The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning

Mark Scott, Nick Gallent, Menelaos Gkartzios, Mark Scott, Nick Gallent, Menelaos Gkartzios

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032567075
• eBook ISBN: 9781351591867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning provides a critical account and state of the art review of rural planning in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Looking across different international experiences – from Europe, North America and Australasia to the transition and emerging economies, including BRIC and former communist states – it aims to develop new conceptual propositions and theoretical insights, supported by detailed case studies and reviews of available data. The Companion gives coverage to emerging topics in the field and seeks to position rural planning in the broader context of global challenges: climate change, the loss of biodiversity, food and energy security, and low carbon futures. It also looks at old, established questions in new ways: at social and spatial justice, place shaping, economic development, and environmental and landscape management. Planning in the twenty-first century must grapple not only with the challenges presented by cities and urban concentration, but also grasp the opportunities – and understand the risks – arising from rural change and restructuring. Rural areas are diverse and dynamic. This Companion attempts to capture and analyse at least some of this diversity, fostering a dialogue on likely and possible rural futures between a global community of rural planning researchers.

Primarily intended for scholars and graduate students across a range of disciplines, such as planning, rural geography, rural sociology, agricultural studies, development studies, environmental studies and countryside management, this book will prove to be an invaluable and up-to-date resource.

1

New horizons in rural planning

Mark Scott, Nick Gallent and Menelaos Gkartzios

Introduction

While rural concerns were central to the emergence of planning in the last century, during the second half of the twentieth century planning theory and practice have been dominated by urban challenges, with an increasingly unimaginative rural planning regime driven largely by a dominant agricultural agenda. This productivist agenda continues to relegate potentially progressive rural planning debates behind farmland preservation, amenity protection, and a minimal approach to socio-economic issues (Lapping, 2006). However, the continued impacts of urbanisation, demographic changes, the decline of the traditional rural economic base, the emergence of multi-functional rural landscapes, and deeply contested new demands for rural space suggests an urgent need to reinvent rural planning for the twenty-first century.

While we increasingly live in an ‘urban age’ – characterised, according to Brenner and Schmid (2014), by an uneven yet planetary process of urbanisation – ‘the rural’ still matters, and through this Companion we call for planning theory and practice to engage proactively with rural regions and localities and not simply to cast these places as residual or as scenic backdrops to growing urbanisation. A quarter of the population across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries can be classified as living in predominantly rural regions, defined in terms of low population density and the absence of major urban centres (OECD, 2018; see also OECD, 2011 for methodology). A further 26% of the population across the OECD live in intermediate regions, characterised largely as near-urban rural areas or the rural–urban fringe – these regions are often undergoing rapid and contested social, economic and environmental changes in the face of urbanisation processes and changing demands for land resources and rural amenities. Moreover, the OECD (2018) highlight that 83% of land across OECD countries are within predominantly rural regions. Managing land-use change and mediating between competing interests in the use of land is central to the rural planning challenge, particularly given threats to natural resources and importance of balancing global challenges with local demands and needs.

The effective management of rural resources and land use is central to key global challenges that require critical advancement in order to reposition rural planning as a key framework to address, inter alia, climate change mitigation (e.g. transitions to post carbon landscapes, carbon sinks), climate change adaptation (e.g. ecosystem services for managing flood risks), biodiversity loss (e.g. site specific conservation to ecological networks), energy security (e.g. roll-out of renewable energy infrastructure), global food security, contested resource extraction (from minerals to ‘fracking’ debates), and the siting of key strategic infrastructure (e.g. interurban or international transportation networks). These global concerns overlap and interact with local and more traditional challenges surrounding housing supply, sustainable and inclusive communities, protecting valued landscapes and rural heritage, or addressing rural decline. In this context, the rural should also be understood as a social space (a living and working countryside) and not simply as a resource base.

