Assembling rurality in transition: a conceptual framework for understanding rural transformation in South Africa

1 Introduction

In the context of South Africa and the Global South more broadly, the pace and depth of change in rural human settlements are outstripping the capabilities of existing governance and planning structures. The tools of definition for planners and policymakers, such as the distinction between rural and urban space, agricultural typologies, and population density, define the space according to past conditions rather than current trajectories. This has the effect of exacerbating the governance deficit in the context of customary law and traditional leadership, which is currently unrecognized in law, the unregulated conversion of peri-urban communal land, the misapplication of infrastructure investments across boundaries that no longer reflect the spatial reality, and the governance of communities in the rural–urban fringe according to a spatial reality that no longer exists (Dufty-Jones, 2015; Wong et al., 2021; Mubangizi, 2023). This paper proposes the concept of the rural–urban transition assemblage (RUTA) as a five-pillar conceptual architecture for understanding the space of rurality as the relational outcome of the interrelated drivers of change in historically unique and institutionally differentiated contexts, as synthesized from 93 key publications in the field.

The study is located in the South African context, with deliberate purpose. The spatial legacies of colonial land expropriation, apartheid homelands, and the patchy service delivery record in post-1994 South Africa are more than simply contextual to the processes of rural change; they are the mechanism that drives it. This is why the study aims to shed light on the processes that explain the divergent impacts of the pressure of urbanization in freehold vs. communal areas, and the prevalence of the “village peri-urban” condition, characterized by settlements that are geographically distant from the metropolitan centers but functionally urban in terms of their economy, infrastructure, and identity (Iaquinta and Drescher, 2000; Varkey and Manasi, 2019). This is why the study argues that the unique nature of the governance frontier in these areas demands a framework that is cognizant of the dual tenure system and the administration of customary land, as opposed to one that is imposed in an unaltered form from the European or East Asian experience (Cousins, 2007; Zondi, 2023; Du Plessis, 2023). Although the study is located in the South African context, it is hoped that the logic of the study will have broad application to other areas of the subcontinent and the Global South more broadly, where the influence of customary tenure, governance fragmentation, and the spatial legacy of colonialism are similarly implicated in the expression of the forces of global urbanization.

A significant body of literature agrees that rural and urban spaces cannot be conceived of as binary opposites, but rather as poles of an urban-rural continuum that changes at varying rates in different directions (Halfacree, 2007; Cattaneo et al., 2022). Ideas such as peri-urbanization, which refers to the expansion of settlement and business beyond the boundaries of the urban area proper (Shaw et al., 2020); rurbanization, which refers to the injection of urban characteristics into formally designated rural areas (Hoffmann et al., 2023); and counterurbanization, which refers to the migration of people to less densely populated rural areas based on amenity-seeking behavior (Willett, 2023; Yu et al., 2024), each capture an aspect of the urban-rural continuum. Planetary urbanization theory argues that urbanization now occurs over the entire surface of the earth (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). However, none of the above theories satisfactorily address the issue of how the same set of macro-level factors, such as the expansion of infrastructure, the migration of labor, the commodification of land, and climate change, can have such disparate effects at the local level depending on the local history of institutions. RUTA aims to address this issue. RUTA, through the use of assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2006) and social-ecological systems (SES) theory (Ostrom, 2009), treats each rural–urban transition area as unique, rather than as an instance of a universal process.

There are three substantive questions that inform the discussion. Firstly, there is the issue of conceptualization, which asks how rurality is being reconceptualized and operationalized as a dynamic and transitional concept, and how the post-apartheid spatial legacies and dual tenure systems in South Africa complicate the usual rural–urban dichotomy. Secondly, there is the issue of the drivers and dynamics, which asks what the literature reveals in terms of the patterns of change in land use, governance, and socio-cultural dynamics in urbanizing rural regions, and how these intersect to produce differentiated outcomes. Finally, there is the issue of the consequences and governance, which asks how the transformational dynamics reshape the socio-environmental systems, and what the literature suggests in terms of the most appropriate planning and policy approaches to support the process of rural human settlement development.

From these questions, and in addition to the RUTA framework, we propose three propositions:

• Rurality in transition zones needs to be conceptualized not as an essential characteristic of settlement type but rather as a relational and multi-dimensional phenomenon;
• Divergent effects are produced at the local level from the same set of macro drivers such as infrastructure expansion, migration, market integration, and climatic change, depending on the nature of the tenure system;
• Fragmentation of governance is an important mediating factor that connects the macro drivers to socio-environmental outcomes in transition zones.

The methodology adopted is that of a narrative literature review, where the paper synthesizes conceptual, theoretical, and empirical studies from the fields of geography, planning, development studies, and environmental governance. The narrative literature review is appropriate in fields that value critical judgment, theory-building, and integrative argumentation over the emphasis on replicability, which is the focus of systematic reviews (Grant and Booth, 2009; Ferrari, 2015). The search strategy involved the use of the databases of Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar, from where a total of 93 publications were obtained from the period between 2010 and 2025, along with foundational studies based on citation tracking. The narrative synthesis is the methodology and the evidence base at the same time; it is the means and the end, and RUTA is derived from this synthesis rather than being the focus of the paper itself. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the research methodology and search strategy. Section 3 provides the thematic synthesis of the literature based on conceptualizations of rurality, causes of transition, and the socio-environmental outcomes Section 4 presents the RUTA framework, its five pillars, and the policy implications. The final section offers concluding remarks and directions for future research.

2 Research methodology

2.1 Search strategy and databases

To capture interdisciplinary debate and empirical studies, searches were centered on major bibliographic resources and complemented by purposive searches for gray and policy literature. The review started with a pool of 691 records, which were progressively screened; 93 core publications were included in the final synthesis and form the evidence base for the RUTA framework and the policy recommendations presented (Figure 1). Primary bibliographic databases interrogated were Scopus, Science Direct and Web of Science (for peer-reviewed scholarship across geography, planning, environmental and development studies) and Google Scholar (to locate gray literature, reports, and working papers not indexed elsewhere). These databases were selected for their broad multidisciplinary coverage and ability to retrieve both theoretical and empirical contributions (Bramer et al., 2017). The principal search window was 2010–2025, chosen to prioritize contemporary debates and empirical studies that reflect recent patterns of urbanization and rural change. Where seminal older works were important for argument (e.g., classic conceptual papers), these were included through citation-tracking.

2.2 Search terms and strategy

The search approach was iterative and reflexive, with initial exploration informing subsequent refinements to keywords and their combinations. Boolean operators are logical operators that govern the inclusiveness and specificity of bibliographic database searches, and their application is well established in literature review methodologies, as applicable to the social, environmental, and planning sciences (Bramer et al., 2017; Rethlefsen et al., 2021). Three Boolean operators were employed to inform search approach design for this review. The OR operator is inclusive, ensuring that all literature containing at least one of the search terms is included, which is vital in an interdisciplinary field such as rural transformation, where a single phenomenon, such as rural transformation, is described by multiple terminologies across disciplines ranging from geography, planning, development economics, and environmental governance. Therefore, search terms such as (“rurality” OR “rural transition” OR “rural change” OR “rural transformation”) ensured that terminological variability across disciplines did not act as an exclusion filter, as similarly applied by Shaw et al. (2020) in their review on peri-urbanization in Europe and by Cattaneo et al. (2022) in their synthesis on development along the urban–rural continuum, which cuts across disciplines.

The AND operator is exclusive, ensuring that literature contains all search terms, thereby ensuring thematic conceptual relevance at their intersection, as opposed to their application in isolation; for instance, search terms such as (“peri-urban” AND “governance”) ensured that literature was exclusively on governance in peri-urban areas, as similarly applied by Sakketa (2023) in his review on peri-urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa and by Sarfo et al. (2024) in their meta-analysis on African land use systems. The NOT operator was similarly employed to exclude literature where search terms had undesirable meanings, thereby ensuring search term precision without sacrificing inclusiveness, as similarly applied by Rethlefsen et al. (2021). This Boolean approach addressed the major methodological limitation inherent in interdisciplinary literature review methodologies, which is under-retrieval resulting from terminological inconsistency and over-retrieval resulting from search terms with multiple meanings. Examples of search strings used (adapted for each database syntax) include:

• “rural transformation” OR “rural change” OR “rurality” OR “rural transition” OR “rural-urban continuum” OR “rural-urban spectrum” OR “rural-urban interface”) AND (“urbanization” OR “peri-urban” OR “periurban” OR “rurban” OR “hybrid rural” OR “post-rural”).
• (“village peri-urban” OR “semi-urbanization” OR “in-situ urbanization”) AND (“land use” OR “settlement” OR “governance”).
• (“rural governance” OR “territorial governance” OR “land consolidation”) AND (“policy” OR “planning”).

