introduction spatial planning concepts have become prominent in discussions and strategies that focus on regional and rural development. at the heart of this policy framework is an understanding that competition between regions is one of the primary driving forces influencing social and economic development and hence cohesion. it is also understood that some regions have greater advantages in t...

This paper presents a new approach to the semantics of spatial degree and comparison (gradation) expressions (e.g., 2m less long than). Taking a broad cognitive science perspective, results of different research fields are combined into a cognitive framework for the ‘semantics of gradation’ (Bierwisch 1989). A distinction between implicitly and explicitly represented aspects of space will be ma...

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INTRODUCTION Rural populations face numerous barriers to health, including poorer health care infrastructure, access to care, and other sociodemographic factors largely associated with rurality. Multiple measures of rurality used in the biomedical and public health literature can help assess rural-urban health disparities and may impact the observed associations between rurality and health. Fur...

The term rural is used to describe people, places, traditions, and spaces. It is often employed as a setting for study as well as an object of study. People's perceptions of rural are confused and differ considerably. For over a century researchers have attempted to define more precisely this term using social, economic, and or ecological components. However, problems of interpreting official d...