Rural Revival

How, if possible, to re-populate declining rural and regional areas? Examining this crucial and complex issue in relation to Australia, this book explores how a particular organization, 'Country Week', has emerged and developed as one means of stimulating the repopulation of declining or stagnating areas. While this is a problem shared by many other developed countries in Europe and North America, Australia's 'Country Week' programme puts forward an innovative range of place-marketing strategies that challenge rural decline and urban migration and can offer new approaches which could be adopted more widely.

How, if possible, to re-populate declining rural and regional areas? Examining this crucial and complex issue in relation to Australia, this book explores how a particular organization, 'Country Week', has emerged and developed as one means of stimulating the repopulation of declining or stagnating areas. While this is a problem shared by many other developed countries in Europe and North America, Australia's 'Country Week' programme puts forward an innovative range of place-marketing strategies that challenge rural decline and urban migration and can offer new approaches which could be adopted more widely.

The Democratic Party left rural America behind. This urgent rallying cry shows how Democrats can win back and empower overlooked communities that have been pushing politics to the right—and why long-term progressive political power depends on it. Through 2 successful elections in rural red districts that few thought could be won by a Democrat, twentysomethings Maine state senator Chloe Maxmin (D-District 13) and campaign manager Canyon Woodward saw how the Democratic Party has focused for too long on the interests of elite leaders and big donors, forcing the party to abandon the concerns of rural America—jeopardizing climate justice, racial equity, economic justice, and more. Dirt Road Revival looks at how we got here and lays out a road map for progressive campaigns in rural America to build an inclusive, robust, grassroots politics that fights for equity and justice across our country. First, Maxmin and Woodward detail how rural America has been left behind. They explore rural healthcare, economic struggle, brain drain, aging communities, whiteness and racism, education access, broadband, Big Agriculture, and more. Drawing on their own experiences, they paint a picture of rural America today and pinpoint the strategic failures of Democrats that have caused the party to lose its rural foothold. Next, they tell the story of their successful campaigns in the most rural county in the most rural state in the nation. In 2018, Maxmin became the only Democrat to ever win Maine House District 88 and then unseated the highest-ranking Republican in Maine —the Senate Minority Leader—in 2020, making her the youngest woman senator in Maine’s history. Finally, Maxmin and Woodward distill their experiences into concrete lessons that can be applied to rural districts across the country to build power from the state and local levels on up. They lay out a new long-term vision for Democrats to rebuild trust and win campaigns in rural America by translating progressive values to a rural context, moving beyond the failed strategies of establishment consultants and utilizing grassroots-movement organizing strategies to effectively engage moderate rural voters.

Can rural churches experience significant growth? The answer is, "YES!" This book defines and applies four major factors that distinguish growing churches from the rest of the pack.

The URA periodical is an annual open-access publication, which will accompany the Sino-German research and development project Urban-Rural Assembly (URA,01LE1804A-D), sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the FONA program Sustainable Development of Urban Regions (NUR). By combining scientific and essayistic writings, photographic works, and/or ethnographic studies including interviews, spatial mappings and drawings, the URA periodical will seek to bridge academic, practice and policy discourses around global sustainability challenges and integrated planning and governance approaches at the urban-rural interface. Der URA Sammelband ist eine jährliche Open-Access Publikation, die im Rahmen des deutsch-chinesischen Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprojektes Urban-Rural-Assembly (URA) herausgegeben wird. Durch die Kombination von wissenschaftlichen und essayistischen Schriften, fotografischen Arbeiten und ethnografischen Studien, einschließlich Interviews sowie räumlicher Kartierungsarbeiten, werden die einzelnen Ausgaben des URA Sammelbandes eine Brücke zwischen akademischen, praktischen und politischen Diskursen zu globalen Nachhaltigkeitsfragen und integrierten Forschungs- und Entwicklungsansätzen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Stadt und Land schlagen. URA wird vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) im Rahmen des FONA-Programmes Nachhaltige Entwicklung städtischer Regionen (NUR) gefördert (KZF: 01LE1804A-D, 2019-2024).

Sure to be controversial and spur debate, this book presents a powerful analysis of rural change to marketization and globalization. Using Russia as a case study, it examines the how the rural population responded to reform policies during the transition away from communism. Wegren draws upon extensive field work, survey data, interviews, and wide-ranging Russian language source material to investigate adaptive behaviours by different groups of the rural population. The differentiated and nuanced analysis sheds considerable light on debates over whether actors are motivated mainly by rational or moral considerations.

Shows how small farming communities--the heart and soul of America--are both besieged and determined to survive, and reveals, through vivid storytelling, how the future of America is being played out on the high plains of Kansas.

Rural communities depend on the health of the agrarian cultures that compose them. These cultures grow out of the symbiotic relationship between a particular landscape and the human community that lives on and uses the land. Agrarian cultures had their origin in the development of agriculture and gave birth to the civilizations and empires of history. Based on the exercise of hierarchical power characteristic of their nature, empires and civilizations are always a threat to the welfare of their agrarian cultures, that by nature tend to be local, relational, reciprocal, and ecological. This is the story of the three Anabaptist agrarian cultures--Swiss German, Low German, and Hutterian--of the Freeman, South Dakota, rural community, and their sojourn within the empires of civilization through the centuries. More specifically, this is the story of their birth, growth, maturation, and death (or rebirth?) in the particular landscape of the Great Plains to which they came from Russia in the 1870s. Here we see the agrarian cultures' struggle to adapt to the new environment of the Great Plains and to maintain their unique identity while living within American society. This is the drama of a rural community's life cycle!