Bonner analyses historical contributions to the urban-rural debate by Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tonnies, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth, and Robert Redfield, as well as contributions by contemporary theorists, such as Ray Pahl, Anthony Giddens, and Peter Berger. He shows how both societal developments and scientific assumptions unwittingly shape the debate, making a distinctive rural culture more and more difficult to identify, and suggests that phenomenology can rescue the urban-rural debate from its conceptual predicament. Through an analysis of statements by parents in both urban and...