Reconsidering Territorial Governance to Account for Enhanced Rural-Urban Interdependence in America

Abstract

The urban-rural interface is structured by intense social, economic, and environmental interdependencies among urban and rural places. Accordingly, we argue that the rural-urban interface should be governed in a new, hybrid manner—one that accounts for both place-based and relational exigencies. The United States lacks a coherent, coordinated approach to multijurisdictional planning and governance, but multijurisdictional governance can and often does succeed through cooperation at the state and local levels. To illustrate this point, and to ground the theoretical discussion, we present three examples of multijurisdictional planning that are effective at the local level, and one example that has failed to accomplish such goals. Governance of the zone of rural-urban interactions will be more effective and accountable if policies and programs involve not only the constituent municipalities located in this space, but also the social, economic, and environmental relationships in which these communities are embedded.

Keywords

urban-rural interface territorial relational multijurisdictional governance mobilities turn soft spaces spaces of engagement

In U.S. politics, “taking back control” has become a populist theme. But how do local communities and their governments engage with forces of change that transcend their boundaries? Rural and urban communities all face the challenge of territorial governance in an ever more interdependent world, where many people feel increasingly powerless in the face of forces beyond their democratic control.

America’s new rural-urban interface is a case in point, structured by ever more intense social, economic, and environmental interdependencies among urban and rural places and an inability individually to address the broader forces of change. Without cooperation, or coordination at a higher level, local governance is unable to respond effectivity to the challenges of an increasingly interdependent world. One-size-fits-all policies such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (e.g., “welfare reform”), for example, instituted work and training requirements that, while realistic for urban persons, were unattainable for the rural poor in the absence of explicit mechanisms that link rural persons to urban training, child care, and transportation services (Jensen and Chitose 1997). In addition, focusing on one community at a time deflects attention from the collective needs and opportunities that exist in the broader field of multijurisdictional relationships. The result is waste and inefficiency, redundant programs, and missed opportunities for more strategic, effective, and accountable governance. Moreover, competition and conflict between neighboring places reduces the possibilities for cooperative solutions to challenges in the rural-urban interface (OECD 2013). This is especially true in areas such as emergency medical service, fire suppression, and education. In education, for example, go-it-alone strategies often result in a loss of services in smaller rural schools, and even school closures, while intercommunity cooperation in such areas as administrative services, procurement, and the teaching of specialized advanced placement courses could contribute to the viability of local rural schools while guaranteeing access to high-quality education regardless of a student’s place of residence.

This article develops a conceptual framework for examining the dynamic organization of communities located in the rural-urban interface, a conceptualization that provides guidance for more effective governance of interaction and interdependence. Castells wrote in 1997 of the “annihilation of space” brought about by advances in information technology, modern transportation, and other societal and global transformations facilitated by deregulation, devolution of authority, ever more mobile capital and labor, and heightened corporate penetration throughout national and global space. Interestingly, much the same language was used in 1852 by Frederick Douglass to describe how the railway, steamship, and telegraph incubated and intensified new patterns of spatial interaction. Here, we examine what such a networked and interdependent world, and associated developments in social science theory, namely, a “relational turn” (Massey 2004) and a “mobilities turn” (Urry 2007), implies for the ways we understand the interface between rural and urban space and its governance. More generally, we explore the challenges and opportunities of governing at the urban-rural interface, which, we argue, now requires a more cooperative logic rather than the traditional logic of nested hierarchical, spatial governance (Gualini 2006).

Our goal is to illustrate how current definitions and thinking about political geography represent a conceptual roadblock to spatial integration and governance at the rural-urban interface. We begin by explaining the “rural-urban interface.” We then examine emerging patterns of social and economic organization in the rural-urban interface, along with a hybrid conceptualization that acknowledges growing interdependence among bounded places located hierarchically along the rural-urban continuum. We consider the current status of multijurisdictional governance at the regional and local levels, and illustrate how our hybrid approach contributes to more effective and accountable solutions to problems facing people and communities in the rural-urban interface. Our theoretical discussion is grounded in four examples of multijurisdictional governance, which effectively highlight a new perspective on spatial planning shaped by a relational understanding of space and place (Graham and Healey 1999; Healey 2007). This new perspective challenges our current understanding of autonomous bounded territorial entities, and proposes instead that spatial and social boundaries are increasingly porous—hence the term soft spaces, introduced later in this article (Paasi and Zimmerbauer 2016, 76). We conclude with some observations about the challenges and opportunities of using a hybrid territorial/relational lens to conceptualize and implement rural-urban governance.

The New Rural-Urban Interface

Social scientists, policy-makers, and social commentators have long observed that a growing amount of social, economic, demographic, political, and environmental activity occurs in the rural-urban interface.¹ Until recently, this urban-rural space (e.g., peri-urban, urban fringe, or rurban) has been thought of as almost entirely under urban control—political and economic influences that radiate outward from the urban core or city. Early regional economic theory, and much contemporary thinking, conceptualized metropolitan regions as an asymmetric set of social and economic relationships whereby the center dominates the hinterland, and places in the hinterland possess little or no collective agency. Shucksmith (2008, 63) has characterized this mode of thought as “cities as the locomotives of economic development, and rural areas as carriages being pulled along in the wake of the great modern metropolis.” Ward (2006, 52) has argued that such thinking “reproduces a rural development problem. It establishes and reinforces out-of-date notions of geographic centrality and hierarchies, and it actively marginalises places, consigning them to the periphery, dividing and polarising.” This city-centric thinking is the legacy of central place theory (Christaller 1933/1966; Losch 1940/1954), as synthesized, enhanced, and imported into American research on regional economy and society by Bogue (1950), Berry (1967), and many other scholars. Previous research has documented the growing demographic and economic dominance of the nation’s large cities (Fischer and Hout 2008). Moreover, central place theory continues to form the fundamental basis of the American system of statistical geography, especially the core-based concepts of metropolitan statistical areas, micropolitan statistical areas, and noncore areas (U.S. Census Bureau 2013).