Searches combined free-text and, where available, controlled vocabulary (e.g., Scopus subject terms) and were iteratively adjusted to improve relevance (Bramer et al., 2018). Search results were exported into a reference manager for organization. In addition to database searching, snowballing (backward and forward citation tracking), hand searches of key journals, and targeted searches of policy databases (e.g., government and international agency reports) were used to ensure conceptual coverage rather than mere numerical exhaustiveness (Grant and Booth, 2009).

2.3 Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Because the review is narrative and interpretive rather than strictly systematic, inclusion criteria privileged conceptual and contextual relevance alongside methodological credibility:

Inclusion criteria

• Works (peer-reviewed articles, books, book chapters, high-quality reports and influential working papers) published between 2010 and 2025, excepting earlier canonical texts included for conceptual grounding.
• Studies addressing rurality, peri-urbanization, rural–urban interactions, land-use change or governance of rural transitions.
• Analytical breadth: qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods and conceptual papers were considered to capture theory and empirics.
• Geographic emphasis: global literature accepted; particular attention paid to Sub-Saharan Africa (including South Africa) and other comparative case studies relevant to the study's themes.

The key search window of 2010–2025 was selected to highlight the empirical and conceptual literatures that reflect the current pattern of urbanization, governance, and rural–urban change in an era marked by digital connectivity, climate change, and intensifying land commodification. This does not, however, imply that the prior body of scholarship was irrelevant to the present study. On the contrary, the foundational scholarship on the conceptualization and measurement of rurality, including the index-based approaches of (Cloke 1977, 2006), the social constructionist approaches of Halfacree (1993, 2007), Mormont (1990), and Jones (1995), the power-sensitive approaches of Murdoch and Pratt (1993) and Marsden et al. (1993), and the measurement-focused approaches of Copus (2001) and Wandl et al. (2014), was included in the study via citation tracking and explicitly discussed in Sections 3.1, 3.2. This was done on the basis of their conceptual necessity, in the sense of defining the intellectual foundations from which all post-2010 scholarship on rurality and rural–urban change has been developed, and from which this study and its framework necessarily proceed. Excluding this scholarship would have been to render the framework conceptually under-specified. This approach of prioritizing the empirical window of 2010–2025 and including foundational conceptual texts via citation tracking aligns with established best practice in narrative and integrative literature reviews, including Grant and Booth (2009) and Ferrari (2015).

Exclusion criteria

• Publications solely focused on urban studies without substantive reference to rural or peri-urban dynamics.
• Publications prior to 2010 that did not contribute clear conceptual value (exceptions made for seminal theoretical works).
• Non-English sources were generally excluded due to language constraints, but important non-English works that were widely cited in English literature were included via citation tracking where possible.

This approach balances comprehensiveness of ideas with pragmatic limits on time and language while allowing justified inclusion of older, foundational texts that inform interpretation (Ferrari, 2015).

2.4 Literature identification and selection

Selection followed an iterative, purposive sampling logic typical of narrative reviews: after initial searches, abstracts and introductions were scanned for conceptual relevance and contribution to the themes of rurality, land use, governance or socio-environmental impacts. Promising items were read in full. Citation chaining (both backward and forward) helped identify additional influential works and gray literature (Grant and Booth, 2009). Decisions were guided by the question: does this source advance conceptual clarity or empirical understanding of rural transformation? Where items offered important counterarguments or contradictory findings, they were deliberately retained to support balanced synthesis. The process was documented in an internal selection log (date of retrieval, reason for inclusion/exclusion) to maintain transparency of judgement.

2.5 Data extraction and management

Rather than a rigid extraction table used by systematic reviews, data capture emphasized thematic notes and conceptual mapping. For each included source the following were recorded in a structured spreadsheet:

• Bibliographic information [author(s), year, title, outlet].
• Geographic and temporal scope.
• Theoretical framing or definition of rurality.
• Methods and principal empirical findings (where applicable).
• Relevance to thematic categories (e.g., land use change, governance, socio-environmental impacts).
• Notable methodological limitations or points of debate.

2.6 Data analysis and synthesis

Analysis was thematic and interpretative. Following principles articulated for Kuckartz (2018) integrative and narrative reviews (Cooper, 1989; Grant and Booth, 2009), the synthesis involved:

• Immersion and open coding: repeated reading of included texts to identify salient concepts and recurring constructs (e.g., “village peri-urban,” “land consolidation,” “multifunctional land use”).
• Thematic grouping-clustering codes into higher-order themes (for this review: conceptualizing rurality; measuring rurality; land-use and settlement change; socio-economic transitions; governance and policy; socio-environmental implications).
• Critical interrogation: comparing and contrasting empirical findings and theoretical claims, highlighting points of convergence, divergence and tension (including counterarguments and contexts where theories fail).
• Integrative argumentation: synthesizing themes into a coherent narrative that supports conceptual advancement and the development of a guiding framework.

Where studies were methodologically diverse or yielded conflicting findings, synthesis emphasized contextual explanation (explaining differences by geography, policy regime, or temporal frame) rather than quantitative aggregation. This narrative approach allowed the review to produce interpretive insights and policy-relevant propositions (Ferrari, 2015; Cooper, 1989).

2.7 Quality, reflexivity, and limitations

A narrative review depends on interpretive judgment; reflexivity and transparency were therefore integral throughout. The process recorded all choices, search strings, inclusion rationale, and dissenting findings, so that the review's interpretative moves can be followed and, if necessary, challenged. Rather than applying formal risk-of-bias tools (which are typical of systematic reviews), conceptual rigor and source triangulation were used to assess the trustworthiness of conclusions; where empirical claims were weakly supported or context-specific, the narrative explicitly qualifies their generalizability. As with all narrative reviews, the selection strategy privileges conceptual richness over numerical completeness (Grant and Booth, 2009); language restrictions and the 2010–2025-time window may have omitted relevant local studies, and the absence of formal quality scoring means empirical claims should be read with attention to the evidentiary basis reported alongside each theme.

3 Literature review

3.1 Drivers of rural–urban change: reconceptualizing rurality and the continuum

The concept of rurality has been subject to considerable debate and refinement in the decades of research on rural studies, and this provides essential background to the current measurement and governance difficulties. The initial attempts to operationalize the concept of rurality were undertaken by Cloke (1977), who developed an index-based approach to defining English and Welsh settlement areas in terms of population density, commuting, and occupational characteristics, and in this way established the rural–urban continuum as the dominant conceptual tool for understanding rurality. However, this quantitative approach was productively challenged by Halfacree (1993), who showed how rurality operates just as much as a social representation as it does as a quantified reality, and how communities have a significant and often differing understanding of the concept of “rural” and its associated characteristics, which cannot be explained in terms of quantified reality. Mormont (1990) further developed this understanding by highlighting how rurality is not a spatial concept in its own right but rather a social construction created, reproduced, and contested in practice. In this way, Murdoch and Pratt (1993) and Marsden et al. (1993) developed a power-sensitive and socially differentiated understanding of rural space, in which the construction of rurality in relation to capital, governance, and cultural factors was emphasized, rather than its inheritance from nature. Jones (1995) also demonstrated how the discourse of rurality in relation to the lay population has important implications for planning and governance, since it affects the legitimacy of interventions in rural areas. More recently, Woods (2007) developed the concept of the global countryside, highlighting how global capital, migration, and culture rework rural space in a way that fundamentally transcends traditional typologies of rural and urban space. Collectively, these foundational studies highlight a clear progression from index-based classification, to social constructionism, and on to relational and globalized understandings of rural space, and they collectively emphasize how measuring rurality requires us to pay attention to the social construction, political classification, and power relations that underpin the concept of “rural” in a particular context (Cloke, 2006; Halfacree, 2007; Nelson et al., 2021).

In turn, these theoretical changes have led to a need for new methodologies of measurement. A wide range of composite measures is currently used to define locations on the rural–urban continuum, including quantitative measures such as population density and economic characteristics, as well as morphological, infrastructural, and socio-institutional characteristics (Nelson et al., 2021). There is no single measure that can be used universally, and the weight given to different characteristics can vary greatly across different countries and regions (Cattivelli, 2024; Liu et al., 2022a). Commuting patterns, digital connectivity, land use, and spatial identity of individuals are some of the characteristics used to determine if a location is rural or urban (Nelson et al., 2021; Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno, 2022). Of particular interest is how debates around South Africa have demonstrated how the spatial legacies of apartheid and diverse systems of livelihood can challenge continuum thinking in a manner that is not captured by standard measures (Neves and Du Toit, 2013).

