Rural Places and Planning

RURAL PLACES AND PLANNING Stories from the Global Countryside

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Menelaos Gkartzios, Nick Gallent and Mark Scott

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First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Policy Press, an imprint of Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-info@bristol.ac.uk Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4473-5637-0 paperback ISBN 978-1-4473-5638-7 ePub ISBN 978-1-4473-5639-4 ePdf The right of Menelaos Gkartzios, Nick Gallent and Mark Scott to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents List of figures, tables and boxes Acknowledgements Preface

iv v vi

1

Introduction

1

2

The built rural

25

3

The economic rural

47

4

The land-based rural

71

5

The social and cultural rural

97

6

Conclusions

123

References Index

140 169

iii

List of figures, tables and boxes Figures

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1.1 2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

The ‘rural idyll’, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’?

Landscape near Kirkby Stephen, Upper Eden Valley Community of Suodenniemi Walbundrie Hotel and Pub, New South Wales Røros and its surrounding mining and agricultural landscape The distinctive wooden structures in Røros, along with its prominent masonry church Røros in winter Blue Ridge downtown’s tourist economy – an example of bar/ restaurant business Workspace provision in Blue Ridge – serviced site with three tenants An industrially cutaway bog Example of a peat restoration project Bord na Móna’s Mountlucas Wind Farm, including new amenity, walking tracks and trails for local community use Topography of the Yangliu Watershed where the SLCP was implemented New tree planting within the Yangliu Watershed Restructuring the Aigas Forest from a commercial forest to a local amenity resource Volunteers working at Aigas Community Forest ‘For Lots of Lost Windows’ (2006) by Akiko Utsumi (permanent installation) ‘Tsumari in Bloom’ (2003) by Yayoi Kusama (permanent installation) ‘The Rice Fields’ (2000) by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov (permanent installation) Group of volunteers painting the first rainbow crosswalk in Mahone Bay, Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia at Pride 2020 Pride parade, Eskasoni First Nation, Nova Scotia (2019)

2 30 37 44 54 55 56 61 64 80 81 82 87 88 93 94 108 109 110 117 118

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 3.1 6.1

Developing place capitals Emerging functions of the rural The scope of rural planning Smart possibilities for rural places The new rural economy Planning for the good countryside

7 19 21 39 48 128

The Fannin County tourist product

62

Box 3.1

iv

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Acknowledgements We are indebted to the commissioning and production teams at Policy Press, whose support, guidance and encouragement were instrumental in turning our rough ideas into this more polished text. Emily Watt, Freya Trand, Angela Gage and Annie Rose deserve special mention. The book’s cover photo, ‘The Lure of the Land’, is by Joanne Coates and was taken in rural Northumberland in England.

Selecting the right photo for a cover is never easy, but Joanne’s work focuses on how we perceive, present and think about rural places – and therefore aligns with the goals of this book. Rural Places and Planning was written during a global pandemic. We dispensed with the usual face-to-face gatherings, working on the book during lockdowns in relative isolation. While there were of course periodic meetings on Zoom, this has been an odd experience, but also an opportunity for reflection on the multi-faceted nature of rural planning research and on the great diversity that exists in rural places, which continue to provide a source of inspiration and learning for planning scholarship.

Although much of the research for this book has been secondary-source and online, sometimes referencing past projects, we are grateful to the many people around the world who answered emails and supplied us with images for our rural planning case studies. As such, we wish to thank Johanna Seppa, SuodenniemiSeura; Dag Kittang, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim; Jan Hackett, Fannin County Chamber of Commerce; Christie Gribble, Fannin County Development Authority; Jun He, Yunnan University; John Graham, Aigas Community Forest; Marcus Collier, Trinity College Dublin; Fram Kitagawa and Masahiro Sekiguchi, Art Front Gallery; Tadahiro Asai, Echigo-Tsumari Satoyama Collaborative Organisation; Shelley Rafuse, Lunenburg Pride; Muin Ji’j (Bertram Bernard Jr.), Pride Eskasoni; and also Adrian Favell, Nathaniel Lewis and Hironori Yagi. The many colleagues who share both our interest in rural places and also their insights during the symposia, workshops and conferences we attend during more ‘normal’ times also deserve our thanks.

Finally, the personal credits: Menelaos would like to dedicate this book to his parents, Leonidas and Vera. Nick’s gratitude goes to Manuela, Marta and Elena – a source of constant support, inspiration and purpose. Mark would like to thank Karen, Ada and Lucas for their love and support, and their patience during various lockdowns, and he would like to dedicate this book to his late parents, Moore and Myrtle.

v

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Preface Rural Places and Planning explores the interface between the constituent elements of rural places and the idea – and practice – of planning, broadly defined. Those places are material (from land and landscapes to buildings and infrastructures), socially constructed (extending from culture and identity to social exchanges) and comprise critical practices (including economic ones, which interlock with material and social assets). Borrowing from earlier writings, these attributes are presented as capitals; and those capitals can be thought of as both place assets and as plains of interface with the processes and actions of planning. This presentation of rural places provides an interrogative frame and a way of thinking about ‘good places’ – in which economic processes are sustainably embedded in social life, local culture and material assets. Likewise, planning is characterised by its close relationship with people and place – as an idea that people want to engage with, and as a practice that draws on their capacities and articulates their visions for the future.

The idea and practice of planning, as well as what constitutes ‘rural’, varies greatly from one country to the next. This variation is often explained with reference to underlying regulatory systems, along with diverse international interpretations and descriptive definitions of rurality. Legal frameworks, settlement hierarchies across urban and rural spaces, land ownership, the form and purpose of plans, and planning cultures, are all different. But Rural Places and Planning is not primarily concerned with those underlying systems and taxonomies. Because its focus is on rural communities, its consideration of planning is largely about the engagement with, and experience of, planning with and within communities.

