Contested Countryside: The Rural-Urban Fringe in North America

THE PAPERS IN this edited collection describe various aspects of the North American (United States and Canada) rural-urban fringe. This is defined as the ever-growing and evolving territory lying within 40 to 50 miles of every major urban concentration. Urbanization in the region has been fast, and the conflicts inherent to peri-urban areas intense. They include contests over land use and political power between different social and economic classes, rather than between rural and urban populations. The chapters are arranged along four themes. The first examines the spatial structure and organizational form of the contemporary rural-urban fringe in North America, drawing on empirical studies in Florida (United States) and Ontario (Canada). The chapters in the second part examine issues related to agricultural land alienation. Over the past 30 years, local, state, provincial and national governments have taken a number of actions to slow the loss of critical agricultural resources to urbanization, and farmland conversion is likely to remain the most critical land policy issue in the new millennium. The protection mechanisms described include purchase of development rights and less well known approaches such as equity insurance and equity mortgage on farmland. The third section presents three case studies of the relationships between countryside and large urban centres. These include the role played by “rural” areas and activities in the metropolitan growth strategy of Vancouver metro region; the difficulties associated with attempts to regulate the use of water, a “rural” resource, by the residents of New York; and the economic contribution of urban-based agriculture in the Connecticut region. The final section describes the work of NGOs which, in the North American context, are the most rapidly expanding area of environmental action and are particularly active and widespread in the rural-urban fringe.