Sustainability science is use-inspired fundamental research that links knowledge to action such that meeting the needs of society can be balanced with sustaining the life support systems of the planet (1, 2). Nowhere is this action-oriented research needed more than in urban areas that are now home to more than half of the world’s population, generating about 80% of the world’s economy (3) as w...

The rapid and large-scale urbanization of peri-urban areas poses major and complex challenges for wildlife conservation. We used population viability analysis (PVA) to evaluate the influence of urban encroachment, fire, and fauna crossing structures, with and without accounting for inbreeding effects, on the metapopulation viability of a medium-sized ground-dwelling mammal, the southern brown b...

Africa is urbanizing rapidly, and this creates both opportunities and challenges. Labor productivity appears to be much higher in developing-world cities than in rural areas, and historically urbanization is strongly correlated with economic growth. Education seems to be a strong complement to urbanization, and entrepreneurial human capital correlates strongly with urban success. Immigrants pro...

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the least urbanized region of the world and more than 60% of the population, 570 million people, still live in rural areas [1]. Over the next few decades Africa will be one of the most rapidly urbanizing regions [2], and with this transition is an expected rise in cardiovascular risk factors and disease (CVD) [3]. Across sub-Saharan Africa, many adults migrate back an...

This cross-sectional study was carried out to estimate the prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus and its' risk factors in an urbanizing rural community of Bangladesh. Two villages were randomly selected from the rural areas of Gazipur district and total 975 subjects (> or =20 years), were included following simple random procedure. Capillary blood glucose levels, fasting blood glucose (FBG) le...

Assessing the world’s progress against poverty calls for frequent and careful measurements, using household surveys and price data. Fortunately, the task of measuring poverty is becoming easier, and the results are probably getting more accurate over time. The best data for assessing progress against poverty come from surveys of the living standards of nationally representative samples of house...

Understanding spatial distributions, synergies, and tradeoffs of multiple ecosystem services (benefits people derive from ecosystems) remains challenging. We analyzed the supply of 10 ecosystem services for 2006 across a large urbanizing agricultural watershed in the Upper Midwest of the United States, and asked the following: (i) Where are areas of high and low supply of individual ecosystem s...

Abstract This paper proposes an infrastructure analytic for exploring the urbanizing landscapes of China's “national new areas.” In effort to develop a less city-centred approach transformations underway in these spaces, I consider area as “infrastructure space” which conventional distinctions between rural and urban have become increasingly meaningless. Such draws our attention ways large-scal...

Engaging with different literatures in economic geography, postcolonial urbanism, and planetary urbanization, this article seeks to develop a theoretical understanding of remote urban formations taking shape India’s countryside. The analysis draws on extensive primary data collected at two study sites Bihar West Bengal, which rendered an uncommonly rich set for such areas. We observe emergent t...