Recently, however, scholars have reconsidered the hierarchical nature of spatial relationships constituting U.S. metropolitan regions. The urban-rural interface is conceptualized as a space of social and economic interdependence and interpenetration rather than a social or symbolic boundary separating urban from rural life (Lichter and Brown 2011; OECD 2013). The demographic and economic hegemony of the nation’s large cities is unmistakable, along with the asymmetrical nature of the power relationship between central cities and hinterland communities. Yet recent scholarship has observed an acceleration in the volume of urban-rural transactions but has begun to question the extent of asymmetry and the relative lack of autonomy possessed by peripheral places, at least in certain types of transactions, such as food security, waste management, recreation and leisure, and environmental services (Lichter and Brown 2014). Similarly, Scott (2011, 857) has argued that the interstitial spaces lying between metropolitan areas are undergoing significant transformation “as they become increasingly articulated with the rhythms and cultures of the modern metropolis,” and scholars such as Harrison and Heley (2014, 1118) and Cloke (2006, 19) suggest that this “urbanization of the rural” is accompanied by “ruralization of the urban” as processes of deconcentration, decentralization, and gentrification lead the urban form to adopt very strong rural characteristics.

In this article we employ a relational² perspective to examine the spatial organization of the rural-urban interface. We see the interface as a space that is produced and reproduced by social, economic, environmental, and other types of transactions that occur on a regular basis and are part and parcel of a metropolitan region’s essential organization and structure. We see these rural-urban relationships whether they involve commuting and labor market mobility, land use changes, direct marketing of urban services or agricultural produce, or the hauling of urban trash to rural landfills as providing possibilities for collaboration on one hand and conflict on the other. These relationships are infused with power, the deployment of which is often opaque and obscured. The rural-urban interface is not neatly bounded by governmental or politico-administrative borders. It is a multilevel, polycentric space where governance flows across units and jurisdictions (Homsy and Warner 2013), a “space of flows” as Castells (1989) terms it.³ In this article, we critique approaches that unduly privilege governmental units and fail to engage with the social, economic, political, and environmental relationships in which places are embedded.

In principle, an approach that addresses both relational and territorial aspects of the settlement system could be achieved, as noted above, either by hierarchical coordination from a higher level of government or by horizontal cooperation. The next section explains why we believe that the coordinated approach is decreasingly possible in contemporary America. We then set out an alternative, cooperative conceptual framework to help policy-makers consider how to design and implement effective and accountable governance structures in support of people and communities in the rural-urban interface. Our framework is derived from the new spatial planning literature, as articulated by scholars such as Allmendinger and Haughton (2009), Gualini (2006), and Paasi (2013). While it embraces relational thinking, it also acts within legally sanctioned spaces (Allmendinger, Chilla, and Sielker 2014; Shucksmith, Brown, and Vergunst 2012; Cox 1993). Hence, our framework features a hybrid of territorial and relational thought, addressing both bounded political and administrative territories and the social, economic, and environmental relationships in which these communities are enmeshed and embedded.

A Lack of Coordination: The Rise and Fall of National-Level Regional Planning in the United States

The U.S. federal government does not have an overarching regional development policy (OECD 2010). A 2009 World Development Report background paper contended that regional policy in the United States comprises “a complex web of (often poorly) integrated programs … that operate at different and often overlapping scales” (Hewings, Feser, and Poole 2009, 2). The report goes on to observe that the “degree of coordination across spatial governance regimes is often ad hoc at best.” Moreover, Drabenstott (2006) has shown that only a small fraction of U.S. development-oriented programs actually focus on either place-specific development, for example Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Community Development Block Grant Program; or broader area and regional development, for example, the Commerce Department’s network of multicounty economic development districts (EDD). Instead, the majority of development-related funding and program effort is focused on physical infrastructure, education, and housing programs that occur in specific, bounded places. These observations are consistent with Storper et al.’s (2015) recent study of San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’ differing fortunes since 1970. They concluded that “it is not realistic to propose that regions devise formal strategies for regional economic development in the U.S. There would be no agency to implement them even if they were well designed. … In addition, existing interests in fragmentation and overlap are entrenched and supported by a widely shared ideology of community economic development and local control” (Storper et al. 2015, 227).

The United States did not always suffer from a relative lack of national-level programs promoting and supporting multijurisdictional planning and development. In fact, as late as the early 1980s, the United States had a robust system of substate regionalism. At that time, a wide variety of regional councils and agencies was supported by federal grant programs. These councils operated in both metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Nonmetropolitan regional councils tended to place emphasis on general management, planning, and policy advice to local governments, while metropolitan councils devoted attention to planning in such specific areas as environmental quality and transportation (Stam and Reid 1980). Most of the programs assisted regional organizations that performed specific functions, such as transportation, land use planning, or economic development. Some of the federal programs, however, such as those focusing on health care planning, only assisted substate regional organizations devoted to particular functions.⁴ Most, but not all, of these federal programs were available nationwide.

Substate regionalism began after World War II in the United States, and accelerated greatly during the early 1970s. For about a decade, the federal government had a significant impact on the growth of substate regionalism. According to research by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR; 1977), only five federal planning grant programs for community development used an area-wide approach in 1964. By 1972, there were twenty-four such programs, and thirty-two by 1976 (ACIR 1979). Beginning in the late sixties, the federal government coordinated general purpose regional development programs through a network of A-95 regional clearinghouses. In addition, regional planning and service delivery for single functions such as health care, transportation, mental health, and environmental quality management were also developed during this time. Federally mandated planning in general, and substate regionalism in particular, dwindled by the late 1970s. Neither the Carter nor the Reagan administration nor Congress was willing to sustain it (Bowman and Franke 2008). The Reagan administration was especially hostile to the idea of federal planning. With its supply side view of the market, the culture of planning was seen to limit the reach of market mechanisms, and to substitute professional for consumer judgment (Melhado 2006). Accordingly, nationally managed substate regionalism virtually disappeared in the United States after 1980.⁵

Toward Cooperation: A Territorial Framework for Examining Governance of the Rural-Urban Interface

Without regional or subregional governance, atomized local government is likely to lose its capacity to perform effectively in an increasingly interdependent, networked, and neoliberal world (Lewis et al. 2013). This will take place in the face of market and other forces, which transcend spatial or place boundaries. Jobs are offshored, services centralized or withdrawn, and decisions made far away in boardrooms and offices without knowledge of or commitment to the places concerned.

