The distinct challenges across urban and rural areas in education are non-binary, with great variation within both urban and rural areas, depending on population density, infrastructure, distances, and other factors. The solution, likewise, is not merely to provide more of the same services in rural areas that are offered in urban areas. Global data sets like the ones provided by Moreno-Monroy and co-authors (2020) for FEAs, or by Cattaneo and co-authors (2021) for URCAs open new possibilities. Matching them with improved geo-located data—as was done for poverty in Section 3.3—that identify and describe the contexts in which children and youth live, the constraints they face, and their educational participation, is crucial. It will enable policies that are better designed and better targeted so that every child has equal opportunities to fully realize their potential.

# 5. The way forward

With this review, we revisit rural–urban connectivity, emphasizing the bidirectional nature of rural– urban relationships, and the difficulty of discussing social and economic processes in one area without acknowledging the other. We bring together two different approaches that address territorial issues – functional areas and the rural–urban continuum – and provide a framework for their adaptation and operationalization based on recently published data and the methods to compute it. This area of research is significant for all countries regarding access to employment, education, health services, and opportunities for civic engagement. For low income countries, it is particularly relevant for poverty reduction strategies, organizing city–region food systems, and mobility transitions towards more commuting and less migration. We suggest directions to shift the discussion on development policy towards a more territorial perspective that accounts for interlinkages between different size cities as well as their surrounding rural areas. We argue that the recently developed URCA global data set is an important step forward, especially if complemented with studies, to understand how spatial relationships operate in a variety of social, economic, and developmental contexts. Similarly, the global delineation of metropolitan areas (Moreno-Monroy, Schiavina, & Veneri, 2020) also provides new entry points for informing development policy, particularly for urban planning.

Although not covered in this paper, we acknowledge that, with ICT, rural–urban linkages may become partly decoupled from travel time and distance to an urban center. This trend has, to some extent, increased with the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, while the pandemic has exacerbated long-standing inequalities – including spatial inequalities along the rural–urban continuum – it has also induced innovation. The consequential health crisis, for example, pushed physicians and health systems worldwide to adopt virtualized treatment approaches between patients and health providers (Webster, 2020). The challenge will be to sustain these innovations on a permanent basis after the pandemic. Rural residents can greatly benefit from enhanced quality-of-life provided by better ICT connectivity for access to e-government, health care, education, etc. However, small towns and rural communities often lack the basic ICT infrastructure needed to prosper in the digital age, namely internet access (Lai & Widmar, 2020), as well as access to digital goods and services such as e-health (Webster, 2020) and online education. This is an interesting avenue for future research that will surely affect social and economic development along the rural–urban continuum.

Another unaddressed, though very important area, is that of natural resource management and, specifically, of ecosystem services – the benefits that people obtain from nature – that also differ along 26