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Introduction: The Broad Contours of Exurban Landscape Change

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A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia

Abstract

Scholars of ecological and social change have wrestled in recent years with the emergence of a particular kind of place beyond cities and suburbs where urban and rural are “intermingled” or “fused,” a place increasingly referred to as “exurbia.” This introductory chapter to A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia outlines the main goals of this book, first by addressing the challenges of studying environmental and social issues related to exurbia and second by offering a qualitative yet comparative empirical approach to the study of exurbia to complement the more quantitative emphasis in existing scholarship on densities and dispersion of residential settlement patterns. The chapters in this book together offer a comparative and political ecological perspective, which is to see exurbia as a landscape produced by shifting global economic conditions. The book focuses on struggles over exurban landscape change in land-use planning and decision-making processes. By comparing exurban transitions and by discussing the similarities and differences between very different exurban landscapes and experiences, we explore exurbanization from a comparative qualitative perspective.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The concept of environmental imaginaries (Peet and Watts 1996) is useful in political ecology for studying the relative influence of particular ideologies of nature in landscape politics, where ideologies have the power to define the nature of nature in a particular place (e.g., “endangered species habitat,” “natural heritage system”) and to determine the corresponding land uses permitted. (For a detailed discussion of the use of the concept of environmental imaginaries in exurban political ecology, see Chap. 2).

  2. 2.

    For an introduction to neoliberalism in geography scholarship, see Harvey (2007); also Gibson-Graham 2006 for a critique of scholarship

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Environmental Studies, Planning Program, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J 1P3

    Laura E. Taylor

  2. Department of Environmental Studies, Ursinus College, 1000, Collegeville, PA, 19426, USA

    Patrick T. Hurley

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  1. Laura E. Taylor
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Correspondence to Laura E. Taylor .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Laura E. Taylor

  2. Environmental Studies, Ursinus College, Collegeville, Pennsylvania, USA

    Patrick T. Hurley

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Taylor, L.E., Hurley, P.T. (2016). Introduction: The Broad Contours of Exurban Landscape Change. In: Taylor, L., Hurley, P. (eds) A Comparative Political Ecology of Exurbia. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29462-9_1

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