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.

The book examines the extent to which the sustained population growth of Australia’s heartland regional centres has come at the expense of demographic decline in their own hinterlands, and, ultimately, of their entire regions. It presents a longitudinal study, over the period 1947-2011, of the extensive functional regions centred on six rapidly growing non-metropolitan cities in south-eastern Australia, emphasising rapid change since 1981. The selected cities are dominantly service centres in either inland or remote coastal agricultural settings. The book shows how intensified age-specific migration and structural ageing arising from macro-economic reforms in the 1980s fundamentally changed the economic and demographic landscapes of the case study regions. It traces the demographic consequences of the change from a relative balance between central city, minor urban centres and dispersed rural population within each functional region in 1947, to one of extreme central city dominance by 2011, and examines the long-term implications of these changes for regional policy. The book constitutes the first in-depth longitudinal study over the entire post-WWII period of a varied group of Australian regional cities and their hinterlands, defined in terms of functional regions. It employs a novel set of indices which combine numerical and visual expression to measure the structural ageing process.

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.

Governance of Europe's City Regions considers the changing role of the European Union in regional issues, explores how national governments have become increasingly involved at the regional scale and examines the constitutional and political contexts in which regional and local governments operate. Detailed case studies of regionals in Germany and England illustrate contrasts in European approaches to the scale of government, and the complex interactions of international, national, regional and local scales of policy intervention. The book offers a unique perspective, which links together an analysis of both regional Europe and the local economic and political factors that shape successful regions.

This book for the first time thoroughly investigates the extent of economic and institutional integrations and the underlying governance reshuffling process of China’s city-regionalism. By using the Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou sub-region (SDH) in southern China as an empirical case, this book provides convincing evidence that China’s city-regionalism is essentially a state-orchestrated and institution-based process. Perspectives from “market-industry-infrastructure” and multi-level governance (MLG) have been provided to systematically examine China’s city-regionalism. This book has essentially made a definitive contribution to China’s regional governance. Methodologically, it shows how China’s city-regionalism can be examined through a problem-solving and case-by-case paradigm, through building a bridge between an empirical slogan and an inclusive theoretical term for institutional integration and through MLG and its integrative approaches in China. Exhilarating findings are presented using extensive tables, graphs, and maps along with the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. Undergraduates, graduates, and researchers who are interested in China’s city-regionalism and regional governance would be the readership of the book, and officers from different levels of government as well as policymakers will find the book inspiring.

This is Volume II of thirteen in a series on Urban and Regional Sociology. Originally published in 1964. This book, like its predecessor in this series (City Region and Regionalism, 1947), is not about planning. It is concerned with the inherent geographical structure of society upon which planning must be based, and it insists that knowledge of the spatial anatomy of society must precede the treatment of its defects. The study is limited to the countries of the United States and western Europe, though its procedures and generalizations can be extended to other lands.