Academic critique suggests that, no matter how well-developed such measures are, they cannot fully comprehensively measure the essence of the term “rural” because local values, political factors, and planning considerations all impact what is considered significant (Nelson et al., 2021; Halfacree, 2007; Cattivelli, 2024). Svendsen (2013), for instance, shows how in rural Denmark, social capital and involvement in formal institutions are key factors in defining rural identity that are completely ignored in quantitative measures, a situation that is familiar in South Africa in communal settings where traditional practices are a part of everyday rural living. Both Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno (2022) and Jain and Korzhenevych (2022) note that, in response to urbanization, a range of new rural phenomena, such as peri-urbanization, exurbanization, rurbanization, and rural gentrification, has emerged, each with a unique set of dominant rural and urban characteristics. The key feature that ties all these new rural phenomena is that, in each case, proximity to cities, the decline of agricultural livelihoods, and the influx of migrant populations all contribute to a blurring of traditional boundaries and a growing irrelevance of traditional typologies (Liu et al., 2022a).

Conceptually, a growing body of research treats space not as neatly divided into rural and urban, but as a continuum between the two. Cattaneo et al. (2022) describe how the movement of goods, services, labor and cultural practices links distant farming areas with large urban centers. Shaw et al. (2020) likewise point out that peri-urban margins are highly dynamic, as social change and shifts in land use spread outward from cities. The notion of the village peri-urban captures this condition well: settlements located far from metropolitan cores may nonetheless adopt urban-style infrastructure, planning regulations or consumption patterns (Varkey and Manasi, 2019; Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno, 2022).

Alternative trends complicate this picture. Counter-urbanization, better-off city residents moving to villages for cheaper housing or a different lifestyle, is reshaping some rural places in China and parts of Western Europe, and can trigger local gentrification (Yu et al., 2024; Willett, 2023). New residents often change housing markets and land use. In other words, rural change is not a simple, one-way flow toward urbanization, it is contested and multi-directional and sometimes involves selective or temporary moves from the city to rural areas (Zang et al., 2020).

These relational and multi-dimensional understandings of rurality, rooted in decades of foundational rural studies scholarship and refined through contemporary essmpirical work, form the conceptual foundation of RUTA's first pillar: the retreat from rural–urban dualism toward a dynamic continuum in which spatial, social, and institutional processes co-produce rural places (see Table 1).

Table 1. Synthesis of key findings and interpretive insights on rural–urban transition.

3.2 Drivers of rural–urban change: measuring rurality as a dynamic process

Researchers have responded to the conceptual shifts described above by developing more sophisticated measurement tools. Copus (2001) demonstrated that conventional population-based rurality indices systematically misclassify transitional areas, particularly peripheral zones that are neither densely urban nor agriculturally dominant, a critique that remains directly relevant to South African peri-urban and communal settlements where livelihoods, tenure arrangements, and built environments resist simple classification. Wandl et al. (2014) extended this argument by proposing multi-indicator spatial models capable of capturing “territories-in-between” that resist binary urban–rural labeling, identifying morphological, functional, and relational dimensions of in-between spaces across European contexts with methodological lessons applicable beyond Europe. Building on these critiques, Li et al. (2015) proposed a composite rurality index (RI) combining demographic, economic, and infrastructure indicators, and subsequent studies have expanded this framework to include remoteness, land fragmentation, and access to services (Nelson and Nguyen, 2022; Inostroza and Taubenböck, 2024).

Jiang et al. (2024), for instance, compare several indices to classify villages according to agricultural productivity and proximity to services, demonstrating how different metrics bring different dimensions of change into focus. Other scholars emphasize the importance of context-specific approaches. While in measurement practice, South African contexts highlight the importance of including customary tenure and informal economic activity in any rurality index, since standard indicators can misclassify communal areas (Neves and Du Toit, 2013; Mudapakati et al., 2024).

Despite these methodological advances, conventional measures continue to have clear limitations. Simple indicators such as the share of the population engaged in farming or distance from the nearest city, often miss important local realities. Static classifications also struggle to keep pace with gradual change. Once an area is reclassified as “urban,” further stages of urbanization may go largely unrecorded in official statistics (Cattivelli, 2024). In response, many scholars now call for longitudinal and mixed methods approaches. Nelson et al. (2021) show that combining satellite imagery with household surveys can reveal hybrid rural–urban landscapes more accurately. Similarly, multi-scalar metrics, applied at settlement, regional and network levels, make it possible to distinguish genuinely isolated villages from peri-urban satellites (Wang et al., 2023; Cattivelli, 2024).

Crucially, the measurement of rurality is not only about technique; it is also about politics. Government agencies often use the distinction between the rural and the urban for the allocation of resources, as well as for fine-tuning their instruments of public policy (Dufty-Jones, 2015). The difference between the official categorization of places and their actual characteristics can cause the systematic misallocation of developmental aid, which is particularly evident in China, South Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa (Wong et al., 2021; Neves and Du Toit, 2013). The central argument of Cloke (1977, 2006), which asserts that the indices of rurality should be contextually grounded and updated regularly, is as relevant today as it was at the inception of measuring rurality; what has changed is the level of complexity of the socio-spatial environments that such indices should be able to capture. The methodological shift toward composite, longitudinal indices of rurality, building on the foundational critiques of Copus (2001) and Wandl et al. (2014) and extended by contemporary work (Nelson et al., 2021; Inostroza and Taubenböck, 2024), directly informs RUTA's call for multi-scalar, mixed-method operationalization that integrates spatial, social, and institutional data (see Table 1).

3.3 Land-use and spatial change in urbanizing rural areas

One of the clearest signs of rural urbanization is visible in shifting land-use and settlement patterns. A substantial literature now shows rural landscapes becoming multifunctional: productive farms sit beside replanted forests, parks, new housing estates and visitor facilities (Pinto-Correia et al., 2016; Baldwin et al., 2023; Debolini et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2022b). Agriculture's long dominance is loosening as outside actors value rural land for leisure and conservation while local households diversify into non-farm activities to cope with tightening economic margins (Baldwin et al., 2023; Zhu et al., 2019).

Change often comes with its potential for conflict. Debolini et al. (2015), for instance, outline how the urban fringes in Morocco are experiencing development encroachment that clashes with established vineyard and olive tree plantations, creating conflict in the area. Such similarity is also evident in Africa, where peri-urban land is sold, transferred, or otherwise usurped, thereby marginalizing small-scale farmers (Sumbo et al., 2023; Mudapakati et al., 2024).

In particular, South Africa peri-urban and communal land transformations are strongly influenced by changing customary practices and emergent land markets. Detailed case studies show that the commodification of high-value crops and the growth of de facto customary land markets are producing processes of individualization and selective land accumulation within communal areas, with implications for access, equity and environmental stewardship (Olofsson, 2021). Community level research also documents residents' perceptions of residential expansion and de-agrarianization, where agricultural land is converted into housing or other uses as household livelihoods diversify or rely increasingly on non-farm income (Zondi, 2023). These South African patterns often differ from temperate-region models of consolidation and mechanized intensification, underscoring the need for land-use analysis and policy that are sensitive to customary tenure dynamics and local livelihood change.

Spatially, new human settlements continue to expand outward along road corridors and infrastructure networks, converting previously agricultural landscapes into fragmented mosaics of housing, industry, and residual farmland (Peng et al., 2016; Tao et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2023, 2024). In jurisdictions lacking effective planning structures, spontaneous development emerges on unimproved land, a pattern particularly prevalent across sub-Saharan Africa (Shaw et al., 2020; Onyebueke et al., 2020).

Those tensions have prompted calls for smarter land management. Medeiros (2022) proposes a “development clusters for small places” approach, whereby population, services and infrastructure are concentrated in strategically planned nodes. This deliberate clustering of settlements and farmland is presented as a way to manage urban spillover, protect agricultural viability, and lower per-capita costs of service delivery through greater institutional thickness and economies of scale. Gao et al. (2024) evaluate comprehensive land consolidation projects and show that rationalizing settlement distribution through deliberate population concentration can improve service provision and optimize land use at the rural–urban margin. China's land-consolidation experiments offer instructive lessons: by reorganizing plot structure and pooling development rights, such interventions aim to steer peri-urban growth onto firmer, greener foundations (Jiang et al., 2022, 2024; Wang et al., 2023). Rather than leaving expansion to unfettered market forces, these strategies explicitly weigh trade-offs, food security, housing demand and environmental protection, at the rural–urban margin.

