- Email: [email protected]
Revisiting ‘rural’
STOTEN-32789; No of Pages 4 Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Science of the Total Environment journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv
Revisiting ‘rural’ Ian MacGregor-Fors a,⁎, Luis-Bernardo Vázquez b a
Red de Ambiente y Sustentabilidad, Instituto de Ecología, A.C., Carretera antigua a Coatepec 351, El Haya, Xalapa 91070, Veracruz, Mexico El Colegio de la Frontera Sur. Grupo de Investigación en Sistemas Socioecológicos Urbanos/RG-URSES, Carretera Panamericana y Periférico S/N, Barrio María Auxiliadora, San Cristobal de las Casas 29290, Chiapas, Mexico b
H I G H L I G H T S • • • • •
There is no current agreement on the definition of ‘rural’. We performed a global survey on the academic conception of ‘rural’. Results show no clear consensus, not even in the components of its definition. Conception of ‘rural’ is related with respondent origin, rather than area of expertise. We suggest a framework that encompasses all socio-ecological systems on Earth.
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 3 May 2019 Received in revised form 8 June 2019 Accepted 8 June 2019 Available online xxxx Editor: Damia Barcelo Keywords: Non-urban Socio-ecological systems Human activities Rurality Urbanization Landscapes
a b s t r a c t ‘Rural’ is widely referred to across an array of disciplines. Often used to broadly describe study groups or areas, the definition of ‘rural’ has been subject to discussion and debate, triggering a diverse set of conceptual and practical meanings of the term. This has resulted in important ambiguity related to the concept of ‘rural’ and the pressing need to build an integral framework that allows its standardization. Here we assess the current conception from the academic arena through a global survey of researchers. Our results show that ‘rural’ is widely defined with no clear consensus even about the central components of its definition. We found marked variation in the conception of ‘rural’ among respondents, but area of expertise showed less influence than region of origin. We suggest a hierarchical, context-dependent, and integrative framework that considers an urban–non-urban dichotomy followed by a trichotomy based on human presence and activities, encompassing all social and ecological systems on Earth. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Together with the rapid advance of the urban and agricultural frontiers has come the pragmatic division of landscapes into ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ (Böbel et al., 2018; Bosak and Pearlman, 1982). International organizations, as well as government agencies, have attempted to standardize the definition of the ‘rural’ concept, which have somehow permeated the academic sphere (Braga et al., 2016). However, they have also been avoid and criticized probably because of their biases and scope, often representing decontextualized abstractions of the concept (da Veiga, 2004; Peen et al., 2010; Webb, 1985). As summarized by the UN for many countries from across the globe, urban/rural dichotomies rely on population-based statistics systems, although some few
⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (I. MacGregor-Fors).
countries do use a set of discriminants (United Nations, 2005). Other agencies such as the USDA recognize the complexity of ‘rural’ and pinpoint the importance of focusing on the purpose of the activities conducted in a landscape to define it (e.g., primary, secondary, tertiary; La Caille, 2006). Given the multi-factorial nature of the ‘rural’ concept (Gessert et al., 2015; Öğdül, 2010), there is a pressing need to establish a foundation for the standardization of its definition both by academics and policymakers. To provide a global academic overview of the definition of ‘rural’, we gathered publications indexed in the Web of Science (www.webofscience.com). Our search, performed on 28 December 2017, included one single keyword (i.e., rural) and considered a fiveyear period (2012–2016). This search returned 70,768 publications from N500 Web of Science Categories, with the following ones heading the list: (1) Public Environmental Occupational Health, (2) Environmental Sciences, (3) Economics, (4) Environmental Studies, (5) Planning
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135 0048-9697/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
2
I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
Development, (6) Medicine General Internal, (7) Geography, and (8) Education Research. Since these categories comprised almost half of the retrieved publications (~46%), we focused on them to gather a representative sample of how the term ‘rural’ is used in the scientific literature. We downloaded information related to the most recent 500 publications for each of the leading Web of Science categories and generated an email list of all corresponding authors. This yielded a list of email addresses of 2973 researchers, all of whom we contacted to complete an English only electronic poll on 1 February 2018. The poll asked their country of birth and requested information regarding to the respondent's area of expertise (including the eight identified by the Web of Knowledge, but allowing the respondents to specify others). Afterwards, one central question was posed: “In 2-3 lines, briefly describe what ‘rural’ means to you.” With the latter, our intention was to get the most detailed, free-style, definition of the term from the respondent's perspective. We left the poll open for one month, as the number of entries decelerated significantly after the first 15 days. We obtained 164 responses from 48 countries. We grouped countries using the general UN regionalization (i.e., Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania; United Nations, 1999), considering further classification intro groups strongly represented in our sample: Latin America, Northern America, West Europe, and East Europe. Regarding expertise, respondents self-identified their area of expertise, yielding N40 specific expertise areas, which we classified into six general categories: Economy, Education, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Medicine, and Social Sciences. Although the response rate was low (5.5%), it is possible that our messages were automatically marked as spam, besides the
