The belief that between the truly rural and the truly urban are many ‘shades of grey’; if we actually look along a scale from the single isolated farm all the way to the megalopolis, we do not find any clear boundaries between hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. Sheppard and Nagar (2004) Antipode 36, 4 state that ‘it is important to reconceptualize the urban as rural–urban continuum in attending to processes of domination, co-optation and resistance, especially in Asia and Africa where populations are predominantly rural and historical patterns of colonial and postcolonial capitalist development and labor migration connect the lives in the urban, peri-urban, and rural areas in intricate and inseparable ways’.