Settlement change does not follow one path of development. In some cases, rural towns become denser as market demand fills in vacant spaces; in other cases, the vitality of the rural village declines as out-migration occurs among younger cohorts (Li et al., 2020; Wu, 2020; Zang et al., 2020; Yanbo et al., 2021). Government initiatives can lead to denser rural service centers, but the effectiveness of such policies depends critically on the design of the policy and the institutions, resettlement in Ethiopia is a contested case (Adam and Dadi, 2023; Holm, 2016; Human Rights Watch, 2012).

These patterns of fragmentation, multifunctional conversion, and contested tenure feed directly into RUTA's land-use and spatial change pillar, confirming that land transformation is simultaneously a physical, institutional, and political process in which historical tenure arrangements shape who benefits and who loses (see Table 1).

3.4 Socio-spatial restructuring and identity fluidity

From an economic perspective, it has been noted that a trend exists toward a diversified source of livelihood, rather than solely depending on farming as a means of income. Meta-analysis studies, such as that carried out by Arouri et al. (2017), suggest that when the size of the urban market increases, the overall non-farm income in rural areas tends to rise, i.e., rural dwellers can seek to augment their income with the rise in wages through opportunities in trading, construction, or services. In markets where access to entry is available, opportunities exist for income augmentation and poverty reduction (Arouri et al., 2017; Cattaneo et al., 2022). These benefits, however, are not equally distributed, with some being able to easily capitalize on new opportunities while others, such as the landless, are left behind (Cattaneo et al., 2022; Sarfo et al., 2024).

The pattern of migration has provided a particularly insightful perspective on these trends. Rural–urban migration has traditionally been seen as a means of employment and income remittance, but recent studies have highlighted the importance of reverse flows, i.e., urban–rural mobility. Counter-urbanization, or amenity-driven urban–rural migration (Willett, 2023; Yu et al., 2024), injects new capital into rural areas, along with increased demand for housing, land, and services. At the same time, rural dwellers are also connected to urban centers, which are far removed, with some working in urban centers during the week and returning to their homes at weekends, while others seek remittance income from urban employment centers (Nelson et al., 2021).

From a cultural perspective, rural areas are becoming increasingly urbanized while at the same time retaining their rural identity. Rural youth are connected to urban culture through educational aspirations and social media, but at the same time, traditional social networks are still being maintained. A review carried out by Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno (2022) suggests that rural areas are “multivocal” (having multiple identities and diverse practices and representations); rural communities may identify as rural in one context (valuing nature or farming heritage) and as urban in another (working in a city or studying in the capital). This hybrid identity can lead to social friction when older traditions clash with newcomers' ways (Wu et al., 2016). These everyday tensions illustrate how rural change is experienced unevenly and often felt most strongly at the local level. Nevertheless, new institutions, or new norms, are beginning to emerge to deal with these dynamics (Jiang et al., 2022). In some cases, joint land management entities or village committees have been created to balance the need for agricultural development with the need for development (Baldwin et al., 2023). On the larger geographical setting, the concept of eco-tourism cooperative initiatives, which bring development to the rural environment while conserving the environment, is new. These emergent governance forms suggest that rural communities are not passive recipients of urbanization but active co-producers of transition outcomes, a point with direct implications for RUTA's governance pillar (Chu et al., 2023; Baldwin et al., 2023).

Despite all of this, however, the effects of these rural transitions remain anything but universally positive. Issues of inequalities continue to pose a problem. In these rural areas where urbanization takes place and a new city develops, land and property values can skyrocket, benefiting landowners while relegating those renting or occupying the land illegally to the fringes of society (Willett, 2023). Access to new job markets can also find those with more education or social connections gaining benefits while leaving the more marginalized sectors of society behind (Sarfo et al., 2024; Aboye, 2024). Social stratification strongly mediates transition outcomes: gender, class, and land tenure position determine whose livelihoods are enhanced and whose are displaced (Arouri et al., 2017; Rocheleau et al., 1996; Sarfo et al., 2024). In certain areas around the world, economic gains of one sort or another are absorbed by and into the dominant patriarchal or caste systems and structures, offering little to nothing to women or the lower castes despite economic growth (Arouri et al., 2017; Sarfo et al., 2024).

These dynamics of livelihood diversification, identity fluidity, and social stratification correspond directly to RUTA's socio-spatial restructuring and identity fluidity pillar, confirming that transition outcomes are differentiated by access to assets, social networks, and historically conditioned power relations (see Table 1).

3.5 Governance and institutional fragmentation

Governance and policy frameworks frequently lag behind the rapid changes unfolding in rural areas. Many national systems remain urban-centered and continue to rely on outdated definitions of what “rural” means, producing a pronounced “governance gap” (Dufty-Jones, 2015; Wu et al., 2016; Wong et al., 2021). In practice, this looks familiar: planning documents draw neat boundaries around an urban core and treat everything beyond as rural hinterland, even when peri-urban villages share roads, services and labor markets with the city. That kind of siloing can leave transitioning places without appropriate services (Jain and Korzhenevych, 2022; Morzillo et al., 2015).

South African governance arrangements provide a clear empirical example of the scalar and institutional mismatches described in the literature. Post-apartheid planning frameworks, including SPLUMA, now operate alongside entrenched customary authorities and hybrid institutional practices that predate them by generations. The result is not simply complexity, it is a coordination problem that plays out daily at the municipal and local level, where statutory and customary systems frequently pull in different directions (Du Plessis, 2023). Scholarship on traditional authorities and communal land shows that chiefs and local power structures continue to shape allocation and control of land in ways that can either hinder or enable inclusive outcomes, depending on accountability mechanisms and the strength of municipal-traditional collaboration (Bennett et al., 2013; Ntsebeza, 2005).

Many policy instruments were designed for a different era, when villages were assumed to be stable, agriculturally focused communities. Agricultural extension programs, subsidy schemes and land-use rules were built around farming as the dominant rural activity. But as residents increasingly pursue non-farm work or repurpose land, these frameworks can become misaligned, sometimes even blocking locally driven innovation. Such misalignments can inadvertently block locally driven innovation or exclude transitioning settlements from appropriate support, generating de facto governance vacuums at the rural–urban interface (Zhu et al., 2019; Dufty-Jones, 2015). These examples suggest the bluntness of many existing policy tools when faced with hybrid rural conditions.

Scholars therefore argue for place-based, multi-level policy responses. Planning should be tuned to local circumstances rather than imposed as one-size-fits-all (Syssner, 2023; Rong et al., 2023). Integrated rural–urban development plans, which combine housing, agriculture and transport measures, can be one practical route for fringe areas (Nelson et al., 2021; Wong et al., 2021). China's land consolidation schemes illustrate how coordinated action on parcels and infrastructure can aim to boost agriculture, industry and ecological goals at the same time (Jiang et al., 2024; Rao, 2022).

Institutionally, stronger cross-sector coordination is essential. Rural transformation touches forestry, agriculture, housing and conservation departments, yet these agencies rarely work together. There are promising exceptions. Local governments elsewhere are experimenting with multi-stakeholder forums that bring farmers, entrepreneurs and civil society into the design of rural futures (Chu et al., 2023; Jiang et al., 2022). Still, such initiatives are not yet the norm and more systematic integration is needed (Wong et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2019).

Equity, both social and institutional, must be central to policymaking. Evidence suggests that land and resource-based choices have the propensity to consolidate vulnerability while failing to address different abilities to adapt (Aboye, 2024). Evidence from Ethiopia and Ghana shows that better-resourced actors consistently capture a disproportionate share of transition gains while marginalized groups, including women, informal settlements, and smallholders, face increased vulnerability and dispossession (Aboye, 2024; Sarfo et al., 2024; Rocheleau et al., 1996). Thus, all these studies address the importance of enhancing local adaptive capacity through education, microfinance, and citizen-driven governance, as proposed by Chu et al. (2023) and Sarfo et al. (2024). These governance failures, scalar mismatch, institutional fragmentation, and equity deficits, are not incidental but structural, functioning as the central mediating mechanisms through which similar drivers produce divergent transition outcomes; they constitute the core of RUTA's governance pillar (see Table 1, “Governance and institutional fragmentation”).

3.6 Socio-environmental outcomes of rural–urban transition

Urban-driven transformations in rural areas have significant environmental and social sustainability implications. On the environmental side, land conversion and intensification often degrade natural resources. Deforestation occurs as farms or woodlots are cleared for housing or roads (Wang et al., 2023; Wen et al., 2020). Pollution can spread outward: urban sewage or industrial effluents sometimes contaminate nearby farmland and water (Yuan et al., 2018). Many authors therefore stress the need to incorporate ecological criteria into rural planning. Environmental effects of peri-urban change are visible in South African wetlands and riparian systems, case work such as the Nandoni study illustrates how agricultural conversion and unregulated settlement expansion can rapidly degrade ecosystem services and why co-management approaches are needed (Banda P. et al., 2024).

