Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/20462
Title: Demographic Change: Beyond the Urban-Rural Divide
Contributor(s): Argent, Neil  (author)orcid 
Publication Date: 2016
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/20462
Abstract: At the most basic level of analysis, rural societies are constituted by the people that live within their spaces and places. Of course, it is the many and various social, cultural and economic relationships among these people as well as their demographic characteristics that can be said to shape the distinctiveness of rural places (Panelli, 2006). Increasingly, these places are being moulded by relationships that are 'stretched out' across space, from the local through to global scales. Rapidly increasing levels of personal migration and mobility into and out of rural regions across the globe, emanating from seemingly ineluctable processes of modernisation, industrialisation and urbanisation, are drawing rural and urban together, unsettling long-established dichotomous notions of the two entities' apparently separate natures. Simultaneously, and given that voluntary human physical mobility is always inextricably intertwined with social mobility, these population shifts are centrally implicated in the creation, or persistence, of sociospatial inequality. This intertwining of demographic, socioeconomic and political change can be seen in such diverse instances as the 'gentrification of the countryside' in Western, high-amenity rural regions and localities, and the plight of the 'left behind' populations in rural China and in other, Western nations, as the young migrate to take up more remunerative employment in burgeoning industrial cities. Rural populations within these different societies are also changing across time and space in structural terms. For example, long-term, secular trends towards declining fertility and smaller household sizes are combining with variegated patterns of international and internal migration to produce altered national and regional population growth trajectories and age-sex structures. One of the key outcomes of these dynamics is accelerated and structural ageing of rural communities, a demographic trend that is raising a number of challenges for service provision and community development, particularly in more remote areas. In these contexts, this chapter introduces this section of the Handbook by, first, briefly considering the long-standing but increasingly blurred spatial and social taxonomies regarding rural and urban, second, offering a broad account of the diverse 'shapes' of global north rural populations and contemporary demographic issues and, finally, providing a brief synopsis of each of the section chapters.
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies, p. 29-35
Publisher: Routledge
Place of Publication: London, United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781138804371
9781315753041
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 160499 Human Geography not elsewhere classified
Fields of Research (FoR) 2020: 440612 Urban geography
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 970116 Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2020: 280123 Expanding knowledge in human society
280114 Expanding knowledge in Indigenous studies
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
Publisher/associated links: http://trove.nla.gov.au/version/225069096
Series Name: Routledge International Handbook Series
Editor: Editor(s): Mark Shucksmith and David L Brown
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter
School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

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