Introduction

In the aspatial, dichotomous world of most development theories, there is no room for small rural towns. Here, the world is perceived as either rural or urban, and small towns are regarded either as an indiscriminate part of the urban sphere, as in Upton’s theory of urban bias (Lipton, 1976; Harris and Moore, 1984), or as an undifferentiated part of the rural sphere, as in Mellor’s theory of rural industrialization and much of the rural development literature from the 1970s Mellor, 1986; Mellor et al., 1987).