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What happens to rural communities when their traditional economic base collapses? When new money comes in, who gets left behind? Pushed Out offers a rich portrait of Dover, Idaho, whose transformation from “thriving timber mill town” to “economically depressed small town” to “trendy second-home location” over the past four decades embodies the story and challenges of many other rural communities. Sociologist Ryanne Pilgeram explores the structural forces driving rural gentrification and examines how social and environmental inequality are written onto these landscapes. Based on in-depth interviews and archival data, she grounds this highly readable ethnography in a long view of the region that takes account of geological history, settler colonialism, and histories of power and exploitation within capitalism. Pilgeram’s analysis reveals the processes and mechanisms that make such communities vulnerable to gentrification and points the way to a radical justice that prioritizes the economic, social, and environmental sustainability necessary to restore these communities.
Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Sustainable Livelihoods and Rural Development looks at the role of social institutions and the politics of policy, as well as issues of identity, gender and generation. The relationships between sustainability and livelihoods are examined, and livelihoods analysis situated within a wider political economy of environmental and agrarian change.
As the first book in the Restructuring Rural Areas series, "Constructing the countryside" presents a new methodological approach to the analysis of rural change. The authors seek to link wider developments in the global political economy to the behaviour of local actors and, in so doing, they place research into rural studies much more firmly than hitherto in the mainstream of social science enquiry. The outcome is a book that promotes a truly interdisciplinary approach through which the constant "reconstruction" of the countryside can be properly understood. This holistic perspective, sustained by an historical analysis of rural change, has been made possible by the extensive research experience of the authors.; The book is a product of the work done at the London Countryside Research Centre, which was set up in 1989 by the Economic and Social Research Council. The Centre's research has focused upon the social and political forces for change in rural areas and how these relate to rapid alterations in national economic circumstances and to public policies affecting the countryside for example, the Common Agricultural Policy of the EC .; On the one hand, the book provides a set of insights into the trends that will guide rural change in advanced economies into the next century; on the other, it offers a challenging account of how they can be investigated.; "Constructing the countryside" will appeal to both students and staff in a wide range of social science disciplines, including agricultural economics, environmental management, planning, land economy, geography and rural sociology, and to all those concerned with the future development of rural areas.; This book is intended for students and researchers in rural planning and environmental/geographical studies, whether within a geographical or a sociological milieu.
In the last decade, rural development emerged as one of the prominent challenges facing the United States. Strong support for rural development is now found in both major political parties and at federal, state, and local levels. There is little doubt that the development of rural America will become even more important in the future. Despite unprecedented growth, both urban and rural areas in the United States are greatly deficient in many aspects of quality living conditions. The nation’s cities are slowly strangling themselves, jamming together people and industry while spawning pollution, transportation paralysis, housing blight, lack of privacy, and a crime-infested society. Rural areas simultaneously suffer from the other extreme: lack of sufficient employment opportunities, outmigration and depopulation, and too few people to support services and institutions. The migration from rural areas contributes to the problems of both the city and countryside depopulating rural places at the expense of overcrowded cities. This book focuses on rural development processes, problems, and solutions. Seven prominent specialists in the field, including agricultural and regional economists, demographers, and administrators, discuss the development of the open country, small towns, and smaller cities (up t fifty thousand population). They present an integrated approach to rural development problems, not a mere collection of readings. Valuable guidelines for policies to benefit both rural and urban areas are provided. Since rural development involves interdisciplinary scholarship, this book will be of interest to a wide range of social scientists working in rural areas both here and abroad. Economists, sociologists, and political scientists, as well as community leaders and planners, legislators, government officials and interested laymen, will find this volume useful in understanding the rural development effort. Chapters on the following topics are included: the Philosophy and Process of Community Development; The Emergence of Area Development; Demographic Trends of the U.S. Rural Population; The Conditions and Problems of Nonmetropolitan America; Systems Planning for rural Development; Use of Natural Resources in Community Development; and Rural Poverty and Urban Growth, An Economic Critique of Alternative Spatial Growth Patterns
Three billion people live in rural areas in developing countries. Conditions for them are worse than for their urban counterparts when measured by almost any development indicator, from extreme poverty, to child mortality and access to electricity and sanitation.
