Urban-Rural Linkages - Urban Policy Platform

WHAT ARE

URBAN RURAL LINKAGES?

Urban-Rural Linkages touch on a broad variety of thematic areas ranging from urban and territorial planning, strengthening small and intermediate towns, from enabling spatial flows of people, products, services and information to fostering food security systems as well as touching mobility and migration, reducing the environmental impact in urban-rural convergences, developing legislation and governance structures and promoting inclusive financial investments among others. Fostering Partnerships – between urban and rural actors and areas at the local level are crucial for a transformative agenda. But also global partnerships for an integrated territorial development are crucial for transforming towards sustainable and resilient societies. Through shared principles these levels of transformation can be better aligned.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO LINK URBAN AND RURAL AREAS?

While the world, and especially Africa, is rapidly urbanizing, the development gap between rural and urban areas tends to increase. Urbanization has been widely acknowledged for its transformative power, but even though urban and rural areas depend on each other, rural areas often lag behind and worldwide, 85 per cent of the poor still live in rural areas. In both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs)1 and the New Urban Agenda (NUA)2, United Nations Member States agreed to policies that support integrated urban and territorial planning and development. They called for new, inclusive approaches and enhanced synergies between urban and rural communities and spaces – an essential component of the vision of Agenda 2030 to “leave no one behind”.

Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles and Framework for Action

UN-Habitat initiated and convened the process to develop “Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles and framework for Action” with over 130 actors ranging from experts working in the field of urban, rural, and territorial development, representatives of national and sub-national governments, development partners, think tanks, academia, and intergovernmental organizations. The Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles and framework of actions are based on the premise that urban and rural areas should not be treated as separate entities when development plans, policies and strategies are made. Rather, the aim is to harness the potential that their combined synergy generates, so that everyone benefits from the circular flow along the urban-rural continuum. The goal of these Guiding Principles is to inform pragmatic strategies and propose a Framework for Action to build an enabling environment for more inclusive and functional urban-rural linkages. The principles are flexible and can be applied by all levels of stakeholders at all scales.

Access the URL-GP to Advance Integrated Territorial Development publication in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Portuguese that was launched in May 2019 during the UN-Habitat Assembly.

The Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles (URL-GP)

Translate global normative agendas in national and subnational commitments for territorial cohesion and action.

Locally Grounded Interventions

Incorporate the urban-rural nexus in multi-sectoral, multi-level and multi-stakeholder approaches to governance integration.

Intergrated Governance

Promote integrative, inclusive and systems-based approaches to urban and territorial policy and planning.

Functional and Spatial Systems-Based Approaches

Secure and prioritize sustainable public and private investment to balance and strengthen urban-rural linkages.

Financial Inclusive

Foster partnerships, alliances and networks that link urban and rural actors and different sectors.

Balanced Partnerships

Translate global normative agendas in national and subnational commitments for territorial cohesion and action.

Human Rights-Based

Build urban-rural linkages to recognize cultural differences, overcome conflict, and inequalities in provision of social and health services.

Do not Harm and Provide Social Protection

Protect, sustain, and expand areas important to biodiversity and ecosystem services in transition to resilient, resource efficient societies.

Environmentally Sensitive

Create spaces and mechanisms to ensure meaningful participation of people, local institutions and communities.

Participatory Engagement

Establish or improve knowledge systems and fill data gaps to address urban-rural continuum and territorial cohesion using age- gender- and spatially disaggregated data.

Data Driven and Evidence Based

e-learning course – Functional Urban-Rural Linkages for Sustainable Urbanization

This course provides an overall understanding of the significance of urban-rural linkages to sustainable urbanization and integrated territorial development. It also provides a detailed overview and methodologies of localizing the ‘URL-GP’ (Urban-Rural Linkages: Guiding Principles and Framework of Action)

The course conceived around the following premises:

Moving away from “Learning about the URL-GP” to “Learning how to apply the URL-GP”.
Moving away from “Learning through generic exercises/academic examples” to “Learning by doing” in a real-life project, that directly contributes to localizing the URL-GP and ultimately leads to implementation on the ground.
Moving away from “Training of Trainers” classroom methodologies to “Self-taught and self-mentored, step-by-step and real-life learning processes”. The aim of the course is not to teach people about the URL-GP, but to guide people in how to apply the URL-GP in their areas of work

TAKE THE COURSE

Compendium of inspiring Practices

Recognizing the importance of integrated territorial development for achieving sustainability, UN-Habitat is undertaking a comprehensive effort to develop user-friendly tools and meticulously gather a wide array of insightful global case studies. This valuable knowledge base is showcased in the continuously evolving “Compendium of Inspiring Practices on Urban-Rural Linkages,” a key resource that vividly illustrates the diverse and far-reaching applications of the Urban-Rural Linkages Guiding Principles (URL-GP) across various sectors and through the power of multi-stakeholder collaborations. By making these resources readily available, UN-Habitat seeks to empower national and subnational authorities, development organizations, civil society and other stakeholders to effectively apply the URL-GP within their specific contexts, ultimately contributing to the realization of more inclusive and balanced territorial development.

Access the compendiums here.

Advocacy

The International Forum on Urban-Rural Linkages – IFURL is one of the key activities of UN-Habitat’s Urban-Rural Linkages programme which includes, capturing, analysing and promoting the inspiring practices implemented in different territories around the world. The purposes of the Forum are to thoroughly analyse and capture the unconventional and inspiring practices implemented across the urban-rural continuum, and to better understand how such innovative interventions have contributed to revitalizing rural areas through empowering local people.

IFURL

International Dialogue on Urban-Rural Linkages (IDURL4 2025) | Third International Forum on Urban-Rural Linkages (IFURL3 2023) | Second International Forum on Urban-Rural Linkages (IFURL2 2021) | First International Forum on Urban-Rural Linkages (IFURL 2019)

URL Webinar series – In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN-Habitat Urban-Rural Linkages project aims to exchange information and learn from the efforts of different actors to overcome this crisis and enhance post-crisis recovery actions by bringing a focus to urban-rural linkages and integrated territorial approaches. For this purpose, UN-Habitat is hosting the webinar series, Urban-Rural Linkages in the time of COVID-19.

Urban-Rural Linkages Newsletters – This newsletters present the activities that UN-Habitat and partners are conducting to highlight the role of territories and urban-rural linkages in responding to the challenges generated by the pandemic. They also contain insights from the URL webinars as well as a section for short articles on Urban-Rural Linkages, presenting an experimental framework for new approaches in urban-rural planning and governance.

The 2025 Catalogue of Publications: Policy, Legislation and Governance Section (Urban-Rural Linkages) is a compilation of PLGS, Urban-Rural Linkages normative tools and knowledge products to support governments at all levels and other stakeholders.

Each publication has a summary and QR code. You can download your publication of interest by scanning the QR code or clicking the report cover.

Click to download.