Search Results (315)

Social sustainability has become a central concern in development-induced resettlement, yet little is known about how social integration and community relations are sustained over long time horizons. Drawing on a retrospective longitudinal ethnographic reconstruction spanning 21 years (2004–2025) of Three Gorges Dam resettlers relocated to rural Anhui, China, this paper examines the co-evolution of group boundaries, interaction strategies, and social networks between migrants and local residents. Using group boundary theory, we identify three sequential phases of interaction: initial boundary demarcation and social distancing, subsequent bridge-building through economic cooperation and relational ingratiation, and a later stage of pragmatic, transactional engagement. We show that the gradual erosion of migrant–local boundaries is driven by economic interdependence, cultural adaptation, individualization, and rural out-migration. Rather than resulting in deep social fusion, long-term integration stabilizes in a form of “thin integration,” characterized by low-density but sustainable social ties, institutionalized conflict resolution, and routine coexistence. This study conceptualizes social integration as a dynamic process of social sustainability, demonstrating how resettled communities maintain social order and functional cohesion amid structural change. The findings contribute to debates on sustainable rural development, forced migration, and the long-term governance of resettlement communities. Full article

Sustainable development affects the quality of life of spatially diverse populations, and the pursuit of improved living conditions—both objective and subjective—is often associated with residential relocation. This article examines population movements from urban to rural areas outside agglomerations. Quantitative research was first conducted to assess population changes in rural areas in Poland between 2002 and 2024 and to determine the role of urban-to-rural migration in this process. The second stage consisted of qualitative research conducted among residents of selected Polish villages. The results indicate that the largest scale of migration from urban to rural areas outside agglomerations occurred in the western part of the country, particularly in the Dolnośląskie and Wielkopolskie Voivodeships, which are characterised by high levels of socio-economic development and good spatial accessibility. New residents—counterurbanists—primarily selected areas with high natural values. The decision to relocate to the countryside stemmed mainly from a desire for lifestyle change. In many cases, the opportunity to live in rural areas enabled newcomers to realise their aspirations of establishing their own businesses, which improved both their quality of life and that of the local community. Full article

In the context of China’s accelerated urbanization process, the increasing number of rural-to-urban migrants has become an integral part of urban economic development. Ensuring stable housing for the floating population is essential to facilitating their integration into urban society and promoting the realization of their health rights. Drawing on data from a large-scale survey of Chinese internal migrants, this study empirically analyzes how homeownership influences health services accessibility in rural-to-urban migrants. The findings indicated that homeowners exhibited approximately 18.4% higher odds ratio of accessing public health services compared to renters. This result remained robust after addressing potential reverse causality using instrumental variable approaches and correcting for self-selection bias through propensity score weighting methods. Meanwhile, the mediating effect decomposition showed that migrants’ perception of acculturation and community participation played parallel mediating roles in the relationship between homeownership and health services accessibility. Furthermore, the heterogeneity analysis revealed that the positive impact of homeownership on health services accessibility was more pronounced among individuals with lower household income and shorter migration duration. Our research underscores the importance of securing stable housing for rural-to-urban migrants as a key determinant in advancing the equitable development of urban health systems. Full article

Cancer is one of the biggest health burdens for women in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), with the incidence of breast, cervical and colorectal cancer on the rise. Although preventive measures such as the HPV vaccination and population-based screening are available, access to them remains very unequal. Women in rural, low-income and refugee communities face additional barriers, cultural stigmatisation, low health literacy, gender norms and fragile health systems, leading to delayed diagnoses and poorer outcomes. This review summarises the results of 724 peer-reviewed publications to assess the current situation of cancer screening in MENA and Mediterranean countries. The studies were classified into four dimensions: cancer type (breast, cervical, colorectal), behavioural constructs (awareness, uptake, education), vulnerability factors (e.g., migrants, refugees, low-literacy groups), and geography (indigenous MENA populations versus diaspora and Mediterranean immigrant communities). The results show large inequalities in access and participation due to fragmented policies, socio-cultural resistance and infrastructure gaps. Nevertheless, promising approaches are emerging: community-led outreach, mobile screening programmes, AI-assisted triage and culturally appropriate digital health interventions. Comparisons between the local and diaspora populations make it clear that systemic and cultural barriers persist even in well-equipped facilities. Closing the screening gap requires a culturally sensitive, digitally enabled and policy aligned approach. Key priorities include engaging religious and community leaders, promoting men’s engagement in women’s health and securing sustainable funding. With coordinated action across all sectors, MENA countries can build inclusive screening programmes that reach vulnerable women and reduce preventable cancer mortality. Full article

