Mid-sized towns in rural areas support the spatially balanced and sustainable development as enforced by territorial policy, as well as preservation of area-comprehensive public service in all partial areas. However, the article also shows that mid-sized towns have a wide range of development potentials that require targeted support by instruments of state development, regional and structural policy. In the scope of the debate about future-capable regional development and assurance of infrastructure supply in rural spaces, a number of fields for action becomes evident for rurally-peripheral areas in order to design the challenges of socio-economical structural change processes.
All in all, it therefore can be said that the article makes an important contribution in the scope of the discussion
of design of development and socio-economic structural change in rurally-peripheral regions, and that it has ad direct practical benefit for politics and planning practice.
At the regional and urban levels, the expert commission has dealt with the question of which strategies can prevent spatial inequality and the resulting feeling of dependence among parts of the population and has formulated nine strategic approaches that deal with the model of equivalent living conditions and support for the implementation of this new promotional, state- and federally-financed funding, the stabilization of municipal finances, the increased participation of citizens, the stabilization of rural migration regions and greater social mixing in cities.
The special issue on “Regional Worlds,” edited by Martin Jones and Anssi Paasi, combines various current theoretical perspectives on the region and accompanies this with empirical examples from Europe, Africa, and North America. The issue attempts to address the still-current significance of the region in geography and breaks down old dichotomous conceptualizations of “region” as either territorial or relational, in order to unite the conceptualizations. The authors point out that regions are constructed according to various disciplinary perspectives on different scales (sub-national, national, supranational, cross-border). They contextualize regions in connection with globalization, border regions, agency/advocacy, social construction, and historical processes of development and change.
