Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide: Towards Universally Sustainable Regional Economic Development
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Urban and Rural Development".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 January 2023) | Viewed by 8081
Special Issue Editors
Division of Applied Social Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
Interests: regional economics; sustainable rural economic development; rural entrepreneurship
Interests: regional economics; sustainable rural economic development; rural entrepreneurship
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The rural–urban divide has quickly become a major international topic, particularly following the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit vote a few months earlier. In both elections, long-ignored rural areas made clear their exasperation with the status quo by voting—often against their own economic interests—for nationalist agendas. Yet antagonisms between the two types of regions can easily dilute the potential prosperity of both to the broader detriment of sustainable political and economic fabrics.
This Special Issue aims to provide fresh insights into how rural and urban areas can collaborate and complement each other economically to the benefit of both. A core principle to this initiative is that individual global states and regions are each in unique positions to become leaders in building innovative bridges between rural and urban regions. Economic development is often considered a zero-sum game, where one region’s gain is another’s loss. In the U.S. case, urban areas have grown rapidly since the Great Recession. Urban areas also appear to be recovering more quickly from the COVID-induced recession, leaving rural areas further behind.
Yet matching urban industrial clusters with rural areas’ highly entrepreneurial cultures offers the unusual opportunity for all regions to succeed. Enterprises located outside of urban cores can reduce the quickly rising pressures on overstretched housing markets and infrastructure while simultaneously stimulating rural regions’ growth prospects. Information technology now allows the diffusion of location-neutral businesses and employees away from concentrated urban cores, all while still being connected to these centers of agglomerative economies. Rural regions’ lower costs of living and often higher quality-of-life can be tapped by those seeking precisely such amenities, secured by connections back to dynamic urban centers. Producer and consumer services may be particularly low-hanging sectoral fruit.
We seek frontier research that can illuminate current and potential economic bridges across the rural–urban divide. We are hopeful the papers from this issue will help to frame the diverse potential roles of the private, public, academic, and philanthropic sectors in one of the new millennium’s critical issues, based on the analytical expertise of the contributors. In that spirit, we welcome your participation in this venture and look forward to working with you. We will also feature special sessions at the 2020 North American Regional Science Council meetings in San Diego on the focal theme. More information on the conference can be found at http://www.narsc.org/newsite/
The rural–urban divide has quickly become a major international topic, particularly following the 2016 US Presidential election and the Brexit vote a few months earlier. In both elections, long-ignored rural areas made clear their exasperation with the status quo by voting—often against their own economic interests—for nationalist agendas. Yet antagonisms between the two types of regions can easily dilute the potential prosperity of both to the broader detriment of sustainable political and economic fabrics.
This Special Issue aims to provide fresh insights into how rural and urban areas can collaborate and complement each other economically to the benefit of both. A core principle to this initiative is that individual global states and regions are each in unique positions to become leaders in building innovative bridges between rural and urban regions. Economic development is often considered a zero-sum game, where one region’s gain is another’s loss. In the U.S. case, urban areas have grown rapidly since the Great Recession. Urban areas also appear to be recovering more quickly from the COVID-induced recession, leaving rural areas further behind.
Yet matching urban industrial clusters with rural areas’ highly entrepreneurial cultures offers the unusual opportunity for all regions to succeed. Enterprises located outside of urban cores can reduce the quickly rising pressures on overstretched housing markets and infrastructure while simultaneously stimulating rural regions’ growth prospects. Information technology now allows the diffusion of location-neutral businesses and employees away from concentrated urban cores, all while still being connected to these centers of agglomerative economies. Rural regions’ lower costs of living and often higher quality-of-life can be tapped by those seeking precisely such amenities, secured by connections back to dynamic urban centers. Producer and consumer services may be particularly low-hanging sectoral fruit.
We seek frontier research that can illuminate current and potential economic bridges across the rural–urban divide. We are hopeful the papers from this issue will help to frame the diverse potential roles of the private, public, academic, and philanthropic sectors in one of the new millennium’s critical issues, based on the analytical expertise of the contributors. In that spirit, we welcome your participation in this venture and look forward to working with you. We will also feature special sessions at the 2020 North American Regional Science Council meetings in San Diego on the focal theme. More information on the conference can be found at http://www.narsc.org/newsite/
Keywords
- Regional economic development
- Urban and rural economics
- Entrepreneurship
- Innovation
- Broadband
- Producer and consumer services
