Article
Special Issue on Amenity migration, exurbia, and emerging rural landscapes
GeoJournal
(2011)
Abstract
Introduction by special issue editors.
Special issue here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10708-009-9335-0
Trends of amenity migration and exurbanization are changing the ways many rural landscapes around the globe are used, imagined, and transformed. The articles in this special issue examine these trends in diverse ways, providing a ‘state of the research’ view of amenity migration and exurbia from the perspectives of rural and cultural geography and political ecology. This research engages difficult questions about increasingly common land uses in high amenity rural and exurban areas and the environmental ideals and policies that are associated with these places. The assembled articles suggest that environmental governance and ideology may be inadequately aligned with diverse needs and desires in the many places experiencing exurbanization. The rural is still too often thought of as removed from modern globalized networks of mobility and representation, and rural governmental institutions facing exurbanization and amenity migration are often unequipped to grapple with the multiple competing interests that constitute diverse and changing rural agendas. By focusing mainly on protecting particular rural landscape attributes or specific ecological attributes, or on facilitating urbanization processes and development opportunities, environmental management practices may often miss opportunities to engage with the complex mixing of urban and rural and to facilitate dialogue across competing perspectives.
The geographical research in this special issue helps to elucidate the context and causal structures associated with the complex relationship between urban and rural, particularly in regions experiencing dispersed urbanization and exurban landscape change. This research considers the breadth and diversity of conditions and locations in which amenity migration is reworking rural landscapes, as well as the politics that accompany and result from these changes. This focus highlights the ways that the urban and the rural are closely intertwined. For example, urbanizing regions can be particularly susceptible to changing trends in land economics and environmental management practices, and exurban environmental policies and representations are often strongly influenced by urban imaginaries and ideologies of rural nature. Increasingly global in both extent and character, the amenity of rurality has played a volatile role in dispersed urbanization over the past century.
Disciplines
Publication Date
2011
Citation Information
K. Valentine Cadieux and Patrick T. Hurley. "Special Issue on Amenity migration, exurbia, and emerging rural landscapes" GeoJournal (2011) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/kvalentine-cadieux/19/