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Countryside planning has become popular due to the improvement in the economic level of China. A rural construction planning permission system is an important means to guide and standardize village construction. Therefore, this study investigates the current condition of rural planning in Guangdong and the general condition of Guangdong Province. Village planning problems, such as the village theory, lack of characteristics, and lack of coordination, are also presented. The bottleneck of the construction village planning permission system is presented. A “three-step” strategy and mode transformation (i.e., legal, personalized, and independent steps) is established based on the analysis of the Guangdong rural planning problems. Finally, the general requirements for village construction under the permission system are proposed along with the study of the village planning in Guangdong, which is the representative case. Therefore, this study provides a reference for the effective linkage between village planning and the rural construction planning permission system.

Rural society is increasingly open to a globalized world, and migration from rural areas to cities is becoming increasingly important. Many rural areas face depopulation, an aging population, and limited access to a range of services. To address this challenge, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) involved in the concept of smart villages have much to offer. In order to streamline the debate, this chapter proposes a methodology based on resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a habitat or system to recover to its initial state when the disturbance to which it has been subjected has ceased. In this regard, a retrospective of rural areas is proposed based on the experience of the garden city model, for which the advantages of rural areas were evident over those of urban areas. The objective is to reconsider the intrinsic qualities of rural areas in order to recover and enhance them with the added value of the European Union (EU) Smart Villages approach. These facets will be the driving forces behind sustainable development. In conclusion, a number of recommendations are presented, including the development of a catalog, structured by regions and territories, of rural areas and their different potentials and opportunities, for the development of smart villages projects.

By analyzing the mechanisms by which rural infrastructure resilience (RIR) impacted population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

This study considered 213 administrative villages in Longxi County in the Longzhong loess hilly region as the evaluation unit. Based on the construction of a multidimensional RIR evaluation system, the spatial spillover effect of RIR on population loss was determined using the spatial Durbin model (SDM).

The average resilience of each subsystem of rural infrastructure in Longxi County was low, and there were large differences in the spatial distribution. The mean RIR index value was 0.2258, with obvious spatial directivity and agglomeration characteristics. The population loss index of Longxi County had a value of 0.1759, with 26.29 of villages having a high loss level. The population loss was relatively serious and was correlated with the spatial distribution of RIR. The villages with larger RIR index values had lower population loss. The RIR had a significant spatial spillover effect on population loss. Productive infrastructure resilience and living infrastructure resilience (LIR) had negative spillover effects on population loss, and social service infrastructure resilience (SSIR) had a positive spillover effect on population loss.

By analyzing the mechanisms by which RIR impacted on population loss in Longxi County, this study proposes measures to improve RIR, which provides a practical reference for realizing China's rural revitalization strategy, besides providing ideas for alleviating population loss in similar regions around the world.

The literature of entrepreneurship has an urban focus and despite the emergence of the rural entrepreneurship literature, we know little about the characteristics, philosophies, operating practices and growth strategies of ordinary village entrepreneurs’ in a UK context. As a concept, the “village entrepreneur” is contentious as theoretically there should be little difference between urban and rural entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, there is! The concept is important because many villages are in decline and are marginal places in terms of entrepreneurial opportunity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A review of the fragmented literature is conducted to synthesise and develop greater understanding. Drawing on a “life-story” approach the empirical strand comprises of an analysis of five ethnographic interviews with village entrepreneurs.

The respondents did not consider themselves entrepreneurs whom they characterised as flash, rogues and even crooked. Their embedded village entrepreneur persona was constructed around tales-of-character, hard work and perseverance. They prided themselves in making “slow-money” which they retain over their lifetime. Embeddedness, self-efficacy, character and morality were key themes encountered.

From a research perspective the findings are based on a limited sample and the study was not specifically designed to capture data on characteristics, philosophies and operating practices. Further research on a larger scale is necessary to validate the findings.

From a practical perspective policy makers require to consider the notions of embeddedness, self-efficacy, character and morality when considering implementing growth strategies in rural areas.

This study contributes to the growing literature of rural entrepreneurship by expanding the typology of rural entrepreneurs and by detailing philosophies, operating practices, and growth strategies suitable and appropriate for small village and rural businesses.

The key purpose of the paper is to consider the challenges facing local authorities in supporting sustainable rural settlements in their efforts to be enterprising and sustainable in confronted with increasingly severe downward pressure on local authority finances due to the recession; the long-term trend of increased adult social care costs linked to a challenging demographic profile across rural England; and increasing expectations around service delivery arising from more discerning “e-enabled” users of public services.

This paper offers a structured reflection on the responses of a qualitative study of village sustainability, based on case studies of the inhabitants of three villages in Lincolnshire, England. The paper draws on responses by 70 voices to a series of workshops held in village halls and pubs.

Significant work needs to be done at the local level, to support the transition from long-standing, organic practice within communities to the creation of an infrastructure which can support the delivery of more services by communities themselves.

