Urban-Rural Relations in the Post-Urban World

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In Tigran Haas and Hans Westlund (Eds.) (2018) In the Post-Urban World: Emergent
transformation of cities and regions in the innovative global economy. London: Routledge,
pp. 70-81
Hans Westlund
Urban-Rural Relations in the Post-Urban World
”I’ll begin with the following hypothesis: Society has been completely urbanized. This
hypothesis implies a definition: An urban society is a society that results from a process of
complete urbanization. This urbanization is virtual today, but will become real in the future”
(Henri Lefebvre 1970/2003 p 1).
“…the city region is not just an expression of globalization but represents a more
fundamental change in the urbanization process, arising from the regionalization of the
modern metropolis and involving a shift from the typically monocentric dualism of dense
city and sprawling low-density suburbanization to a polycentric network of urban
agglomerations where relatively high densities are found throughout the urbanized region.”
(Edward W. Soja 2011, p 684).
”…as property size increases in a build environment, so does the distance between
various land uses, and thereby the amount of movement required for the same amount of
exchange and interaction. To fulfil the increased need for movement between places, the
domains dedicated to transportation are expanded, in length and breadth, creating even
greater distances between land uses.”
(Torsten Hägerstrand & Eric Clark 1998, p 25)
The first quote above is the first sentences in Henri Lefebvre’s book “The Urban revolution”, published
in French already 1970 but not until 2003 in English. In the introductory chapter he summarized the
results of this complete urbanization:
“…agricultural production has lost all its autonomy in the major industrialized nations and as part of a
global economy. It is no longer the principal sector of the economy, nor even a sector characterized by
any distinctive features (aside from underdevelopment). (…) as a result, the traditional unit typical of
peasant life, namely the village, has been transformed. Absorbed or obliterated by larger units, it has
become an integral part of industrial production and consumption. (…) In this sense, a vacation home,
a highway, a supermarket in the countryside are all part of the urban fabric. Of varying density,
thickness, and activity the only regions untouched by it are those that are stagnant or dying, those that
are given over to ‘nature’ (…) Small and midsize cities became dependencies, partial colonies of the
metropolis. In this way my hypothesis serves both as a point of arrival for existing knowledge and a
point of departure for a new study and new projects: complete urbanization. The hypothesis is
anticipatory. It prolongs the fundamental tendency of the present” (Lefebvre, 1970/2003, p 3f)
As Lefebvre’s book was not published in English until 2003, his ‘anticipative’ statements were for a
long time only known in the French-speaking world. During the counterurbanization of the 1970s (see
e.g. Beale 1975, Champion 1992), his claims were also provoking and contentious. However, during
the scant half-century since Lefebvre published his book, development itself has proved that he

indeed was on the right track, both theoretically and empirically. Society has become ‘completely
urbanized’. From the year 2008 more than 50 percent of the world’s population is living in cities (The
World Bank 2016). Currently there are about 500 cities with over one million inhabitants in the world
and it is estimated that in the year 2030 the number will be 663 (The Globalist 2015).
The second quote above is from Edward Soja. Soja (2000) discussed the transformation of cities and
suburbs in terms of ‘Postmetropolis’ regions, mainly based on experiences of the transformation of
Greater Los Angeles. One of the features of the postmetropolis regions are according to Soja, a
globalization of the urban population, resulting both in “the most culturally and economically
heterogeneous cities the world has ever known” (Soja 2011, p 683) and in increased social and
political polarization. However, this increased heterogeneity is paralleled with a “homogenization of
built environments, visual landscapes, and popular tastes and fashions” (Soja 2011, p 683). “Suburbia
and suburban ways of life are changing, becoming more dense and heterogeneous [in demographic
and economic terms], more like what the urban used to be” (Soja 2011, p 684). The result is the
transformation of big cities from dense centers with sprawling low-density suburbs, to polycentric city
regions with relatively high density all over.
The third quote above is a remark in Thorsten Hägerstrand and Eric Clark. Their observation reflects
another feature of global urbanization, viz. the transformation of dense cities to considerably sparser
city regions that include not only urban activities and land use but also former rural activities and land
use that have been integrated in ‘the urban fabric’. The transformation of cities to city regions is a
process in which market and planning have gone hand in hand. Markets of labor, housing and daily
consumption (incl. leisure) have been spatially extended by the population increase caused by
urbanization, but spatial extension without extended transportation infrastructure soon comes to a halt.
Planning and construction of infrastructure for trams, railroads, subways, cars, buses and trucks made
the forming of functional city regions possible – and the extended transportation infrastructure has also
made non-planned spatial extension of the city regions, like urban sprawl possible.
The three quotations might seem almost incompatible, but it is more reasonable to say that they
underscore different aspects of the urban transformation to a post-urban world. Lefebvre discussed
the urbanization of society at large in economic, social and cultural terms and how also rural areas are
integrated in this process, but he wrote his book before the age of globalization and he left the aspects
of density outside his analysis. Soja emphasize the transformation of the city-suburb dichotomy to
polycentric city regions with much more equalized population density than in the previous stage.
Hägerstrand’s and Clark’s remark about the increased need for movement between places concerned
the density issue at another spatial level. However, it is also strongly connected to the role of
transportation infrastructure for the ‘region enlargement’ outside the city-suburban fringe that takes
place as a result of improved transportation supply.
The notion of a post-urban world leads not only to a wide range of issues on the future of integrated
city regions and their internal and external networks. The fact that neither the urban nor the rural is
what it was, also leads to questions on the future of urban-rural relations. This chapter starts with an
overview of how urban-rural relations have been interpreted in spatial theories from the pre-industrial
era and onwards. It thereafter discusses urban-rural relations in the knowledge economy and the
dissolution of the urban-rural dichotomy in the post-urban world. Finally, possible development
strategies for the peripheral countryside to avoid turning back ‘over to nature’ are discussed.
From concentric rings to sprawling city-networks
The urban-rural dichotomy has existed ever since the origin of cities, i.e. when the agricultural surplus
was large enough to feed agglomerations of non-peasants. In the pre-industrial economy, cities
remained small (with a few exceptions) and agriculture’s productivity low. When von Thünen (1826)