Similarly, we accept all multiple, relational and sometimes even contradictory understandings of rurality: rather than defining rural places, we are interested in exploring how these places are actually working, what capitals they are ‘made of ’ and how these capitals intersect with the planning vision of co-producing better places. Across four chapters, 12 rural planning cases are narrated within European, South East Asian, Australian and North American contexts. These cases relay the experiences of confronting a critical planning challenge that is, for example, about advancing material development (of housing, infrastructure or essential services), pursuing sustainable economic pathways, protecting land, landscapes or nature, or contributing to the socio-cultural life of places as well as promoting the inclusion of marginal groups and recognising their needs. These experiences are situated within a framework of place capitals, and an attempt is made to show how engagements with one capital affect others, and how different planning strategies and actions contribute to making the good rural place.

One of the major challenges in writing this book has been the compilation and the choice of our international ‘stories’. While a few of those cases draw on our research, most have been constructed from secondary material – planning and policy documents or the work of other researchers. We recognise that planning vi

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Preface

scholarship has its own knowledge politics – it is very much a Global North and Western project – although we have tried to include as much spatial heterogeneity as possible, drawing on available published research beyond our own. What was the motivation for writing an international book on rural planning? Our 2019 Routledge Companion to Rural Planning contained more than 50 chapters from researchers based in different countries around the world. They provided detailed accounts of critical issues, all framed by a broader consideration of the challenges facing rural places. But the essential nature of those places remained opaque, or rather an attempt to distil common parameters was relegated behind the local detail and the immense breadth of the cases. Rural Places and Planning, on the other hand, puts the accent on developing an understanding of rural places. Its six chapters all address the composition of those places and planning’s engagement with place-visioning and shaping. It seeks to present good planning as a sociospatial process that is anchored in local aspiration and discourse, and ultimately finds expression in the governance of plans and projects. A number of theoretical propositions help us construct this view of planning, starting with that of place capitals – borrowed from Bourdieu (1986) and subsequently developed by other scholars. Shucksmith’s idea of the ‘good countryside’ (2018) is also valuable, as is Woods’ notion of the ‘global countryside’ (2007) in which relational and globalised spaces are products of a mix of local and global processes, home to multiple identities and are best served by multi-level governance. Good planning is inseparable from place: an unavoidable social practice – or higher instinct of preparedness (to meet and confront critical challenges) – that is not dependent on any underlying bureaucracy or system. This is the overarching message that we hope to convey in this book.

Menelaos Gkartzios, Nick Gallent and Mark Scott July 2021

vii

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1

Introduction

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A proposition This is a book about the relationship between rural places and planning, about how planning can support the co-production of ‘better places’ (Healey, 2010) and how, in turn, rural places are able to build the capacities and the neoendogenous agency needed to achieve sustainable development goals (Ray, 1997; Gkartzios and Scott, 2014). Despite the rapid and fundamental transformations faced by rural areas over the last century, dominant planning orthodoxies have continued to treat rural places as residual and subordinate spaces that require little intervention or investment. This is, in large part, because they are viewed through the lens of agriculture-biased and productivist rationalities that elevate farming and preservation interests above everything else that co-exists in the countryside (Lapping, 2006; Lapping and Scott, 2019). This reductive approach is coupled with dominant discourses of rurality that either present rural places as exclusive, almost pre-industrial, havens for selective elites (popularised by the discourse of the ‘rural idyll’, Figure 1.1) or as places that are ‘left behind’ technologically, culturally and economically and thus unable to compete in a globalised economy (Murdoch et al, 2003). While none of these narratives captures the complex and nuanced reality of contemporary rural places, their persistence in popular, policy and academic discourses (for example Short, 2006; Cruickshank, 2009; Peeren and Souch, 2018) reveals a failure to appreciate the unique and highly contextspecific attributes of different spatial pathologies. This rural myopia also impacts planning policy and practice, which privileges urban and metropolitan contexts in research and policy.

Far from being parochial backwaters, the ‘global countryside’ from which we extract our titular ‘stories’ comprises relational spaces that are the products of both local and global processes. Indeed, the idea of the global countryside, rooted in the work of Woods (2007), is concerned with deep connectivity and the need for rural planning, however defined and taken forward, to link local action to global challenges. The purpose of this book is, in part, corrective: to shine a light on how rural places function, how they are networked with their wider regions, metropolitan and global contexts, and how planning can support inclusive, socially just and sustainable outcomes that match rural needs while addressing global challenges.

In order to achieve this purpose, the book aims, first, to provide a comprehensive view of what rural places are, their constituent components or capitals, and how they are continuously changing, not just as resource spaces but also as arenas of socio- economic and political processes and outcomes, characterised by 1

Rural Places and Planning

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Figure 1.1: The ‘rural idyll’, England’s ‘green and pleasant land’? (Northumberland, England)

Source: Authors

ever-growing local and extra-local networks, mobile populations, new emergent economies, exclusions and conflicts over development trajectories. Second, the book seeks to illustrate how planning, in its globally differentiated forms, might be able to intervene, not merely as a regulatory framework but as a continuously evolving system of enhanced spatial governance that co-creates context-specific 2

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Introduction

‘bottom-up’ opportunities, taking advantage of rural resources (both tangible and intangible) and combatting prolonged and emergent spatial inequalities.

This is achieved through the presentation of illustrative stories, or cases, that unpack the ways in which planning policy interacts with the complexity of rural places. Those cases (12 in total, three in each thematic chapter) are drawn from international contexts and aim to reveal both the diversity of rural places globally and the different ways that planning activity – rooted in different ideological, political and institutional traditions – operates across different cultural contexts.

The broader goal here is to show how social phenomena and spatial inequalities play out in different ways, generating myriad alternative relationships between planning and rurality.

Diversity of relationships and outcomes does not preclude opportunities for policy transfer and ‘lesson learning’ across international contexts (Hantrais, 2009).

While our cases reveal the specificities of much rural planning knowledge, it is possible to embrace ‘pluralistic universalism’ by accepting that knowledge is place-sensitive and bound by specific cultural norms, and that reapplication ‘may be disruptive or even inappropriate’ (Lowe, 2012, p 20). That universalism makes it possible to learn something from every context, if there is sufficient sensitivity to the unique realities in which planning pathologies form (Gkartzios and Shucksmith, 2015).

