Despite the fact that the rural commuter belts of cities are major loci of population change, economic growth and dynamic social change within city regions, most research tends to ignore this area while focusing on the built-up city core. However, with the current emphasis on the role of rural areas in policy debates, it is vital to recognize the importance of the 'commuter belt'. By comparing four major European cities (in England, France, Germany and Spain), this book offers the first comparative investigation of the dynamism of city rural hinterlands. It assesses whether rural areas will become effectively integrated into quality of life improvements as a result of their inter-dependencies with cities, focusing on the critical arenas of employment change, housing and service provision. In doing so, it investigates how change in these three fields impact on the quality of life and physical environment of rural hinterlands.

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead. Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

This interdisciplinary book brings together eleven original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, America and Japan which represent innovative and important research on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. They discuss the factors which determined the changing nature of port-hinterland relations in particular, and highlight the ways in which port-cities have interacted and intersected with their different hinterlands as a result of both in- and out-migration, cultural exchange and the wider flow of goods, services and information. Historically, maritime commerce was a powerful driving force behind urbanisation and by 1850 seaports accounted for a significant proportion of the world’s great cities. Ports acted as nodal points for the flow of population and the dissemination of goods and services, but their role as growth poles also affected the economic transformation of both their hinterlands and forelands. In fact, most ports, irrespective of their size, had a series of overlapping hinterlands whose shifting importance reflected changes in trading relations (political frameworks), migration patterns, family networks and cultural exchange. Urban historians have been criticised for being concerned primarily with self-contained processes which operate within the boundaries of individual towns and cities and as a result, the key relationships between cities and their hinterlands have often been neglected. The chapters in this work focus primarily on the determinants of port-hinterland linkages and analyse these as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction. Marking a significant contribution to the literature in this field, Port-Cities and their Hinterlands provides essential reading for students and scholars of the history of economics.

Despite the fact that the rural commuter belts of cities are major loci of population change, economic growth and dynamic social change within city regions, most research tends to ignore this area while focusing on the built-up city core. However, with the current emphasis on the role of rural areas in policy debates, it is vital to recognize the importance of the 'commuter belt'. By comparing four major European cities (in England, France, Germany and Spain), this book offers the first comparative investigation of the dynamism of city rural hinterlands. It assesses whether rural areas will become effectively integrated into quality of life improvements as a result of their inter-dependencies with cities, focusing on the critical arenas of employment change, housing and service provision. In doing so, it investigates how change in these three fields impact on the quality of life and physical environment of rural hinterlands.

Despite the fact that the rural commuter belts of cities are major loci of population change, economic growth and dynamic social change within city regions, most research tends to ignore this area while focusing on the built-up city core. However, with the current emphasis on the role of rural areas in policy debates, it is vital to recognize the importance of the 'commuter belt'. By comparing four major European cities (in England, France, Germany and Spain), this book offers the first comparative investigation of the dynamism of city rural hinterlands. It assesses whether rural areas will become effectively integrated into quality of life improvements as a result of their inter-dependencies with cities, focusing on the critical arenas of employment change, housing and service provision. In doing so, it investigates how change in these three fields impact on the quality of life and physical environment of rural hinterlands.

For centuries, cities have entertained close relationships of various kinds and qualities with their – adjoining or non-contiguous – hinterlands, the latter being structured around zones of agricultural production, transport corridors such as river systems, shipping routes or railway lines, market relations, but also issues of political domination, or landownership. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the blurring and re-negotiation of city-hinterland-relations under the auspices of fossil-fueled, industrialized and globalized economies and transitions in the energy base of societies became a dominant factor. A variety of new social forms of mobility, such as intra- and interregional migration, daily commuting and tourism, strengthened and at the same time complicated the interwovenness. Taking stock of regional case studies in Austria, Denmark, and Italy, this theme issue reflects on the historically changing relations between cities and rural areas, and on the factors which let cities and their hinterlands appear as a 'region' with a distinct social ecology and with a distinct economic, social and cultural profile. Particular emphasis is to be given to the 'making' and 'unmaking' of regions, the development of market relations over time, the changing framework conditions in terms of political constitution as well as changes in land use and the urbanizing effects of tourism in peripheral regions. Seit Jahrhunderten unterhalten Städte enge und komplexe Beziehungen mit ihrem jeweiligen Hinterland. Strukturiert wurden diese Hinterländer durch Zonen der landwirtschaftlichen Produktion, Verkehrskorridore, Marktbeziehungen, aber auch durch politische Dominanz oder Grundeigentum. Im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert wurden die Stadt-Hinterland-Beziehungen unter den Vorzeichen fossilenergetischer, industrialisierter und globalisierter Ökonomien und Gesellschaften neu verhandelt. Mobilitätsformen wie Migration und Tourismus intensivierten und komplizierten das Beziehungsgefüge. Basierend auf Fallstudien zu Österreich, Dänemark und Italien untersucht das Jahrbuch die sich historisch wandelnden Beziehungen zwischen Städten und ländlichen Gebieten sowie die Produktion sozio-ökonomischer, sozial-ökologischer und kultureller Regionalität.

This work provides an amalysis of European capital cities and their impact in the early modern period. Capital cities were dynamic and influential, accounting for more than a third of all European city growth during the 16th and 17th centuries. Some were ancient cities, like Paris and London; a number were new expressions of royal power, such as Madrid and Berlin; other were colonial cities, offshoots of state empires, like Dublin or Naples.