Western Rural Research Between 1994 and 2014: From Rural Landscape to Rural Society

Urban-rural integration and the coordinated development of urban and rural areas have become the strategic task of China’s new urbanization. For this, the rural area has become the focus of the domestic academic circles. The urban and rural planning discipline is also in urgent need of expanding the study of rural areas. While as one of the core contents in the study of western human geography, rural research has added a lot of new contents after nearly decades of development, which also presents the diversified characteristics. In order to grasp the context of rural research in a more comprehensive way, this paper is based on the comprehensive perspective of geography and planning discipline. It analyzes the progress of the western rural study between 1994 and 2014 by using the relevant statistic software. Besides, it summarizes the relevant contents from five main research topics, which are rural landscape and ecology, rural development and evolution, rural governance and rural planning, rural special population research, rural social issues. Finally, this paper indicates the difference between Chinese and Western studies by comparing, in the hope of providing references for the domestic rural research. 关键词: 乡村地理学;城乡规划;共词分析;聚类分析;乡村研究;进展