Summary of the rural planning and sustainable rural development

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Summary of the rural planning and sustainable rural development

The book tried to analyse the policies and approaches used by southeast Asian countries in response to the changing rural-urban relation, it suggested that rural and urban problems cannot be treated separately because urban problems are usually rooted in unsatisfactory rural plannings. Developing countries have experienced rapid urbanisation since 1950s, planners have tried to develop policies to enhance economic growth and development. During the process of transformation, traditional rural-urban relations are often be distorted. Besides, new technologies and urban-based industrialisation strategies brought out a polarised dichotomies between large cities and rural areas, in relation to demographic, economic and political characteristics, for examples difference in salaries, functions and infrastructures. Although urban expansion facilitated urban industrialisation and rural-to-urban migration, urban dominance and ever-increasing population pressure gived rise to the aggravation of landlessness, rural poverty and environmental degradation. In response to this situation, many Asian countries in the seventies have adopted a rural-based regional strategy to reduce regional growth disparities and promote subordinate rural development. Nevertheless, critics claimed for a more balanced approach thought that the rural-based strategies may have overreacted to the persistent problems of urban primacy, they think that the relative stagnation of rural area is resulted from false dichotomic opposition of rural versus urban and polarised development in the capital cities and national core areas due to the green revolution meant. Therefore, the writer explained the importance of thorough understanding of rural-urban relations in regional context and claimed that the different degrees and forms of integration of the national economy in the world system determine the pattern of rural-urban transformation.

Chapter Two reviewed the trends of poverty and rural-urban disparities in the south and southeast Asia. Lo and Saliah assessed the dualism and disparities between rural and urban sectors by using a holistic macro-spatial framework characterised by the spatial organisation of rural-urban relations. The writers noticed that though the per capita Gross National profit increased even greater than expected, one-third of the Third World population had no benefit from the adopted policy. The underlying reason is expected to be the polarisation of development. Therefore, industrialisation models like the ‘Chinese model’, ecodevelopment and ‘another development’ put emphasis on self reliance and advocated a people-centred basic needs, in order to reverse the patterns of uneven development with attention given to development at regional and local levels. Lo and Saliah investigated the national economic growth by Gini coefficients and GNP per capita, they discovered that only Sri Lanka, Japan and Taiwan in southeast Asia undergone a significant economic improvement from the 50s to 70s, but all the three districts showed distinct patterns of polarised development. Then, the  authors argued that the Gini coefficients does not detect directions of redistribution with reference to specific income groups and is failed to represent a more qualitative interpretation of the levels of income received, especially by the lower income groups. For that reason, the authors constructed a macro-spatial framework specifically explains the key dimensions of development and accounts for the variety of prevailing national conditions, like resource endowment and population pressure.

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  The macro-spatial framework analyses the dualism between rural and urban areas with respect to external relations in different districts particularly the North and South, together with formal and informal economic activities. The model is built on five components respectively: a world market(WM) for exporting manufactured goods; an urban formal(UF) sector of modern manufacturing and corporate business; an urban informal(UI) consisted of traditional and small scaled economies; a rural export(RX) sector represented colonial plantation economy; and finally a rural peasant(RP) economy which isolated from national and world market. The writers then used the macro-spatial framework to explain the following rural-urban ...

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