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.

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead. Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

This interdisciplinary book brings together eleven original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, America and Japan which represent innovative and important research on the relationship between cities and their hinterlands. They discuss the factors which determined the changing nature of port-hinterland relations in particular, and highlight the ways in which port-cities have interacted and intersected with their different hinterlands as a result of both in- and out-migration, cultural exchange and the wider flow of goods, services and information. Historically, maritime commerce was a powerful driving force behind urbanisation and by 1850 seaports accounted for a significant proportion of the world’s great cities. Ports acted as nodal points for the flow of population and the dissemination of goods and services, but their role as growth poles also affected the economic transformation of both their hinterlands and forelands. In fact, most ports, irrespective of their size, had a series of overlapping hinterlands whose shifting importance reflected changes in trading relations (political frameworks), migration patterns, family networks and cultural exchange. Urban historians have been criticised for being concerned primarily with self-contained processes which operate within the boundaries of individual towns and cities and as a result, the key relationships between cities and their hinterlands have often been neglected. The chapters in this work focus primarily on the determinants of port-hinterland linkages and analyse these as distinct, but interrelated, fields of interaction. Marking a significant contribution to the literature in this field, Port-Cities and their Hinterlands provides essential reading for students and scholars of the history of economics.

This work provides an amalysis of European capital cities and their impact in the early modern period. Capital cities were dynamic and influential, accounting for more than a third of all European city growth during the 16th and 17th centuries. Some were ancient cities, like Paris and London; a number were new expressions of royal power, such as Madrid and Berlin; other were colonial cities, offshoots of state empires, like Dublin or Naples.

In the context of mounting challenges stemming from a rapid transformation of the urban-regional landscapes in many Asian countries, this book highlights a multifaceted array of issues that increasingly engage the academic and planning communities in search of viable solutions to complex problems facing us. Even though cities continue to dominate development studies, urbanization of Asia is evolving toward a hybrid urban-rural nexus beyond the cities. This volume considers these shifting dynamics of Asian urbanization, including urban spatial transformations and their ramifications in the context of sustainability and planning. Through the lens of a set of empirical studies across diverse disciplines, geographies and methodologies. yet with an overarching concern for sustainability in varied (but interconnected) areas such as climate change, land use planning, infrastructure and urban mobility, and quality of life, these studies examine a range of important topics (e.g., flooding, transportation, housing, open space/ green space, urban garden and such) in city/regional settings. Together, they add insights into varied transformational processes or patterns at work on the urban-regional landscapes in a number of Asian countries while offering innovative approaches or alternatives. The proposed volume fills a gap in urban/regional studies in context of South and Southeast Asia that will be of interest to all stakeholders (e.g., planners, administrators, academicians and the citizenry), particularly those interested in sustainability and planning paradigms. It should be a timely and valuable addition to the Asian urbanization literature.

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.

This interdisciplinary collection explores the diverse relationships between the frequently ignored and inherently ambiguous hinterlands and their manifestations in literature and culture. Moving away from perspectives that emphasize the marginality of hinterlands and present them as devoid of agency and “cultural currency”, this collection assembles a series of original essays using various modes of engagement to reconceptualize hinterlands and highlight their semiotic complexity. Apart from providing a reassessment of hinterlands in terms of their geocultural significance, this book also explores hinterlands through such concepts as nostalgia, heterotopia, identity formation, habitation, and cognitive mapping, with reference to a wide geographical field. Literary and filmic revisions of familiar hinterlands, such as the Australian outback, Alberta prairie, and Arizona desert, are juxtaposed in this volume with representations of such little-known European hinterlands as Lower Silesia and Ukraine, and the complicated political dimension of First World War internment camps is investigated with regard to Kapuskasing (Ontario). Rural China and the Sussex Downs are examined here as writers’ retreats. Inner-city hinterlands in Haiti, India, Morocco, and urban New Jersey take on new meaning when contrasted with the vast hinterlands of megacities like Johannesburg and Los Angeles. The spectrum of diverse approaches to hinterlands helps to reinforce their multilayered and multivocal nature as spaces that defy clear categorization.

This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water.

In Hinterlands and Commodities: Place, Space, Time and the Political Economic Development of Asia over the Long Eighteenth Century, well-known economic and social historians examine important questions concerning temporal and spatial relationships among central places, hinterlands, commodities, and political economic developments in Asia and the Global economy over the long eighteenth century. These timely essays engage hinterlands and commodities providing novel foci on historical impacts maritime trade on political economic developments involving place, space, and time in Asia, thereby furnishing historical background for current conditions. They contribute to discourse concerning historical interactions among indigenous Asian merchant activities and European commercial counterparts. Contributors are: George Bryan Souza, Dennis O. Flynn, Marie A. Lee, Ghulam A. Nadri, Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Tsukasa Mizushima, Tomotaka Kawamura, Atushi Ota, Ryuto Shimada, and Ei Murakami.

Winner of the Regional Studies Association's Best Book Award 2018. In the last few decades, many global cities and towns have experienced unprecedented economic, social, and spatial structural change. Today, we find ourselves at the juncture between entering a post-urban and a post-political world, both presenting new challenges to our metropolitan regions, municipalities, and cities. Many megacities, declining regions and towns are experiencing an increase in the number of complex problems regarding internal relationships, governance, and external connections. In particular, a growing disparity exists between citizens that are socially excluded within declining physical and economic realms and those situated in thriving geographic areas. This book conveys how forces of structural change shape the urban landscape. In The Post-Urban World is divided into three main sections: Spatial Transformations and the New Geography of Cities and Regions; Urbanization, Knowledge Economies, and Social Structuration; and New Cultures in a Post-Political and Post-Resilient World. One important subject covered in this book, in addition to the spatial and economic forces that shape our regions, cities, and neighbourhoods, is the social, cultural, ecological, and psychological aspects which are also critically involved. Additionally, the urban transformation occurring throughout cities is thoroughly discussed. Written by today’s leading experts in urban studies, this book discusses subjects from different theoretical standpoints, as well as various methodological approaches and perspectives; this is alongside the challenges and new solutions for cities and regions in an interconnected world of global economies. This book is aimed at both academic researchers interested in regional development, economic geography and urban studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers in urban development.