Some scholars have characterized these transformations in terms of the differential mobility of people in places, arguing that this difference is becoming an increasingly potent stratifying factor of life chances in our late modern or postmodern times, because the differential mobility of people in places constrain some while enabling others, whether in urban or rural settings (Urry 2007). These ideas have become widely adopted in sociology to the extent that they are referred to as a “mobilities turn.” Complementary to this is the “relational turn,” which is being explored by geographers and planners, both in Europe and America. They focus on the social and networked nature of space and scale (Friedmann 1993; Amin 2004; Massey 2004, 2005; Thrift 2004), and the increasingly “porous” nature of boundaries and borders (Amin 2002, 391). These writers dispute “the idea that space can be understood as a ‘container’ and scales as nested hierarchies of bounded and partitioned spaces” (Allmendinger, Chilla, and Sielker 2014, 2703). Nevertheless, there is a recognition that portraying relational and territorial spaces as unduly dichotomous may be unhelpful, and that both may be significant.

This raises many questions for both rural and urban studies. Most fundamentally, recognition of the networked nature of space and scale, and the porous nature of boundaries and borders might call into question the notion of “place” itself, place-based development, the rural-urban binary implicit in rural or urban studies, and, important for this article, the liminal space of the rural-urban interface. However, we argue that, while the extent and nature of mobility have increased in contemporary society and new forms of mobility are restructuring people’s social and economic lives, people still solve the challenges of everyday life in places that are meaningful for them (Shucksmith, Brown, and Vergunst 2012; Beynon and Hudson 1993). Accordingly, we reject a simple territorial versus relational dichotomy, and see the rural-urban interface as a synthesis of place-based relationships and broader relational processes, both of which must be addressed. In other words, local governance might draw upon and employ a range of relational networks that stretch beyond the local jurisdiction, but these are still simultaneously lodged within their territories (Allen and Cochrane 2010).

To this end, “Local and regional actors construct ‘spaces of engagement’ (or networks of association) that link them to regional, national, or supranational institutions in order to secure their local ‘spaces of dependence’—areas in which their prosperity, power, or legitimacy relies on the reproduction of certain social relations” (Mackinnon 2010, 5). Other attempts to overcome the territorial/relational dualism have drawn on a range of theories, or revived the concept of localities in terms of absolute, relative, and relational space (Jones and Woods 2014; Anderson and McFarlane 2011). Jones and Woods (2014) make the important point that to have analytical value any locality must have both material coherence and imagined coherence. In other words, there must both be institutional structures that hold a locality together and provide vehicles for collective action, and there must also be a shared sense of identity that makes that place meaningful as a space of collective action.

So while increasing mobilities and global flows are restructuring the nature of rural-urban and global-local relationships, places still matter. Many institutions such as councils are still place-based and places still have meaning for those who live there. The challenge for governance in the rural-urban interface is to simultaneously acknowledge the legitimacy of place-based interests while also engaging with transcendent inter-place relationships through constructing spaces of engagement.

This combination of relational and territorial insights has implications for multilevel governance in many spheres, and not only with respect to the rural-urban interface. First, this calls into question how we conceive of place-based policies, whether characterized as “bottom-up” (endogenous) or “top-down” (exogenous) in rural studies, “place-shaping” in urban studies and planning (Forester 1999), and “asset-based community development” or “community capitals” approaches (Flora and Flora 2008).

Our perspective on governance in the rural-urban interface is shaped by the notion of networked development (Shucksmith 2012; Lowe, Murdoch, and Ward 1995; Ray 2006). This notion proposes that social and economic development processes combine bottom-up, internal (endogenous) forces and top-down, external (exogenous) forces. The local necessarily interacts with the extra-local in contemporary networked society, with importance attached to both vertical (hierarchical) and horizontal networks (Schucksmith 2010). Critical to the socioeconomic development process are those institutions, actors, and networks that have the capacity to link businesses, communities, and institutions involved in governance at a variety of scales. Networked development therefore involves not only deliberative governance and territorial place shaping, but also institutional capacity building and sharing of responsibilities with an enabling state and other external actors (Shucksmith 2012). Places need to be integrated within wider networks and structures so that external resources can be readily appropriated when they are absent or damaged in the local setting, and to secure their wider spaces of association in a networked world.

Challenges to fundamental spatial concepts such as territory, border, and place have also been central to recent developments in planning theory, notably the emergence of a new “spatial planning” founded upon a relational understanding of space and place (Graham and Healey 1999; Healey 2007). While planners “have traditionally thought and practiced with and through clearly bounded scales (national, regional, local), in this century the new spatial planning is imposing relationally inscribed concepts … into the lexicon of spatial planners” (Heley 2013, 1325). “Relational thinking has challenged the understanding of the world as a simple continuum of bounded territorial entities and suggests that regions are social constructs and results of power struggles, and that their borders are increasingly porous” (Paasi and Zimmerbauer 2016, 76). Nevertheless, consistent with our contention that governance should reflect a combination of relational and territorial thinking, the legitimacy and accountability of planners is still seen to reside in bounded territories, with their electorates, laws, and regulatory codes. For this reason, Cochrane and Ward (2012, 7) argue that “policy-making has to be understood as both relational and territorial, as both in motion and simultaneously fixed, or embedded in place. Rather than seeing this as an inherently contradictory process, however, what matters is to be able to explore the ways in which the working through of this tension serves to produce policies and places, policies in place.”

