The Interaction between Urban and Rural Areas: An Updated Paradigmatic, Methodological and Bibliographic Review

Abstract

The relationships and interactions between rural and urban spaces have long been of interest in the territorial sciences. However, the approaches taken to these questions have evolved in line with the changing characteristics of the two types of territories, reflecting new relationships and structures. From these premises, we update the concept of rural–urban interaction by means of an extensive bibliographic review, which, among other results, highlights: (1) the profound change that has taken place in recent years in rural–urban interaction through processes such as de-agrarianisation, the tertiarisation of the economy and improvements in transport and communication infrastructures; (2) the resulting obsolescence of earlier typologies and procedures focused on discrimination between rural and urban environments, rather than on the interaction between them; (3) the difficulty of establishing valid, widely applicable typologies, given the profound differences in terms of (a) the scale and content of the statistics available in each country and (b) the territorial background in terms of economic functions and the characteristics, ancient and modern, of human settlement; (4) the predominance of an urban-centric approach, to the detriment of more traditional rural functions, such as agriculture, the importance of which is diluted by its low relative weight in terms of employed population and contribution to GDP. Consideration of these findings leads us to propose a new approach to the question of rural–urban interaction, reflecting the multifunctionality of rural spaces, and we identify useful areas for future research.

Reconversion of Agri-Food Production Systems and Deagrarianization in Spain: The Case of Cantabria

“…The socio-territorial transformations of urbanized, peri-urban, and perimetropolitan rural areas have been analyzed in recent decades by various authors [42][43][44][45], some of whom have argued that rural development initiatives can serve to alleviate the excessive growth of urbanized rural areas while also mitigating the economic inferiority of spaces that have usually been considered less developed and analyzed under the double perspective of the absolute primacy of agricultural activity and the small population size of human settlements [46].…”

Untitled

“…Rural entrepreneurship refers to entrepreneurial activity in a rural setting. The characteristics of the rural context play a significant role, but globalization and social/economic transformations can complicate the differences between rural and urban societies, making rural spaces multifunctional places where infrastructure has been improved, and the economy has been outsourced (Delgado-Viñas & Gómez-Moreno, 2022). It seems that rural entrepreneurship focuses on agricultural and livestock activities and yet, today, rural areas offer various economic opportunities classified as rural entrepreneurship outside of primary sector activities.…”

Urban Rural Interaction: Processes and Changes in the Marina Oriental of Cantabria (Spain)

“…Defining and differentiating rural and urban spaces has become a complex task. The concept of rural has been changing during the last decades from being a synonym of backwardness and only linked to agrarian activity to having more and more positive meanings and being associated with quality of life, with much more variety of uses, economic activities, and functions than it had in the past [19,20]. It has gone from rural spaces whose only function was essentially the production of food and raw materials to something more plural and multifunctional, defined by many authors with the expression "new rurality" 1 .…”