Villes et Campagnes dans les Pays du Sud: Géographie des relations

THE AIM OF this edited collection is to show the diversity of the relationships which link (or ‘de-link’) urban centres and rural areas in a number of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but also to identify common approaches which go beyond the usual division along geographical and cultural lines. The various chapter show that in all these different contexts the usual distinction between rural and urban dwellers, and between cities and countryside do not reflect the reality, especially with regard to the increasing social polarisation which takes place in the rural areas as well as in the urban centres. The book is organised in three sections. The first one examines agricultural production in four different contexts. The first chapter describes India’s food policy and analyses whether the assumption of “urban bias” is still valid and how it is affected by export-oriented agricultural production. This is followed by the description of peri-urban agriculture in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso’s second urban centre, where urban farmers increasingly control fruit and vegetable crops for the city’s market. By contrast, the expansion of Mexico City has not stimulated the development of high revenue commercial crops production. However, traditional ways of life and subsistence agriculture still remain in some pockets within the metropolitan area. The last paper in this section examines how food supply in Uganda’s capital Kampala has been affected by the long political crisis which affected the country under Idi Amin’s regime from 1966 to 1986. The second section of the book focuses on the overlap between spatial and historical dimensions in rural-urban interactions. The first paper examines the colonial origins and development since independence of the very different spatial models in the two nations in the island of Haïti. The description of the recent increase in the mobility of the Serer people in Senegal and of the impact of transformations in the transport system of the wider Senegal-Mali region are followed by the analysis of the role of political and administrative definitions of rural and urban areas in boundaries in Ethiopia and in Brazil. The papers in the third and final section of the book question the validity of universal models of spatial organisation. The first paper on the Indian state of Kerala describes how the continuum between built-up areas and agricultural land and the high levels of population mobility in both directions point to the complementarities rather than to the contrasts between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ spaces. The last two chapters examine the role of small towns in West Africa and the changing rural-urban relations in one of China’s emerging metropolitan regions, in the southern triangle between Guangzhou (Canton), Hong Kong and Macao.