Rural Development: Assessing Vitality, Vulnerability, and Versatility of Communities with Remote Sensing

This book aims to foster a dialogue within and across rural communities, practitioners, academics, and decision-makers for interdisciplinary collaborations and informed actions. It offers knowledge about challenges faced by rural communities around the world to assess their Vulnerabilities, Vitality assets, and Versatility to react in a time of global threats and discusses the opportunities and the limits of new technologies, such as remote sensing, to assess these rural conditions. The case studies and examples included discuss how rural communities cope with emergencies and unexpected changes from outside and how to collaborate for achieving better preparedness.

Features

• Provides a practical guide with resources and applications for researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers exploring rural development challenges worldwide
• Introduces the emergent concept of “Vitality, Vulnerability and Versatility” to better grasp the challenges of ural communities
• Offers a valuable set of tools to assess rural vulnerability and vitality and focuses on long-term rural transformations that are meaningful for various communities
• Integrates remote sensing technology and explores its opportunities and limits when used in different environments
• Includes real-life case studies from different countries to illustrate how rural conditions assessment can be performed
• Introduces a visual roadmap to facilitate and compare rural assessment between and within rural communities

This book is an insightful resource for practitioners, researchers, graduate, and senior undergraduate students in the fields of urban/regional planning, land management, geography, environment studies, and remote sensing, as well as agencies and NGO institutions working with rural communities.

Dr Luc Ampleman is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Management of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. He is a former governmental advisor for the Ministry of Transport of Québec and a transport planner in Canada’s northernmost region of the Province of Québec. His research interests cover local geopolitics, sustainable mobility in remote areas and transport diplomacy. He is the author of Transport Diplomacy: Planning Narratives and Mobility Cooperation published by Routledge.

Prof. Dr. Ir. Walter Timo de Vries has been Chair of Land Management at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) since 2015. His current research interests at TUM include smart and responsible land management, urban and rural development and land consolidation. Recent publications include the CRC/Taylor and Francis books Geospatial Science for Smart Land Management: An Asian Context, Sustainable and Smart Spatial Planning in Africa, Responsible and Smart Land Management Interventions: An African Context and Advances in Responsible Land Administration.