At the same time, rural landscapes can offer environmental benefits if managed wisely. Zang et al. (2021) propose a social-ecological framework where multifunctional land uses (agriculture, forestry, recreation) sustain both ecosystems and livelihoods. The literature is clear on this point: development outcomes depend less on the land-use change itself than on how it is steered. Aligning development trajectories with sustainability goals through appropriate governance arrangements and incentives is therefore critical (Chu et al., 2023; Zang et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2022b; Quendler et al., 2024).

Social sustainability also needs attention regarding environmental issues. People who are poorer tend to live in more marginal areas and are more susceptible to environmental hazards. Conversely, rural gentrification might end up creating opportunities for “green grabbing,” where environmental plans and projects end up pushing people out instead of providing positive benefits for the local population (Yuan et al., 2018; Zhu et al., 2019). Going forward, some places have started combining plans related to rural revivals and conservation zoning and providing job opportunities in the environment sector for local populations (Rao, 2022).

Climate resilience has also moved to the forefront of the discussion. Rapid land-use change can either strengthen or weaken a community's capacity to cope with environmental stress. Evidence from surveys in Eastern Africa, China and Sweden suggests that rural areas with more diversified economies tend to cope better with climate-related shocks than villages dependent on single-crop farming systems (Li et al., 2019; Agergaard et al., 2021). Emerging research consistently calls for climate risk to be integrated into rural planning frameworks, particularly in ecologically sensitive regions where livelihoods are most directly exposed to environmental variability (Aboye, 2024; Sarfo et al., 2024).

Within this literature, sustainability emerges as both a factor conditioning rural transformation and a core aim of these transformations. To address these challenges, there is an emergent trend within this literature of a focus on socio-ecological resilience. This framework not only recognizes that rural thriving is contingent on a functional interrelationship between healthy environments and a functional social framework (Chu et al., 2023; Zang et al., 2021). These socio-environmental dynamics correspond to RUTA's fifth pillar, confirming that environmental outcomes are governance-contingent rather than structurally predetermined, a conclusion mapped directly onto the framework's feedback mechanisms in Table 1.

4 Synthesis, framework development, and implications

4.1 Integrative synthesis of literature

From an initial pool of 691 records, we assembled a purposive set of conceptual, empirical and policy-focused studies to underpin an integrative synthesis. The literature yields a coherent set of interlinked patterns that describe how rural–urban transitions play out across very different places. Together, these findings clarify how scholars currently conceptualize rural transformation, reveal the mechanisms driving change, and highlight the structural conditions that shape outcomes. These findings provide empirical support for a conceptual framework developed below (see Figure 2), while flagging areas where further theoretical sharpening and empirical testing is required. This perspective aligns with the recent “relational turn” in sustainability and transformation research, which foregrounds relations, practices and co-constitutive processes rather than treating social and ecological elements as separate components (West et al., 2024).

One clear, recurring conclusion is the retreat of rural–urban dualism. Increasingly, researchers reject the idea that “rural” and “urban” are fixed, mutually exclusive categories. Instead, rurality is understood as relational, multi-dimensional and continuously produced (Li et al., 2015; Nelson et al., 2021). To capture that complexity, scholars now combine indicators, infrastructural connectivity, livelihood diversification, commuting patterns, service access and residents' own spatial identities, rather than relying solely on population size or density (Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno, 2022).

Assemblage and systems-based perspectives push this argument further; it provides a philosophical basis for this perspective. DeLanda (2006) shows, social phenomena are best read as emergent configurations of heterogeneous components, a reading that supports analyzing rural–urban transitions as evolving, unstable assemblages rather than fixed typologies. They frame rural–urban transitions as emergent outcomes coming out of interacting social, material, and ecological processes, not as simple one-way shifts. In short, the literature is moving us away from static snapshots and toward a richer, more dynamic way of seeing how contemporary rural spaces are produced (Hoffmann et al., 2023; López Cifuentes and Sonnino, 2024). This conceptual reorientation provides a direct foundation and emphasis on co-evolving components and non-linear change.

Closely linked to this reconceptualization is the identification of a relatively consistent constellation of macro-level drivers shaping rural transformation. Across regions, market integration, capital mobility, labor migration and commuting, infrastructural expansion (including transport, utilities, and digital connectivity), and environmental or climatic pressures repeatedly emerge as key forces (Arouri et al., 2017; Cattaneo et al., 2022; Tesfay et al., 2025). Importantly, these drivers rarely operate independently. Instead, their interaction produces hybrid rural–urban spaces in which agricultural, residential, commercial, and service-oriented functions coexist. Formerly agrarian settlements are thus transformed into multifunctional and often peri-urban assemblages, characterized by overlapping land uses and mixed livelihood strategies (Jiang et al., 2024; Wang et al., 2023).

Land use change has been highlighted in the literature as one of the most visible and evident indicators of change in the rural landscape. Existing research has demonstrated that the rate of change is rapid but reflect uneven patterns in the way monocultural agricultural areas are transforming into mosaics of different land uses, including housing, small-scale industry, and conservation areas (Baldwin et al., 2023; Debolini et al., 2015; Wen et al., 2020). Remote sensing techniques have proven effective in detecting both the speed and spatial extent of these shifts across regions (Peng et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2023).

How that conversion plays out, however, depends a great deal on tenure and governance. Where land rights are unclear or plural, think customary or communal systems, changes often follow a different logic: speculative investment, contestation and, at times, dispossession become common features (Mudapakati et al., 2024; Onyebueke et al., 2020). In other words, land-use change is not purely a spatial or technical process; it is deeply institutional and political.

Alongside spatial change, livelihoods are also shifting. As links with nearby urban economies strengthen, rural households increasingly diversify: more people take up non-farm wage work, run informal enterprises, rely on remittances, or adopt multi-locational household strategies. At the aggregate level these moves can reduce poverty and boost income resilience (Arouri et al., 2017; Cattaneo et al., 2022). But the benefits are not evenly shared. Access to land, capital, education, and social networks strongly influences who can seize new opportunities (Aboye, 2024; Sarfo et al., 2024). At the same time, counter-urbanization and amenity migration can push up land and housing prices, displacing renters and small producers and creating new socio-spatial inequalities where communities were once more homogeneous (Willett, 2023).

The social and cultural side of transition adds yet another layer. Research consistently finds that people in urbanizing rural places develop fluid, layered identities: long-standing rural attachments sit alongside urban aspirations and everyday practices (Cockx et al., 2018; Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno, 2022). It is common for individuals to juggle wage labor or digital work while continuing to farm, uphold customary land claims and maintain village ties. These hybrid identities do more than describe feelings, they shape real decisions about land use and determine how communities engage with planning, whether through acceptance, negotiation or resistance. Identity, then, is an active force in how rural–urban transitions unfold.

A persistent and important finding is the mismatch between governance arrangements and on-the-ground realities. Planning systems and policy instruments still tend to rely on rigid rural or urban categories, making them poorly suited to hybrid, fast-changing spaces (Dufty-Jones, 2015; Wong et al., 2021). Two related governance problems stand out. First, there is scalar mismatch: national or municipal rules are often applied at the local level without enough attention to local variation or to institutional capacity (Cash et al., 2006; Nelson et al., 2021) A study on scale mismatches in social-ecological systems provides a robust diagnostic for these problems, identifying causes, consequences and potential corrective strategies (Cumming et al., 2006). Second, institutional pluralism creates overlapping authorities, statutory planners, traditional leaders and private developers, that breed legal ambiguity and implementation paralysis (Mubangizi, 2023; Onyebueke et al., 2020). These issues help explain why many policy tools struggle to respond effectively to contemporary rural change and instead, these governance failures are repeatedly identified as key mechanisms through which rural–urban transitions produce social conflict and environmental degradation.

Environmental outcomes associated with transition are similarly contingent and context dependent. While land conversion and densification are linked to biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, pollution, and ecosystem fragmentation in many cases (Frommen et al., 2021; Yuan et al., 2018; Yin et al., 2024), other studies demonstrate that transitions can also support positive environmental outcomes when multifunctional land uses, reforestation initiatives, or green infrastructure are intentionally promoted (Baldwin et al., 2023; Zang et al., 2021). Environmental resilience therefore emerges as neither automatic nor incidental, but as a product of governance choices and incentive structures.

