Urban—Rural Flows and the Meaning of Borders

Abstract

This article focuses on political and everyday interplay and integration between city and hinterland, investigating borders and boundaries in such interplay. Five Norwegian city-regions served as the empirical basis for analysing two empirical fields. In the first field — everyday mobility and flow — institutionalized interactions between the cities and their hinterlands were analysed as well as objectives and meaning as motivations in everyday mobility in the city-region between city and hinterland. In the second field — urban-regional economic development policy — the questions addressed related to the degree to which governance networks are developed as a tool in local economic development policy, the geographical span such networks have, and the degree to which actors are motivated by the idea of creating a city-region where the importance of borders is decreasing. The issues were discussed in a theoretical frame related to urban and boundary theory.The results demonstrated the multitude of meanings with regard to borders and boundaries, underscoring how fundamentally different cognitive approaches related to borders and flows are constituent in the two empirical fields as well as how borders and boundaries are used to separate and connect in fulfilling purposeful ends.

Youth migration, rurality and class

“…As rural societies and actors are exposed to the same national social forces as are their urban counterparts, they develop similar social and cultural practices. The practical boundaries between city and countryside are blurred, though the representational boundaries are affected to a lesser extent (Hidle et al, 2009). At the same time, the integration into wider social structures leads to disintegration of the previously coherent rural societies.…”

Urban–Rural Interactions in Latvian Changing Policy and Practice Context

“…The most important reasons are: (1) the diffusion of rural non-agricultural activities and employment, (2) the increase of suburbantype settlement forms and urban -rural commuting and (3) the spread of urban life style in rural settlements (Khorev, 1971, p. 372). Through everyday, weekly or seasonal human interactions (commuting, experience, information and commodity exchange) physical and socially constructed urban -rural borders are changing, particularly in expanded city regions (Hidle et al, 2009). Modernization paradigm changed the way urban -rural linkages are being perceived and interrelated with the other binary dimensions of nature society (Andersson et al, 2009;Woods, 2009).…”

Urban GHG accounting: discrepancies, constraints and opportunities

“…• administrative approach (Hartshorne 1933;Aguilar et al 2003) • functional approach (Brown & Holmes 1971;Douglass 2000;Hidle et al 2009) • morphological approach (Benediktsson et al 2003;Rashed et al 2003) It is important that the selection of urban-specific system boundaries is based on the concrete targets and policy goals or governance structure (Seto et al 2014;Liu et al 2015) as it can have a substantial influence on the results of the analysis. Nowadays, the topic is poorly addressed in accounting methods.…”