demonstrated, collective rural-urban water management is indeed possible, but there are many other instances where the use of water is not collectively governed.

Tourism and recreation are other activities linking urban and rural communities, whereby the sites of outdoor recreation are often located in rural areas and small towns while the demand for leisure is concentrated in urban counterparts. Without collaborative governance, rural areas would have little incentive to protect the environment for urban demand for recreation, creating a potentially large environmental inefficiency. Even if the regulation of these activities is developed at higher levels of government implementation is local.

A research agenda that examines shared interests and collaboration among places is an important basis for development. Future research should focus on the institutions providing services, employment, and civic participation. It should examine how relationships between places develop over time, how power is distributed, and how inter-place spaces are governed (including the roles of both public and private actors). A major question is whether multi-scalar governance is democratic. Since governance typically adheres to municipalities, the multi-scalar model embedded in the rural-urban continuum transcends such boundaries raising the question of responsiveness and accountability. Research should explore how the “soft space” approach may obscure power inequalities within and between places that undermine democracy.

A variety of methodological approaches will be needed including grounded case studies with a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, and analysis of secondary data aggregated into substantively meaningful spatial categories. For example, the development of the RUCC in the US informs the design and implementation of a wide range of social and economic programs. In the institutional realm, for example several scholars have used the RUCC framework to examine ideological and political differences across the rural-urban continuum (Kelly & Lobao, 2019; Scala & Johnson, 2017). The URCA global data set facilitates this type of analysis in other countries where data of this kind are not readily available.

The challenge of a new research agenda lies in avoiding the trap of going from one oversimplified categorization to another. The URCA approach provides a broader classification that allows for a more nuanced representation of identity; however, it does not directly examine how institutions and governance vary across the rural-urban continuum. Regardless of how it is aggregated, secondary data analysis does not directly examine the nature and change of relational dynamics that produce the ruralurban continuum. This is well illustrated, for example, by the findings from a case study in the United States on service access for elderly rural persons which showed how rural places with greater access to health services had stronger local institutions and more effective relationships with other places at the same or higher spatial scales (Brown et al., 2019). Other dimensions will have to be incorporated and overlaid with the URCA global data set, such as industrial hubs, service centers, or as satellites to other centers. A similar approach could be followed in classifying rural areas based on the agrarian structure and modes of agricultural production. These, in combination with case studies, could shed new light on bi-directional interactions between urban agglomerations and with their surrounding areas.

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