Workshop-based approaches to gathering responses can allow for biased responses, and this study is limited to the views of self-selecting actors in three villages.

The paper examines the barriers and opportunities facing local communities and introduces the concept of community to community learning.

The aim of this paper is to understand the influence of the external environment and rural retailer purchase preference on the length of channels in rural areas in India.

The methodology involved the survey of over 686 rural retailers in 103 villages across rural India, to trace the structure of distribution channels.

The correlation analysis and ANOVA test show that channel length varies in regions based on variation in the external environment. Village retailer with his unique buying preferences also influences the distribution channel.

The study involves only two product categories and ignores the evolutionary aspect of distribution channels.

The study provides pointers to marketers interested in gaining access to rural markets.

The paper is one of the first empirical studies which focuses on understanding the distribution channel in rural areas, by starting from the village retailer onwards to the channel intermediaries in the nearest small town.

Smart villages are a currently discussed approach to rural development promoted by the European Union. This approach factors in the diversity of rural areas and the different nature of challenges faced by each area. The central role is assigned to local communities – formation of appropriate characteristics and attitudes that enable the creation of optimal conditions for development. This is also the result of the evolution of a Rural Development Policy, which is driven by the dynamics and direction of change of rural areas and changes in societal perception of change events in rural areas.

The implementation of this development approach at the local level requires a transformation of the current school of thinking on development and the utilization of available resources. The key role in this process is played by local governments, which are part of the local community and also represent its interests.

The chapter combines theoretical and practical issues, and represents a geographic perspective. Its first aim is to answer the question: How can local governments create the right conditions for smart development at the local level? The second aim is to discuss the smart village approach in the context of selected development concepts. This leads to a number of specific recommendations for policymakers. It also helps them to understand the approach, which is vital in the implementation of the aforesaid recommendations.

The concept of smart village emerged in the European Union (EU) level policy debates on rural development in 2016, following the stakeholder-driven Cork 2.0 Declaration. It was developed through a pilot project initiative on ‘Smart, Eco, Social Villages’ and spelled out in the ‘EU Action for Smart Villages’ initiative.

While the concept of smart villages remains unclear for many, substantial work has been carried out to develop the concept and to prepare the underlying supporting instruments at the EU level over the last three years.

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of how the concept of smart villages has evolved at the EU level and to draw some recommendations for future policy work. The chapter reveals difficulties in the utilization efficiency of the EU funds in rural areas and shows a patched landscape of fragmented policy instruments. The key arguments are that while the mixture of these tools is important, the glue that binds them together is still missing, and that the general utilization efficiency is not sufficient. The authors offer a set of five recommendations for the short to medium term, which is needed for the successful implementation of the smart approach: integration, simplification, communication, innovation, and ‘rural proofing.’

This study explores configurations that promote the development of collective economies in China's rural villages and reveals the multiple development pathways that otherwise remain relatively unexamined in the literature.

The authors obtained first-hand representative case data from 20 villages in 12 counties in 5 provinces in East, West and Central China via fieldwork and applied fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) to conduct a configurational comparative study of the development of village collective economies.

This paper identifies five factors in the current literature that affect the development of village collectives, based on an “entrepreneur–situation” analytical framework. Using the fsQCA method, this study further obtains two main configurations of conditions that culminate in the growth of rural collective economies in China. The first solution is the “top-down path”: When entrepreneurial leadership (EL), resource endowment (RE) and government assistance (GA) are present, a village collective economy will experience a high level of development, irrespective of policy support (PS) and villagers' participation (VP). The second solution is the “bottom-up path”: When EL, VP and PS are present and GA is not present, a village collective economy will experience a high level of development, irrespective of RE. In both situations, EL stands out as the core condition for the development of village collective economies, implying the need for the government to vigorously cultivate the entrepreneurial skills and aspirations of village cadres.

Taking a configurational perspective and using an fsQCA approach, this research constructs an “entrepreneur–situation” analytical framework to investigate the key combinations of factors and pathways involved in the high level of development of Chinese village collective economies.

Over recent decades, rural areas have been facing significant challenges that exacerbate the existing discontent in their communities. These challenges are mostly reflected in depopulation trends, increased vulnerability to external shocks, and reduced quality of basic services. Local Action Groups (LAGs) all over Europe have been working on these challenges since the early 1990s. More recently, the smart villages concept is starting to generate enthusiasm among rural development stakeholders to try to revert these trends by supporting communities to move toward a more sustainable future while taking advantage of new emerging opportunities. This chapter demonstrates that the LEADER approach and its principles are also part of the smart villages concept. However, practical differences between the two emerge as a result of limitations imposed by restrictive LEADER regulatory frameworks in many member states. Our main argument is that LEADER has what is needed to be the main tool for driving smart villages in Europe as long as there is a policy framework in place that enables LEADER to exploit its full potential. This conclusion is grounded on the analysis of the role that LEADER played in a number of smart village initiatives across the EU.