Rural Planning Futures

Principles, Policy and Practice in the UK and Ireland

Mark Scott, John Sturzaker, Nick Gallent, Gavin Parker, Amy Burnett, Ian Mell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040337585
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Rural Planning Futures charts the critical societal challenges that are reshaping rural places across the UK and Ireland. The book evaluates current planning processes and explores the prospects for an enhanced, cross-sectoral and holistic future practice that mediates rural change towards more resilient and sustainable outcomes. Rural places and planning have, for too long, been viewed as marginal to both the theory and practice of planning. However, rural places are central to addressing critical global challenges – from climate action, through nature recovery, energy transitions, and food security, to water quality – while also facing more localised conflicts around housing, the siting of infrastructure, and the challenge of sustaining local services. The policy response to these complex challenges has too often been fragmented, siloed, and fixated on the short-term. By illustrating how key 'rural capitals' are linked and integrated, this book argues for a reset of the rural planning narrative and for the urgent disruption of established ways of working. Using innovative case studies, the chapters detail how planning for rural places must be guided by the pursuit of social value rather than protecting private interests. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in planning, geography, rural studies, landscape studies, and regional studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction: Towards rural planning for the future
• 2. Rural Planning Policy and Governance
• 3. Planning for Societal Challenges and Rural Capital
• 4. The ‘Built Rural’ – Housing, Renewable Energy and Critical Service Infrastructures
• 5. The ‘Economic Rural’ – Supporting Recovery and Regeneration
• 6. The ‘Land-based Rural’ – Land, landscape and ecosystems
• 7. The ‘Social and Cultural Rural’ – People and rural place leadership
• 8. Planning – Engaging Relational Capitals and Supporting the ‘Good Countryside’
• 9. Conclusion – Planning for Rural Futures
• Index