In the rapid development of rural tourism, multiple disturbances, such as capital reorganization, uneven resource distribution, and the marginalization of farmers as the main body, have emerged. This has led to the dual challenges of increased vulnerability and insufficient resilience of farmers’ livelihood systems in the face of risk shocks. Based on survey data of the “Agri-Tourism–Commerce–Culture Integration” demonstration zone in China, this study integrates the Pressure–State–Response model into the analysis of livelihood resilience and constructs a “vulnerability–adaptability–recuperability” tri-dimensional framework. Through methods such as the entropy weight method, the synthetical index method, grey relational degree analysis, and the obstacle degree model, this study measures the levels of different livelihood types of farmers in each dimension of livelihood resilience and their influencing factors. The research findings indicate that the overall livelihood resilience of farmers in the study area was at a medium level, with vulnerability making the most significant contribution, reflecting that the current livelihood system is dominated by risk resistance. Different types of farmers exhibit heterogeneity in resilience, with tourism-oriented farmers showing the highest resilience and agriculture-oriented farmers the lowest. However, tourism-oriented farmers also display the most prominent vulnerability, revealing the tension between short-term efficiency enhancement and long-term risk diversification in single livelihood strategies. Key factor analysis reveals that vulnerability correlates most strongly with livelihood resilience. The most correlated indicators are the price increase rate, proportion of migrant workers, and neighborhood trust in the vulnerability, adaptability, and recuperability dimensions. Diagnosis of obstacle factors reveal that loan accessibility, land resource dependency, and agricultural risk perception rank as the top three common obstacles, with tourism-driven farmers exhibiting higher obstacle degrees than other farmer categories. These findings not only validate the empowering effect of rural tourism on farmers’ livelihoods but also reveal the different livelihood strategies chosen by various farmers. Based on the results, this study proposes policy recommendations of “common optimization + individual adaptation” to enhance farmers’ livelihood resilience. This is conducive to transforming external support into farmers’ endogenous resilience capabilities and provides a useful reference for achieving the deep integration of rural tourism and farmers’ livelihood systems. Full article

This study utilizes the push–pull framework to examine the impact of homestead and urban homeownership on Chinese migrants’ willingness to settle in urban areas in the long term, as well as the moderating role of local homeownership. The results show that homestead has a significant pushing effect on migrants’ long-term residence, whereas local homeownership has a significant pulling and positive moderating effect. In addition, we conducted multiple robustness tests to confirm the validity of our findings. Moreover, urban homeownership exerts significantly heterogeneous effects on long-term migration across different ages, income levels and regions. Also, migrants who own homesteads and housing are more inclined to relocate to urban areas within the same provinces rather than moving to major cities. Furthermore, we identified the mechanism that local homeownership promotes social integration, which, in turn, strengthens migrants’ long-term residence intentions in urban areas. This study enriches research on China’s land systems and urban migration and aims to shed light on enhancing existing migrant welfare, optimizing housing policies and facilitating urban integration. Full article

Employment promotion and employment realization are the core and fundamental problems in the resettlement of land-expropriated farmers transferred to citizens. To solve this problem, it is necessary to clarify the key factors and mechanisms that affect the employment behavior of “farmers to citizens” workers. Taking the labor force from land-expropriated “farmers to citizens” in the construction of Beijing city sub-center as the research object, this paper utilizes Logistic ISM to determine the key factors affecting the employment behavior of the labor force when changing from rural to urban, as well as the internal logical relationship and hierarchical structure among the influencing factors. The results show that only 40% of the migrant workers in the sample have achieved employment, while 69% of the unemployed population have a willingness to work but are limited by age, skills, and family factors. The logistic regression model identifies that the employment behavior of land-expropriated farmers is significantly affected by 10 factors, including gender, age, work experience, hobbies, employment demand, expenditure change, employment difficulty cognition, government training, policy satisfaction and social security. Among them, ISM further reveals that these factors form a three-level hierarchical mechanism of “structure–cognition–behavior”; gender, social security and policy satisfaction are the deep-root factors, and the intermediate factors, such as hobbies and government training, affect employment demand, employment difficulty cognition and other surface factors, and ultimately affect the employment behavior of land-expropriated “farmers to citizens”. Based on this, it is proposed to start from four aspects: differentiated employment guidance, policy transmission optimization, service efficiency improvement, and industrial driving, to systematically promote the realization of more comprehensive and stable employment for the rural-to-residential population, and provide institutional guarantees and practical paths for their sustainable livelihoods. Full article

