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This chapter introduces the theoretical and political-practical underpinnings of this volume. It also gives an outline of the editorial organisation of the book and the various chapters. The chapter examines the literature on rural-urban relations, city-near rural areas and current challenges and problems identified in these areas. We identify huge sustainability and resilience problems in current rural-urban relations and metropolitan ruralities. We also relate to writings about a transition from the current carbon-based economy and society to a post-carbon society with reduced ecological footprints. The contributions in this volume are based on the current situation and provide ideas to develop the debate on rural-urban relations, metropolitan ruralities and post-carbon transition.

Departing from an ideal interpretation of the collaborative governance approach, the authors analyse the integrative and collaborative capacities of project-based regional development actions in spatially diverse city regions in Finland. Scrutinizing the relevance of collaborative ideals and their institutional prerequisites becomes all the more salient given the strong emphasis on collaborative approaches to regional diversities throughout Europe. The results show that the integrative potentials are related to specific types of areas. They also call the facilitating capacities of politico-administrative institutions into question. The results are interpreted in terms of an institutional duality that strongly corresponds to the public-private divide.

This chapter summarizes the theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in the volume and draws up some final conclusions. The methodology is meta-analysis of the chapters in the volume. The main conclusions are that ordinary citizens, professionals, and administrators alike generally are willing to reform urban and rural-urban policy into a more sustainable direction but that the affected political and governance systems have difficulties in responding to this. The editors’ advice is to further develop collaborative governance involving a broad range of stakeholders and perhaps also to start using the wide range of economic incentives available to decision-makers today to further a more sustainable development in rural-urban catchments. We hope that this concluding analysis will feed the debate on these critical issues.

The differences of urban and rural as social spaces, their functions in society, as well as their mutual dependence have been a subject of scientific thinking since the antique times. This chapter revisits the topic from a sociological point of view, studying the evolution of the functions of rural in relation to urban, and how this evolution was reflected in the basic streams of rural research. The text ends by discussing rural research in relation to present social, economic and ecological tendencies. It is argued that the post-productionist phase of rural studies is losing its plausibility, because of the return of material functions for the countryside, during such recent trends as the global food crises and the greenhouse effect. This chapter discusses the prognosis made by the three founding fathers of rural sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman and Charles J. Galpin (1932) that the society is melting together into a ‘rurban’ society, and takes distance from this prognosis for several reasons, for example because ecological tendencies seem to renew rather than diminish the differences between rural and urban. It is further argued that ecosystems have increasing impacts on societies in the form of adapted ‘greenhouse rationalism’. Such changes place rural research in a crossroads, posing the question whether to pay attention to increasingly important impacts of ecosystems on society, or not.