Finally, this book aspires to present rural planning as a discipline in its own right, rather than as an extension of urban planning and urban studies reapplied in contexts beyond the metropolis. While urban planning seems to be a welldeveloped discipline – with its own conference forums, academic journals, university departments and professional organisations – rural planning appears to be the poor relation, lacking similar structures and institutions. This, to some extent, evidences the parochial construction of rurality and rural studies, as something localised and fringe to more important urban concerns. The rural is also neglected, or masked, in planning theory. At first glance, it appears absent from Healey’s (2010) Making Better Places – while urban, regional, environmental spatial and town domains are all presented as critical foci for the ‘practice of planning’. Similarly, Rydin (2011, p 12) has defined planning as ‘a means by which society collectively decides what urban change [emphasis added] should be like and tries to achieve that vision by a mix of means’. This does not mean that these contributions have entirely ignored rural spaces: Healey’s first description of a case of planning conflict is about a village in southern England. Rydin also includes a chapter on the ‘green and pleasant land’, discussing the role of planning in rural locations – and not merely for protecting local amenities. The regular omission of the ‘rural’ from lists of core planning domains illustrates the predisposition of a whole discipline towards urban and broader metropolitan contexts.

In the remainder of this chapter, we outline our approach to exploring the relationship between planning and rural places. This is achieved in three main parts. The first of these proposes four constituent elements of rural places, 3

Rural Places and Planning

borrowing from Bourdieu’s sub-division of capitals. These inter-dependent capitals form the core dimensions of place. The second part then delves more deeply into the materiality, social construction and practices associated with rurality, enabling us to move from the broad idea of place to a more nuanced view of rural place.

The third and final part then introduces planning as a diverse idea and practice rather than a narrow set of regulatory tools. Planning is conceived as being bound into community life: an idea that precedes a diverse range of actions with the potential to make better places.

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Capitals and the countryside In order to gain a more complete understanding of the relationship between planning and rural places, it is necessary to unpack the constituent elements, material and non-material, that ‘make’ those places. Our approach is to deconstruct rural places into their elemental capitals, for reasons that are briefly explained in this introduction and then elaborated upon in the thematic chapters.

Extending beyond economic capital The work of Pierre Bourdieu is seminal to the extension of thinking on capital beyond that understanding provided by economic theory. For Bourdieu (1986), capital is rooted in collective and accumulated labour, which is either objectified in the form of goods (including land and property) or embodied in the form of skills. It can be deployed by individuals or social groups – including groups forming a socio-spatial community – to generate the ‘social energy’ needed to achieve different goals, personal or shared. Bourdieu conjected that capital exists in three ‘fundamental guises’ (p 16): as (foundational) economic capital that is transformable into social and cultural capital. Economic capital is wealth which can be inherited or generated and thus includes ownership of land and housing, and financial resources. Social capital refers to networks of mutual acquaintance and recognition, and inheres in social processes between individuals (or their families) and wider society, for example through membership of a group. Cultural capital is primarily transmitted within the family (that is, from parents to children, see Sullivan, 2001) and is distinguished further into three forms: an embodied state (for example, internalised forms such as language, mannerisms, knowledge), an objectified state (in the form of cultural goods such as books and paintings) and an institutionalised state (in the form of educational qualifications and work experiences). Furthermore, Bourdieu acknowledged the existence of symbolic (or reputational) capital, which encompasses prestige, charisma or status (for example, from the professional status of an individual to the holding of titles of nobility).

In Bourdieu’s framework, economic capital is ‘at the root of all other types of capital’ (p 193) but is relational and convertible. Because other capitals are rooted in economic power, they are not equally accessible or distributed (Wilson, 2010). Rather, their distribution is class-based and class-determined. This means, 4

Introduction

for example, that while the lower classes can acquire cultural capital through education, it is not equivalent to the cultural capital ‘embodied’ in middle- and upper-class groups, whose longer engagement with different types of (elite) education – across generations – and general family upbringing generates a subtly different capital that underpins a range of social advantages, which are largely relational within their closed social network.

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Capitals and place The idea of a broad range of capitals, rooted in economic capital but transformed into social and cultural attributes by virtue of place-based social exchange, has value in both understanding the constituent elements of place and how planning and place interact. First, the abundance or paucity of social or cultural capital might be used to explain spatial inequalities (Pinxten and Lievens, 2014) or capacities (Coleman, 1998). And second, the broadening out of thinking from economic capital underpins a deeper conception of place, focusing attention on socio-cultural assets that might otherwise be underestimated or overlooked (Lee and Shaw, 2016). But it is perhaps the extension of Bourdieu’s ideas, by other scholars, that has made this perspective particularly pertinent to the analysis of place. The idea of environmental capital (for example Karol and Gale, 2004; Wilson, 2007) acknowledges the relational value of nature to humans and the opportunity, in some instances, to embed sustainable economies in a valorisation of nearby natural assets. Likewise, subsets of cultural capital (including emotional capital – see Nowotny, 1981 or Reay, 2004) and social capital (including entrepreneurial capital – see De Clercq and Voronov, 2009) have been viewed as important determinants of caring for place (and people) and of finding and advancing new development opportunities.

Because of the wider benefits arising from stores of capital, they have been frequently presented as public goods or community resources (see Coleman, 1998) that may be present or absent/abundant or limited within different socio-spatial communities. An obvious example is the way in which middle-class groups in rural areas, with significant economic resources, possess the social and cultural capital needed to contest planning decisions and articulate alternative futures for their localities. This is a common observation in the UK (see Sturzaker, 2010; Gallent and Robinson, 2012) and is used to differentiate supposedly vibrant and capable communities from those that are deprived of that capital and the opportunities it can create. But more generally, the perception of a mix of ‘place capitals’ – constituting, co-existing and even competing in rural areas – is now a regular focus for discussion in rural studies, with particular attention given to social capital (as a determinant of social capacity and community action) but also the role played by cultural, emotional and environmental capital in setting particular development trajectories – rooted in place-based knowledge, in care for place and in the valorisation of land and landscape assets (Lee et al, 2005; Sutherland and Burton, 2011; Lowe et al, 2019).