In the absence of hierarchical coordination at the regional or subregional level, cooperation between local jurisdictions offers, in principle, an alternative approach to engaging with the relational forces of change that transcend political and administrative boundaries. But can they succeed in practice in enabling policymaking that is both territorial and relational?

Practical attempts to govern the rural-urban interface more effectively through a hybrid of relational and territorial thinking at the state and local level have indeed emerged in the United States. We have seen in the previous section that the decline of national-level coordination of regional planning in the United States frustrates the need to address both territorial and relational aspects of governance, and this section has advanced an alternative conceptual approach that makes a case for cooperation. We turn now, in the next section, to concrete examples of relational governance in action at the state and local levels, suggesting that such cooperation may be more feasible and appropriate to the American context than hierarchical coordination. These examples ground the theoretical discussion, and show how the relational and territorial perspectives help U.S. planners and policy-makers to reassert the promise of multiscalar governance and planning in the rural-urban interface.

Multijurisdictional Governance and Planning in the United States: Cooperative Approaches

While we have seen that the United States lacks a coherent national approach to multijurisdictional governance, many states, and some metropolitan areas, have developed thoughtful and innovative approaches to assist in regional planning and development. These schemes can be comprehensive and multifunctional in nature, or focused on a particular function such as waste management, fire protection, or water supply. We provide three examples of effective state-level comprehensive planning and development schemes to show that multijurisdictional planning and governance exists and succeeds in the United States and to describe their similarities and differences of focus and organization. These examples are all consistent with the hybridized territorial and relational approach to rural-urban interface governance proposed above. We also include one example of a lack of cooperation frustrating effective governance.

Walworth County’s comprehensive plan

In 1999, the Wisconsin Legislature enacted the “smart growth” law that provided a new framework for the development, adoption, and implementation of comprehensive plans by counties, cities, villages, and towns (Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission 2009). A good example of this was developed by Walworth County. Walworth, located in the southeast corner of the state, comprises the Whitewater-Elkhorn micropolitan statistical area. Its 102,000 persons are spread across fifteen towns that include five small cities, ten villages, and open country. In addition, it is contiguous to both the Milwaukee and Racine metropolitan statistical areas. Accordingly, Walworth County is squarely in the rural-urban interface. In response to the state’s requirements, Walworth County, in cooperation with thirteen of its fifteen towns, prepared a multijurisdictional comprehensive plan that includes issues and opportunities; housing; transportation; utilities and community facilities; agricultural, natural, and cultural resources; economic development; intergovernmental cooperation; land use; and implementation (Walworth County Wisconsin 2010). The plan was developed, and is governed, by a smart growth technical advisory committee that includes one elected representative from each participating town and five Walworth County board representatives at large. The technical advisory committee, the county board, and the participating towns designed a public participation plan at the onset. This essential part of the process seeks to obtain a high level of public input throughout the course of the planning. Hence, the Walworth plan exemplifies the territorial and relational thinking that we propose in this article.

The comprehensive land use plan through the year 2035 is among the most important impacts of Walworth County’s multijurisdictional approach. The countywide land use plan was developed to achieve basic consistency among the fifteen individual town land use plans while at the same time promoting long-standing county planning objectives of protecting important natural and agricultural resources and preserving the unique characteristics of the county, while accommodating expected growth and development (Walworth County Wisconsin 2009).

Flagstaff, Arizona’s fire suppression initiative

Flagstaff, Arizona, is located in the middle of the world’s largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest. According to forest ecologists at the University of Northern Arizona, decades of putting fires out has caused the forest to get too dense, making it more susceptible to big, hot, devastating fires. Without action, unnaturally large and severe wildfire exacerbated by climate change will destroy the forests and put communities at risk. Faced with this probable fate, the Four Forest Restoration Initiative (FFRI) was established to conduct landscape-scale restoration planning and implementation to protect critical wildlife habitat, safeguard communities, and create jobs. The goal is to restore a vast set of forests, grasslands, and springs in Arizona’s high country.

After decades of devastating wildfires and a year of discussions, the U.S. Forest Service, other natural resource agencies, community leaders, environmentalists, scientists, and private industry leaders established the FFRI to restore forest ecosystems on four national forests in Arizona. The initiative includes a multiparty monitoring effort to share diverse perspectives between multiple interests and stakeholders, to foster understanding, and to incorporate the latest scientific evidence concerning environmental and forest management. The FFRI is a collaborative effort involving more than thirty individual public and private entities. This diverse group includes the city of Flagstaff and other municipalities, the county, the state, the timber industry, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service. These stakeholders meet monthly, do research, and work with the Forest Service to create small controlled fires and remove brush and weeds that can lead to large uncontrolled fires that endanger communities, housing, and wildlife. This is a collaborative process. FFRI differs from many past forest management schemes in that it pays attention to both territorial entities such as local government, and to the relationships that link them together in a sociobiological ecosystem. In other words, the initiative’s organizational model is consistent with the hybrid territorial/relational model put forth in this article, and the urban-rural interface that envelops Flagstaff and its environs is part of the ecosystem being managed by FFRI.

New York City’s watershed

Watershed management is a clear example of successful multiscalar governance of natural resources (Bloomquist and Schlager 2005). Watersheds are often located, at least in part, in the rural-urban interface. Hence, this is a good example through which to examine how the (cooperative and competitive) relationships joining urban and rural communities can be mobilized to structure and regulate the use of water located in the hinterland of large cities. Since decisions about the control of water are made by individuals and groups, developing unified authorities involving multiple jurisdictions is especially challenging. We examine this process through the lens of the New York City (NYC) watershed.

