The rapidity and scale of Asia's urbanization has challenged many of the core assumptions about human settlements. The capillary interweaving of urban and rural territories, the often outsize role of the state in shaping sociospatial transformation, and the radical expansion of cities into polycentric urban megaregions, for example, have made Asia a productive site for the theoretical reworking of urban studies, rural studies, and—perhaps most importantly—urban-rural relations. Alongside the work of postcolonial scholars in Latin America and Africa, Asian studies has fueled a critical reappraisal of the conventional Eurocentric view of urban-rural relations, which has typically assumed relatively clear distinctions between urban and rural and a more or less linear transition from the former to the latter.Footnote ¹

While much of this work has originated from Asian urbanists, two recent monographs bring much-needed rural perspectives to these urban-rural problematics: Kristen E. Looney's Mobilizing for Development and Jonathan Rigg's More than Rural. In seeking to expand the urban-centric hypotheses of the developmental state literature, Looney makes a set of contributions that have implications far beyond the disciplinary bounds of comparative politics. For his part, Rigg explicitly sets out to bring a rural corrective to the urban-centrism of “planetary urbanization.”Footnote ² Both Looney and Rigg thus highlight the analytical and political importance of the rural—not despite but precisely because of the world's increasing urbanization.

Based on archival materials and secondary reports, Looney's contribution compares rural development campaigns in Taiwan (1970s), South Korea (1970s), and mainland China (2000s), an ambitious undertaking that also entangles the histories of Japan and the United States. Rigg's text is expansive in an altogether different way: focused on Thailand, the book retrospectively weaves together an entire career's worth of research, including interviews and surveys from a thousand households across seventeen villages conducted over nearly four decades. The resulting books are well argued and provocative and will reward students and scholars across a range of disciplines.

Looney's argument follows the disciplinary conventions of qualitative political science and is addressed primarily to scholars of the East Asian developmental state. Contrary to earlier findings that such states are exclusively urban and industrial in focus, Looney argues that Taiwan, South Korea, and China all underwent extensive, well-intentioned state interventions in rural development. Unlike most characterizations of the developmental state as predominantly technocratic in nature, Looney also identifies a major role for state-led mobilizational campaigns in these efforts. Nevertheless, delivering rural development ultimately depended on the maturity of surrounding institutions—specifically, the ability of farming cooperatives to both collaborate with and maintain autonomy from the state. This nuance means that the book has just as much to offer those interested in agricultural cooperatives as those curious about modernization campaigns. Looney deploys this multicausal framework to argue that Taiwan's Community Development Campaign encountered the most success in encouraging rural development because of the nation's robust network of Farmers’ Associations, while China's anemic Farmers’ Professional Cooperatives hindered the New Socialist Countryside from countering entrenched urban bias (and with South Korea's New Village Movement falling somewhere in between).

The greatest strength of Mobilizing for Development is this comparative framework, which provides a platform to argue for a coherent East Asian approach to rural development rooted in regional learning networks. But the geographical and historical sweep of Looney's project is also a vulnerability. The case study chapters accurately portray each individual country but lack the kind of empirical detail or primary accounts that might complicate state-sanctioned narratives of rural progress, and the laser focus of the analysis sometimes obscures the larger landscape of indirect causes (e.g., fiscal constraints) and second-order effects (e.g., rural urbanization). These lacunae are inherent in a project of this scope, and specialists can turn to a range of recent and forthcoming research investigating the rural development programs of each of these countries in more detail.Footnote ³

One intriguing part of this story that Looney emphasizes but does not fully explain is the fact that all three campaigns were more successful in transforming the rural built environment than the agricultural economy (pp. 35–36). Such investments in rural construction were at least partly driven by the need to absorb overcapacity in the urban economy, and they frequently imposed urban typologies and lifeways on rural communities. This curious pattern thus raises questions regarding the true intentions of these campaigns: did they really constitute a shift to rural bias, as Looney claims, or was this a new form of urbanization based on the extension of urban processes to rural areas?

The emergent possibility of an interdependent, hybridized spatiality that transcends urban and rural categories is the main focus of Rigg's More than Rural. Primarily addressed to the fields of rural geography and Thai studies, the book begins with an empirical puzzle: despite Thailand's rising prosperity and the waning economic importance of agriculture, the primary sector has not consolidated into a smaller number of larger farms, but just the opposite—farms have grown in number and shrunk in size. To explain this counterintuitive trend, Rigg attempts to rethink the rural, which is too often conflated with agriculture and reified as the nonurban. Rigg recommends that we instead start thinking of the rural as a collection of processes that are imbricated with (but not reducible to) those of the urban. For instance, rural industrialization and labor migration have irrevocably transformed villages and households into urban-rural hybrids. These interconnections produce both prosperity and precarity, which, in turn, helps explain the puzzle with which Rigg began: earnings from the urban economy finance sub-subsistence smallholder agriculture, while the retention of village landholdings, however minute, insures against the instability of urban employment. In essence, Thailand's villagers have devised a hybrid strategy of urban-rural cross-subsidization, an approach also found elsewhere in Asia.Footnote ⁴

Much of Rigg's argument resembles previous efforts to destabilize Asia's urban-rural dichotomy through appeals to processual fluidity.Footnote ⁵ Where Rigg diverges from this literature is in his commitment to recuperating the rural as a category of analysis. Rigg wants to change how we think about the rural, not to abandon the term entirely—hence the title of the book. The central message is an important one: rather than a residual of the urban, the rural is constitutive of and integral to processes of urbanization. Nevertheless, the insistence on rural relevance occasionally produces some awkwardness in Rigg's argument against fixed categories, not least his claim that urban-rural hybridity is best understood as a “third rural” (p. 6).

Rigg's book is most compelling when dealing with these issues of epistemology and method, but it is somewhat less satisfying when it comes to the broader implications of his argument. For instance, Rigg prudently avoids a definitive answer to his most adventurous question: is Thailand's urban-rural hybridity a temporary by-product of rapid transformation, or is it indicative of a distinctive Asian mode of settlement? Rigg's analysis is also less successful in explaining the contemporary politics of class in Thailand, where the salience of peasant class identity in the formation of the Red Shirt movement fits uncomfortably into the argument for urban-rural hybridity. Though Rigg acknowledges the continuing ethnographic traction and political significance of the urban-rural dichotomy, he tends to represent reassertions of urban-rural difference as distortions of a more fundamental interdependence. In this respect, Rigg's account might benefit from an encounter with Looney's analytical framework, in which Thailand's “sufficiency economy” could provocatively be read as a kind of anti-mobilization campaign. A deeper engagement with the persistent efficacy of urban and rural categories might also reveal alternative reworkings of these relations—for instance, we could begin to rethink Thailand as an urban-rural middle ground between the wider rural hinterland of mainland Southeast Asia and the regional metropole of Singapore.

Looney's and Rigg's projects represent two complementary approaches to the problematic of Asia's urban-rural relations, exposing both the material efficacy and the conceptual insufficiency of urban and rural categories. Reading these two texts together, it is clear that we need both perspectives to appreciate the full complexity of Asia's ongoing settlement transformations.Footnote ⁶