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Abstract:

Cities are hubs of money, power, and information. Characterised by high population density, numerous built structures, extensive impervious surfaces, decreased vegetative cover, and highly modified ecosystem services, cities or urban areas are surrounded by less-densely populated areas with less built-up space, referred to as rural areas (Wu 2014). Rural areas are perceived as a mosaic of land uses with various types of human intervention and productivity, including various degrees of naturalness. In Europe, one of the most intensely anthropised areas of the world, very few natural areas have been left untouched, and thus the degree of naturalness of rural areas is relatively low. Notwithstanding certain benefits that rural areas gain from cities, such as market access, investment inputs, or employment opportunities (Gebre and Gebremedhin 2019), cities have generally developed an extractive relationship with those areas. The countryside is perceived as a source of food, water, materials, and energy to serve the needs of cities, which behave as accumulative economic nodes (McHale et al. 2015). Widespread policy attention on cities has marginalised rural areas from territorial development planning, forgetting to account for the urban and the rural on equal terms (Urso 2020). Urban dwellers, particularly in middle to high-income countries, are physically and mentally disconnected from the rural world, at most knowing it as a space for recreation and distraction (Roberts and Hall 2001). This disconnect could hamper awareness of overconsumption of natural resources and environmental degradation happening in the rural world (Church 2013), even though environmental driven protest against impacts of climate change and natural resource extraction is often originating from urban citizens (Scheidel et al. 2020).