Rural Transformations : Globalization and Its Implications for Rural People, Land, and Economies

This book focuses on the transformation of rural places, peoples, and land endemic to the contemporary manifestations of globalization.

Migration, global economic restructuring, and climate change are rapidly transforming rural places across the globe. Yet, global attention characteristically focuses on urban social and economic issues, neglecting the continued roles of rural people and places. Organized around the three core themes of demographic change, rural-urban partnerships and innovations, and landscape change, the case studies included in this volume represent both the Global North and Global South and underscore the complexity and multi-scalar nature of these contemporary challenges in rural development, planning, and sustainability.

This book would be valuable supplementary reading for both students and professionals in the fields of rural land management and rural planning.

Holly Barcus is a DeWitt Wallace Professor of Geography at Macalester College (USA). Her interests reside at the intersection of migration, ethnicity, and rural peripheries. For the past 15 years she has been working in western Mongolia amongst the Kazakh population considering questions of identity, environment, and changing migration trajectories. She holds positions on the editorial board for the Journal of Rural Studies and as a co-chair of the International Geographical Union's Commission on the Sustainability of Rural Systems (IGU-CSRS).

Roy Jones is an Emeritus Professor of Geography at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, where he has worked since moving to Australia in 1970. He is an historical geographer with particular interest in the areas of rural and regional change. In 2013, he was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship of the Institute of Australian Geographers.

Professor Serge Schmitz teaches rural geography, tourism strategy, regional development, and landscape planning at the University of Liège (Belgium) and leads the Laboratory for the Analysis of Places, Landscapes and European countryside (Laplec), since 2007. Early work focused on land consolidations, natural parks, and landscape analyses. Today, his research focuses on multifunctional countryside, in Wallonia and around the world, with a special interest for heritage landscapes, rural tourism, and ways of dwelling.