presented his theory on the isolated state, around which the variations in land use could be described
in the form of concentric rings, it meant the foundation for spatial economic theory. The city and its
hinterland existed in a harmonic, mutual relationship, where the countryside produced for the city and
land use was determined by the yield of the land, the products’ prices and the costs for production and
transportation to the city. The theory described the major spatial relation of the pre-industrial economy,
i.e. the hinterland’s agricultural production (and production’s location) for the market in the city.
The agricultural and industrial revolutions were the signals to a wave of urbanization that changed
urban-rural relations considerably. The growing cities demanded increasingly more foodstuff, building
materials and firewood from their hinterlands and in addition they demanded raw material for their
industries. All this meant that the development of cities and their hinterlands went hand in hand.
Christaller’s (1933) central-place theory extended von Thünen’s theory from a single center and its
hinterland to a multitude of central-places at hierarchical levels. Central-place theory also included the
service sector that had developed within the manufacturing-industrial economy – but manufacturing
itself was left outside central-place theory. Instead, the location theory of manufacturing industry
developed along another strand of thought in which the contributions of Launhardt (1885), Weber
(1909), Palander (1935), Lösch (1940) and Hoover (1948) were important landmarks. A common
feature among these works was the focus on the spot of production and the costs of inputs, production
and transportation at that spot. The hinterland was no longer a fixed area, but varied with the type of
production. Another important difference from central-place theory was that the location theories of
manufacturing also laid an emphasis on the market outside the center of production. This was a
recognition of that the centers of production, the cities, not only interacted with places of higher or
lower order in the strict hierarchy, but with the rest of the world. Still, these location theories were
based on the traditional industrial manufacturing with exploitation of raw materials, transportation of
them to the production site, the processing of them to semi-factures or final products, and the
transportation to their markets.
The knowledge economy has brought tremendous changes to this relationship. Agriculture and
exploitation of raw materials have changed from labor intense to capital intense activities which has
meant that the demand for labor in these rural sectors has decreased to a small fraction of what is
was. Simultaneously, the transformation of the cities’ economies to knowledge economies means that
the input from the rural hinterlands stands for an ever decreasing share of cities’ inflows, and that the
share of cities’ production that finds its markets in the hinterlands steadily is decreasing. The
emergence of the knowledge economy has therefore brought new theories. It is no longer the single
industry that is in focus, but the agglomerations of production and consumption – cities – and the
interaction between them. Within the broad field of spatial sciences, various approaches on city-
system s (Pred 1977), world cities (Friedmann and Wolff 1982), global cities (Sassen 1991, Castells
1996), city-networks (Taylor et al. 2002), global city region (Scott 2001a, b) and global mega-city
region (Hall and Pain 2006) have been launched by leading scholars of different disciplines. Today,
these approaches and their implications are more or less taken for granted, but, as pointed out by
Taylor and Derudder (2015), they reflect a very different world than the paradigm that was dominating
half a century ago, the central-place theory. The “city-networks” theories have replaced central-place
theory as the dominating models as a consequence of that relations and exchange of the city-
networks have become so much more important than the relations and exchange between a city and
its rural surroundings. This circumstance has brought this “urban revolution” in the spatial sciences.
The main theoretical approaches for spatial interaction in the pre-industrial, the industrial and the
knowledge economy were briefly summarized above. What are the causes behind this transformation
from predominating central-place – hinterland relations to the city networks of today? A general
explanation might be the transition from regional and national pre-industrial and manufacturing-
industrial economies to a global knowledge economy (Westlund 2006). The generally small cities of
the pre-industrial world were in most cases totally dependent on their hinterlands for food, building
material and firewood. The few larger cities were those who had developed networks with the rest of

