Impact of Globalization on Rural Areas: Changes in Land Use and Functions, Deagrarianization, Tertiarization, Urbanization, and Mobility

Dear Colleagues,

This special issue focuses on how recent processes of globalization modify socio-economic organization and land use in rural areas, both in those integrated into peri-urban and metropolitan areas and in deep and remote rural spaces, at the local and regional territorial level.

Recent rural dynamics have been characterized principally by several interrelated trends: deagrarianization, economic and cultural diversification, population changes, and increased mobility. Although these modifications are common to all rural areas, the manner of their production and the effects they generate, vary greatly from one territory to another depending on different socioeconomic, infrastructural, and cultural circumstances.

It is true that deagrarianization and the simultaneous shift towards a service economy in today’s rural economies and societies have not resulted in the total or partial elimination of some of the characteristics of such territories that are usually associated with rural spaces. But it is also true that some rural areas are undergoing an extraordinary territorial and economic transformation, sometimes described as “new rurality” and at other times as rural urbanization. These changes primarily affect those areas located between the countryside and the city, where intensive processes of rural urbanization, suburbanization, and peri-urbanization are taking place, but also, although in different ways, those rural areas that are more distant and less connected to urban spaces.

In the past, the activities of the primary sector have been essential in rural areas, but today—without these activities having disappeared from the countryside altogether and with them continuing to be a sign of rural identity—their social, economic, and cultural significance has been steadily declining both in absolute and in relative terms. As activities and functions normally conceptualized as urban have gained in importance, agricultural activity, even though highly modernized and intensified, has become relatively less important.

The events noted above have weakened and substantially modified agrarian activities and transformed land use patterns in rural regions. However, in recent decades, agricultural activities have begun acquiring new functions. Factors common to most rural areas are the recognition of biodiversity and heritage values in agricultural uses and the compatibility of both with the production of quality food. These concepts include ecosystem services, peri-urban agricultural parks or domestic market agriculture, and urban productive landscapes.

The different forms of land use, especially in terms of legal regulations related to the provision of land for residential construction, for industrial establishments, and for various types of infrastructure, are critical tools to take advantage of territorial development. Therefore, integrated urban–rural development must be approached through the experimentation of new policies for land use and management.

There are many unanswered questions about the impacts of globalization on rural areas. Contributions to this Special Issue could serve to provide some useful answers for the implementation of land and landscape planning projects and plans.

We kindly invite papers linking the factors mentioned above, rural urbanization, deagrarianization, land management, land-use planning, urban expansion into rural areas, and integrated rural–urban development.

Prof. Dr. Carmen Delgado-Viñas
Prof. Dr. María L. Gómez-Moreno
Guest Editors

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