Table 1 Coded elements form respondent's definition of ‘rural’ among areas of expertise and country of birth. Expertise
Coded elements
Region of birth
Coded elements
Economy Education Environmental Sciences Geography Medicine Social Sciences
70 67 115 153 82 34
Africa Asia East Europe Latin America Northern America West Europe
42 63 77 52 113 167
Fig. 1. Word cloud based on coded elements from the respondent's definition of ‘rural’.
important amount of messages that were returned given that the retrieved email accounts did not longer exist. Yet, although not numerous, our sample is well represented across regions and disciplines. Due to the wide array of response content and length (many of which did not follow the 2–3 line specification), we coded responses using their main components. We afterwards homogenized the codes for the entire sample to have a comparable dataset across regions and areas of expertise. It is noteworthy that coding was performed by the same person (L-BV) to avoid multiple-observer interpretation biases. For instance, a sociologist from Northern America, provided the following definition: “Rural is outside the city limits or boundaries of town. There are natural amenities in a rural area, but there also may be agricultural development, limited infrastructure, and limited industrial development.” We coded this response as containing six components: ‘agriculture’, ‘away from the city’, ‘lack of services’, ‘nature ties’, ‘cultural identity’, and ‘underdevelopment’. After coding all responses, our database contained 526 coded elements that broadly differed among expertise and regions of birth (Table 1). Based on the coded elements from the respondent's definition of ‘rural’, we performed a code count across the entire data-set and graphically represented it with a word cloud (Fig. 1). The most frequent coded element used by respondents was ‘lack of services’; yet, it was included in the response of less than half of the total respondents (43%), indicating marked variation in the elements respondents thought were centrally important to the definition of ‘rural’. ‘Lack of services’ was followed by ‘low population’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘sparsely populated’ and ‘nature ties’, which together comprised more than half of the total coded elements (~52%). To evaluate the existence of expertise or regional similarities in the perception of ‘rural’, we generated a matrix for each topic and calculated the Euclidean distance among coded elements. Given the differences in the number of coded elements by expertise and regions of birth (Table 1), we generated randomly selected sub-samples without replacement based on the smallest sample for each topic (i.e., Social Sciences = 34; Africa = 42). Along with this procedure, we excluded responses from Oceania (n = 7), and those areas of expertise that did not fit the main groups considered in this study (i.e., Entrepreneurship, Biological Anthropology, Statistics; n = 4). We afterwards calculated average Euclidean distances among the six main expertises and regions of birth, and used hierarchical clustering (average linkage) to represent them (Fig. 2). Results of this analysis show larger variation among regions (average Euclidean distances ranging from 9.9 to 14.7) when compared to that of expertise (8.2–10.5), suggesting stronger regional than expertise-based influence in the responses. Regional differences were dominated by two main patterns: (1) Northern America showing differences with the rest of regions and (2) both European regions differing from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which in turn showed highest similarities (Fig. 2). Most Northern American respondents defined ‘rural’ based on countryside being degraded by extractive activities, most Europeans referred to entrepreneurship, the absence of government actions, and being away from cities, and most Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans perceived ‘rural’ to be related to disturbed areas, comfortable living, and the absence of government actions. Although our results are based on a small sample when contrasted with the number of academics working with the ‘rural’ concept in their studies, we found a marked dichotomy of views related to its definition: non-urban human settlements and simply non-urban. We here consider these two views to propose a hierarchical, contextdependent, and integrative framework that places all social and ecological systems on Earth, including those currently considered as ‘rural’ under any of the diverse set of definitions (Fig. 3). Firstly, we consider that the urban–non-urban dichotomy needs to be clearly established. Governmental definitions vary across the globe, and are often reductionist or arbitrary (United Nations, 2005), so we consider they should not underpin an academic dichotomy unless they reflect the regional and multi-factorial nature of ‘urban’, which should be focused on
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
3
Fig. 2. Multivariate cluster analyses (average linkage; Euclidean distances) for a, six regions of birth and b, six areas of expertise of respondents.