the world – by colonization, conquests and trade, but still their hinterlands were highly important for
them. Industrialization meant growth of many existing cities as well as emergence of many new ones.
The classic industrialization was based on exploitation of natural resources. They could be transported
on water or by the new means of transportation, the railroad, but there were often obvious cost-
minimizing reasons to exploit them on site in the home region and then transport the finished products
to their markets. In this way, the vast majority of cities in both the pre-industrial era and during the
manufacturing-industrial period were based on the dominating production factors of the periods, which
were local or regional natural resources.
The knowledge economy is in many ways different from its predecessors. One of the most important
differences is that human capital, i.e. people with knowledge and skills, has replaced raw materials
and physical capital as the main production and location factor. This has far-reaching consequences.
Natural resources and raw materials are no longer driving forces for regional development, as they
can be exploited by "fly-in-fly-out" workforce. The most important location factor for the knowledge
economy’s enterprises is instead trained workforce – which usually is found in large cities and
university towns. Large, diversified labor markets becomes a key location factor for both businesses
and labor, while also other attractive features as e.g. amenities are increasing in importance in the
competition between cities.
Another key difference between the knowledge economy and the manufacturing economy is the big
cities’ relationships to smaller cities and rural areas. The manufacturing economy built to a large extent
on regional raw materials, which created a certain balance between urban and rural areas. The
development of peripheral rural areas during the manufacturing economy can be considered
supporting Innis’ (1930) and North’s (1955) staple-base theory. Exogenous demand for natural
resources, energy and agricultural products brought incomes for consumption and investment to the
centers of exploitation – but changes in the capital/labor ratio or/and diminishing demand
subsequently turned expansion to retrogression.
The knowledge economy has created very different relationships between city and countryside. The
booming big cities have been transformed into city regions in which neighboring smaller cities, towns
and pure countryside have been integrated and become a part of the functional region, for which the
possibilities of commuting has become a decisive factor for the size of the region. Outside the big
cities are mainly large areas of countryside and smaller cities and towns that decrease in population.
As a rule, these large areas lack sufficient concentrations of the now most important production factor,
viz. human capital, which means that labor markets remain small and that the knowledge economy
has difficulties to grow there.
The emergence of metropolitan regions where small towns as well as rural areas are included, while
other, more peripheral rural areas and smaller cities ends "outside" means that the traditional urban-
rural dichotomy has disappeared. The cities that grow are decreasingly functioning as the centers for
their rural areas they once were, but increasingly as centers of multi-functional regions and nodes in
border-crossing city networks. Cities, towns and rural areas that fall outside the expansive regions
have in a relative sense less and less to offer the city regions and their global networks. If they cannot
create new exchanges with these city regions, based on what the expanding regions are demanding,
they end up in a downward spiral.
As pointed out by Westlund and Haas in the introductory chapter to this book, the post-urban world
can also be deducted from a Hegelian dialectical framework, in which a thesis is being met by an
antithesis and the two eventually are transformed into something new and ‘higher’: a synthesis. In our
case, the rural constitutes the original thesis and the urban materializes as the antithesis. Over time,
the rural thesis and the urban antithesis function as the two main poles of spatial interaction. The
industrial revolution was a substantial shift of balance between the two poles in favor of the urban. The
rise of the knowledge economy marked that a synthesis had arisen: the big cities have incorporated
surrounding towns and countrysides and transformed them to parts of multifunctional city regions that