NYC obtains its water from a system of reservoirs located in the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River Valley (see Figure 1). The water is of exceptionally high quality, and requires less treatment and filtration than other urban water systems. Hence, social and economic activities occurring in the vicinity of NYC’s water sources increase the risks of contamination and the need for expensive filtration and other kinds of treatment. Not surprisingly, NYC seeks to control land use in the vicinity of its reservoirs by purchasing conservation easements and by restricting economic activities such as dairy farming. In the early 1990s, NYC proposed regulatory actions that aroused fears that agriculture and other economic activities in the watershed would be significantly curtailed. Specifically, NYC’s proposed regulations would have produced buffer zones around water sources, restricted construction of new sewer connections, and led to significant land purchases by the city around reservoirs and water courses. These potential outcomes generated contentious negotiations between NYC and forty-one communities located in the watershed.

Figure 1

The New York City Watershed

The forty-one localities each had a strong individual interest but lacked a collective “regional identity.” NYC’s proposed regulatory actions awakened a long-held and widespread view of NYC as an “oppressor” of rural towns that dated back to the early part of the twentieth century when the city constructed the West of Hudson Water System (Pfeffer and Wagenet 2003). This oppositional view helped to spur a community development process among the forty-one towns in the NYC watershed that resulted in the establishment of the Coalition of Watershed Towns. This coalition negotiated a mutually advantageous memorandum of agreement (MOA) with NYC in 1997. The MOA permitted NYC to purchase land or conservation easements if NYC agreed not to exercise eminent domain to acquire land for watershed protection. In addition, the Watershed Protection and Partnership Program, involving NYC and the forty-one watershed towns, was established as a mechanism to protect the watershed’s ecology, while at the same time protecting the social and economic vitality of the watershed communities. Hence, this multiscalar governance process “encompasses the interests of both water quality protection for downstream consumers, and the social and economic well-being for upstream residents” (Pfeffer and Wagenet 2003, 114). This integrated, regional watershed management system provides a mechanism for accountability that sets performance standards and responds to diverse community interests (Bloomquist and Schlager 2005). As a result, NYC has avoided costly infrastructure and operating expenditures while upstate communities have been able to seek development initiatives consistent with the MOA.

Lexington, Kentucky

A recent OECD report (2013) on rural-urban partnerships shows that, despite the potential advantages of a cooperative approach to multijurisdictional governance, substantial obstacles to cooperation remain, particularly in their case study, Lexington, Kentucky. The report showed that trust is lacking between the individual county governments composing Lexington’s metropolitan region, and, in addition, the nature of the local tax system stimulates aggressive competition between local authorities for economic development and adds to existing rivalries among counties, making cooperation and partnerships difficult. Lexington and its surrounding counties also have radically different perspectives on future growth in the area. The OECD concludes that “while virtually all local officials recognize that in principle, regional collaboration could improve collective well-being, they fear their jurisdiction would lose in the process. In this environment, absent a compelling reason to collaborate, it is safer politically to act autonomously” (OECD 2013, 329). The key impediments to cooperation are lack of trust, the perceived economic self-interest of local government, differences in culture and values, and a lack of subregional coherence. This example shows how a lack of cooperation often hampers effective multijurisdictional governance.

“Soft Spaces” as a Cooperative Model for Planning in the Rural-Urban Interface

These examples from the United States show that it is possible to transcend the territorial/relational dichotomy in addressing processes that operate across and beyond territorial jurisdictions, but they also reveal some of the cultural and structural challenges and obstacles involved in doing so. We have argued that the legitimacy and accountability of elected politicians and their executives still rest in bounded territories, but they must now confront relational processes and porous boundaries that transcend but also inhabit territories. Meeting these challenges requires conceptual and theoretical development from academia as well as innovations in practices of governance.

In this final section, we raise the question of whether the concept of “soft space,” inspired by developments in European and UK planning and economic development practice, might offer potential in both these respects for America. Indeed, Allmendinger and Haughton (2009) introduced the concept of soft space to show how relational thinking can influence not just research and spatial analysis but also spatial policy and practice. They noticed that spatial planning, while still tied legally to set boundaries for formal plans, was in practice also operating informally beyond its jurisdiction. Planners had found ways of extending their reach over “soft spaces,” beyond the borders of their jurisdiction, to address processes that stretched further afield, such as housing demand, commuting, and water supplies. This was achieved by working with a broad range of public, private, and civil society actors who were able to transcend individual jurisdictions and thereby engage with complex, multilayered, fluid, and, sometimes, fuzzy scales of policy and governance arrangements.

In short, planners have already been found to be at work in subregions that do not conform to politico-administrative boundaries, often in city-regions⁶ or in other urban-rural interfaces, such as around London. This responds to a policy impetus to break away from the shackles of preexisting patterns of governance that are viewed as slow, bureaucratic, or not reflecting the real geographies of problems and opportunities (Allmendinger and Haughton 2009, 619). Allmendinger, Chilla, and Sielker (2014, 2705) therefore conceptualize soft spaces as new spaces for governance that can be relatively enduring or ephemeral, formal or informal, centrally sanctioned or locally driven. They argue that these spaces provide an opportunity to address mismatches between administrative and functional areas by creating bespoke spaces for dealing with specific issues such as regeneration, integrating different sectors such as transport, infrastructure, and education, in processes operating at various scales.

The bottom line—and why we think these concepts are critical to American thinking about governance and policy development in the rural-urban interface—is that soft spaces are hybrids of territorial and relational space. They are so both conceptually and in practical application, enabling (bounded) municipalities or communities and their executives to engage with relational flows and processes that transcend boundaries. For this reason, the developing literature on soft space and fuzzy boundaries may be an avenue worth exploring for U.S. practitioners and U.S. political and social scientists.

To that end, a brief introduction to that literature is sketched here. The soft space approach has some practical advantages that enable cooperation to proceed even where there are significant obstacles to formal collaboration. Perhaps its most attractive feature is its informality and the scope afforded for creativity and experimentation (alongside political deniability). Indeed, it is this experimental and political dimension to multijurisdictional schemes that allows them to be used politically, testing strategies and approaches to an issue without ceding ultimate authority (Allmendinger, Chilla, and Sielker 2014, 2706). This, of course, is double-edged and has its dangers alongside the advantages.

