Special Feature

The Urban–Rural Continuum: Heritage, Livelihoods, and Everyday Infrastructures

Special Feature

The Urban–Rural Continuum: 
Heritage, Livelihoods, and Everyday Infrastructures

How gardens, community networks, and multi-valued landscapes blur the urban–rural divide.

‘Urban’ and ‘rural’ are often treated as separate worlds — one modern and productive, the other peripheral or leftover. But the boundary is less clear in practice. This Special Feature brings together three lenses that reconceptualise urban and rural as one connected system: Singapore’s gardening heritage as resilience infrastructure, alternative food networks as a pathway for rural revitalisation, and cemeteries as multi-valued landscapes where heritage and ecology collide with development pressure.

Featured Articles

Gardening Heritage - Sustainable Urban Living in Singapore with Professor Fiona Williamson
Urbanisation vs. Heritage: The Evolving Role of Cemeteries in Asia’s Cities
Understanding Alternative Food Networks and What It Means For the Developing World

Where the City Expands: Value, Uplift, and Displacement

 

If “urban” and “rural” are one connected system, the peri-urban edge is where that connection becomes a bargain. This is the zone where land can shift quickly from use value (food production, livelihoods, everyday landscapes) to exchange value (development rights and speculation) — often because of planning decisions and new infrastructure rather than anything local communities did. 

Research across Southeast Asia shows why this matters: when value uplift is created by public decisions but captured privately, the costs often resurface as displacement, loss of local production, and higher public spending to manage service gaps and risk. Increasingly, policy and research are moving towards more practical fixes — tighter compensation and resettlement rules, land value capture tools, and “do relocation properly” approaches that treat livelihood recovery as part of development rather than an afterthought.

 

Read more: OECD — Financing Sustainable Cities in Southeast Asia

The Urban–Rural Continuum in Everyday Life

“Urban” and “rural” are often spoken about as separate worlds. In practice, they’re stitched together by everyday arrangements: who supplies whom, where value is captured, and which places are protected — or written off — when development pressure rises. The point here isn’t to romanticise the rural or resist change for its own sake. It’s to show that city resilience depends on these connections, and that many of the most important ones are easy to miss until they’re gone. 

The map highlights three ordinary settings where the continuum becomes visible: procurement that can reshape rural demand, gardening as a form of resilience training rather than decoration, and cemeteries as multi-valued landscapes where heritage and ecology collide with redevelopment. Together, they offer a more grounded way to think about development as a set of choices about what we keep, what we extract, and what we allow to disappear.