5

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Rural Places and Planning

The notion that places possess a particular configuration of capitals, that in a sense makes those places, aligns with community development approaches that draw attention to assets that communities are able to mobilise, convert and ‘develop’ (see, for example, Cooperrider and Srivastv, 1987; Sen, 1992; Nussbaum, 2000). In the rural context, Castle (1998) develops the notion of a four-fold rural capital, consisting of ‘natural, man-created, human and social’ (p 622), to understand different forces in the rural development process (for example economic development, community development, environmental resource management). That compartmentalisation can be seen in Flora and colleagues’ (2018) Community Capital Framework, presented as an approach to baselining community development potential (applicable in a diversity of contexts: see Emery and Flora, 2006) across seven capitals: cultural, natural, human, social, financial, political and built (see Table 1.1). Beyond baselining, the authors identify two trajectories for place development: decapitalisation, where one capital is prioritised above others with detrimental outcomes, and legacy, where capitals remain intact and are transferred to subsequent generations, evidencing sustainable development. In a similar vein, Courtney and Moseley (2008) use place capitals (or ‘inherited resources’) as a baseline against which to assess local economic performance in rural England. Their choice of capitals – economic, human, social, cultural and environmental (see Table 1.1) – was intended to capture the full range of endogenous and exogenous, tangible and intangible forces underpinning local development. Similar capital-based analyses appear frequently in the literature (for example Svendsen and Sorensen, 2007; Bosworth and Turner, 2018).

Capitals and the good countryside Traditional measures of rural ‘performance’ often focus on conventional economic indicators such as employment growth, income levels, business development and productivity. However, both theory and practice have increasingly recognised that these measures have only a partial relationship with community wellbeing and fail to take account of the importance of other factors in shaping quality of life outcomes or the contribution of rural assets (for example land-based ecosystem services) to quality of life beyond a specific locale. Moreover, a focus on economic measurement crucially neglects the potential of economic growth to widen social inequalities or to erode natural capital. As an alternative to conventional indicators, over the last decade or more, economists and psychologists have increasingly focused on identifying the social and environmental determinants of quality of life and life satisfaction, usually through survey-based analyses of affective wellbeing. These types of measurements are being increasingly positioned alongside economic indicators to capture the wider outcomes of policy interventions. Along similar lines, New Zealand’s Treasury Department has adopted a Living Standards Framework based on measurements of financial/ physical capital, natural capital, social capital and human capital as indicators of 6

Emery and Flora Financial resources available to invest in community capacitybuilding, to underwrite the development of businesses, to support civic and social entrepreneurship and to accumulate wealth for future community development Connections among people and organisations to make things happen.

A specific configuration of social capital – entrepreneurial social capital is related to community economic development. It includes inclusive internal and external networks, local mobilisation of resources and willingness to consider alternative ways of reaching goals.

Access to power, organisations, connection to resources

Financial

Social

Political

Convertible into money and may be institutionalised in the form of property rights.

Different types of capital can be derived from economic capital.

Resources that are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalised relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition that provides each of its members with the backing of the collectively owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word

Bourdieu

Economic

Social

Table 1.1: Developing place capitals

Social

Economic

Networks and partnerships linking the public, private and voluntary sectors, the quality of local institutions and governance, trust and the shared norms that facilitate cooperation

Transport and communications infrastructure, workspace, local economic linkages, past private investment by firms and households, range of businesses in existence

Courtney and Moseley

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Social and cultural rural

Economic rural

7

(continued)

Social networks (vertical and horizontal); community capacity and active citizenship (e.g. ability to mobilise social capital); inclusive places; creativity and cultural practices

Physical productive infrastructures (e.g. land assets); entrepreneurial infrastructure (e.g. business links, value chains); community wealth-building capacity

Gkartzios, Gallent and Scott

Introduction

Cultural

Bourdieu

Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, that is, in the form of longlasting dispositions of the mind and body; in the objectified state, in the form of cultural goods (pictures, books, dictionaries, instruments, machines, etc.), which are the trace or realisation of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics and so forth; and in the institutionalised state (educational qualifications).

Human

Cultural

Skills and abilities of people to develop and enhance their resources and to access outside resources and bodies of knowledge in order to increase their understanding, identify promising practices and to access data for community building

How people ‘know the world’, language, traditions, creativity, innovation, influence

and power brokers. The ability of people to find their own voice and to engage in actions that contribute to community wellbeing.

Emery and Flora

Table 1.1: Developing place capitals (continued)

Human

Cultural

8

Education, skills, health, attitudes, confidence, entrepreneurship and capacity for risk-taking of the local population

Political consensus, civic engagement, local history, customs and heritage, ‘place identity’ and people’s sense of place, valorisation of culture and culture as a collective resource

Courtney and Moseley

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Gkartzios, Gallent and Scott

Rural Places and Planning

Infrastructure

Weather, geographic isolation, natural resources, amenities and natural beauty

Built

Natural

Emery and Flora

Environmental

Built rural

Land as a socially productive asset; landscape (e.g. tangible and intangible heritage); nature-based infrastructures (e.g. natural processes, ecosystem services)

Economic infrastructures (e.g. workspace); naturebased infrastructures critical to settlement systems; social-cultural infrastructures (e.g. housing, community facilities)

Gkartzios, Gallent and Scott

Land-based Natural and humanrural made assets that are valorised by local residents, investors and visitors; location, embracing peripherality, perceptions of peripherality and proximity to other places

Courtney and Moseley

Sources: Bourdieu (1986); Emery and Flore (2006, pp 20–1); Courtney and Moseley (2008)

Bourdieu

Table 1.1: Developing place capitals (continued)

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Introduction

9

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Rural Places and Planning

intergenerational wellbeing and as alternative and complementary measures to GDP (New Zealand Government, 2018).