This book offers a unique perspective on rural development, by discussing the most influential perspectives and rendering their risks and benefits visible. The authors do not present a silver bullet. Rather, they give students, researchers, community leaders, politicians, concerned citizens and development organizations the conceptual tools to understand how things are organized now, which development path has already been taken, and how things could possibly move in a different direction. Van Assche and Hornidge pay special attention to the different roles of knowledge in rural development, both expert knowledge in various guises and local knowledge. Crafting development strategies requires understanding how new knowledge can fit in and work out in governance. Drawing on experiences in five continents, the authors develop a theoretical framework which elucidates how modes of governance and rural development are inextricably tied. A community is much better placed to choose direction, when it understands these ties.
Despite the recent economic upswing in many Latin American countries, rural poverty rates in the region have actually increased during the past two decades. Experts blame excessively centralized public administrations for the lackluster performance of public policy initiatives. In response, decentralization reformshave become a common government strategy for improving public sector performance in rural areas. The effect of these reforms is a topic of considerable debate among government officials, policy scholars, and citizensÕ groups. This book offers a systematic analysis of how local governments and farmer groups in Latin America are actually faring today. Based on interviews with more than 1,200 mayors, local officials, and farmers in 390 municipal territories in four Latin American nations, the authors analyze the ways in which different forms of decentralization affect the governance arrangements for rural development Òon the ground.Ó Their comparative analysis suggests that rural development outcomes are systemically linked to locally negotiated institutional arrangementsÑformal and informalÑbetween government officials, NGOs, and farmer groups that operate in the local sphere. They find that local-government actors contribute to public services that better assist the rural poor when local actors cooperate to develop their own institutional arrangements for participatory planning, horizontal learning, and the joint production of services. This study brings substantive data and empirical analysis to a discussion that has, until now, more often depended on qualitative research in isolated cases. With more than 60 percent of Latin AmericaÕs rural population living in poverty, the results are both timely and crucial.
This book focuses on empirical experiences related to market development, and specifically new markets with structurally different characteristics than mainstream markets. Europe, Brazil, China and the rather robust and complex African experiences are covered to provide a rich multidisciplinary and multi-level analysis of the dynamics of newly emerging markets. Rural Development and the Construction of New Markets analyses newly constructed markets as nested markets. Although they are specific market segments that are nested in the wider commodity markets for food, they have a different nature, different dynamics, a different redistribution of value added, different prices and different relations between producers and consumers. Nested markets embody distinction viz-a-viz the general markets in which they are embedded. A key aspect of nested markets is that these are constructed in and through social struggles, which in turn positions this book in relation to classic and new institutional economic analyses of markets. These markets emerge as steadily growing parts of the farmer populations are dedicating their time, energy and resources to the design and production of new goods and services that differ from conventional agricultural outputs. The speed and intensity with which this is taking place, and the products and services involved, vary considerably across the world. In large parts of the South, notably Africa, farmers are ‘structurally’ combining farming with other activities. By contrast, in Europe and large parts of Latin America farmers have taken steps to generate new products and services which exist alongside ongoing agricultural production. This book not only discusses the economic rationales and dynamics for these markets, but also their likely futures and the threats and opportunities they face.
The vastness and isolation of the American West forged a dependence on scarce natural resources especially water, forests, fish, and minerals. Today, the internet is shaping another revolution, and it promises both obstacles and opportunity. Seeking to understand the impact of a global society on western small towns, the author, director of the Western Rural Development Center at Utah State University, conducted strategic planning roundtables in thirteen states. The gatherings brought three major concer