the community-based housing movement in New York, and from active citizenship in the Dutch new towns to associative action in Marseille. It will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and for postgraduate students on social policy, planning and community development courses.