The inadequacies of ‘economic growth’ goals (Max-Neef, 2010; Bache and Reardon, 2013; Bache and Scott, 2017) have prompted interest in broader placebased measures of development success, with wellbeing being contingent on a positive relationship between people and places and on care for environmental or natural capitals (Carlisle et al, 2009; Drescher, 2014). Notions of rural wellbeing frequently challenge the hegemony of neoliberal narratives of rural development, arguing that narrow economic goals should give ground to broader wellbeing ambitions (see Scott et al, 2018a). For example, the OECD’s most recent rural policy position, Rural Well-being – Geography of Opportunities (OECD, 2020a), identifies rural wellbeing as an overarching rural policy goal, to be achieved through enhancing rural economic productivity (to improve material living conditions), focusing on social wellbeing outcomes, and recognising the relationship between a high-quality environment and quality of life. This broadening vista has the potential to overcome some outdated ways of thinking about rural policy conflicts including, for example, the discredited economic argument that presents environmental protection as an obstacle to rural economic development (see Kitchen and Marsden, 2009). Instead, planning for rural places should be built on a clear understanding of the interdependencies between economic, social, cultural and environmental processes within rural localities. This suggests the need to consider the economic and social health of rural communities as important elements of sustainability alongside environmental aspects (Owen, 1996; Saxby et al, 2018) and for spatial plans to create mutually reinforcing relationships between environment and economy to bridge this limiting divide (Kitchen and Marsden, 2006). In order to explore these relationships, we adopt a capitals framework for thinking about, and reflecting upon, the elements that come together to make rural places. That framework also allows us to think about the ways in which planning, as a form of anticipatory consciousness, addresses the linkages between place-based capitals (Shucksmith, 2018).

Rather than provide a checklist of indicators, through our case studies we explore how rural communities themselves mobilise place-based capitals to shape future development trajectories. Here, we seek to answer Shucksmith’s (2018, p 171) provocative call for an understanding of the good countryside: ‘what might constitute visions for rural futures, or our collective imaginaries of rural places into the 21st century, of a Good Countryside to work towards … and how might we approach such a task?’ In addressing this, Shucksmith (2018) recognises that what constitutes the good countryside should be a matter for public deliberation and debate (and not expert prescription), with rural communities themselves best placed to identify priorities or to ‘work through’ their own visions of the good countryside. We identify planning as a key enabling factor in converting, mobilising, reappraising and balancing place-based capitals into sustainable and inclusive development trajectories to create place-based prosperity and intergenerational rural wellbeing.

10

Introduction

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The capitals framing Taking our cue from these debates, and motivated by a desire to connect planning to the constituent parts of rural places (with a view to making places, and indeed planning, better), we propose a simplified framework for exploring constituent capitals (see also Table 1.1). These are (1) the built rural, (2) the economic rural, (3) the land-based rural and (4) the social and cultural rural. These elements are in no way discrete or independent from one another and there are, of course, other ways to conceive rural places (see also Bosworth and Turner, 2018). Yet the idea of constituent parts, capitals, which interrelate to form a complete system, provides both the opportunity to compartmentalise our discussions and to consider how different actions or interventions affect the workings of a complete system or place. Capitals exist in different forms in different places, but in every place they interact, undergo modification and provide the building blocks for a spatially selective construction of rurality. Across the next four chapters, each considering one of our composite and simplified capitals, we look at the interactions between capitals and with planning actions in an attempt to reveal critical interdependencies. For the purpose of our book, understandings of rural places are globally and linguistically differentiated and not necessarily fixed to specific definitions (Gkartzios et al, 2020). As such, we are not concerned with defining rural places in a standardised way; we are rather motivated in exploring the relationship between rural constituent elements and spatial planning. Our case studies, therefore, interrogate how these capitals are perhaps reordered or eroded through a range of interventions or actions. The compartmentalisation into capitals means that the thematic chapters give coverage to the issues listed here: • The built rural, comprising places (big and small), infrastructures (including information and communications technology [ICT]) and housing – the material rural facilitating human habitation. This extends to housing, affordable housing, holiday homes and rural service provision; • The economic rural, looking across traditional activities, transformations and livelihoods in the countryside, economic transitions from a land-based economy to the new rural economy and the capacity for community wealth building to enhance rural prosperity and how wealth can be directed and reinvested back into local assets; • The land-based rural, examining the potential of land to be used as a socially productive asset related to land ownership, land-based ecosystem services as essential nature-based infrastructure critical to addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, and landscape as a collective visual asset in rural places and as an aspect of common heritage; • The social and cultural rural, extending from local and extra-local networks and the mobilisation of place-based cultural resources that can produce change in the social life of rural places, to questions of inclusivity and social justice as a rural planning objective.

11

Rural Places and Planning

These four capitals are tracked in Chapters 2 to 5, with case studies used to illustrate planning’s engagement with these capitals specifically and with place more generally.

Rural places

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A critical focus on place Place has been a fundamental concept within human geography, although its application (as a broad idea) and scholarly examination is now interdisciplinary.

According to Cresswell (2019, p 119) ‘in any given place, we encounter a combination of materiality, meaning and practice’, which are interwoven; place, therefore, is an assemblage of these domains. The materiality of place is most apparent and obvious: places are parks, squares, forests, neighbourhoods – they have houses, shops, cafes and bars; places are suburban, by the sea or occupy the interstitial spaces between skyscrapers; places are obviously rural too. Places exist on footpaths, on cement, on bare soil, on elevated rooftops, on private gardens. However, places are not just physically ‘there’ with fixed qualities waiting to be described and passively experienced (Healey, 2010); rather, spaces become places as a result of interactions with them, through our feelings, our thoughts, our lived experiences and through a process of infusing them with meaning (Tuan, 2001; Massey, 2005). Our interaction with places thus results, for example, in ever-changing emotional and political topographies, heritage and memory landscapes, places with complex histories and stories that can mean different, even conflicting, things to different people (Massey, 1994).

Places are also, finally, practised. People ‘do things in place’ (Cresswell, 2019, p 119), whether individually or collectively, in cities, villages, in the natural environment. We go for walks, we work, study and think in places. We meet people, fall in love and break up in places. We congregate for celebrations and protests; we take part in elections, in university events and we go on holidays in places. We self-isolate and lock-down in places. These practices are equally important, having the power to legitimise or limit what is acceptable in particular places.

