ZONE OF TENSION Historically, landscapes graded from urban centers to scattered villages, to a diverse mosaic of farmlands and natural areas (Figure 1). This gradient allowed both a visual and physical transition while maintaining ecologic, economic, and social connections within the larger landscape. Conflicts between urban and rural residents were minimal, in part due to the limited interface...

share of income inequality.1 In part, today’s rural–urban gap reflects the institutional legacies of socialism. Beginning in the 1950s, Communist Party leaders clearly separated urban and rural residents through a strictly enforced residential permit (hukou) system (see chapter 3), establishing urban and industrial development as the main objective of economic planning. Urban workers were provi...

ZONE OF TENSION Historically, landscapes graded from urban centers to scattered villages, to a diverse mosaic of farmlands and natural areas (Figure 1). This gradient allowed both a visual and physical transition while maintaining ecologic, economic, and social connections within the larger landscape. Conflicts between urban and rural residents were minimal, in part due to the limited interface...

Thar region of Rajasthan, with its varied characteristics in culture, economies, the environment, governance and religion, is home to semi-urban and urban agriculture that seems to have originated in the Fertile Crescent of the homeland of the first farmers. Arid lands and deserts make up a large part of Rajasthan. Two-thirds of the state is desert or dry-lands. Half the state’s population is f...

Since 1952, U.S. timberland has decreased by about 20 million acres, with about one-quarter of the reduction in the South. Although some of the timberland has been converted to urban and developed uses, larger amounts of land shifted uses between forest and agriculture because of changes in product markets and policy conditions. We summarize area trends for major land uses, examine recent polic...