Rural-urban business partnerships: towards a new trans-territorial logic

These years, rural–urban business partnerships emerge in a new trans-territorial logic, surpassing normal trade alliances. Such partnerships embrace social issues, benefits related to place branding, knowledge dissemination, etc. This contribution scrutinizes 11 rural–urban business partnerships in Denmark within fields of food, film, green care, media, retail, teleworking, education, and tourism. The degree of structural and legal formalization varies, but in many cases the formalization is fairly low. Partnership transparency formats depend on interrelationships with volunteering communities. When analyzing resource composition of the rural–urban business partnerships it becomes clear that there are multi-faceted value flows consisting of products, production capacity, market access, knowledge, capital, waste products, and amenities. The creation of productive business partnerships often takes a long time, and they are matters of continual change. The successful examples transform positively the value chain and rearrange the nature and power of transactions in a territorial framework, and they accommodate for entrepreneurial forces in disadvantaged regions.