Gary W. Luck
Digby Race
Rosemary Black
Description:
This book makes a valuable contribution to the literature because it adopts an
integrated and interdisciplinary approach by explicitly linking demographic change
with environmental, land-use, social and economic factors. This integrated approach
was achieved by encouraging interaction among authors writing on similar topics
to ensure coherency and complementarity among chapters, and cross-pollination
of ideas and perspectives. Chapters are presented as interactive and reflective discussions that address the findings of other contributors; yet, each chapter contains
enough background to stand alone as a unique contribution. This allows readers to
focus on those chapters of most interest or read the entire book without unnecessary
repetition. While we believe that the book’s findings will have greater relevance to
issues in the developed world, many of the authors have placed their work in an
international context to broaden the appeal and applicability of their contribution.
Owing to the interdisciplinary nature of the book we believe it will be of particular
interest to demographers, geographers, ecologists, landscape planners, rural policy
analysts and policy makers, sociologists, and regional planners and managers, and
will encourage further discussion, debate and research of this important topic.