Methodologically, recent work shows clear advances in how researchers measure rural–urban transition. The use of composite rurality indices, satellite time-series analysis and mixed-methods longitudinal designs has made it possible to capture change with greater nuance and temporal sensitivity (Inostroza and Taubenböck, 2024; Li et al., 2015; Nelson et al., 2021). Nonetheless, notable gaps remain, many studies rely on single indicators, lack longitudinal depth, or underuse qualitative, place-sensitive approaches that are better suited to reveal dynamic identity, institutional complexity and everyday lived experience. These limitations constrain the ability to trace causal pathways or evaluate policy interventions robustly.

4.2 Toward an integrated conceptual framework

The rural–urban transition assemblage (RUTA) framework reconceptualizes urbanizing rural landscapes as dynamic, multi-dimensional systems rather than a simple rural-to-urban shift. Drawing on assemblage thinking, which frames systems as dynamic configurations of heterogeneous elements (López Cifuentes and Sonnino, 2024; Hoffmann et al., 2023), and complex-systems thinking, which emphasizes non-linear interactions and emergent properties in socio-ecological and socio-technical systems (Mazzocchi, 2025), it treats rural and urban elements as co-evolving components of a single continuum. Spies and Alff (2020) links assemblage thinking to complex adaptive systems/SES (social-ecological systems) approaches by showing how these literatures converge and where they offer complementary diagnostics for integrative research. In this view, the “rural” in South Africa, from sprawling commercial farms to dense communal villages, is not a fixed category but a bundle of spatial-social practices and identities in flux (Mubangizi, 2023).

The RUTA framework is organized around five structural pillars, each of which corresponds to a thematic cluster developed in the preceding literature review and is visually represented in Figure 2: (1) drivers and Hybridization (Sections 3.1, 3.2), capturing the macro-level forces of economic integration, migration and infrastructure expansion that blur the rural–urban boundary; (2) land-use and spatial change (Section 3.3), addressing the conversion and reconfiguration of rural landscapes; (3) governance and institutional fragmentation (Section 3.5), encompassing the scalar mismatches and overlapping authorities that mediate transition outcomes; (4) socio-spatial restructuring and identity fluidity (Section 3.4), reflecting the hybrid identities and differentiated livelihood trajectories of transitioning populations; and (5) socio-environmental outcomes (Section 3.6), covering the ecological and social sustainability consequences of rural–urban change. These pillars are mutually constitutive rather than sequential, as depicted by the overlapping structure of Figure 2, and are held together by the cross-cutting axes of historical legacies and power relations.

The RUTA framework is anchored in the South African context (e.g., post-apartheid spatial legacies, dual land tenure systems, and migration patterns) but is generalisable to other global South settings. It highlights how drivers such as economic change, migration and environmental pressures produce hybrid rurban spaces (Hoffmann et al., 2023), where land-use, governance and identities interact in novel ways. Key themes from the literature converge in this framework: rural–urban hybridity, land-use transformation, governance fragmentation, socio-spatial restructuring, and identity fluidity. In South Africa and similar contexts, rural areas increasingly exhibit urban features (infrastructure, livelihoods, lifestyles) while urban peripheries retain rural characteristics. Iaquinta and Drescher (2000) and Varkey and Manasi (2019) describe a “village peri-urban” phenomenon, where remote rural communities adopt urban-like attributes and consciousness. This hybridity defies any strict urban–rural dichotomy: as Hoffmann et al. (2023: 1743) note, when rural and urban elements “come together, intermingle, and assemble,” they create characteristic spatial and social phenomena that transcend traditional categories.

This framework thus emphasizes a dynamic rural–urban continuum. It foregrounds the material-social flows (people, goods, capital, information) that connect rural and city (Hoffmann et al., 2023; Tesfay et al., 2025) and treats landscape transition as an assemblage of interacting processes.

Figure 3 presents one perspective on rural–urban transition using indicative transition positions (α → β → γ), reflected through shifts in development indices such as the rural–urban development index (URDI) and the rural–urban integration index (URII) (Zhang et al., 2023). These states and transition positions are illustrative rather than deterministic and are intended as heuristic reference points along a broader, dynamic continuum of possible trajectories, within which pathways may diverge, stall or reverse. The RUTA framework adopts this interpretation of transition but extends it beyond index-based representations by incorporating multiple interacting material, social and institutional dimensions, thereby accommodating non-linear, place-specific and historically contingent pathways of change.

4.2.1 RUTA framework components

The rural–urban transition assemblage (RUTA) makes historical legacies, power relations and social justice explicit as its key analytic axes. RUTA is intentionally grounded in the South African case because colonial land systems, apartheid spatial planning and the persistence of dual tenure arrangements do more than form background context, they are causal mechanisms that shape how global drivers (market integration, infrastructural expansion, and migration) are translated into very different land-use, governance and livelihood outcomes across places (Delius and Beinart, 2021; Ntsebeza, 2005; Bennett et al., 2013). This emphasis aligns with recent calls to center the “urban South” in sustainability debates, showing that urbanization processes and their sustainability implications may differ fundamentally in the Global South (Nagendra et al., 2018).

In practice this means that comparable pressures (for example, new transport corridors or proximity to urban nodes) produce divergent assemblages depending on whether change occurs on freehold farms, communal tenure areas, or peri-urban settlements; tenure dualism, overlapping authorities and uneven institutional capacity therefore mediate whether transitions produce inclusion, dispossession, or contestation (Mubangizi, 2023; Banda L. et al., 2024). By focusing on the historical-institutional context and power asymmetries present in the assemblage itself, RUTA not only explains the uneven nature of rural–urban transitions but also provides a conceptual mechanism for analyzing why similar drivers may yield different outcomes in different localities across South Africa. RUTA is grounded in the historical-institutional and path dependence literatures (Pierson, 2000; Thelen, 1999), which posit drivers (such as infrastructure expansion, market integration, and migration) as inputs into the system whose translation into socio-spatial outcomes is conditioned by pre-existing institutional forms and power conditions (Cousins, 2007; Pieterse, 2008). Power asymmetries between state actors, market actors, and communities condition who is able to capitalize on a given driver and therefore produce different land use outcomes under similar biophysical or macroeconomic conditions (Peluso and Watts, 2001; Murdoch, 2000). Finally, empirical studies on urbanization processes confirm that the same driver (such as a new road or market link) produces formal and planned expansion where tenure is well-defined and municipal planning capacity is strong, while producing informal and fragmented settlement where tenure is complex and municipal capacity is weak (Angel et al., 2011; Turok and McGranahan, 2013). Conceptually, this is consistent with the assemblage and social-ecological systems literatures on the one hand (DeLanda, 2006; Ostrom, 2009), which posit outcomes emerging from the complex interplay of material infrastructures, institutional rules, social practices, and ecological constraints. RUTA therefore explicitly specifies the mediating link between drivers and outcomes through the mediating conditions and is therefore clearly explanatory rather than descriptive.

RUTA also speaks to debates on planetary urbanization by re-grounding global spatial dynamics in historically specific institutions. Planetary urbanization emphasizes how urban processes extend beyond city boundaries through capital flows, infrastructure corridors and logistical networks (Brenner and Schmid, 2015; Brenner, 2018). RUTA accepts the diagnostic of extended urbanization but critiques its tendency to treat global processes as uniformly realized: in South Africa those processes are unevenly articulated through apartheid spatial legacies and tenure dualism, so planetary dynamics are locally assembled rather than universally expressed.

The RUTA framework's contribution can be demonstrated through direct comparison with the three frameworks to which it is most closely related. Hoffmann et al.'s (2023) concept of rurbanity shares RUTA's commitment to relational, hybridity-centered analysis, yet remains primarily descriptive, it characterizes the co-presence of rural and urban elements without specifying the institutional mechanisms or power relations that explain why particular configurations arise. Social-ecological systems (SES) frameworks (Ostrom, 2009; Cumming et al., 2006) offer rigorous governance diagnostics and multi-level institutional analysis, but they do not foreground historically produced inequalities, such as apartheid spatial planning or dual tenure arrangements as causal mechanisms. The planetary urbanization paper by Brenner and Schmid (2015) identifies how urban processes extend through capital flows and infrastructure beyond city boundaries, but, as Nagendra et al. (2018) note, it tends to treat these processes as uniformly expressed rather than locally assembled through specific institutional histories. RUTA integrates the relational sensibility of rurbanity, the institutional diagnostics of SES thinking, and the scalar awareness of planetary urbanization, while adding a historically specific causal layer that explains why comparable drivers produce divergent outcomes across different South African localities. This integration is not merely additive: by treating historical legacies and power relations as constituent elements of the assemblage rather than contextual backdrop, RUTA enables explanatory claims, about why transitions unfold differently across freehold farms, communal tenure areas, and peri-urban settlements, that none of the constituent frameworks can make individually.