Fig. 3. Hierarchical, context-dependent, and integrative framework that considers all social and ecological systems.
infrastructure, rather than solely population size, for instance (MacGregor-Fors, 2011). Subsequent to the urban–non-urban distinction, we propose a trichotomy, based on our interpretation of the coded data in relation to human presence and activities, as follows: (1) settlements, concentrating human population, both urban and non-urban, (2) regions where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, some in which people are mainly absent (e.g., tree plantations); and (3) wildlands, ranging from deserts to rain forests, where people can be present, but sparsely, and ecosystem structure and functions are not directly driven anthropogenically (Fig. 3). These two levels of analysis result in four main conditions: (1) urban human settlements, (2) non-urban human settlements where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, (3) non-urban areas where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, basically in the absence of people, and (4) wildlands. This multi-factorial multi-scale approach will allow describing sites more accurately in different spatio-temporal scales and avoid misunderstandings given by factors related to non-standardized simplistic approaches. We recognize that this framework is coarse-grained; yet, it is inclusive and incorporates regional variation of what is considered ‘urban’, as well as the types of economic activities developed across landscapes. Ultimately, we did not use the term ‘rural’ anywhere in our framework to avoid misinterpretations due to the broadness of the term, but if the use of ‘rural’ is imperative, it could be used instead of ‘non-urban’. Yet, in doing so, one unresolved issue would remain: should wildlands be considered ‘rural’, or should ‘rural’ be reserved only for systems where human activities mold the structure and function of landscapes? Given that such expositions are more philosophical than pragmatical, we
suggest avoiding the use of ‘rural’ in the academic literature unless clearly defined. Acknowledgments We are deeply thankful to the colleagues that took the time to fill our poll and share with us their personal perception of the meaning of ‘rural’, as well as Profs. Paige Warren and Richard Fuller for their enlightening comments and suggestions. We here list the colleagues that asked to be acknowledged by name, as typed in the poll: Deborah Salon, Iván Antonio Ayala Monge, Balraj, Samara Reddy, Mark Everard, Kirit Parikh, Joanna Mazur, Roland Abah, Olgica Djurkovic, Mark Francis, Mehdi Ben Khelil, Rhett Harrison, Katia Laura Sidali, David Larsen, Ricardo Chávez, Philipp Grundmann, Matthew G. Nagler, Samuel Charlton, Dawn Whittall, Shizuka Hashimoto, Sujay Ghosh, Burak Pekin, Riccardo Scalenghe, Massimo Rovai, Gianni Petino, Raffaele Zanoli, Olena Riga, Peter HuttenCzapski, Cecilia Viana, Cécile Détang-Dessendre, Silvia Diana Matteucci, Duncan Maru, Adrian Ghilardi, KC, Czesław Adamiak, David Hamer, Karim Mardaneh, Gunilla Almered Olsson, Diane Sykes, Donna Treby, Ignacio López Moreno, Lucky Maluleke, Ana Sengga, Nasrin Aghamohammadi, Garry Nixon, Mark D. Bjelland, Douglas Myhre, Marota Aphane, Serge Schmitz, Nina, Juan Antonio García González, Peter Wirth, Roopam Shukla, Paparatnam Kalivarapu, Tabitha Mukeredzi, Inés Santé, Clancy Blair, Natalia Cappelletti, Lindy Charlery, Yohan Sahraoui, David L. Brown, Jeff Brooks, Desmond Whalen, K. B. Singh, Elizabeth Burmeister, Zhan Wang, Marit Aure, Cláudia Chaves, Jonna Mazet, A. D. Salisu, Samantha Reid, Christopher R. Bryant, Thomas C. Ricketts, Goran Mutabdzija, Hermes Iturriza, Cristina Quintas Soriano, Jairo Arboleda, Marco Barra Mora, José Roberto Fernández Franco, and Raffaele Zanoli.
