Introduction to Rural Planning

Economies, Communities and Landscapes

Nick Gallent, Iqbal Hamiduddin, Meri Juntti, Sue Kidd, Dave Shaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138811447
• eBook ISBN: 9781317608622
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Introduction to Rural Planning: Economies, Communities and Landscapes provides a critical analysis of the key challenges facing rural places and the ways that public policy and community action shape rural spaces.

The second edition provides an examination of the composite nature of 'rural planning', which combines land-use and spatial planning elements with community action, countryside management and the projects and programmes of national and supra-national agencies and organisations. It also offers a broad analysis of entrepreneurial social action as a shaper of rural outcomes, with particular coverage of the localism agenda and Neighbourhood Planning in England. With a focus on accessibility and rural transport provision, this book examines the governance arrangements needed to deliver integrated solutions spanning urban and rural places. Through an examination of the ecosystem approach to environmental planning, it links the procurement of ecosystem services to the global challenges of habitat degradation and loss, climate change and resource scarcity and management.

A valuable resource for students of planning, rural development and rural geography, Introduction to Rural Planning aims to make sense of current rural challenges and planning approaches, evaluating the currency of the 'rural' label in the context of global urbanisation, arguing that rural spaces are relational spaces characterised by critical production and consumption tensions.

Part 1
Rurality, rural governance and planning

1
Introduction

Background and aims

This book provides an introduction to rural planning in England, Scotland and Wales (henceforth ‘Britain’), but with a primary focus on England. As an introduction, it offers a way in, for new readers, to the many different subjects and issues that define the field of rural planning and confront policy making and practice. Planning in Britain can seem to be in a state of perpetual flux: the institutional and governance frameworks in which its formal planning systems are situated are forever changing, and policy is interpreted and used differently from place to place. Moreover, the boundaries of ‘planning’ seem to be ever-expanding, embracing the programmes and actions of many different agencies and stakeholders – from the supra-national to the very local. Planning exists in many forms and at multiple levels and is very much an instrument of shifting political priority. Making sense of the ‘system’ and drawing out constants, or at least key principles, is no easy task. But such is the primary aim of this introductory text: to make sense of rural planning in Britain and to reveal the continuities and shifts in thinking that have delivered the approach to managing rural change that we have today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

It achieves this aim within twelve chapters, each structured in a broadly similar way. The chapters begin with discussions of the central questions, challenges or debates that might confront anyone wishing to intervene in (or merely understand) matters of rural development and change. The chapters end by looking at how these same questions, challenges and debates are expressed in Britain and have shaped development and planning outcomes. The first part of this book is concerned with perceptions and definitions of rurality and with the governance frameworks and debates in which planning is situated. The three parts that then follow propose that economic change (and, in the case of rural areas, a transition away from land-based activity to other forms of production and consumption) underpins all other social and environmental outcomes, which the various aspects of policy and planning are called upon to respond to. Hence the book’s core structure is a simple one, moving from baseline economic and land questions, to issues of people and communities in the countryside, and then onto debates around landscape and environmental change and management. The social and environmental parts could easily have been reversed, without any disruption to the logic of economic drivers underpinning social and environmental outcomes. This is part of the basic premise of the book: to make sense of rural planning, it is necessary to understand the economic undercurrents of rural change, on the one hand, and the broader politics of governance and planning on the other.

This introductory chapter sets the broad parameters of rural planning debate, leaving detailed practices and outcomes to later parts. So, what is rural planning, what does it do and why do we need it? Planning, wherever it takes place, is very much defined by its context and by the problems that it is called upon to help resolve. This means that a logical place to start this ‘introduction to rural planning’ is to unpack its constituent parts: the ‘rural’ and the ‘planning’. Arriving at some definition of each, which can be carried forward into later chapters, is the main aim of this introduction. Beyond that, it also addresses two sets of key questions.

The first set is generic, dealing with broad understandings of rurality (as the defining context), rural challenges, rural development and the scope of planning in the countryside. The second set is focused on Britain: how rurality is perceived and defined in the nations of Britain; how these perceptions colour understanding of rural problems and how these might be addressed through public policy and planning. The intention is to provide an introduction to both general ‘rural’ and ‘planning’ issues before drilling down into the narrative of rural change and planning debate in Britain. The chapter then ends with a navigational aid for the reader, in the form of a short sketch of the content of later chapters.