Thus, a potentially serious criticism of such informal approaches, and a challenge both for practice and academia, is what we characterize as the dark side of multijurisdictional governance: that is, the potential of such practices to obscure power arrangements and be nondemocratic. Soft spaces may allow experiments and initiatives to escape democratic scrutiny to the benefit of powerful actors, while obscuring where power actually resides. For example, Allmendinger and Haughton (2009) argue that the development of (so-called) sustainable communities in the Thames Gateway in the spaces between formal agencies and plans and strategies has been used to overcome resistance to new housing development. Olsen and Richardson (2011, 361) see such use of multijurisdictional governance as a way of camouflaging contested spatial politics, while Paasi and Zimmerbauer (2016, 88) emphasize that power in such processes derives not from one electorate or its officers but is embedded in a complex assemblage of actors, interactions, interests, negotiations, struggles, and events that occur through networks, perhaps facilitating capture of democratic processes by social elites. This raises the question of how to enjoy the advantages of working in this informal, creative way while also ensuring transparency and accountability.

From an analytical perspective, we offer two further criticisms of the concept of soft space, neither of which may impede its practical governance application to rural-urban interaction. First, the soft spaces may only loosely be said to create hybrids of territorial and relational space, since they only seem to apply to contiguous territories and relations that overspill administrative boundaries, rather than in circumstances where it is harder to map relational space on to territorial space. In this sense, soft spaces may be more akin to Jones and Woods’s (2014) lens of relative space than relational space. This may matter less when focusing on subregional or regional rural-urban interdependencies than if we were concerned with the noncontiguous urban-rural interdependencies of the global agri-food complex, for example. Second, because soft space derives from planning theory, it still privileges governments (local, regional, and national) as social and political actors, despite the diminished role of local governments under neoliberalism in an interconnected world.

These emerging approaches to transcending the territorial/relational dichotomy have advantages and dangers, therefore, some of which may be inherent but others may be avoidable. The concepts of soft space and fuzzy boundaries emanate from a substantial international literature from which American academics and practitioners can draw in developing appropriate approaches to conceptualizing and addressing pressing issues in the rural-urban interface.

Conclusion: The Promise of Relational Governance at the Rural-Urban Interface

In this article we have framed the rural-urban interface as a social and economic space that is produced and reproduced by social, economic, political, and other kinds of relationships between urban and rural communities. Rather than being a boundary that divides rural from urban space, the interface is a zone of intense interaction that links rural and urban people and communities. We drew on ideas from European planning and geography to develop a conceptual framework for examining the dynamic structures and processes that construct the interface, and as a basis for multiscalar governance of rural-urban space where diverse processes are structuring and restructuring everyday life. The dynamic model we propose is a hybrid of territorial and relational spaces that enables (bounded) electorates and their executives to engage with relational flows and processes that transcend political and municipal boundaries.

This hybrid of territorial and relational thinking identifies the real geographies of problems and opportunities, thereby minimizing the mismatch between administrative and functional areas. Places, with their institutions, governments, histories, and legacies, matter in present-day America, but these entities are embedded in complex multiscalar networks where much social, economic, and political life is transacted. Hence, governance in the rural-urban interface can be more effective, responsive, and accountable where both territorial and relational aspects of rural and urban space are considered and accounted for in policy development and program administration.

We have argued that the soft space approach is flexible and dynamic, but that it carries a risk of obscuring power relationships and undermining democratic governance. Instead we propose a hybrid, cooperative approach that, while still flexible and experimental, can help to minimize the antidemocratic tendencies of soft space because concrete communities have histories, legacies, and identities, or what Jones and Woods (2014) have called material and imagined coherence. We used diverse examples to ground our discussion of the hybrid governance model, and to demonstrate that these theoretical concepts can be translated into real-world practice, so long as we also learn from experiences and studies in the UK and Europe as well as those in the United States. Our perspective includes not only the network society of enhanced connectivity and interdependencies, but also the changed role of government and administrative borders and place-based actors.

Consistent with our contention that a hybrid approach can be effective and accountable, Storper and his colleagues (2015) showed that San Francisco’s superior performance in terms of gross value added (GVA) per capita compared with that of Los Angeles is at least partly related to its adoption of multijurisdictional governance. They observe that while neither San Francisco nor Los Angeles has a single regional development agency with powers to coordinate regional development policies, “nevertheless, many regionally important projects are carried out by either the biggest cities in the region or by special-purpose agencies created by political coalitions among the cities and counties,” including, for example, water supplies and transport infrastructure (Storper et al. 2015, 145). However, the study concludes that San Francisco has learned about the benefits of multiscalar cooperation and has built effective institutions for cooperation since the 1950s, with the councils in the Bay Area learning how to collaborate effectively, while “Los Angeles county inspires competition and rejection by its neighbor counties” (Storper et al. 2015, 168).

These authors draw attention to the relational processes that cut across administrative territories: “metropolitan regions rarely have agencies whose role is to promote regional economic development but instead rely on a patchwork of cities and counties and their many departments and agencies … this is a problem because economies operate at regional scales, with causes and effects that do not respect the borders of cities and counties or the different powers of their dizzying array of agencies and policies” (Storper et al. 2015, 226). Indeed, while many factors are involved, Storper and colleagues find that networks and relational landscapes are far more significant to the divergence of these regional economies (Storper et al. 2015, 169–70, 201–8) than the usual factors used to explain urban growth. Entrepreneurs in San Francisco were able to draw on boundary-spanning economic and social networks, which enabled them to combine knowledge from different fields as well as to facilitate the emergence of an innovative organizational ecology and an open source culture.

We believe that governance of the rural-urban interface will be more effective and accountable if policies and programs involve not only the constituent municipalities located in this interface but also the social, economic, and environmental relationships in which these communities are embedded. This hybrid approach can produce effective governance at the urban-rural interface, in potentially contentious areas as waste management; infrastructure development; changing land use patterns, including but not limited to the location of housing; economic activities; municipal facilities such as transportation and waste water treatment plants; environmental protection and natural resources management; and local food systems.