From sense of place to place-making ‘Sense of place’ – or the appreciation of ‘character’ (Massey, 1991) – is complementary to the idea of place, referencing the ‘emotive bonds and attachments, both positive and negative, that people develop or experience in particular locations and environments’ (Foote and Azaryahu, 2009). That sense of place is an affective characterisation of the ways in which place materiality, the social construction of place, and also personal or collective lived experiences of place are ‘all coming together’ (Healey, 2010) to structure our attitudes, beliefs and feelings towards place(s) and also our understanding of acceptable behaviours and modes of living within those places (Jorgensen and Stedman, 2011).

12

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Introduction

Of equal importance are the concepts of ‘placeless-ness’ (Relph, 1976) and ‘non-place’ (Auge, 1995), where any sense of place has been lost and replaced by the inauthentic, the soulless and the transient ‘spaces’ associated with hyper mobility and attendant processes and outcomes of globalisation. But this loss is a disputed reality and that dispute, over the effects of globalisation, has focused greater attention on the processes that make or unmake place. Globalisation, or the abstraction and domination of spaces/places by capital, does not automatically bring homogeneity: rather, it causes multiple, overlapping and often ephemeral experiences of place, each with its own value. Massey (1991) contends that societies have a responsibility to cultivate a progressive ‘global sense of place’ that embraces globalisation, as an agent of change, and the new social relations it generates. This more extrovert and relational view of places, and place-making, acknowledges the new significance of place-networks and of increased connectivity – rather than being threatened by the openness and fluidity that comes with that connectivity (Massey, 1991). This global sense of place is very much at the fore in Woods’ (2007) conception of the ‘global countryside’ with its multi-levelled connections and its characterisation as something dynamic and relational.

Indeed, place-making – a term that is sometimes used to denote a mode of planning that is more broadly owned and focused – seeks to enhance that (global) sense of place through the engagement of multiple agents and by embracing alternative and conflicted meanings of place and a plurality of lived experiences.

Sense of place is a culmination of processes, actions and meanings that can be attributed to place-making or shaping (Foote and Azaryahu, 2009), with these two concepts bound in a process–product (albeit a never finished product) dialectic which is at once social and political (Healey, 2010). Place-making is a social responsibility rather than something invested in professionals (including public sector planners). It can be presented in different terms but generally embraces an enhanced form of spatial governance that brings places and people into a process of imagining, articulating and materialising better places (Friedmann, 2010).

Rurality, rural areas and rural places Numerous scholarly contributions on the nature of place have also focused on ‘the rural’, moving discussion far beyond early descriptive and positivist definitions of rurality (Halfacree, 1993). Those early definitions sought to distinguish rural from non-rural ‘administrative units’ according to population or density thresholds, or the profile of economic activity. They pinpointed areas of population sparsity and ‘weaker’ economic profiles: non-urban places with negative, laggard or peripheral characteristics. In such definitions, rural was very much a pejorative term, inferring disconnection or subordination (Lowe, 2012; Gkartzios et al, 2020). Early descriptive definitions eventually gave ground to more sophisticated positivist rural typologies based on available socio-economic data. In Britain, these included Cloke’s (1977) and Cloke and Edwards’ (1987) indexes of rurality based on UK Census data. Later, and internationally, these have included indexes and 13

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Rural Places and Planning

typologies such as those by van Eupen et al (2012) and Hedlund (2016). Policy makers have often funded the development of quantitative measures of rurality, which can now be found in many countries (see a review by Nelson et al, 2021).

However, the typologies that they underpin have been criticised for the way they generalise the idea of rural spaces/places and reproduce outdated dichotomies.

The lived experience of ‘the rural’ is not captured in any aggregation of key data and such indexes mask the reality of different countries and places having their own culturally contingent ideas of the countryside (Woods, 2005).

The circulation of positivist views of the rural, and their failure to draw out the unique socio-economic phenomena produced by rurality, led Hoggart (1990) to conclude that it was ‘time to do away with the rural’. While researchers did not turn away from seeking those unique phenomena, they started to look in new places, developing less positivist understanding of rurality and viewing such spaces as relational and mixing different ways of life. Pahl (1966) had already developed an urban–rural continuum that sought to reveal processes rather than types. This approach differed from later planning-led conceptions of rurality, which conceived of a clear unambiguous divide (Murdoch and Lowe, 2003). But elsewhere, the blending of rural and urban processes – to produce a rural–urban continuum and a mixing of rural and urban values, identities and networks – had long been an important way of thinking about the ‘production’ of rural places (such as in Greece; see Damianakos, 1997).

For some researchers, ‘rural’ is important not because it explains spatial processes but because it is used in everyday parlance and is a source of identity (Halfacree, 1993). It is precious to people and helps them make sense of their own biographies. For that reason, Halfacree’s work has focused on the symbols, signs and imageries that are behind representations of rurality. Subjective representations of rural places are grounded in social constructionism and particularly in the work of Michel Foucault, which invites far greater diversity in thinking on the rural (for example da Silva et al, 2016) and, more critically, reflections on how power dynamics produce dominant representations and prioritise the interests of powerful actors (for example Rye, 2006; Sturzaker and Shucksmith, 2011).

There is a long sociological tradition of ascribing key values to the countryside and to rural communities, which began with the work of Ferdinand Tönnies and Louis Wirth. However, the ‘new’ social constructionism turned away from fixed representations and embraced a new plurality of values, identities and even languages (Gkartzios and Remoundou, 2018; Gkartzios et al, 2020). This was in contrast, for example, to the work of Louis Wirth (1938) who, like Tönnies before him, presented urban life as dynamic and impersonal, and its rural counterpart as stable and personal, characterised by closed networks and everyday familiarity.

This myth – the rural of the popular imagination – was stripped away and replaced with a much more malleable, locally contingent and differentiated countryside.