Part 1: Rurality, rural development and planning

Perceptions of rural change and continuity

In the opening chapter of his 2005 textbook on Rural Geography, Michael Woods challenges the reader to imagine a typical rural place. He contrasts likely European, and particularly English and Scandinavian, images with those from North America or Australia. He then asks the reader to populate their images with people, with economic activities – from farming to tourism – and with the problems, social and economic, that such places face (Woods, 2005a: 3). He concludes that perceptions of rurality are culturally specific – borne of different experiences and exposure to competing ideas communicated through television and other media – and may ultimately be vague and ambiguous. In some parts of the world, rural areas may be viewed nostalgically, being seen to represent a nation’s roots in an agrarian past and its heritage. Elsewhere, they are backwaters, where essential development has not been able to achieve a secure enough foothold. The rural areas of some countries are protected as recreational spaces, with policy and planning emphasis placed on conservation and the promotion of leisure activities. But in other places, the countryside is an economic hinterland, which feeds the city and forms part of the essential infrastructure for urbanisation. The rural can either be seen in opposition to the urban, or as a less densely developed and populated extension of the city. Building on the work of Lefebvre (1970), Brenner and Schmidt (2011: 12) argue the case for ‘planetary urbanisation’ in which ‘[…] spaces that lie well beyond the traditional city cores and suburban peripheries […] have become integral parts of the worldwide urban fabric’. This means that the ‘[…] idea of the “non-urban” [including the rural] appears increasingly to be an ideological projection derived from a long dissolved, pre-industrial geo-historical formation’ (Brenner and Schmidt, 2011: 30). In other words, there is no rural, only an extended urban. This theoretical position is motivated by a desire to reset the boundaries of urban studies, and claim firstly that ‘rural’ is an outdated idea and secondly that spaces are functionally inter-connected. The view taken in this book is that inter-connectivity does not invalidate the claim of geographical specificity (see Chapter 11 for an extended discussion). There are of course difficulties with the rural label; it can denote many different things and there are inevitable differences from one rural place to the next. But if the term conveys particular problems and challenges then it would seem to retain some value. Planning, as we will see later, is a spatial undertaking, dealing with problems or managing opportunities that are place-based, stemming from the rise or decline of a particular economic activity and the consequent spatial misalignment between where people need to live and where they work or receive services. It is reasonable, we think, to talk of a ‘rural problem’ even if that problem is differently constructed from place to place.

In very general terms, the rural areas of many advanced industrial countries (the core focus of this book) are often described as ‘post-productivist’, meaning that their primary function is no longer centred on food production or other ‘land-based activities’. The advent of global markets means that the food or timber is being produced overseas. This can mean that the relationship between urban and rural places has altered, and sometimes that production has been substituted with consumption, and significant numbers of people residing in towns and cities now see the countryside as a leisure space – a destination for day trips, longer holidays or the purchase of second homes – or at least a non-productive space from which to commute to urban jobs or retire to in later life. Going back to images of the rural: one popular one is of lowland farming landscapes; another is of recreation spaces, for rambling or more adventurous mountain trekking, inland boating and such like. But whether food is being produced or tourists attracted, the relationship with urban spaces and urban populations is strong. And it is often the case that these consumption and production functions co-exist: the countryside is ‘multi-functional’ or post-productivist with an element of retained production. This might suggest an economic adjustment that has produced a new balance, between the remnants of land-based activity and a new economy centred on tourism. However, economic change is sometimes accompanied by negative social consequences or environmental degradation.

Where there are strong consumption-driven counter-urbanisation pressures affecting rural areas, families and communities reliant on traditional rural jobs, or seasonal employment in tourism, may find it difficult to compete for housing. Service provision may change to suit the tastes and needs of newcomers and quickly a social ‘reconfiguration’ of the countryside takes place, marked by new social and economic inequalities. This may be accompanied by either a clamour for further development, which may affect the look and perhaps the ‘quality’ of rural places, or by a rejection of development and change (by conservative incomers), which denies existing residents the homes they need and accentuates the process of gentrification. But where this pressure is weaker and places are being abandoned, a different set of rural problems will arise. Depopulation of the countryside is selective, depriving areas of its youngest and most ambitious people. Areas experience demographic aging and their needs change, but it becomes difficult for national or local governments to service these needs as the local tax base collapses (and other voluntary or community actions may become the only means of supporting vulnerable residents). Much depends on wider economic forces and the changing relationship between rural and urban areas, the physical connection between the two and their proximity. The problems of rural areas are often different in more affluent compared to poorer countries. And within the same country, the nature of problems varies depending on distance from urban cores. Reference is often made to the challenges of urban-fringe, accessible rural, or near-urban areas, compared to those that are more ‘deeply’ rural, remoter and perhaps isolated.

