Urban & Rural Areas

Urban and Rural Areas
Urban and Rural areas in the world
Urban areas (or urban agglomerations) are areas of continuous urban development within a metropolitan area (labor market area), and are the physical form of that constitutes the essence a city. Generally, urban areas can be identified by the lights one would see from an airplane at night or in a satellite photograph. Urban areas are acomponent of metropolitan areas, the other component of which is non-urban or rural territory. A metropolitan area is the combination of the urban area(s) and rural areas, which together comprise the economic region or labor market (commute shed).
What is ‘urban’ and what is ‘rural’? The implications of administrative definitions
The difference between urban centres and rural areas may seem soobvious that definitions should not be an issue. However, there can be major variations in the ways in which different nations define what is an urban centre. The criteria used include population size and density, and availability of services such as secondary schools, hospitals and banks. However, the combination of criteria applied can vary greatly. Even the population thresholds used can bedifferent: for many African nations it is 5,000 inhabitants, while for most Latin American and European nations it can be as low as 2,000 or 2,500 or even just a few hundred inhabitants.
This wide fluctuation in definitions has three important implications.
• Official classifications should be treated with caution – for example, a large proportion of settlements classed as ‘rural’ in China and Indiawould fall within the ‘urban’ category if they used the criteria and population thresholds adopted by many other countries. Given the size of the population of these two countries, this would significantly increase the overall proportion of urban residents in Asia and in the world.
• International comparisons are difficult, as they may look at settlements which, despite being classed in the samecategory, may be very different in both population size and infrastructure. In addition, the reliability of data on urbanization trends within one nation can be compromised by changes in the definition of urban centers over time.
• Public investment in services and infrastructure tends to concentrate on centers that are defined as urban. As a consequence, investment can bypass settlements notdefined as urban even if these can, and often do, have an important ‘urban’ role in the development of the surrounding rural areas. Within national and regional urban systems, larger cities also tend to be favored with public investment over small and intermediate-sized urban centers, including those with important roles in supporting agricultural production, processing and marketing.
Outside the cityboundaries: the peri-urban interface
The physical boundaries of urban built-up areas often do not coincide with their administrative boundaries. The areas surrounding urban centers generally have an important role in providing food for urban consumers, with proximity lowering the costs of transport and storage. It is difficult to make generalizations on the nature of peri-urban areas, whichdepends on the combination of a number of factors including the economic and infrastructural base of the urban center, the region and the nation; the historical, social and cultural characteristics of the area, and its ecological and geographical features. Peri-urban areas around one center are also not necessarily homogenous: high- and middle-income residential developments may dominate one section,while others may host industrial estates and others provide cheap accommodation to low-income migrants in informal settlements.
The peri-urban interface around larger or more prosperous urban centres is also the location where processes of urbanisation are at their most intense and where some of the most obvious environmental impacts of urbanisation are located. They are often characterised by:...