Approaches to analyzing the rural-urban interface: Comprehensive development views from town and countryside

Abstract

The urban-rural interface has usually been studied from the point of view of cities with different sectoral interests and very little from rural perspectives. Nevertheless, these kinds of areas need to be studied from both points of view and from comprehensive approaches that could reflect their complexity. Thus the work is oriented to make a comparative analysis of two main approaches to dealing with the rural-urban interface in a Latin-American context: one coming from towns and the other from the countryside, where both of them include the sustainable and a territorial perspective of development. The analysis has taken into account economic, social, environmental and political-institutional issues, as well as urban-rural interactions. Results underline some contributions of such approaches to theory and practice of planning and management of these spaces; such as the value of a complex systems view, planning in different spatial scales and time scenarios, the territory as a support of socio-economic and environmental processes and the role of local actors in this transformation. To conclude, rural development has been arising as an emergent field where medium and small size towns play an important role in linking production with local and global markets and enforcing rural-urban relationships in urban systems. © 2010 WIT Press.