Sustainable Geographical Changes in Rural Areas: Key Paths, Orientations and Limits

Abstract

Rural differentiation processes have formed the backbone of rural studies. Owing to the strength of rural–urban and local–global relationships, the theoretical approaches to rural restructuring in the Anglo-Saxon world and new rurality in Latin America only have a limited capacity to explain contemporary global phenomena of rural spaces. Due to this, transverse theoretical and methodological approaches have emerged to explain social, environmental and spatial (rural) processes. Here, a new approach is proposed called the individual–global field, based on the individual–global binary category to substitute the traditional relevance of the locality–community–globality association This new approach tries to reinvigorate rural geography in a more flexible way, based on minor theory, to adapt to all the phenomena that can occur globally. In any case, various spatial planes are proposed, dominated by specific socioeconomic processes on which the rural individual would move.

Transition Characteristics and Driving Mechanisms of Rural Settlements in Suburban Villages of Megacities under Policy Intervention: A Case Study of Dayu Village in Shanghai, China

“…In terms of research areas, the structural dimensions of rural change and their transition characteristics have been widely documented in the literature in recent decades [2]. Empirical cases exist not only in the Global North, such as in Britain [42,43], France [44], Spain [45], Italy [19,26], and the United States, but also in the Global South, such as in African and South American countries [46]. In China, different areas have been studied, such as the Bohai Rim region, the capital region, the mountain area, and the central region [47][48][49][50].…”

Sustainable Geographical Changes in Rural Areas—Social, Environmental and Cultural Dimensions

“…Two years after starting this Special Issue, it is necessary to delve into the heterogeneity of the various academic trends and the multiple rural realities across the world. There is a fragmentation of tendencies or approaches [1] in the global North as the plurality of academic orientations widens and, in parallel, relatively autonomous theoretical orientations emerge in the global South. In the global North, rural geographic theory has been dominated since the 1990s by political economy and socio-cultural approaches and more recently by the moral and ethical dimension of new ruralities and the rural emotions or by the (re)materialization of rural geographic studies.…”

“…In addition to an essentially theoretical contribution to the emergence of new autonomous arguments in the academic context of the global South [1], the three empirical and spatially localized contributions reflect transformation processes in the Global South in African countries such as Uganda [3], Asian countries such as China [2] or Southeast Asian countries such as xfMalaysia [4].…”