Footnotes

NOTE:

The authors would like to acknowledge the advice and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers. Mark Tewdwr-Jones, Mike Woods, Andy Pike, Dan Lichter, and those attending the TARRN Network meeting in Belfast in May 2016 also made helpful suggestions. As usual, any errors remain the authors’ responsibility. This work was supported by USDA NIFA multistate research grant # 1597800 as administered by the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station.

Notes

David L. Brown is international professor of development sociology at Cornell University. He is past president of the Rural Sociological Society and past chair of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Development Sociology. He is the author or editor of ten books, most recently the Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies (2016).

Mark Shucksmith is a professor and director of Newcastle University Institute for Social Renewal, UK. He is the author or editor of twelve books, most recently the Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies (2016). He was awarded the OBE by Queen Elizabeth in 2009 for services to rural development and to crofting.

References

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR). 1977. A catalogue of federal grant-In-aid programs to state and local governments: Grants funded FY 1975. A- 52a. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR). 1979. A catalogue of federal grant-in-aid programs to state and local governments: grants funded FY 1978. A-72. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Allen

John

Cochrane

Allan D.

2010. Assemblages of state power: Topological shifts in the organization of government and politics. Antipode 42 (5): 1071–89.

Allmendinger

Phil

Chilla

Tobias

Sielker

Franziska

. 2014. Europeanizing territoriality: Towards soft spaces? Environment and Planning A 46 (11): 2703–27.

Allmendinger

Phil

Haughton

Graham

. 2009. Soft spaces, fuzzy boundaries, and metagovernance: The new spatial planning in the Thames gateway. Environment and Planning A 41(3): 617–33.

Amin

Ash

. 2002. Spatialities of globalisation. Environment and Planning A 34 (3): 385–99.

Amin

Ash

. 2004. Regions unbound: Towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler B 86 (1): 33–44.

Anderson

Ben

McFarlane

Colin

. 2011. Assemblage in geography. Area 43 (2): 124–27.

Berry

Brian J .L.

1967. Geography of market centers and retail distribution. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

10.

Beynon

Huw

Hudson

Ray

. 1993. Place and space in contemporary Europe: Some lessons and reflections. Antipode 25 (3): 177–90.

11.

Bloomquist

William

Schlager

Edella

. 2005. Political pitfalls of integrated watershed management. Society and Natural Resources 18 (2): 101–17.

12.

Bogue

Donald

. 1950. The structure of the metropolitan community: A study of dominance and subdominance. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

13.

Bowman

Ann

Franke

James

. 2008. The decline of substate regionalism. Journal of Urban Affairs 6 (4): 51–63.

14.

Castells

Manuel

. 1989. The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban regional process. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

15.

Castells

Manuel

. 1997. The rise of the network society. London: Blackwell Publishers.

16.

Christaller

Walter

. 1933/1966. Die zentralen orte in suddeutschland [Central places in southern Germany]. Trans. by Baskin.

C. W.

Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

17.

Cloke

Paul

. 2006. Conceptualising rurality. In The handbook of rural studies, eds. Cloke

Paul

Marsden

Terry

Mooney

Patrick

, 18–28. London: Sage Publications.

18.

Cochrane

Allen

Ward

Kevin

. 2012. Researching the possibilities of policy mobility: Confronting the methodological challenges. Guest editorial. Environment and Planning A 44 (1): 5–12.

19.

Cox

Kevin R.

1993. The local and the global in the new urban politics: A critical view. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 (4): 433–48.

20.

Douglass

Fredrick

. 1852. What, to the Slave, Is the 4th of July? Speech in Rochester, New York. Available from http://www.blackpast.org/1852-frederick-douglass-what-slave-fourth-july.

21.

Drabenstott

Mark

. 2006. Rethinking federal policy for regional development. Economic Review 91 (1): 115–42.

22.

Fischer

Claude

Hout

Michael

. 2008. Century of difference: How America changed over the last 100 years. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.

23.

Flora

Cornelia

Flora

Jan

, eds. 2008. Rural communities: Legacy and change. 3rd ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

24.

Forester

John

. 1999. The deliberative practitioner: Encouraging participatory planning processes. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

25.

Friedmann

John

. 1993. Towards a non-Euclidian mode of planning. Journal of the American Planning Association 59 (4): 482–84.

26.

Graham

Stephen

Healey

Patsy

. 1999. Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for planning theory and practice. European Planning Studies 7 (5): 623–46.

27.

Gualini

Enrico

. 2006. The rescaling of governance in Europe: New spatial and institutional rationales. European Planning Studies 14 (7): 881–904.

28.

Harrison

John

Heley

Jesse

. 2014. Governing beyond the metropolis: Placing the rural in city-region development. Urban Studies 52 (6): 1113–33.

29.

Healey

Patsy

. 2007. Urban complexity and spatial strategies: Towards a relational planning for our times. London: Routledge.

30.

Heley

Jesse

. 2013. Soft spaces, fuzzy boundaries and spatial governance in post-devolution Wales. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (4): 1325–48.

31.

Hewings

Geoffrey

Feser

Edward

Poole

Ken

. 2009. Spatial/territorial development policies in the United States. Background paper. World Development Report: Reshaping Economic Geography. Washington, DC: World Bank. Available from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTWDRS/Resources/477365-1327525347307/8392086-1327527757537/Hewings.pdf.

32.

Homsy

George

Warner

Mildred

. 2013. Climate change and the co-production of knowledge and policy in rural USA communities. Sociologia Ruralis 53 (3): 291–310.

33.

Jensen

Leif

Chitose

Yoshimi

. 1997. Will workfare work? Job availability for welfare recipients in rural and urban America. Population Research and Policy Review 16 (4): 383–95.

34.

Isserman

Andrew

Rephann

Terance

. 1995. The economic effects of the Appalachian regional commission. Journal of the American Planning Association 61 (3): 345–65.

35.