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
4
I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
The authors dedicate this paper to the memory of Chabelita and Doña Maru, two warriors that recently crossed their finish line. References Böbel, T.S., Hackl, S.B., Langgartner, D., Jarczok, M.N., Rohleder, N., Rook, G.A., ... Reber, S.O., 2018. Less immune activation following social stress in rural vs. urban participants raised with regular or no animal contact, respectively. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 115, 5259–5264. Bosak, J., Pearlman, B., 1982. A review of the definition of rural. J. Rural Community Psychol. 3, 3–34. Braga, G.B., Remoaldo, P.C., Fiúza, A.L. de C., 2016. A methodology for definition of rural spaces: an implementation in Brazil. Ciênc. Rural 46 (2), 375–380. Gessert, C., Waring, S., Bailey-Davis, L., Conway, P., Roberts, M., VanWormer, J., 2015. Rural definition of health: a systematic literature review. BMC Public Health 15, 378.
La Caille, P., 2006. What Is Rural? USDA Rural Information Center https://www.nal.usda. gov/ric/what-is-rural MacGregor-Fors, I., 2011. Misconceptions or misunderstandings? On the standardization of basic terms and definitions in urban ecology. Landsc. Urban Plann. 100, 347–349. Öğdül, H.G., 2010. Urban and rural definitions in regional context: a case study on Turkey. Eur. Plan. Stud. 18, 1519–1541. Peen, J., Schoevers, R.A., Beekman, A.T., Dekker, J., 2010. The current status of urban-rural differences in psychiatric disorders. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 121, 84–93. United Nations, 1999. Methodology - Standard Country or Area Codes for Statistical Use (M49). Statistic Division https://unstats.un.org/unsd/methodology/m49/. United Nations, 2005. Demographic Yearbook. Statistics Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN, New York. da Veiga, J.E., 2004. The rural dimension of Brasil. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura 12, 71–94. Webb, S.D., 1985. Rural-urban differences in mental health. In: Freeman, H.L. (Ed.), Mental Health and the Environment. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, pp. 226–249.
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Science of the Total Environment journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/scitotenv
Revisiting ‘rural’ Ian MacGregor-Fors a,⁎, Luis-Bernardo Vázquez b a
Red de Ambiente y Sustentabilidad, Instituto de Ecología, A.C., Carretera antigua a Coatepec 351, El Haya, Xalapa 91070, Veracruz, Mexico El Colegio de la Frontera Sur. Grupo de Investigación en Sistemas Socioecológicos Urbanos/RG-URSES, Carretera Panamericana y Periférico S/N, Barrio María Auxiliadora, San Cristobal de las Casas 29290, Chiapas, Mexico b
H I G H L I G H T S • • • • •
There is no current agreement on the definition of ‘rural’. We performed a global survey on the academic conception of ‘rural’. Results show no clear consensus, not even in the components of its definition. Conception of ‘rural’ is related with respondent origin, rather than area of expertise. We suggest a framework that encompasses all socio-ecological systems on Earth.