This Companion sets out to provide a comprehensive statement and reference point for rural planning in an international context. The Companion aims to provide critical reviews of the current state-of-the-art of conceptual, theoretical and empirical knowledge and understanding of rural planning, addressing the multi-dimensional nature of the field. Moreover, the Companion aims to push the boundaries of rural planning in three ways. First, the Companion gives coverage to emerging topics in rural planning so as to reposition rural planning within the context of global challenges in the twenty-first century. Second, the Companion addresses topics that currently represent significant gaps in the rural planning literature – such as a queer perspective of rural planning, rural planning and environmental justice, artistic methodologies in rural planning research, and so-called green and land grabbing – and by addressing these topics, the Companion aims to set new agendas for rural planning research. Third, the Companion includes emerging geographical frontiers of rural planning. Whereas rural planning research is dominated UK and US literature, the Companion seeks to foster an international dialogue with contributors from throughout Europe, Canada, Australasia, and importantly from emerging and transition economies representing a unique feature of the Companion – primarily BRIC economies and former communist societies. Therefore, the contributing authors have been tasked with reviewing the international ‘state-of-the-art’ in relation to their topic and to incorporate regional/local case study material to illustrate these wider trends when appropriate. A key position for us in editing this book was to avoid marginalising specific contexts by addressing them collectively as ‘international case studies’, while presenting others as the norm. We recognise that rural planning knowledge and research carries its own asymmetries; the literature is very much shaped by mature and western economies, but we have aimed to include emerging and transition economy cases and commentary as much as possible. Through this approach therefore, the Companion includes empirical and case study material from the US, Canada, UK, Norway, Ireland, Greece, France, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, Spain, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Uganda.

Understanding rurality and rural change

What is meant by the word ‘rural’? How is rural space differentiated globally, and is there an observable, universal taxonomy of rural types? The rural studies literature has grappled with these questions at least since the 1960s. Within the Companion, Gallent and Gkartzios (Chapter 2) discuss in more detail the various conceptions of ‘rural’ and how these relate to planning debates. Each new turn in theoretical and methodological approaches raises different sets of questions for rural planning theory and practice.

Gallent and Gkartzios chart the constant development in both definitions and classifications of ‘the rural’ over recent decades. This includes attempts to define the ‘rural’ as functional ‘positivist’ spaces based on measurable and observable data (e.g. population density, settlement, land-cover, employment and labour market characteristics and so on; see, for example, Cloke, 1977; Cloke and Edwards, 1986). While this approach remains popular within policy debates, by the mid 1990s, Chapter 2 outlines how positivist accounts of rurality had increasingly been displaced by cultural approaches to understanding the rural, and by political economy approaches seeking to describe the shift towards the so-called post-productivist countryside. The ‘cultural turn’ within rural studies shifted the methodological focus to include feminist approaches, ethnographies and discourse analyses, which attempt to capture rurality as a phenomenon which is socially and culturally constructed, and therefore contested (Halfacree, 1993; Cloke, 1997). A rich vein of research emerged illustrating the significance of discourse, social representations and cultural symbolism in constructing the rural, stressing multiple and redefinable social spaces, rather than set, rural geographical spaces (see, for example, Jones, 1995; Halfacree, 1995; Pratt, 1996; Cloke, 1997; Phillips, 1998; van Dam et al., 2002). This provided a new understanding of rural conflicts as researchers increasingly highlighted that the very notion of rurality had become deeply contested, underpinned by latent social conflicts – termed by Woods (1998, 2003) as the ‘politics of the rural’.

While there has been much focus in rural studies in conceptualising the rural, there has also been much debate concerning (uneven) processes of rural change or restructuring and its impact on redefining the role of rural areas and in underpinning different development trajectories across rural space. In this context, analysis of the shifting role and function of agriculture has provided a key departure point for examining rural transformations. For example, an extensive body of literature emerged in the 1990s (Marsden et al., 1993; Lowe et al., 1993; Munton, 1995; Marsden, 1998; Murdoch et al., 2003) charting the demise of productivist agricultural models, opening opportunities for a substantial growth in demand for new uses for rural space (e.g. amenity, recreation, conservation, residential) and creating new conditions for actors to pursue their demands both in the market place and in the political system. In contrast to the cultural turn in rural studies, this work placed more emphasis on the politics of place and power struggles to examine rural change, with two key inter-related themes emerging from this research: (1) that the dominant concerns of productivist agriculture are declining in the face of competing consumption interests; and (2) new patterns of diversity and differentiation are emerging across rural space in relation to governance and regulative processes – the so-called ‘differentiated countryside’. The key argument underpinning this approach to understanding rural change is outlined by Lowe et al.:

It is our argument that fundamental changes in the productivist regime have, firstly ‘opened the door’ for various (non agricultural) economic interests to assert claims on rural land and, secondly, created a vacuum in rural policy making which competing policy ‘communities’ . . . have sought to fill. This has resulted in uneven processes of economic development and uneven processes of regulation – both between sectors and places.