Jones

Martin

Woods

Michael

. 2014. New localities. Regional Studies 47 (1): 29–42.

36.

Lewis

Nick

Heron

Richard Le

Campbell

Hugh

Henry

Matthew

Heron

Erena Le

Pawson

Eric

Perkins

Harvey

Roche

Michael

Rosin

Christopher

. 2013. Assembling biological economics: Region-shaping initiatives in making and retaining value. New Zealand Geographer 69 (3):180–96.

37.

Lichter

Daniel

Brown

David L.

2011. Rural America in an urban society: Changing spatial and social boundaries. Annual Review of Sociology 37:565–92.

38.

Lichter

Daniel

Brown

David L.

2014. The new rural-urban interface: Lessons for higher education. Choices 29 (1): 1–6.

39.

Losch

August

. 1940/1954. Die raumliche ordnung der wirtschaft [ The economics of location]. Trans. by Woglom

Walter

Stolper

Wolfgang

. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

40.

Lowe

Philip

Murdoch

John

Ward

Neil

. 1995. Networks in rural development: Beyond endogenous and exogenous models. In Beyond modernisation: The impact of endogenous rural development, eds. van der Ploeg

Jan D.

van Dijk

Gert

, 87–105. Assen, the Netherlands: Van Gorcum.

41.

Mackinnon

Danny

. 2010. Reconstructing scale: Towards a new scalar politics. Progress in Human Geography 35 (1): 21–36.

42.

Massey

Doreen

. 2004. The political challenge of relational space: Introduction to the Vega Symposium. Geografiska Annaler B 86 (1): 3.

43.

Massey

Doreen

. 2005. For space. London: Sage Publications.

44.

Melhado

Evan

. 2006. Health planning in the United States and the decline of public-interest policymaking. Milbank Quarterly 84 (2): 359–440.

45.

OECD. 2010. Regional development policies in OECD countries. Paris: OECD. Available from http://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/regionaldevelopmentpoliciesinoecdcountries.htm.

46.

OECD. 2013. Rural-urban partnerships: An integrated approach to economic development. Paris: OECD.

47.

Olsen

Kristian

Richardson

Tim

. 2011. The spatial politics of spatial representation: Relationality as a medium for depoliticization? International Planning Studies 16 (4): 355–75.

48.

Paasi

Anssi

. 2013. Regional planning and the mobilisation of regional identity: From bounded spaces to relational complexity. Regional Studies 47 (8): 1206–19.

49.

Paasi

Anssi

Zimmerbauer

Kaj

. 2016. Penumbral borders and planning paradoxes: Relational thinking and the question of borders in spatial planning. Environment and Planning A 48 (1): 75–93.

50.

Pfeffer

Max

Wagenet

Linda

. 2003. Communities of interest and the negotiation of watershed management. In Pathways for getting to better water quality: The citizen effect, eds. Morton

Lois Wright

Brown

Susan

, 109–19. New York, NY: Springer.

51.

Ray

Chris

. 2006. Neo-endogenous rural development in the EU. In The handbook of rural studies, eds. Cloke

Paul

Marsden

Terry

Mooney

Patrick

, 278–91. London: Sage Publications.

52.

Scott

Allen J.

2011. A world in emergence: Notes towards a resynthesis of urban economic geography for the 21st century. Urban Geography 32 (6): 845–970.

53.

Shucksmith

Mark

. 2008. New Labour’s countryside in international perspective. In New Labour’s countryside: Rural policy in Britain since 1997, ed. Woods

Michael

, 59–78. Bristol, UK: Polity Press.

54.

Shucksmith

Mark.

2010. Disintegrated rural development? Neo-endogenous rural development, planning and place shaping in diffused power contexts. Sociologia Ruralis 50 (1): 1–14.

55.

Shucksmith

Mark

. 2012. Future directions in rural development. Dunfermline, UK: Carnegie UK Trust. Available from http://www.carnegieuktrust.org.uk/publications/future-directions-in-rural-development-full-report/.

56.

Shucksmith

Mark

Brown

David L.

Vergunst

. 2012. Constructing the rural-urban interface: Place still matters in a highly mobile society. In Rural transformations and rural policies in the US and UK, eds. Shucksmith

Mark

Brown

David L.

Shortall

Sally

Vergunst

Warner

Mildred

, 287–306. New York, NY: Routledge.

57.

Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission. 2009. Community assistance. Available from http://www.sewrpc.org/SEWRPC/communityassistance/AdvisoryServices.htm.

58.

Stam

Jerome

Reid

Norman

. 1980. Federal programs supporting multicounty substate regional activities: An overview. Rural Development Research Report No. 23. Washington, DC: USDA-ERS.

59.

Storper

Michael

Kemeny

Thomas

Makarem

Naji

Osman

Taner

. 2015. The rise and fall of urban economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.

60.

Thrift

Nigel

. 2004. Transurbanism. Urban Geography 25 (8): 724–34.

61.

Urry

John

. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity Press.

62.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2013. Metropolitan and micropolitan areas. Available from http://www.census.gov/population/metro/.

63.

U.S. Economic Development Administration (EDA). 2007. What you need to know about your economic development administration. Washington, DC: U.S. EDA.

64.

Walworth County Wisconsin. 2009. Multijurisdictional comprehensive plan. Fact Sheet No. 5. Available from http://www.sewrpc.org/SEWRPCFiles/CommunityAssistance/Smartgrowth/Walworth/fact_sheet_walworth_5.pdf.

65.

Walworth County Wisconsin. 2010. A multi-jurisdictional comprehensive plan for Walworth County: 2035. Community Assistance Planning Report No. 288. Available from http://www.sewrpc.org/SEWRPCFiles/Publications/CAPR/capr-288-comprehensive-plan-for-walworth-co-2035.pdf.

66.

Ward

Neil

. 2006. Rural development and the economies of rural areas. In A new rural agenda, ed. Midgley

Jane

, 46–67. Newcastle upon Tyne: Ipprnorth.