The different images of rural areas – ranging from the lowland pastoral idyll to the mountainous uplands of Europe; and from the prairies and vast farming belts to the wildernesses of North America – are often infused with a general awareness of the difficulties that economic restructuring has brought, triggered by industrialisation in the nineteenth century and running alongside urbanisation, and a flight to towns, in the first half of the twentieth century. Those same difficulties have been modified, in many instances, by counter-urbanisation – and a flight from towns – since the later twentieth century. In some places, this means a loss of core economic activity and an emptying of rural places, with little or no replacement migration. Elsewhere, it means diversification into non land-based economic activities and occasionally significant levels of migration. Rural areas may face abandonment; or stagnation and decay; or a replacement of former economic activity that brings profound social consequences. Likewise, they may find themselves locked into a new relationship with urban cores, or occupying a distant economic periphery where, without external assistance, they are consigned to gradual economic and social decline.

Public policy and the rural

Many countries around the world have identified particular sets of difficulties and tensions that assemble outside of towns and cities to form a distinct rural problem. Generally, these are characterised either by depopulation followed by abandonment and poverty, or by repopulation followed by social transformation and inequality. Attitudes to, and perceptions of, the countryside have an important role to play in producing these outcomes. In places where rurality is associated with a lack of socio-economic opportunity and peripherality, the countryside may struggle to retain population, attract alternative forms of development, or new people. Elsewhere, nostalgia for the countryside may drive investment and bring new people to rural areas. New people can mean new entrepreneurialism, business start-ups, and a welcome diversification of the economic base. In the post-war period, there has been a tendency in some parts of Europe, for example, to exploit a ‘rent gap’ in rural compared with urban property prices. Adventitious purchases have bought second homes in rural hinterlands or in more isolated areas. This has brought seasonal repopulation and a discourse around social equality and the right to the countryside; and it has often been accompanied by various forms of permanent migration and residence. But elsewhere, a different attitude towards a ‘backward’ countryside has resulted in disinterest in rural investment, and this can sometimes be explained by different national patterns of home ownership and property investment, which have not inflated prices to the point where they trigger urban flight.

New rural wealth and inequality is, in some instances, propagated by conservative planning systems that concentrate higher land values in the most attractive rural areas by constraining the supply of additional housing. In those instances, policy has focused on finding ways to vent ‘rural pressure’ and achieve greater equity in the distribution of resources. Hence, there is a focus on levering community gains through planning control and finding ways to diversify rural economies, often by permitting new forms of development. Responses to this predicament are frequently local and the problem itself is contested: wealth masks poverty and the need to intervene – by providing public or other forms of affordable housing – is disputed. But in instances of depopulation and perhaps the impoverishment of entire rural regions, the emphasis has been placed on structural development: dealing with rural peripherality and decline through high-level interventions that aim to transport prosperity from growth to laggard areas. The common starting point in both situations was economic restructuring from the nineteenth century onwards. But the outcomes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been framed by national economic circumstances and by different societal relationships with the countryside: as a place to ignore or as a place of status and potential investment.

But whatever the outcomes might be, governments have frequently shaped investments and interventions with a view to altering the development trajectory of rural regions and places. Their starting point for doing this, for intervening in rural problems, has been an attempt to move beyond mere perception and to try to define and delineate rural areas.

Definitions of rurality

‘Social constructions of the countryside’ have been popular amongst researchers, and these tend to draw on post-modern and post-structural theoretical traditions, highlighting the diversity of lived rural experiences and the limits of viewing rural areas purely in functional terms (Cloke et al., 2006: 21). It was noted above that aesthetic perceptions of the countryside (what we think it looks like, or should look like) are often fused with an acknowledgement of various rural problems; economic, social and environmental. Cloke and colleagues follow this line, arguing that the rural is defined through the ‘interconnections between socio-cultural constructs of rurality and nature […] and the actual lived experiences and practices of lives in these spaces’ (Cloke et al., 2006: 21). This can provide a localised and nuanced view of the countryside, capturing the many different facets and challenges of rural life. But althoug...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Lists of illustrations
• Notes on authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART 1 Rurality, rural governance and planning
• PART 2 Economy and land
• PART 3 People and communities
• PART 4 Environment and landscape
• PART 5 Future rural
• References
• Index