RESHAPING THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: SHIFTS IN THE GEOGRAPHIES OF URBAN-BASED LIVELIHOODS.

• Author: Potts, Deborah

INTRODUCTION

For almost all of human history, most people lived in rural areas and the control of rural production and labor generally lay at the heart of societies and political regimes. The shift of productive forces to urban locations during the Industrial Revolution, along with the commoditization of land, created the broad economic conditions that allowed or forced more rural people to migrate to cities to find work. The 20th century saw mass migrations into urban settlements as these changes spread and consolidated in societies globally. For many regions, this transformation finished well before the first decade of the 21st century, during which human populations became primarily urban. The relative scale of migration flows across the urban-rural divide then dwindled gradually as the pool of rural people became smaller compared to urban populations. The relative size of the rural and urban shares of national output is always shifting, usually in favor of the urban. Over time, many rural settlements are redesignated as urban when they meet certain population thresholds or become less agricultural in their employment characteristics. (1) This factor, however, varies across geographic contexts. Many societies--particularly those in South Asia and much of Sub-Saharan Africa--are still mainly rural.

This paper examines the ways in which global urban livelihood shifts are reshaping the nature of linkages between rural and urban areas and associated inequalities. It argues that these urban livelihood changes require a broadening of our understanding of the geographic scope of the urban-rural divide. In the following sections, the emphasis is on the urban end of the divide; the interactions across it, particularly patterns of migration; and how these reflect the changing types of livelihoods that have emerged in cities in different parts of the world. The paper will show how issues of resilience and the shifting costs and benefits of urban livelihoods have implications for understanding the urban-rural divide today. It will argue that the wider geographic scope of the divide and the ever-increasing susceptibility of rural or urban livelihoods to be transformed by economic changes beyond national borders often means that national policies are insufficient to reduce inequalities between rural and urban areas or bolster livelihoods in either sector, because the real solutions lie in the international sphere.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE "RURAL" AND THE "URBAN": THE EVOLUTION OF THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE

The urban-rural divide is has been conceptualized in various ways with differing emphases on social, economic, or political characteristics and organization. These do not necessarily manifest as inequalities; they may reflect different values, environments, and rhythms of life in ways that lend no particular advantage to rural or urban people. However, the long history of the urban, stretching back over several thousand years, has usually been associated with control and exploitation of the rural. In fact, this arguably underpinned the development of urban centers and their populations. The invention of agriculture not only created surplus and tradeable production, but also, by freeing some humans from their existential ties to finding food, allowed for the division of labor and specialization, the emergence of political and religious elites, and further differentiation between humans based on the new social relations of production. These productive and political forces were concentrated in new settlement types: towns and cities, i.e., the "urban." Until then, the "rural" did not exist, as it is understood largely in terms of its contradistinction to the "urban." The two are relational concepts.

There are numerous ways of theorizing the urban-rural divide. Since the Industrial Revolution, the divide and its associated academic study has often been bound to the concept of agrarian transition. This field of inquiry is mainly concerned with the incorporation of capitalist relations into peasant societies and associated changes in the social relations of production and thus class structures. In North America and much of Europe, which are highly urbanized and where agriculture accounts for tiny proportions of the workforce and gross domestic product, this framing of issues around the divide is no longer significant, though it still has purchase in more rural countries. A further complexity is that any discussion of rural and urban dynamics, including the concept of the urban-rural divide, is very much influenced by what is deemed "rural" or "urban." One way of thinking about the "rural" and the "urban" is to treat them as a spectrum of settlement types and livelihoods, from "very rural" at one end to "very urban" at the other, with a host of intermediary types of physical locations and associated livelihoods, all of which are intricately linked by urban-rural movements and flows of goods and services. (2) For instance, the 2012-2017 international project RurbanAfrica emphasized how links between the conventionally rural and urban, especially migration, could transform some rural settlements and thus complicate the binary. (3) Towards the urban end of the spectrum, there is now discussion of new types of "in-between" places--"particular urban environments, marginal and residual, produced by the urban sprawl," as architects Giovanna Piccinno and Elisa Lega define them--in which the nature of production and market forces are not the defining aspects. (4) Posing even more of a challenge to the idea of a urbanrural divide is the concept of planetarv urbanism, which argues that there is now no "rural," but only a "non-urban realm" that can be understood in terms of "connections to the heartlands of urban concentration," per urban theorists Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid. (5)

While these approaches can yield important insights into the changing dynamics of contemporary settlements, space precludes the possibility of incorporating them into a single article on the urban-rural divide. As such, this paper will approach the urban-rural divide using comparative national statistics on these categories published in national censuses or the United Nations' World Urbanization Prospects. These can be problematic, and sometimes misleading, due to long gaps between censuses and very different national approaches to defining urban settlements. However, most practitioners outside of academic social science circles--including governments, ministries, statistical offices, development agencies (e.g., the World Bank, UN, regional development banks), economists, development practitioners, the private sector, and policymakers generally--still work with the general concepts of "rural" and "urban." For these reasons, and for the sake of clarity and brevity, this article takes the conventional usage of the terms.

Migration is a core component of the urban-rural divide. Urban areas are centers of industrial production, administration and government, trade, commerce, and services, and therefore tend to have more wage employment than rural areas, generating higher incomes and myriad opportunities for self-employment and small-scale enterprises, both formal and informal. The lower value added per worker in the natural resource-based production that has typified rural areas--such as farming, forestry, fishing--has generally meant lower incomes for workers. (6) This typically results in migration flows towards urban areas that are selective of the youthful, better educated, and potentially most productive people. This can then reduce the economic vibrancy of rural areas, creating a feedback loop encouraging further outmigration. However, such widening of the urban-rural divide and increasing of the scale and permanence of urban-rural migration can be mitigated by remittances from urban workers. These can fund investments in rural production and infrastructure. Supportive government policies toward agriculture and rural services can also help. Geography also plays a part: Remote areas with limited transport and access to markets are much poorer than those near major settlements and transport corridors. (7) Per capita income data within countries nearly always show that rural areas are poorer than urban. Yet such averages can hide more than they elucidate. They do not account for the significant differences between different types of rural areas and between urban settlements. Additionally, gaps between the incomes of the richest and poorest can be as large within cities as between rural and urban areas. Finally, when disposable incomes are compared after necessary cash expenditures, it becomes apparent that urban poverty is frequently underestimated. (8)

NEGOTIATING THE URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE

While the world has evidently become more urban, the process has been less straightforward than the standard theory of unilinear modernization postulated. This theory assumed that migration to towns was, or swiftly became, permanent; it argued that if circular migration occurred, whereby people moved back and forth between rural and urban areas, it would inexorably and steadily be replaced by permanent migration as urban economies developed. (9) The outcomes of the urban-rural divide were predictable everywhere. For instance, it was argued that "[c]urrent African and South Asian patterns of temporary migration will almost surely give way to permanent patterns." (10)

Such unilinear theorizing was based on European and American experiences in the 19th and much of the 20th century, when cities in these regions dominated global urban production and were associated with higher valueadded employment. Rather obviously, however, the situation was different in subaltern urban systems elsewhere, from Mali to Myanmar to Malaysia. For example, restrictions on urban-rural migration and on the permanent residence of families in urban areas were common during the colonial era and...