evidence: Since AR5, there has been increasing understanding of the interdependence of meta-regions, large, small and rural settlements which may be connected through key infrastructure (Lichter and Ziliak, 2017), including national and trans-national infrastructure investments (Hanakata and Gasco, 2018). Almost all the world’s non-urban population and its provisioning ecosystems are impacted by urban systems through connecting infrastructure and family and kinship ties, remittances and trade arrangements that influence flows of water, food, fibre, energy, waste and people (Trundle, 2020; McIntyre-Mills and Wirawan, 2018; Zhang et al., 2019; Nerini et al., 2019; Friend and Thinphanga, 2018). Many rural places are so deeply connected to urban systems that risks are observed to cascade from one to the other, for example, when drought in arable zones leads to food insecurity in cities, or where flood damage to urban transport infrastructure leads to prolonged isolation of small towns and rural settlements (Friend and Thinphanga, 2018; McIntyre-Mills and Wirawan, 2018). A focus of this chapter is the experience of a range of urban settlements, from small to large, and the connecting infrastructure and formal and informal networks and systems that join them to each other.