Planning the Global Countryside:Comparing Approaches to Teaching Rural Planning

Abstract

Planning is largely an urban field. While the issues facing megacities around the world have received a great deal of attention from plan ners, the converse of global urbanization— global rural decline—has occurred. The latter is also becoming the focus of significant schol arship. To explore the impacts of globalization on rural areas, we made a comparative assess ment of how rural planning is conceptualized and taught in the three nations with the larg est economies: Germany, Japan, and the U.S. We begin with a discussion of the meaning of rurality and a summary of the issues facing rural Germany, Japan, and the U.S. We then report on education for rural planning in the three countries. We conclude with a brief discussion of the challenges that globalization presents to rural planners.