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history: Received 3 May 2019 Received in revised form 8 June 2019 Accepted 8 June 2019 Available online xxxx Editor: Damia Barcelo Keywords: Non-urban Socio-ecological systems Human activities Rurality Urbanization Landscapes
a b s t r a c t ‘Rural’ is widely referred to across an array of disciplines. Often used to broadly describe study groups or areas, the definition of ‘rural’ has been subject to discussion and debate, triggering a diverse set of conceptual and practical meanings of the term. This has resulted in important ambiguity related to the concept of ‘rural’ and the pressing need to build an integral framework that allows its standardization. Here we assess the current conception from the academic arena through a global survey of researchers. Our results show that ‘rural’ is widely defined with no clear consensus even about the central components of its definition. We found marked variation in the conception of ‘rural’ among respondents, but area of expertise showed less influence than region of origin. We suggest a hierarchical, context-dependent, and integrative framework that considers an urban–non-urban dichotomy followed by a trichotomy based on human presence and activities, encompassing all social and ecological systems on Earth. © 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Together with the rapid advance of the urban and agricultural frontiers has come the pragmatic division of landscapes into ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ (Böbel et al., 2018; Bosak and Pearlman, 1982). International organizations, as well as government agencies, have attempted to standardize the definition of the ‘rural’ concept, which have somehow permeated the academic sphere (Braga et al., 2016). However, they have also been avoid and criticized probably because of their biases and scope, often representing decontextualized abstractions of the concept (da Veiga, 2004; Peen et al., 2010; Webb, 1985). As summarized by the UN for many countries from across the globe, urban/rural dichotomies rely on population-based statistics systems, although some few
⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (I. MacGregor-Fors).
countries do use a set of discriminants (United Nations, 2005). Other agencies such as the USDA recognize the complexity of ‘rural’ and pinpoint the importance of focusing on the purpose of the activities conducted in a landscape to define it (e.g., primary, secondary, tertiary; La Caille, 2006). Given the multi-factorial nature of the ‘rural’ concept (Gessert et al., 2015; Öğdül, 2010), there is a pressing need to establish a foundation for the standardization of its definition both by academics and policymakers. To provide a global academic overview of the definition of ‘rural’, we gathered publications indexed in the Web of Science (www.webofscience.com). Our search, performed on 28 December 2017, included one single keyword (i.e., rural) and considered a fiveyear period (2012–2016). This search returned 70,768 publications from N500 Web of Science Categories, with the following ones heading the list: (1) Public Environmental Occupational Health, (2) Environmental Sciences, (3) Economics, (4) Environmental Studies, (5) Planning
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135 0048-9697/© 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
2
I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
Development, (6) Medicine General Internal, (7) Geography, and (8) Education Research. Since these categories comprised almost half of the retrieved publications (~46%), we focused on them to gather a representative sample of how the term ‘rural’ is used in the scientific literature. We downloaded information related to the most recent 500 publications for each of the leading Web of Science categories and generated an email list of all corresponding authors. This yielded a list of email addresses of 2973 researchers, all of whom we contacted to complete an English only electronic poll on 1 February 2018. The poll asked their country of birth and requested information regarding to the respondent's area of expertise (including the eight identified by the Web of Knowledge, but allowing the respondents to specify others). Afterwards, one central question was posed: “In 2-3 lines, briefly describe what ‘rural’ means to you.” With the latter, our intention was to get the most detailed, free-style, definition of the term from the respondent's perspective. We left the poll open for one month, as the number of entries decelerated significantly after the first 15 days. We obtained 164 responses from 48 countries. We grouped countries using the general UN regionalization (i.e., Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Oceania; United Nations, 1999), considering further classification intro groups strongly represented in our sample: Latin America, Northern America, West Europe, and East Europe. Regarding expertise, respondents self-identified their area of expertise, yielding N40 specific expertise areas, which we classified into six general categories: Economy, Education, Environmental Sciences, Geography, Medicine, and Social Sciences. Although the response rate was low (5.5%), it is possible that our messages were automatically marked as spam, besides the
Table 1 Coded elements form respondent's definition of ‘rural’ among areas of expertise and country of birth. Expertise
Coded elements
Region of birth
Coded elements
Economy Education Environmental Sciences Geography Medicine Social Sciences
70 67 115 153 82 34
Africa Asia East Europe Latin America Northern America West Europe
42 63 77 52 113 167
Fig. 1. Word cloud based on coded elements from the respondent's definition of ‘rural’.
