No boundaries: exurbia and the study of contemporary urban dispersion

Abstract

The dream of a house in the country, at the seashore, or near a ski hill, is one shared by many in North American society. But the environmental and social impacts of the realization of this dream by an increasing number of people has created crises and conflict for many communities. The concept of exurbia has traditionally been used to describe settlement patterns simultaneously dispersed from the city yet also connected to urban networks. This paper reviews scholarship across disciplines including geography, ecology, sociology, and political ecology. Exurbia is here proposed to be strengthened as a powerful conceptual approach to capture and discuss the complex processes producing this phenomenon. Previous scholarship has produced excellent but largely disconnected work on the periurban zone around cities, exurban settlement processes, tensions between exurbanites and other rural residents, environmental impacts and habitat fragmentation. Future work on exurbia holds a great deal of promise to think about cultural values supporting the processes that produce these landscapes, working across scales from local to global using interdisciplinary and multi-method study.

Use of Applications With Georeferenced Contacts ‘Dating Apps’ to Identify Creative Areas

“…Being (N) public quantitative data from the City of Barcelona [29]; (G) public GIS data from the City of Barcelona [29]; (W) data retrieved from Wapo queries; (S) self elaborated from the previous sources. In this context, urban dispersion is taken as the definition given by Taylor [30], and Fillion [31] calculated by measuring average distances of buildings to each other. To address the lack of quantitative correspondence, all data layers described above were cross-referenced to find spatial correspondence with the results of the queries.…”

Rural identity and landscape aesthetics in exurbia: Some issues to resolve from a Central European perspective

“…In a literature review on the phenomenon of exurbia, Taylor (2011) states that the search for the "rural idyll" is a powerful factor in the residential decisions and conservationist activities of exurbanites. The presence of natural elements (Champion, 1998;Hart, 1995) and low residential density (Berube et al, 2006;Ryan, 2002) are the most widely discussed aspects of this concept.…”

“…The exurban settlement process is largely driven by incoming residents seeking amenities such as proximity to landscapes of high natural (Ryan, 2002) and aesthetic value (Gosnell and Abrams, 2011), or privacy (Taylor, 2011). Studies of the economic impact of amenity migration (e.g.…”

“…Studies of the economic impact of amenity migration (e.g. Carruthers and Vias, 2005), however, describe negative impacts of this migration, and subsequent changes in land use, on the scenic quality of the landscape that originally attracted the exurbanites (Sullivan, 1994;Taylor, 2011). Other studies (Hurley andWalker, 2004 Walker andFortmann, 2003) note that where this is the case, the exurbanites tend to control the use of natural amenity areas, disrupting socio-political relationships in these areas.…”

Theories of Urban Dynamics

“…The adaptation to the cyclical model seems quite acceptable [12], although, from certain positions, there is an insistence, now clearer, on the simultaneity of certain processes [11,13,14] and even on the tendency towards stabilization in all habitats [15].…”