Urban-Rural Linkages and Global Sustainable Land Use

Currently, more than half of the world´s population is living in cities, which has implications for land use and land use changes, the use of natural resources, and the absorption of rural labor in cities. Economic development and respective resource use as well as livelihoods bind cities and rural areas together. The rural population is increasingly adopting urban behavior, or becoming socially urbanized. A growing interdependency of rural and urban dwellers on the resources they offer to each other makes rural-urban linkages more important for global land use and respective governance approaches. As rural-urban linkages increase and intensify, global land use faces changes and new opportunities in cities and the rural hinterlands. With increasing international and even global trade, traditional flows of (primary) goods – food, textiles, and timber – from rural production areas to adjacent urban processing and consumption centers shift towards a spatial decoupling.