China’s rapid urbanization has created the world’s largest internal migration, increasingly shaped by women’s participation. Co-migrant mothers—rural women who bring their children to cities—occupy complex roles as workers, wives, and caregivers. Existing studies focus on left-behind mothers or individual coping, but little is known about how co-migrant mothers collectively reshape motherhood through urban spatial and social change. Based on fieldwork in a Guangzhou migrant community, this study develops the “disembedding–re-embedding–reconstruction” framework to show how mobility reconfigures motherhood. Moving from villages to cities disembeds mothers from the moral surveillance that enforces self-sacrificing norms. Community-based organizations (CBOs) then serve as re-embedding sites where women form new maternal subjectivities through mutual support and reflection, producing a locally rooted idea of self-caring motherhood. This idea reframes care as reciprocal rather than self-depleting and affirms mothers’ emotional and bodily well-being as part of family life. Finally, these values are reconstructed in households through subtle temporal and spatial negotiations that adjust gendered divisions of labor without open conflict. Highlighting collective empowerment and spatial transformation, this study moves motherhood research beyond individualized lenses and reveals grounded, pragmatic forms of gendered agency in China’s rural–urban migration. Full article

The dual Hukou system, originating in China’s planned economy period, structured Chinese society into separate urban and rural segments, thereby generating distinct sets of rights and benefits for agricultural and non-agricultural residents regarding land, social security, education, and healthcare. Urban home purchase is a pivotal indicator of social integration for rural–urban migrants in destination cities. While the literature has extensively examined migrants’ residential conditions in China, the institutional impact of the agricultural hukou system—a core constraint—on their urban homeownership, along with its underlying mechanisms and heterogeneity, remains underexplored. To address this gap, this study adopts a twofold approach: theoretically, it employs the separating equilibrium model in housing markets with incomplete information to verify that agricultural hukou acts as an institutional barrier to migrants’ local home purchases; empirically, it uses data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) and applies the Fairlie decomposition method to quantify the constraint effect. The empirical results suggest that agricultural hukou exerts a 29.72% suppressive effect on migrants’ urban home purchase behavior. This effect operates indirectly by weakening migrants’ long-term settlement intention, which serves as a mediating variable. Moreover, the hindrance of agricultural hukou varies heterogeneously across groups, differing in education level, generational cohort, and regional distribution. To advance the fair and sustainable development of the real estate market, we advocate accelerating hukou reform by decoupling public services from residence status, fostering inclusive urbanization, and ensuring equitable development of housing markets. Full article

Financial literacy, defined as the set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable individuals to make informed economic decisions and manage resources efficiently, is fundamental for social inclusion and the reduction of inequalities. This study, through a systematic review of the scientific literature using the PRISMA methodology, selected 120 primary studies that met the inclusion and exclusion criteria and presented a low risk of bias. These studies examined aspects related to financial literacy programs, the populations benefited, their effects, the challenges encountered, and the lessons that can guide the replication of these initiatives. The results show that the most frequent programs include training in basic financial concepts—savings, budgeting, access to banking services and microfinance—as well as workshops, seminars, and group training sessions. The populations most benefited were rural communities and women, although informal workers, migrants, and refugees could also significantly improve their financial inclusion and economic resilience. Among the positive effects, improvements were observed in income and expense management, increased savings, investment planning, preparation for emergencies and retirement, and the strengthening of economic empowerment and the sustainability of microenterprises and small enterprises. These findings highlight the importance of implementing financial literacy programs adapted to specific contexts to promote inclusion and economic well-being. Full article

Our study examines whether the inflow of rural-to-urban migration increases the productivity of manufacturing firms in China, using cross-sectional data from the 2005 China 1% Population Survey and the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms. The analysis accounts for firm heterogeneity—including ownership, export orientation, and industry type—and explores the moderating role of regional minimum wage policies. The results indicate that the inflow of rural-to-urban migration significantly enhances firm productivity through agglomeration effects, technological efficiency, and cost advantages, and the findings remain robust under alternative specifications. Productivity gains are most pronounced among private, non-exporting, and technology-intensive firms, while the effects are weaker or insignificant for state-owned and exporting firms due to higher skill requirements and labor mismatches. At the regional level, moderate minimum wage standards amplify the productivity benefits of migration, whereas higher wage levels reduce cost advantages. These results highlight that the productivity effects of rural-to-urban migration are context-dependent—shaped by firm characteristics and regional wage settings. The study contributes new empirical evidence to the international literature on labor mobility and sustainable industrial productivity and provides policy insights aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizing differentiated regional and sectoral strategies for inclusive and sustainable growth. Full article

