Introduction

For decades, scholars have been interested in rural-urban relations, ruralurban interactions, and rural-urban dynamics. Work on themes such as urban peasants, the role of intermediate urban centres, and urban bias in development, are all ‘old’ concerns. These themes, however, need to be re-examined in the light of new and intensifying globalisation processes. Lives and livelihoods are being profoundly re-worked as processes of market integration, modernisation and industrialisation are brought to bear in new and more intense ways. The functional integration of economic activities across regions, together with new trading regimes, is manifested in new international divisions of labour that link people and places in the Global South to global markets in new ways. Peasants are becoming post-peasants; households are being divided by generation and gender; livelihoods are becoming increasingly delocalised; interlocking livelihoods and occupational multiplicity are displacing more singular ways of making a living; and de-agrarianisation is replacing the more familiar process of agrarian transition.