Peri-urban interfaces - the zones where urban and rural areas meet - suffer from the greatest problems to humans caused by rapid urbanization, including intense pressures on resources, slum formation, lack of adequate services such as water and sanitation, poor planning and degradation of farmland. These areas, home to hundreds of millions of people, face unique problems and need distinctive and innovative approaches and solutions. This book, authored by top researchers and practitioners, covers the full breadth and depth of the impacts of rapid urbanization on livelihoods, poverty and resources in the peri-urban zones in diverse African, Asian, Latin American and Caribbean contexts. Topics include peri-urban resource sustainability, ecosystems and societies and environmental changes in peri-urban zones. Rich case studies cover production systems and livelihoods including the impacts of irrigated vegetable production, horticulture, dairy enterprises, waste-fed fisheries and pastoral livelihoods. Also addressed are planning and development issues in the peri-urban interface including the difficulty in achieving sustainability, conflict and cooperation over resources, and a fresh look at the relationship between people and their environment. The final part of the book presents policies and strategies for promoting and measuring sustainability in peri-urban zones including community-based waste management, the co-management of watersheds and empowerment of the poor. This book is the most comprehensive examination of the challenges and solutions facing the people and environments of peri-urban zones and is essential reading for all practitioners, students and academics in geography and development.

What is the urban–rural interface? Is it a visual phenomenon, a place where country gives way to neighborhoods and shopping areas in a startling way? Is it a simple factor of population density? There is nothing simple about the urban–rural interface—editors David Laband, Graeme Lockaby, and Wayne Zipperer present the broad spectrum of interdisciplinary complexities at play. Organized into three sections on changing ecosystems, changing human dimensions, and the dynamic integration of human and natural systems, this book is a must read for anyone who works in the real world, where natural and human systems are joined. This is the new sustainability science, an emerging discipline that integrates social and economic values with the physical, chemical, and ecological functions of ecosystems. The goal is optimal management, since our human impact is often significant and far-reaching in both space and time.

This book highlights the important role of the complex nature of interactions between rural and urban areas in Africa and how this relates to sustainable development on the continent – one with a fast urbanization rate. The volume critiques the widely held assumption of a societal divide where rural areas are mostly agricultural, whilst urban areas engage in industry and services. Contributors provide conceptual arguments and present case studies in Africa which illustrate the complex and multifaceted interdependencies between cities and rural areas, through the flow of natural resources, people, capital, information, goods and services which directly impacts the socio-ecological as well as economic sustainability of these spaces. This volume forms part of an Education for Sustainable Development in Africa (ESDA) book series involving the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability and 8 partner African universities running Master’s Programs in sustainable development. The book series is intended to serve primarily as undergraduate and graduate instruction materials for courses on sustainable development in Africa, as well as policy input to key developmental issues in Africa.

Sustaining the rural and urban populations of the developing world has been identified as a key global challenge for the twenty-first century. Rural-Urban Interaction in the Developing World is an introduction to the relationships between rural and urban places in the developing world and shows that not all their aspects are as obvious as migration from country to city. There is now a growing realization that rural-urban relations are far more complex. Using a wealth of student-friendly features including boxed case studies, discussion questions and annotated guides to further reading, this innovative book places rural-urban interactions within a broader context, thus promoting a clearer understanding of the opportunities, as well as the challenges, that rural-urban interactions represent.

With a current population inflow into cities of 200,000 people per day, UN Habitat expects that up to 75% of the global population will live in cities by 2050. Influenced by forces of globalization and global change, cities and urban life are transforming rapidly, impacting human welfare, economic development and urban-regional landscapes. This poses new challenges to urban governance, while emerging city networks, advancing geo-technologies and increasing production of continuous data streams require governance actors to re-think and re-work conventional work processes and practices. This book has been written to enhance our understanding of how governance can contribute to the development of just and resilient cities in a context of rapid urban transformations. It examines current governance patterns from a geographical and inclusive development perspective, emphasizing the importance of place, space, scale and human-environment interactions, and paying attention to contemporary processes of participation, networking, and spatialized digitization. The challenge we are facing is to turn future cities into inclusive cities that are diverse but just and within their ecological limits. We believe that the state-of-the-art overview of topical discussions on governance theories, instruments, methods and practices presented in this book provides a basis for understanding and analyzing these challenges.

Discusses the role of small towns as agents for rural improvement and focuses on the links provided by small towns to both rural areas and larger towns. Reviews the role of selected indigenous nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in supporting the activities of small enterprises in small towns and rural areas. Covers trends from the 1960s.

This book has been initiated by the workshop on Cultural heritage in changing landscapes, held during the IALE (International Association for Landscape Ecology) European Conference that started in Stockholm, Sweden, in June 200 1 and continued across the Baltic to Tartu, Estonia, in JUly. The papers presented at the workshop have been supported by invited contributions that address a wider range of the cultural heritage management issues and research interfaces required to study cultural landscapes. The book focuses on landscape interfaces. Both the ones we find out there in the landscape and the ones we face while doing research. We hope that this book helps if not to make use of these interfaces, then at least to map them and bridge some of the gaps between them. The editors wish to thank those people helping us to assemble this collection. First of all our gratitude goes to the authors who contributed to the book. We would like to thank Marc Antrop, Mats Widgren, Roland Gustavsson, Marion Pots chin, Barbel Tress, Tiina Peil, Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann for their quick and helpful advice, opinions and comments during the different stages of editing. Helen Soovali and Anu Printsmann together with Piret Pungas - thank you for technical help.