4.2.1.1 Drivers and hybridization

Economic growth, migration (especially youth moving to cities), infrastructure expansion and climate pressures drive rural change. These create hybrid socio-material spaces (Swyngedouw, 2014; Hoffmann et al., 2023), for example, peri-urban farms, rural townships with urban industry, or gated communities on communal land. Urban demand for resources commodifies land (Tesfay et al., 2025), while remittances and cultural flows link city and village (Mubangizi, 2023). The framework treats such drivers as inputs that blur boundaries; rural landscapes morph functionally, not by becoming fully “urban” but by acquiring new mixed uses (agriculture, residence, industry) and identities. This continuous flux echoes Hoffmann et al.'s notion of “rurbanity,” a state of being-and-becoming between rural and urban.

4.2.1.2 Land-use and spatial change

Rural–urban transition entails significant land-use and spatial change, involving radical shifts in land use from agriculture to housing, industry and other non-farm activities, alongside changing settlement patterns. As urban expansion extends into formerly rural areas, agricultural plots are subdivided and informal settlements frequently emerge on the urban periphery. The RUTA framework further illustrates how multiple land uses, including commercial agriculture, conservation, informal settlement and new infrastructure, increasingly compete for limited land resources (Ekers and Prudham, 2017). As Tesfay et al. (2025) argue, peri-urban spaces thus become “hot spots” of contestation and inequity under the combined pressures of market forces and uneven governance.

In South Africa, historically and currently, disparities and discrepancies in tenure and ownership of land through freehold farms as against communal territories under a tribal authority make land use change uneven and disputed. For example, leases and claims that are long-term and multiple may exist, creating a situation of ambiguity over jurisdictions (Mubangizi, 2023). This framework, therefore, covers land use change as a key factor that is driven by economic and societal elements.

4.2.1.3 Governance and institutional fragmentation

One of the key questions is how various levels of governance interact and/or contradict each other during a transition process. Typical changes from a rural to an urban area often occur faster than planned, and various actors involved [planning officials from the municipality, tribal officials, and developers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working together] are often regulated by conflicting regulations. For instance, as shown by Mubangizi (2023), within South Africa, there are conflicts in definitions of “rural,” and this directly influences allocation and distribution of resources and development. The framework treats the coexistence of state institutions, traditional leaders and informal community structures as a central feature of transition. These mixed systems of authority can sometimes foster resilience through local collaboration, but fragmentation also creates persistent gaps. By placing governance at the center, the RUTA framework draws attention to both coordination failures and the emergent local collaborations that can partially fill those gaps (for example, multi-stakeholder networks and public-private partnerships).

4.2.1.4 Socio-spatial restructuring and identity fluidity

Urbanizing rural areas undergo marked changes in social relations and identity. Development often produces clear winners and losers, with some households moving into more secure, diversified livelihoods while others remain marginalized. At the same time, notions of “rural” and “urban” become porous, many people adopt practices and aspirations associated with towns while retaining village-based ties and customs. Hybrid rural–urban continua therefore emerge, where everyday life combines elements from both settings, for example, a household may remain resident in a village yet follow urban consumption patterns and participate in remote or wage work. Migrants commonly sustain strong connections to their places of origin through remittances, festival attendance and ongoing claims to family land, stitching social relations between town and rural. The framework therefore foregrounds a socio-cultural layer that examines how norms, values and networks stretch across space. Following Mubangizi (2023), it treats rurality as socially constructed and continually reshaped through experience, capturing multi-scalar forms of belonging (to village, city, ethnic group, and nation) and the gradual cultural mixing that accompanies transition.

These components form an interconnected assemblage. Drivers induce hybridity and land change, which feed back into socio-spatial patterns and stress governance. For instance, new land markets (economic drivers) produce informal settlements (spatial outcome), prompting novel governance responses (e.g., upgrading projects) and identity shifts (residents seeing themselves as urbanites with rural ties). By situating all elements within one conceptual frame, the RUTA Framework enables scholars and policymakers to trace how an intervention in one domain (say, improving rural roads) might cascade through the system (affecting migration, market access, and social networks).

The reviewed literature strongly supports the core claims of the RUTA framework. Evidence consistently demonstrates that rural–urban transition unfolds as an assemblage of interacting drivers, land-use dynamics, governance relations, and socio-cultural transformations (Hoffmann et al., 2023; López Cifuentes and Sonnino, 2024). Empirical studies substantiate the existence of feedback loops linking economic drivers to spatial hybridity and subsequent social and environmental outcomes (Arouri et al., 2017; Cattaneo et al., 2022; Tesfay et al., 2025). Research on tenure, land consolidation and institutional coordination maps directly onto RUTA's governance node, while socio-environmental scholarship confirms that resilience functions simultaneously as an outcome and a constraint within transitional assemblages (Chu et al., 2023; Yuan et al., 2018).

The literature also points to a few clear priorities for strengthening RUTA. First, we must put power, social justice and historical legacies front and center, colonial land regimes, apartheid planning and the diversity of post-reform institutions help explain why the same drivers produce very different outcomes in different places (Mubangizi, 2023; Rocheleau et al., 1996). Second, RUTA needs to be made operational, that means casting the framework as a set of testable, multi-scalar propositions and pairing those propositions with empirically tractable indicators that combine spatial data, household-level analysis and institutional mapping.

These implications are especially visible in the South African case. Dual tenure systems and apartheid-era spatial legacies continue to shape how rural–urban transitions unfold. Communal and freehold areas, for example, respond differently to market pressure, producing uneven service delivery, recurring land conflicts, and divergent development paths (Banda L. et al., 2024; Mubangizi, 2023; Babalola, 2023). Such cases underline why historical and institutional context must be central to any assemblage-based reading of rural–urban change and provide a solid empirical anchor for RUTA.

4.3 Policy implications and analytical applicability of the RUTA framework

The rural–urban transition assemblage (RUTA) model carries direct and differentiated policy and planning practice implications in South Africa and comparable Global South contexts. RUTA's emphasis on understanding rural–urban transition as a historically specific process of assemblage redirects policy attention from static categorical distinctions to the institutions and arrangements that actively produce transition. RUTA is not a policy template but a conceptual model that provides a tool for practitioners to understand the particular drivers of transition, governance arrangements, and socio-spatial processes in a specific setting. The following five policy implications are direct and specific to RUTA's five structural pillars.

Pillar 1-Drivers and hybridization: multidimensional and dynamic classifications of rurality.

RUTA's first pillar disputes a key assumption underlying all current rural development policy: that places can usefully be described as either rural or urban and therefore treated accordingly. The evidence cited in both Sections 3.1, 3.2 above shows that drivers of urbanization, market integration, infrastructure extension, migration, and climate stress, interact in a non-linear fashion to produce rurban spaces that cannot usefully be classified as either rural or urban (Hoffmann et al., 2023; Nelson et al., 2021). Policy frameworks based on a rural/urban dichotomy systematically misclassify transitional spaces and therefore misallocate rural development support, a particularly serious issue in South Africa where post-apartheid administrative boundaries frequently do not correspond to the realities of peri-urban communal settlements (Mubangizi, 2023; Neves and Du Toit, 2013). In place of rural/urban dichotomies, governments and planners should use composite multidimensional rurality indices that take account of both spatial and longitudinal changes in rurality in a manner that is sensitive to different types of infrastructure, livelihoods, and institutions in addition to density (Nelson et al., 2021; Cattivelli, 2024). In the South African case, these should also take account of customary tenure and informal economic practices, as standard indices systematically misclassify communal spaces (Mudapakati et al., 2024). This would enable planners to distinguish between a communal settlement in an early stage of transition and a settlement that is already showing signs of peri-urbanization.

Pillar 2-land-use and spatial change: treat land conversion as an institutional and political process requiring integrative governance.

Land use change in urbanizing rural areas is not a technical or spatial process; it is an institutional and political process driven by tenure ambiguity, speculative investment, and differential customary and statutory authority (Mudapakati et al., 2024; Onyebueke et al., 2020). Scholarship on South Africa shows that the coexistence of freehold and communal tenure systems has a profound impact on land use change and leads to radically different land use change processes under similar market drivers, an aspect of land change that RUTA's second pillar focuses on (Olofsson, 2021; Ntsebeza, 2005). The policy implication of these findings is that land use planning in urbanizing rural areas must be tenure-sensitive and must involve customary and statutory planning agencies as co-decision-makers and not merely as consultees. Land consolidation mechanisms, such as those proposed and tested in rural China (Jiang et al., 2022, 2024) and now being promoted for sub-Saharan Africa's urbanizing rural areas (Sumbo et al., 2023), offer a framework for guiding land conversion processes toward more equitable and food secure change by aggregating development potential, rationalizing settlement distributions, and conserving highly valued agricultural land at the rural–urban interface. In South Africa, the Land Court and existing participatory land use planning systems offer an opportunity for addressing these issues and are currently not being utilized to their full potential in addressing land change processes in transitional areas (Banda L. et al., 2024).

