This innovative book brings together the world's leading scholars of rural migration to examine the theoretical construction of counterurbanisation as a pervasive feature of most modern Western societies and, in a series of specially written contributions based on original research, indicate the problem and issues that the process involves, touching on class, gender, community, conflict, economic and social change, isolation and lifestyle. This is an important summary of "state-of-the-art" research in this important field of population geography.