(Lowe et al., 1993: 218)

Since the 1990s, key themes within the rural restructuring literature have included the shifting nature of agriculture (Wilson, 2008) and the related and contested emergence of new uses for rural space and competing societal demands for the consumption of ‘rurality’ (e.g. Woods, 2005, 2006). A significant body of literature has also examined the emergence of a new set of rural social geographies associated with diverse processes of rural in-migration. These include extensive studies of counterurbanisation (e.g. Halfacree, 2001; Mitchell, 2004), rural gentrification (e.g. Smith and Phillips, 2001; Phillips, 2004, 2010; Phillips and Smith, 2018), international migration (e.g. Halfacree, 2011), international second home-ownership (e.g. Wong and Musa, 2014), and retiring to the countryside (e.g. Stockdale, 2011). Increasing attention has also been given to the influence of external actors in shaping rural localities including capital, consumers and regulating bodies from processes of economic globalisation (e.g. Brunori and Rossi, 2007) and the increased significance of neoliberal ideas, policies and practices to the unfolding of social and spatial life in rural areas (e.g. Dibden et al., 2009; Shucksmith and Rønningen, 2011). In essence, these studies have charted a series of ‘radical breaks and ruptures within rural societies’ (Smith, 2007: 275) leading to a fundamental reconfiguration of rural housing and land markets, local economies, rural resource use, spatial mobilities, and rural politics (Marsden, 2009; Bell and Osti, 2010).

While this literature has provided rich accounts of the changing rural condition, other researchers have questioned the use of rural to explain changing spatial dynamics. Hoggart (1988), for example, questions the notion of rural restructuring as being blind to the causal processes that transcend any rural–urban divide. This led Hoggart (1990) to argue for abandoning rural as an analytical construct – which he suggests is too often deployed as a term of convenience but without justification as a causal category. Hoggart contends that causal forces in rural areas are not distinctive (e.g. from some urban areas), nor are they uniform within or across rural areas. Hoggart’s perspective, moreover, challenges those interested in rural planning to consider if there is something distinctive about planning in rural contexts – is rural planning fundamentally different to urban planning? Is ‘rural’ an explanatory factor in understanding planning outcomes?

In a similar vein to Hoggart, recent scholarship has also questioned the usefulness and universality of ‘rural’ as a ubiquitous concept. Brenner and Schmid (2014), for example, unpack the usefulness of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ as opposing analytical concepts, suggesting that there is limited analytical value in dividing human settlement into urban and rural containers in light of their structuration by wider political-economic processes. These themes are also addressed (but from a rural perspective) by Lichter and Brown (2011) who examine rural restructuring through exploring the rural–urban relationship and the influence of urbanism and globalisation on rural life. They argue that there is a greater interpenetration of rural and urban life and a blurring of rural–urban spatial and social boundaries – and that the pace of change is accelerating. They conclude that rural–urban relations are increasingly symmetrical rather than asymmetrical and, therefore, it is becoming more difficult to discuss rural and urban change without acknowledging the other. However, despite a dominant discourse of global urbanisation, Woods’s ongoing research into the global countryside (see Chapter 53) re-emphasises that rural areas retain a distinctiveness, both functionally and politically, and therefore it is vital that the rural agenda is not overlooked, or indeed merged with urban planning agendas (Gallent et al., 2015). More recently, Gkartzios and Remoundou (2018) challenged the role of monolingual academia in constructing the rural, with diverse and nuanced meanings of the rural often missed from international research when they are disseminated in the language of English.

Overall, within this Companion we take a pragmatic and inclusive approach to rurality, allowing each author and chapter to take forward their own approach or interpretation of ‘the rural’. This approach has a number of advantages. First, any attempt to define the rural and present an international and workable definition would merit an entire Companion on its own – thus, we recognise the ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Boxes
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 New Horizons in Rural Planning
• Part I Concepts and Foundations
• Part II the State and Rural Governance
• Part III Planning For the Rural Economy
• Part IV Social Change and Planning
• Part V Planning the Inclusive Countryside
• Part VI Rural Settlement, Planning and Design
• Part VII Landscape, Amenity and the Rural Environment
• Part VIII Energy and Resources
• Part IX Reflections and Futures
• Index