Rural areas were suddenly re-presented as places of significant transformation, underpinned by urban-to-rural mobilities and by middle-class nostalgia for countryside settings and lifestyles (Halfacree, 1995). Across many parts of the 14

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Introduction

world, counterurbanisation has become a critical process and research focus in rural studies over the last five decades. Indeed, since the term was first coined to explain the growth of non-metropolitan population share in the US in the 1970s (Berry, 1976), it has become a universal shorthand for the restructuring arising from middle-class colonisation of rural areas (Champion, 1989; Boyle et al, 1998; Mitchell, 2004; Stockdale, 2006). As a framing, it has been applied equally in the Global North (for example Grimsrud, 2011) and Global South (for example Potts, 2005), although its traction has arguably been greatest in Britain where numerous sub-processes – from population ageing, through housing market change, to new modes of tourism – are presented as part of a broader counterurbanisation trend (see Champion and Brown, 2012). Its most visible outcomes have been amenity and lifestyle-led migration, housing market distortions and the social reconfiguration – or gentrification – of many rural areas (Benson and O’Reilly, 2009).

Counterurbanisation is, in turn, underpinned by new mobilities: these mobilities are important for places because they introduce contested meanings, new politics and new place actors/capacities (Cresswell, 2006). How rural places ‘work’ has been transformed by mobilities (Milbourne and Kitchen, 2014): a prime example of this is the way in which ‘counter-urban’ (or ex-urban) groups have been found to shape local planning strategies in such a way as to protect the values and amenities that are important to them (see Sturzaker, 2010). Statutory local plans have become instruments of so-called NIMBYism where, as in Britain, ex-urban groups are able to exert significant pressure over the political and discretionary decision making behind planning outcomes (Spencer, 1997).

In those situations, counterurbanisation and NIMBYism become synonymous and a principal cause of declining housing access and social exclusion (see, for example, Satsangi et al, 2010). But elsewhere, counterurbanisation can be a positive agent of change, providing a means of repopulating depleting and marginal rural areas (for example, in Japan – Odagiri, 2019). Critiques of the assumed universality of counterurbanisation/mobility outcomes (rooted in an Anglo-centric perspective) have given rise to broader foci on rural-to-rural movements, open-ended migration and crisis-led mobilities (Halfacree, 2008; Stockdale, 2016; Remoundou et al, 2016; Gkartzios et al, 2017).

Getting back to the nature of place, this journey from positivist to dynamic and transformational conceptions of the rural has brought us to a point where rural places are ever-changing and shaped by the power and agency of multiple groups (Frouws, 1998; Richardson, 2000; Donovan and Gkartzios, 2014). The recent deconstruction of the rural has followed geography’s own cultural turn.

This journey was summarised by Cloke (2006) who charted the way in which positivist tendencies, including his own, had given way, for the most part (except in agricultural economics), to a diversity of thinking on the rural that seemed to have jettisoned (or significantly relegated) any notion of distinct ‘function’: he called this ‘post rurality’.

This functional detachment has been met in recent years by calls to reconnect with the material reality of rural places (Lu and Qian, 2020). The increasing 15

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Rural Places and Planning

divergence between cultural and material perspectives had also driven a wedge between academia and policy making, with the latter looking for failings (for example, low productivity or declining accessibility – as direct measures of rurality) that policy might address (Jones, 1995). But at the same time, academia saw the opportunity of bringing new issues to policy debate, recognising that this needed to be done in a clear way, with supporting data. In the 1990s, the need for a broader perspective on rural lives – beyond agricultural economics – prompted Philo (1992) to flag important equality concerns that had taken root in rural areas, and thereafter for Cloke and Little (1997) and Little (1999) to draw attention to different lived realities of rurality, raising important public and social policy questions that would later be turned into new planning agendas (Doyle, 2018; Doan and Hubbard, 2019; Shortall, 2019). And so, in a sense, Cloke’s post-rurality was more of a moment than a sustained trajectory. Once identified as a new direction, or distraction, it triggered a rapid response. Building on Lefebvre’s The Production of Space (1991), Halfacree (2006) argued that rurality properly comprises localities (of production and consumption), representations (lay and professional) and everyday lives (or the experience of rurality that Philo, Little, Cloke and others had been drawing attention to, and couching in policy terms, during the preceding decade).

As Halfacree (2006) argues, discourse about rurality is, of course, not only produced by scholars (Jones, 1995; Woods, 2011). For example, a popular rural discourse is evidenced in recent years in the way that the countryside is mobilised in cultural production, and specifically within the global circuits of the ‘art world’ (Gkartzios et al, 2019). In Britain, for example, while the 2012 London Olympics’ artistic performances at the opening ceremony celebrated the British countryside and placed ‘the village’ at the heart of a global spectacle, London’s public art gallery, the Whitechapel, has since hosted a series of events on ‘The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection’, culminating in a Rural Assembly conference (Whitechapel, 2019). And, even more recently, architect Rem Koolhaas has curated a large-scale exhibition in New York’s Guggenheim on ‘Countryside, The Future’, which explored ‘radical changes in the rural, remote, and wild territories collectively identified here as “countryside”, or the 98 % of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities …’ (Guggenheim, 2020). These point to a notion of rurality which is increasingly multifunctional and co-produced in various political and social locales, both material and symbolic, within and beyond rural areas (Hamilton, 2015).

Across these different plains, and because of political and material dynamics, rural areas – and rural places – form what is frequently called a ‘differentiated countryside’ (Murdoch et al, 2003). Digging deeper than measurable characteristics (percentage of land use in x, or percentage of inhabitants engaged in y), the proposition of a countryside differentiated by power dynamics across multiple agents (political, economic and social) has become an important lens for examining and explaining the production of rural place. It contends that difference is explained by reliance on state support, the dynamic between economic development and environmental 16

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Introduction

conservation interests, or the dominance of traditional landowners versus the intrusion of state or new institutional investment. Complex power hierarchies find expression in localities, representations and everyday lives – and in development trajectories. They produce a ‘preserved countryside’ in which conservation interests dominate; a ‘contested countryside’ in which opposing rationalities compete; a ‘paternalistic countryside’ in which traditional landowners hold sway; and a ‘clientelist countryside’ in which the state and institutional landowners frame opportunities for rural development. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this lens has been accused of perpetuating Anglo-centric bias. While it has been deployed in international settings (for example Herslund, 2012; Brunori and Rossi, 2007), it is calibrated to the unique socio-economic and political realities of England (OECD, 2011; Shortall and Alston, 2016). Its constituent building blocks are formed from those realities, limiting its transferability to different places.