The paper examines the current landscape, as well as the promises and pitfalls, of the digital transition in agricultural production and rural areas in Greece. It questions whether digitalisation is a viable option given the demographic dynamics, gaps in digital infrastructure, and heavy reliance on migrant labour in rural Greece. The methodological approach employs a mixed-methods design, integrating statistical and cartographic analyses of available census data with qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, and a focus group). The main research question is grounded in a brief theoretical framework that addresses critiques of the inevitability of technological innovation and highlights the need to understand the complex dynamics of digital change. The paper analyses the dynamics and challenges of digital change in rural Greece, examining how demographic change and ageing, the structure and size of farms, and dependence on migrant labour relate to gaps and inequalities in digital infrastructure and skills. A critique of the prevailing discourse on digital transformation is supported by a discussion of the recently collected qualitative empirical material. The concluding section highlights the key findings and provides policy recommendations. Full article

This paper examines the humanitarian, social, and economic disruptions resulting from the 2023–2024 closure of the Lukeville, Arizona, Port of Entry (PoE). Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, including semi-structured and informal interviews, observation, and participation in local community events, we examine how a rural, unincorporated community handled a historic border closure. Further, we analyze how the closure impacted migrants, especially asylum seekers, who were excluded from protection due to bureaucratic and discretionary decision-making. The closure not only disrupted asylum access but also humanitarian aid networks, local economies, cross-border families, and Indigenous sovereignty, producing a geography of sanctioned neglect. These findings demonstrate how federal enforcement decisions, often made without considering borderland communities’ realities, frequently lead to their further destabilization while these areas are already navigating structural abandonment. We conclude with recommendations emphasizing harm reduction and preparation practices to mitigate future disruptions. Full article

China’s urbanization has witnessed a significant influx of people pursuing better economic prospects. However, as digitization becomes increasingly integrated into urban living, it raises the bar for migrants’ digital literacy, and creates adaptation challenges for rural migrants. Despite a few pieces of literature having analyzed how micro-level economic and social characteristics of rural migrants affect their urban living quality in inflow areas, few studies have examined the influencing factors of migrants’ urban living quality from the perspective of digitization level of the inflow areas, which is a nonnegligible environmental factors in modern China. Based on the data of China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS), this paper empirically examines how urban financial digitization in inflows affects rural migrants’ urban living quality. The impact of financial digitalization on urban living quality of rural migrants presents a significantly positive “U” shape. That is, with the improvement of financial digitalization, rural migrants’ urban living quality in inflow areas would first decline and then increase. The mechanism study shows that the financial digitization affects rural migrants’ living quality through urban settlement intention as intermediary variable. Furthermore, heterogeneity across education attainment, migration scope and duration were investigated. The results of the study provide empirical evidence on how to make rural migrants obtain better life experience with the development of urban digitization. Full article

Urban-to-rural migration is reshaping vernacular villages through transformations in both architectural form and everyday life. This study focuses on three villages in Zhejiang Province, China, and their migrants from urban areas, investigating—through field surveys and interviews—how urban-to-rural migrants’ spatial and lifestyle interventions influence the preservation and transformation of traditional architecture and local cultural practices. Findings indicate that urban-to-rural migrants exhibit diverse spatial preferences and lifestyle patterns, leading to varied modes of building adaptation. Some prioritize modern styles and commercial functions, while others emphasize cultural continuity, community engagement, or individual expression. Most buildings undergo incremental modifications rather than complete reconstruction, reflecting a balance among regulatory constraints, financial considerations, and personal aspirations. Furthermore, some migrants retain traditional spatial hierarchies and layout logic in their architectural designs, thereby sustaining vernacular lifestyles such as intergenerational cohabitation and neighborhood interaction. These building practices also have demonstrative effects within the village, encouraging others to value local culture and spatial traditions. In contrast, other migrants, driven by modern aesthetics or commercial objectives, restructure or even disrupt traditional spatial models, resulting in the fragmentation and weakening of established value systems. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of how urban-to-rural migration reshapes the spatial organization of traditional villages and can inform more flexible and context-sensitive rural planning practices. Full article