Pillar 3-Governance and institutional fragmentation: cross-sectoral and multi-level planning institutions at the rural–urban interface.

One of RUTA's most useful and actionable contributions to knowledge is its clear identification of governance fragmentation as a key feature of rural–urban transition in South Africa. As discussed in detail in Section 3.5, the evidence indicates that the continued presence of planning institutions designed to serve static rural communities with agriculture-centric economies has resulted in systematic mismatches between regulatory environment and lived experience in rural–urban areas (Dufty-Jones, 2015; Wong et al., 2021). In South Africa's case, it has been noted that spatial planning legislation in post-apartheid South Africa has been designed to serve spatial planning and land use management (SPLUM), but in conjunction with customary authority and hybrid institutions, has resulted in coordination failure at the municipal and local level (Mubangizi, 2023; Bennett et al., 2013). The implication for policy in South Africa is that joint planning institutions involving all relevant stakeholders at the municipal level, including tribal authorities, land management agencies, and environmental management departments need to be established at the rural–urban interface (Cash et al., 2006; Cumming et al., 2006). Such institutions have the ability to alleviate overlaps between institutions that have resulted in legal ambiguity and implementation failure in South Africa's rural and urban areas, with policies that are sensitive to customary land governance but also have the capacity to meet the requirements of rural and urban communities in transition.

Pillar 4-socio-spatial restructuring and identity fluidity: invest in the social and cultural infrastructure of transition.

RUTA's Pillar 4 points to an important dimension of rural–urban transition that is systematically ignored in standard policy frameworks: identity and socio-cultural factors that inform how people relate to and engage in transition processes. As shown in Section 3.4 above, the available literature indicates that people in urbanizing rural spaces are increasingly characterized by fluid identity formations where people simultaneously claim their traditional lands and villages while working in urbanizing spaces and consuming urban goods and services (Delgado-Viñas and Gómez-Moreno, 2022; Cockx et al., 2018). Such identity formations are not just important in transition processes but are critical in determining how people use their lands, whether transition planning is seen as legitimate in their eyes, and whether people can tap into the economic spillovers of transition (Halfacree, 2007; Mubangizi, 2023). Therefore, investments in education in rural spaces and digital and cultural connectivity have important theoretical and policy implications that go beyond their symbolic value: they are critical in providing a platform for rural populations in transition to build capacities for participating equitably in a diversifying economy. This is consistent with the emphasis on inclusive rural–urban linkages in SDG planning frameworks, particularly SDG 11 (Ministry of Housing Urban Affairs, 2015a,b) (sustainable cities and communities) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). In South Africa, where migrant labor systems have traditionally disarticulated the social reproduction capacities of rural households, policies that support the livelihoods of the multilocational households, through microfinance, agroI-processing support, and community-based tourism, can insulate households against the impacts of rapid land use changes while maintaining the socio-cultural fabric of the transforming communities (Baldwin et al., 2023; Sarfo et al., 2024).

Pillar 5-Socio-environmental outcomes: integrate environmental management in rural development planning as a matter of social policy.

The evidence reviewed in Section 3.6 of the report establishes that the socio-environmental outcomes of rural–urban transition are not automatic or inevitable, but the result of governance decisions, incentive systems, and the distribution of power over the land and natural resources (Zang et al., 2021; Chu et al., 2023). This has a particular policy implication that RUTA's fifth pillar articulates, that environmental management in rural areas undergoing transition cannot be treated as a separate matter of technical regulation, independent of rural development planning as a whole. If environmental protection is pursued through instruments such as the application of conservation zoning or the financing of green infrastructure, without consideration of the social distribution of costs and benefits, it may lead to the phenomenon of “green grabbing,” where marginal communities in rural areas are displaced in favor of the interests of conservationists and the “green middle classes, as described by Yuan et al. (2018) and Zhu et al. (2019). The Nandoni wetland in Limpopo Province is a case in point of the rapid degradation of ecosystem services in rural areas of South Africa through agricultural conversion and uncontrolled urban sprawl, as well as the importance of co-management approaches that engage local communities as active agents of environmental management, not simply as subjects of it (Banda L. et al., 2024). RUTA supports the inclusion of ecological considerations, such as assessments of ecosystem services and social vulnerability, in rural development planning from the beginning, rather than merely as a mitigation measure in a retrospective analysis. Climate resilience planning must be included in rural planning in ecologically sensitive regions, where a diversified rural economy has been shown to provide a greater capacity for adaptation than a monoculture-based agricultural economy (Aboye, 2024; Agergaard et al., 2021).

While RUTA is informed by the specific institutional context in South Africa, from communal land management to the peri-urban village, the five pillars represent a set of more general and shared characteristics in the rural–urban transition in the Global South, where the majority of the population is becoming increasingly urbanized. The framework is not prescriptive, providing no specific predictions or outcomes, merely a conceptual map that allows the analyst, scholar, or policymaker to trace the impact of a change in any one area, such as a new rural road or land tenure management, on the overall assemblage and its constituent parts, such as migration patterns, market access, and governance and social networks, simultaneously (Hoffmann et al., 2023; Tesfay et al., 2025). In this way, RUTA offers policymakers a practical conceptual tool for understanding the uneven, contested, and irreversible nature of rural transition in a way that is sensitive to both the legacy and momentum of the rural and the urban, respectively.

5 Conclusion

This paper has sought to address the specific and costly failure of the definitional and governance frameworks for rural areas in South Africa and many other countries to match the socio-spatial realities they are claimed to be serving. Rural/urban categories, the dominance of the agricultural economy in the dominant planning models, and the density of the rural population all continue to place transitional spaces in the wrong category based on what they were, not what they are becoming. The rural–urban transition assemblage (RUTA) framework proposed in this paper is a direct response to this failure. By conceptualizing the transition from rural to urban as the historically and institutionally specific outcome of the interaction of the various drivers of transition, rather than as a universally applicable linear process, RUTA provides an explanatory framework that is not available from the dominant models of planetary urbanization, peri-urbanization, rurbanity, and social-ecological systems.

The framework has acknowledged limitations that set the agenda for its further development. The current form of RUTA has been informed by the South African institutional case. Although its analytical logic has been conceived to be generalisable, the five pillars of transition have dimensions that are shared among Global South contexts of customary tenure, fragmented governance, and post-colonial spatial legacies, its generalisability has not been empirically verified. The most important agenda for its future development lies in the empirical operationalization of the indicators of each of the five pillars of transition via spatial analysis, household surveys, and institutional studies, following the methodological approaches outlined in Nelson et al. (2021) and Inostroza and Taubenböck (2024) for composite rurality measurement. Applications of the framework in similar transition contexts, particularly the communal land zones of East Africa and the post-agrarian rural zones of South and Southeast Asia, would allow for the empirical testing of what aspects of transition are context-specific and what aspects of transition are generalisable. The need for longitudinal studies of transition processes has also been highlighted by the current limitations of the literature. The dominance of cross-sectional studies has limited the scope for tracing causal pathways and determining whether interventions in the transition process via better governance have a lasting effect or merely displace the transition pressures spatially and temporally.

South Africa's rural–urban frontiers are not the peripheries of a system that will eventually be fully urbanized. Rather, they are the spaces of active, irreversible, and largely ungoverned change in which the conjunction of global economic forces, post-apartheid institutional legacies, and localized livelihood strategies is shaping new spatial and social forms that will characterize South Africa's urban geography in the decades to come. So too in the Global South, where the majority of future urbanization will occur, not in existing metropolitan areas but in the very spaces of transition that RUTA seeks to theorize. RUTA makes no claim to provide a tool for managing this transformation. Instead, it offers something much better: a conceptual architecture that is sufficiently detailed to reveal what is happening and why, sufficiently nuanced to accommodate the place-specific institutional histories through which global processes are channeled, and sufficiently grounded to provide governance recommendations that can be acted upon.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Themba Lukhele, University of Mpumalanga, South Africa

Reviewed by: Ellen Hoffmann, University of Kassel, Germany

Emanuela Rocha, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Marija Drobnjakovic, Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Serbia