are connected in global city networks. Outside are the remote parts of the former hinterlands that, in
the words of Lefebvre (1970/2003, p. 3), slowly “are given over to nature”. The urban-rural dichotomy
has terminated and a synthesis has emerged in which neither the city nor the countryside are what
they were. Instead, a Post-Urban W orld has arisen.
It should of course be pointed out that the rural surroundings of the city regions still are of importance
for the cities. Many people work in the city but live on the countryside. This means that the relations
between the city and the city-close countryside in certain aspects even have been strengthened and
that the city-close countryside has become an integrated part of the city region. However, cities’
(positive) influence on their surrounding regions decreases with distance. The potential for living in the
countryside and working in the city is depending on commuting time. Swedish studies (Johansson et
al. 2002) have shown that the share of commuters decrease rapidly after one hour’s commuting time.
Even though the acceptable commuting time varies between countries and regions due to traditions
and social conditions, the general pattern of that commuting is decreasing with distance is
undisputable.
It could also be argued that cities need agricultural products and building material, and that city
dwellers relax happy in their summer houses in the countryside – but these once strong city-hinterland
linkages are now urban-rural relations of a much wider context, far beyond what was the former
hinterland. Dairy products, bricks and construction timber are today subjects of a trade which is much
more extended than intraregional. Hinterland firewood for heating the city houses during winter was
once the single main commodity of many cities’ inflows, but is now totally replaced by other, non-
hinterland, energy resources. Rural summer houses in cities’ rural environments are still important
nodes for the extension of urban influence and demand to the surrounding region, but with increasing
incomes, proximity has become less important for the leisure house market, which has become
international and obtained a network character.
To sum up, the transformation from an agricultural, over a manufacturing-industrial, to a knowledge
economy has meant dramatic changes of urban-rural relations. This is reflected both in the ‘real’
economy and in the spatial-economic theories. With the ‘complete urbanization’ cities have become
less and less dependent on their former hinterlands and more and more dependent on their links to
other cities. We have come to a point where it is necessary to ask the question: Is the traditional
urban-rural dichotomy applicable at all on the relations between the current city regions, and the areas
outside them? This issue will be discussed in the next section.
The dissolution of the urban-rural dichotomy in the post-urban world
The above described development can be summarized in three points:
• Cities have developed from small, isolated islands in seas of countryside to city regions being
nodes of global city-networks. Their interactions with the hinterlands outside the city region
have gradually decreased in importance and are with ‘complete urbanization’ becoming
almost negligible.
• These conversions are strongly related to the prevailing type of economy of each period.
During the agricultural period, cities were heavily dependent on foodstuff from their
hinterlands. In the industrial economy cities were still strongly dependent on foodstuff and raw
material from the hinterlands but increasingly also on markets and inputs from other cities. In
the current knowledge economy, the dependency on hinterlands’ foodstuff and raw material is
small while the dependency of exchange with other city regions has multiplied.
• This transformation of urban-rural relations is reflected in the predominating theoretical spatial-
economic paradigms of each period.

Figure 1 depicts cities’ major economic linkages during the three economic periods. Figure 1A shows
the linkages between the market in the isolated city in the pre-industrial period and the agricultural
hinterland’s various belts of production, marked by rings. Figure 1B illustrates on the one hand that
cities are larger during the industrial period than previously. The industrial and agricultural revolutions
had changed urban-rural relations dramatically. Increased agricultural productivity meant that the
countryside could feed much larger urban populations. The industrial production in the growing cities
became the other side of this new relationship, with an urban-rural exchange at multiple levels
compared with the pre-industrial epoch. On the other hand, Figure 1B illustrates cities’ linkages to both
their hinterlands and to other cities that now acts both as markets for cities’ production as well as
sources of input for this production. Figure 1C marks that the predominating relationships of cities in
the knowledge economy are those between cities, while the relations to the former hinterlands have
withered down to negligibility. This is an aspect of the complete urbanization that Lefebvre anticipated.
The urban-rural dichotomy has been dissolved. However, if the urban-rural dichotomy, expressed in
the form of city and hinterland, has ceased to exist, how is this claim compatible with the examples
given in Section 2 of rural-urban commuting, rural summer houses and rural leisure activities? The
answer is that the former rural hinterlands, with the “complete urbanization” and the predominance of
city-networks, have ceased to exist as the prime provider of cities’ foodstuff and raw material, and with
this they have ceased to exist as traditional hinterlands. Instead, the rural areas that surround cities
have developed into two completely different types of areas: those that have become “part of the
urban fabric” and “those that are stagnant or dying, those that are given over to ‘nature’” (Lefebvre
1970/2003, p. 3).

