Urban-Rural Linkages: beyond Euclidian space and city-regions.

1. Urban-Rural Linkages: beyond Euclidian space and city-regions. Professor Mark Shucksmith m.shucksmith@ncl.ac.uk

2. Urban-rural linkages: some official views • European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP): “development of a polycentric urban system and strengthening the partnership between urban and rural areas.” • Member states view growth and innovation as deriving from cities, and the benefits spreading to rural hinterlands. • Rural areas tend to be seen as residuals between dynamic urban growth nodes, rather than as areas with endogenous potentialities.

3. Central Place Theory: - Christaller’s hierarchy of settlements… Services in higher-level settlements will benefit rural hinterlands. Investment/ innovation in cities ‘trickles down’ Cities are the ‘engines of growth’ which pull rural carriages behind Urban-Rural Linkages- the classical view But the world isn’t really like this…

4. Beyond Euclidian space… • Globalisation – • “stretching and deepening of social relations”(Held) • “the annihilation of place by telemediated space” (Scholte) • Networks and flows – distanciated links, fast flows, knowledge networks and multi-scale processes. • Relational space – • Space as socially constructed and continuously co-produced • Connections between territories in terms of ‘relational reach’ rather than proximity • Development as multiple, non-linear, emergent complexity.

5. Zones of accumulation/depletion • Some truth in accessible/ remote rural distinction • But this also should be understood in terms of relational space, not Euclidian space…

6. Consider business networks • Courtney et al (1998) studied transactions of firms in 30 rural areas across EU. Found rural firms more linked to external sales networks than town firms, so cutting across settlement hierarchy. Moreover, those linked strongly into locality were low productivity, traditional firms, while more dynamic sectors were more externally networked. • Others have also demonstrated how firms in rural areas now operate in global and national networks...

7. Finland Case Study Virkkala’s work shows variety of urban-rural relations amongst firms in rural Finland.

8. Rural sites of innovation In England, innovation is higher in rural areas than in cities and other urban areas...

9. ... and rural economies grew faster than urban economies over the last decade… Average annual GVA growth by type of rurality in England, 1995-05 (from Experian and Nesta, 2007)

10. City Regions • Often classical view still dictates policy, as in ‘City Regions’. • In UK, Ward showed rural areas are viewed as pastoral backdrops – not sites of growth. • Meredith’s study of Ireland shows many rural areas are left out.

11. Conclusions So what have we learned? • Urban-rural relationships do not follow the simplistic classical, hierarchical view • These linkages are much more complex in globalised world and relational space • Rural areas have endogenous potentiality and are not merely the spaces between urban nodes • Policies rarely acknowledge this.