The present study explored the motivation of rural-urban migrants who moved from the Himalaya foothills of Uttarakhand to its capital city, Dehradun. A survey of 100 migrant families reported their socio-economic profile before and after migration, personal and general reasons for migration, problems in the village and in the city, and perception of push- and pull factors. A remote sensing-based analysis of land cover and forest changes was conducted for two villages of the migrants’ origin, aiming to link the reasons for migration to land cover changes. This was contextualised by reported large scale changes in forest cover. Major reasons for migration mentioned in this study were education, employment opportunities with the associated income, and facilities. These were perceived as both, push and pull factors, whereas environmental factors ranked very low. Declining environment or agriculture were never mentioned spontaneously as personal reason, and only occasionally as a presumed general reason for migration, but were frequently confirmed as a major problem in the village. Thus, although such problems existed, they seemed not a major driver of rural-urban migration. For most of the respondents their migration resulted in a profound change of livelihoods and significantly improved their socio-economic situation. Land and forest cover around the chosen villages fluctuated by up to 15% with a trend to increasing forest cover in recent years. At the district and state scales, forest cover was rather stable. These results question the narrative of deforestation and environmental degradation in the Himalayas as major push-factors for rural-urban migration in Uttarakhand. Even if environmental constraints were felt, it was rather the differences in socio-economic opportunities (education, employment, facilities) that drove people to migrate to the city. Regarding the push-pull paradigm, we conclude that scenarios of external conditions under which people migrate cannot be evaluated without taking the migrants’ attitudes and choices into account.

Urbanisation is a global trend rapidly transforming the biophysical and socioeconomic structures of metropolitan areas. To better understand (and perhaps control) these processes, more interdisciplinary research must be dedicated to the rural–urban interface. This also calls for a common reference system describing intermediate stages along a rural–urban gradient. The present paper constructs a simple index of urbanisation for villages in the Greater Bangalore Area, using GIS analysis of satellite images, and combining basic measures of building density and distance. The correlation of the two parameters and discontinuities in the frequency distribution of the combined index indicate highly dynamic stages of transformation, spatially clustered in the rural–urban interface. This analysis is substantiated by a qualitative assessment of village morphologies. The index presented here serves as a starting point in a large, coordinated study of rural–urban transitions. It was used to stratify villages for random sampling in order to perform a representative socioeconomic household survey, along with agricultural experiments and environmental assessments in various subsamples. Later on, it will also provide a matrix against which the results can be aligned and evaluated. In this process, the measures and classification systems themselves can be further refined and elaborated.

Asian megacities have attracted much scientific attention in the context of global urbanization, but few quantitative studies analyze wetland transformation in the rural–urban interface. With its rampant growth and transformation from a tree-lined “Garden City” to a busy megalopolis with often-blocked highways and large built-up areas, Bengaluru (Karnataka, S-India) is a good example for assessing how urbanization has led to the acute degradation of wetlands. We therefore investigated long-term land cover and wetland changes from 1965 to 2018 based on an object-based classification of multi-temporal Corona and Landsat images. To quantify and compare the dynamics of open water surfaces and vegetation, we defined the potential wetland areas (PWA) along the rural–urban gradient and linked our analyses to an index describing the degree of urbanization (survey stratification index (SSI)). During the five decades studied, built-up areas in the Bengaluru Urban district increased ten-fold, with the highest growth rate from 2014 to 2018 (+ 8% annual change). Patches of lake wetlands were highly dynamic in space and time, partly reflecting highly variable annual rainfall patterns ranging from 501 mm in 1965 to 1374 mm in 2005 and monsoon-driven alterations in the hydrologic regime. While water bodies and flooded areas shrunk from 64 km² in 1965 to 55 km² in 2018, in 1965, the total rural wetland area with an SSI > 0.5 was twice as high as in 2018. The rural–urban land cover pattern within potential wetland areas changed drastically during this period. This is reflected, for example, by a four-fold increase in the wetland area with an SSI of 0.3, as compared to a decline by 43% in wetland area with an SSI of 0.8. While, in urban areas, wetlands were mostly lost to construction, in areas with a rural character, open water bodies were mainly transformed into green space. The detected changes in urban wetlands were likely accompanied by ecological regime changes, triggering deteriorations in ecosystem services (ESS) which merit further research.

Along with climate change, population growth, and overexploitation of natural resources, urbanisation is among the major global challenges of our time. It is a nexus where many of the world’s grand challenges intersect, and thus key to sustainable development. The widespread understanding of urbanisation as a successive and unidirectional transformation of landscapes and societies from a rural to an urban state is increasingly questioned. Examples from around the globe show that ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’ are not only highly interdependent, but actually coexist and often merge in the same space or livelihood strategy. Our concept of rurbanity provides an integrated theoretical framework which overcomes the rural–urban divide and can be operationalised for empirical research. Rurbanity is the next stringent step following the gradual widening of previous concepts from urban-centred approaches through the emphasis on urban peripheries to attempts of abolishing any distinction of a rural environment and acknowledging the highly dynamic nature of globalising urbanisation. Building on complex systems theory and assemblage thinking, our concept explores complementary aspects of the distinct epistemic worldviews dominating the natural and social sciences. Within this theoretical frame, we derive four analytical dimensions as entry points for empirical research: Endowments and Place, Flows and Connectivity, Institutions and Behaviour, and Lifestyles and Livelihoods. Two examples illustrate how these dimensions apply, interact, and together lead to a comprehensive, insightful understanding of rurban phenomena. Such understanding can be an effective starting point for assessing potential contributions of rurbanity to long-term global sustainability.