Figure 1. Cities’ major spatial-economic linkages in: A, the preindustrial economy; B, the industrial
economy; and C, the knowledge economy.
The first type of rural areas, the city-close countryside has become a part of the city regions through
region enlargement. It is completely urbanized in all aspects but density of housing and population
(although this peri-urban countryside is more densely populated than the rural periphery). Otherwise,
the inhabitants have urban occupations, values, norms and culture, consumption patterns and
lifestyles. This transformation of the city-close countryside is particularly in Great Britain referred to as
“gentrification”, based on the fact that a conspicuous group of the inhabitants express are out-migrated
upper middleclass people enjoying a combined urban-rural lifestyle (see e.g. Phillips 1993). However,
it is not only former rural areas that are objects of this transformation. Also “small and midsize cities
became dependencies, partial colonies of the metropolis” (Lefebvre 1970/2003 p. 3). Thus, these city-
close parts of the former hinterlands become integrated in the expanding city regions. This
development not only transforms parts of the former rural hinterlands to component parts of the urban
system – it also transforms the big cities to city regions with a multitude of densities and activities,
among them also certain forms of agriculture that becomes an “urban agriculture”.
A. City and hinterland in
the pre-industrial economy
B. Cities’ interaction with hinterlands and
other cities in the industrial economy
C. City networks in the knowledge economy
with negligible hinterland interaction

For the other type of rural areas, beyond commuting distance to the growing city regions’ labor
markets, the development potential is significantly lower. Are they, with Lefebvre’s words, slowly being
“given over to ‘nature’”? The next section discusses possible strategies for the rural peripheries in the
post-urban world.
Possible strategies for the rural peripheries
The basic perspective is that cities, towns and rural areas that are located outside the positive
influence of the city regions lack any potential for endogenous growth and development and that only
exogenous demand for their products or resources can stimulate their economies to grow (Westlund
and Kobayashi 2013). Exogenous demand for foodstuff, raw material and energy made many of these
areas flourish during the industrial epoch, but ever increasing capital intensity in production has
reduced the need for labor in these sectors to a small fraction of what it was. Still, exploitation of ore,
oil shale and other minerals makes certain peripheral areas thrive – as long as the deposits are
profitable to exploit – even if increasing parts of the labor force is fly-in fly-out labor.
The growth of the tourism industry has brought attention to the concept of amenities. Amenities can be
defined as qualities of a place or a region that make it attractive for living and/or working in (Power
1988; Green et al. 2005a). From the definition it follows that amenities are not only attractive for
visitors, but also for in-movers and permanent residents in an area. Even if exploitation of natural
resources still is of importance in a number of rural areas, there has been a shift in rural economies
from resource extraction to use of amenities and there are examples in the US of that counties with a
high amount of natural amenities have experienced high employment growth in a broad range of
service sectors (Green et al. 2005a, Shumway and Otterstrom 2001). In an international research
overview, Naldi et al. (2015a) draw the conclusion that rural areas that are endowed with natural
amenities seem to have a better growth potential compared to other areas. A Swedish study Naldi et
al. (2015b) showed that external local conditions and local amenity supply are important factors in
determining the rate of new firm formation. A comparison of urban and rural neighborhoods showed
that the supply of nature- and culture-based amenities were relatively more important in explaining
new firm formation in rural regions, compared to urban regions.
However, even if certain rural areas have natural and cultural amenities that can make them attractive
for tourism or as residential areas, amenities per se are not enough. It must be possible for tourists to
get to the amenity rich areas at reasonable costs and it must be possible for residents in these areas
to commute to work in cities. Business life in amenity rich areas must have access to the urban
markets through good transportation infrastructure and broadband connections. Without infrastructure
for communication and transportation rural development will be impossible.
Several studies have shown that social networks and other aspects of social capital are of significance
for growth in rural communities. Kilkenny et al. (1999) showed the importance of reciprocated
community support for the growth of small businesses in small towns of Iowa, USA. Eliasson et al.
(2013) found a positive relationship between business owners’ opinion on the quality of the local
business-related social capital and economic growth in the municipalities of Sweden, and that the
importance of social capital decreased with municipality size. However, there are also studies that
indicate that local collaboration is not enough to achieve rural development. In a study of Swedish,
small food producing firms, Wixe et al (2016) showed the importance of extra-local and extra-regional
connections for rural firms’ innovation. This indicates that rural firms can compensate for lower
accessibility by building links to non-local and non-regional actors and markets.
Concluding remarks

The emergence of the post-urban world has meant a fundamental change in urban-rural relations. The
city-close countryside has become integrated in the city-regions while the peripheral countryside is,
with certain exceptions, less and less needed by the city regions. Just like developed countries have
their largest exchange with each other rather than with developing countries, the cities that have
expanded to become city regions have the largest exchange with each other rather than with their
former outer hinterlands. Distance-bridging networks have replaced linear distance as the main
principle for spatial interaction. For the survival of peripheral rural areas this is indeed a challenge.
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