It has been argued that this is what happened to Detroit: the &quot;city&quot; is financially separate enough from the surrounding state that it collapsed when its population moved into the suburbs. Of course that process of suburbanisation changes the boundary between &quot;urban&quot; and &quot;rural&quot;.<p>&#x27;Natural resources&#x27; at least in the UK are not so much &#x27;financialised&#x27; as in the control of hereditary landowners. The problems experienced today are not so much the urban exploiting the rural, as the rural landowners exploiting rural tenants.<p>To complicate matters, sometimes the landowners are neither urban nor rural but offshore.