Introduction to livelihoods and urban development
Urban and rural change: interactive resource guide
An interactive guide on the changing relationship between rural and urban livelihoods
Authors:
; Department for International Development
Publisher:
Eldis Document Store, 2004
This resource comes in the form of an interactive guide, setting out the key challenges facing policy makers in a rapidly changing relationship between rural and urban livelihoods. As a starting point, the resource notes some of the current realities that must urgently inform ways in which policy makers’ address issues of rural and urban development:
- around 900 million people currently live in slums
- poor service delivery is endemic in many contexts
- growing regional and local inequalities (i.e. rural neglect or urban ghettoisation)
- growing environmental degradation in all areas through excessive agricultural use and rapid urbanisation
- growing social dislocation and criminality as a result of social inequalities.
The separate concepts of rural and urban, as currently used in many policy arenas are challenged. Rural and urban spaces are undergoing enormous and rapid change, which means old ways of understanding them are increasingly irrelevant. As the authors note, increasingly people occupy both urban and rural spaces, moving between them as migrants, entrepreneurs and consumers. New economic linkages, political processes and cultural change are redrawing the very nature of, and boundaries between the rural and urban. In order for policy makers to improve people livelihoods through poverty reduction and economic growth, this change must be managed with policies that address the complex linkages between rural and urban livelihoods.
A first annex section provides regional overviews for current rural and urban development. A second annex, provides possible future scenarios in the development of rural and urban livelihoods. The authors say this kind of ‘scenario planning’ is a useful methodology for policy makers who must identify critical longer term issues for policy making and intervention.
Scenarios that predict disaster and misery are contrasted to ones that project ideal future development contexts for both rural and urban populations, with optimum livelihood opportunities.