important amount of messages that were returned given that the retrieved email accounts did not longer exist. Yet, although not numerous, our sample is well represented across regions and disciplines. Due to the wide array of response content and length (many of which did not follow the 2–3 line specification), we coded responses using their main components. We afterwards homogenized the codes for the entire sample to have a comparable dataset across regions and areas of expertise. It is noteworthy that coding was performed by the same person (L-BV) to avoid multiple-observer interpretation biases. For instance, a sociologist from Northern America, provided the following definition: “Rural is outside the city limits or boundaries of town. There are natural amenities in a rural area, but there also may be agricultural development, limited infrastructure, and limited industrial development.” We coded this response as containing six components: ‘agriculture’, ‘away from the city’, ‘lack of services’, ‘nature ties’, ‘cultural identity’, and ‘underdevelopment’. After coding all responses, our database contained 526 coded elements that broadly differed among expertise and regions of birth (Table 1). Based on the coded elements from the respondent's definition of ‘rural’, we performed a code count across the entire data-set and graphically represented it with a word cloud (Fig. 1). The most frequent coded element used by respondents was ‘lack of services’; yet, it was included in the response of less than half of the total respondents (43%), indicating marked variation in the elements respondents thought were centrally important to the definition of ‘rural’. ‘Lack of services’ was followed by ‘low population’, ‘underdevelopment’, ‘sparsely populated’ and ‘nature ties’, which together comprised more than half of the total coded elements (~52%). To evaluate the existence of expertise or regional similarities in the perception of ‘rural’, we generated a matrix for each topic and calculated the Euclidean distance among coded elements. Given the differences in the number of coded elements by expertise and regions of birth (Table 1), we generated randomly selected sub-samples without replacement based on the smallest sample for each topic (i.e., Social Sciences = 34; Africa = 42). Along with this procedure, we excluded responses from Oceania (n = 7), and those areas of expertise that did not fit the main groups considered in this study (i.e., Entrepreneurship, Biological Anthropology, Statistics; n = 4). We afterwards calculated average Euclidean distances among the six main expertises and regions of birth, and used hierarchical clustering (average linkage) to represent them (Fig. 2). Results of this analysis show larger variation among regions (average Euclidean distances ranging from 9.9 to 14.7) when compared to that of expertise (8.2–10.5), suggesting stronger regional than expertise-based influence in the responses. Regional differences were dominated by two main patterns: (1) Northern America showing differences with the rest of regions and (2) both European regions differing from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which in turn showed highest similarities (Fig. 2). Most Northern American respondents defined ‘rural’ based on countryside being degraded by extractive activities, most Europeans referred to entrepreneurship, the absence of government actions, and being away from cities, and most Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans perceived ‘rural’ to be related to disturbed areas, comfortable living, and the absence of government actions. Although our results are based on a small sample when contrasted with the number of academics working with the ‘rural’ concept in their studies, we found a marked dichotomy of views related to its definition: non-urban human settlements and simply non-urban. We here consider these two views to propose a hierarchical, contextdependent, and integrative framework that places all social and ecological systems on Earth, including those currently considered as ‘rural’ under any of the diverse set of definitions (Fig. 3). Firstly, we consider that the urban–non-urban dichotomy needs to be clearly established. Governmental definitions vary across the globe, and are often reductionist or arbitrary (United Nations, 2005), so we consider they should not underpin an academic dichotomy unless they reflect the regional and multi-factorial nature of ‘urban’, which should be focused on
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
3
Fig. 2. Multivariate cluster analyses (average linkage; Euclidean distances) for a, six regions of birth and b, six areas of expertise of respondents.
