The Frontier of Urban-Rural “Socio-Spatial” Theory
Abstract：
Since the beginning of the 21st century, rapid development of transportation, information, energy, and other infrastructure networks, coupled with the proliferation of intelligent technologies, have radically reconfigured urban-rural development, pushing it beyond conventional spatial boundaries. Urbanization processes are now intricately linked to deserts, rainforests, oceans, and even deep-sea and outer-space domains. These distant realms actively participate in urbanization through global material and energy cycles, thereby co-shaping developmental pathways. This vast spatial expansion has introduced unprecedented complexity into the scales, dimensions, and socio-spatial dynamics of urban-rural systems, challenging the foundations of existing theoretical frameworks and posing significant challenges to their contemporary interpretation. Through a systematic examination of the literature, this paper argues that urban-rural sociospatial theory needs to broaden its focus along three key dimensions: the reconceptualization of urban-rural relations, the underlying logic of socio-spatial dynamics, and the constitutive elements of socio-spatial interactions. Building on this analysis, this paper proposes an integrated ‘Social-Spatial-Ecological’theoretical framework, which aims to characterize contemporary urban-rural socio-spatial evolution, advance theoretical discourse, and deepen the understanding of the foundational logic of urban-rural development.