Fig. 3. Hierarchical, context-dependent, and integrative framework that considers all social and ecological systems.
infrastructure, rather than solely population size, for instance (MacGregor-Fors, 2011). Subsequent to the urban–non-urban distinction, we propose a trichotomy, based on our interpretation of the coded data in relation to human presence and activities, as follows: (1) settlements, concentrating human population, both urban and non-urban, (2) regions where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, some in which people are mainly absent (e.g., tree plantations); and (3) wildlands, ranging from deserts to rain forests, where people can be present, but sparsely, and ecosystem structure and functions are not directly driven anthropogenically (Fig. 3). These two levels of analysis result in four main conditions: (1) urban human settlements, (2) non-urban human settlements where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, (3) non-urban areas where primary and secondary economic activities are developed, basically in the absence of people, and (4) wildlands. This multi-factorial multi-scale approach will allow describing sites more accurately in different spatio-temporal scales and avoid misunderstandings given by factors related to non-standardized simplistic approaches. We recognize that this framework is coarse-grained; yet, it is inclusive and incorporates regional variation of what is considered ‘urban’, as well as the types of economic activities developed across landscapes. Ultimately, we did not use the term ‘rural’ anywhere in our framework to avoid misinterpretations due to the broadness of the term, but if the use of ‘rural’ is imperative, it could be used instead of ‘non-urban’. Yet, in doing so, one unresolved issue would remain: should wildlands be considered ‘rural’, or should ‘rural’ be reserved only for systems where human activities mold the structure and function of landscapes? Given that such expositions are more philosophical than pragmatical, we
suggest avoiding the use of ‘rural’ in the academic literature unless clearly defined. Acknowledgments We are deeply thankful to the colleagues that took the time to fill our poll and share with us their personal perception of the meaning of ‘rural’, as well as Profs. Paige Warren and Richard Fuller for their enlightening comments and suggestions. We here list the colleagues that asked to be acknowledged by name, as typed in the poll: Deborah Salon, Iván Antonio Ayala Monge, Balraj, Samara Reddy, Mark Everard, Kirit Parikh, Joanna Mazur, Roland Abah, Olgica Djurkovic, Mark Francis, Mehdi Ben Khelil, Rhett Harrison, Katia Laura Sidali, David Larsen, Ricardo Chávez, Philipp Grundmann, Matthew G. Nagler, Samuel Charlton, Dawn Whittall, Shizuka Hashimoto, Sujay Ghosh, Burak Pekin, Riccardo Scalenghe, Massimo Rovai, Gianni Petino, Raffaele Zanoli, Olena Riga, Peter HuttenCzapski, Cecilia Viana, Cécile Détang-Dessendre, Silvia Diana Matteucci, Duncan Maru, Adrian Ghilardi, KC, Czesław Adamiak, David Hamer, Karim Mardaneh, Gunilla Almered Olsson, Diane Sykes, Donna Treby, Ignacio López Moreno, Lucky Maluleke, Ana Sengga, Nasrin Aghamohammadi, Garry Nixon, Mark D. Bjelland, Douglas Myhre, Marota Aphane, Serge Schmitz, Nina, Juan Antonio García González, Peter Wirth, Roopam Shukla, Paparatnam Kalivarapu, Tabitha Mukeredzi, Inés Santé, Clancy Blair, Natalia Cappelletti, Lindy Charlery, Yohan Sahraoui, David L. Brown, Jeff Brooks, Desmond Whalen, K. B. Singh, Elizabeth Burmeister, Zhan Wang, Marit Aure, Cláudia Chaves, Jonna Mazet, A. D. Salisu, Samantha Reid, Christopher R. Bryant, Thomas C. Ricketts, Goran Mutabdzija, Hermes Iturriza, Cristina Quintas Soriano, Jairo Arboleda, Marco Barra Mora, José Roberto Fernández Franco, and Raffaele Zanoli.
Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135
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I. MacGregor-Fors, L.-B. Vázquez / Science of the Total Environment xxx (xxxx) xxx
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Please cite this article as: I. MacGregor-Fors and L.-B. Vázquez, Science of the Total Environment, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.06.135