In contrast, our capitals framing – detailed in the previous section – is far more malleable and rooted in universal realities of material and non-material place assets: its built, economic, land (including landscape and nature) and social-cultural attributes are conceived as plains of interface with the actions and processes of planning, which aim to ‘make better places’. Place is at once a composite of these and a system in which planning is, or should be, an integral part.

Rural planning: integrated or intrusive?

Planning: idea and practice Planning, in the widest sense, is a process of place governance that is underpinned by social relationships (Gallent and Gkartzios, 2019). Like Healey (2010), we view planning as both an idea and a diverse practice that contributes to the development of places – rather than as an instrument of state bureaucracy, administration and control. Planning ‘systems’ are not the focus of this book; instead, we are concerned with the way planning (before it is even badged as such) presupposes the imagination and curiosity to rethink the world, possesses the perception and intuition to understand change, and offers the vision and coordination to co-create ‘better places’. This idea of planning is political but free from administrative constraints. But as a practice, planning is bound within governance structures, and also constrained by political antagonism and policy frameworks, which confer or limit its capacity to survey, analyse and act, but also (and more critically in our view) to bring about change in partnership with communities. As an idea, planning is a higher instinct of human preparedness.

It is both place-bound and place-uneven. As a practice, this higher instinct is fixed within different political economies and their various restrictions and opportunities, becoming an instrument of government or governance that is wielded according to socio-political and ideological predilection. Over time, it becomes a toolbox of instruments – or a system – used to prioritise different interests and target alternative spatial outcomes. Furthermore, as episteme, planning is interdisciplinary (or even trans-disciplinary in its ambition to co-produce places 17

Rural Places and Planning

with communities), embodying an array of traditions and knowledge sets, but often locating in either architecture, engineering, economics or (more recently) in the environmental and social sciences. While there is a degree of universality in the idea of planning, there is great diversity in both episteme and practice, with local systems anchored in different disciplinary traditions and guided by different government objectives and governance processes – see, for example, Gallent et al (2003), Gkartzios and Shucksmith (2015), Lapping and Scott (2019) and Frank et al (2020) for comparative explorations of different rural planning contexts.

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From regulation to spatial visions The practice of planning has changed in recent decades, with a marked shift away from its former regulatory focus towards an emphasis on spatial vision and the realisation of visions through mixed means (Healey, 1997; Tewdwr-Jones, 2001; Gallent and Gkartzios, 2019). In much of Europe, for example, there has been a turn away from the hegemony of expertise, top-down solutions and planning through regulation. The term ‘spatial planning’ gained much currency in the 1990s, embodying the idea of a more open and devolved form of spatial governance: one that challenged the normative construction of planning expertise and sought wider private and civil society inputs into the generation of planning knowledge and formulation of ‘planning solutions’, now more broadly defined.

In the UK, Tewdwr-Jones et al (2010) traced the infusion of this idea into the English system. Despite the change of government in that year, there appeared to be some continuity (or even acceleration) in spatial planning thinking, with communities handed a bigger role in policy and plan making. There are now signs that England may row back from this more social and community-based planning, returning to a more regulatory mindset – of the type that is common in North America and parts of East and South East Asia (notably China and Japan) – having decided to prioritise a narrower set of business interests by jettisoning much of the democracy of local planning (see recent proposals for planning reform: MHCLG, 2020).

But in the majority of liberal democracies, the shift from land-use planning to (strategic) spatial planning (Albrechts, 2004; Albrechts et al, 2003) has been a general trend, evidencing, inter alia, a transformation in the power hierarchies of planning knowledge and the democratic expectations of local populations.

Changes in planning practice mirror an underlying transformation in governance. Land use planning is confined to the policing of land-use change according to fixed rule books. Sometimes, this sort of land policy and planning is needed (to prevent adverse changes that might impact on landscape, important habitats or amenities), but it is patently different from the socio-spatial process required to formulate and deliver visions of positive change that break existing path-dependencies. Spatial planning implies enhanced governance, working in partnership with multiple stakeholders and diverse communities across different scales; it is concerned with a mix of actions and investments of which land-use 18

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Introduction

control is just one (Gallent and Gkartzios, 2019). Building on the earlier work of Healey (1997) and Kunzmann (2000), Albrechts (2004, p 747) observes that while spatial planning generally remains public sector-led, it is characterised by a ‘socio-spatial process through which a vision, actions, and means for implementation are produced that shape and frame what a place is, and may become’. And rather than being a solution in itself, it is an open invitation to think of planning as a ‘socio-spatial’ endeavour that belongs to society at large as opposed to a narrow planning ‘profession’.

That invitation, and the idea that socio-spatial processes (planning) are particular to place, is critically important and provides the cue for much of the discussion contained in this book. Those processes surely need to adapt to discursive and material taxonomies; and they need to acknowledge the peculiarities of rural places, despite the uniformity of tools, regulations and systems that exist at a ‘state’ level. Rural planning requires its own set of ideas and practices, which break from the assumption that all rural places are the same and face the same challenges. Lapping (2006, p 118) contends that ‘rural planning and policy has demonstrated an amazing consistency and lack of imagination in terms of their focus and orientation. In many national and international contexts, an emphasis on agriculture as the rural persists’. The idea of planning has to be underpinned by the idea of rurality and rural places, and by an understanding of the functions they play and the challenges they face. The summary in Table 1.2 aims to begin the process of profiling these functions, showing how they often co-exist and potentially conflict (see also Gallent and Scott, 2017).

Table 1.2: Emerging functions of the rural The rural as …

A playground …

… as a place of consumption for new second home owners, tourists, food consumers

A dumping ground …

… for controversial unwanted land uses (e.g. waste incinerators, prisons)

A post-carbon landscape …

… a site for the (often contested) deployment of renewable energy – wind farms, solar farms, biomass

A resource sink …

… a site for extracting resources, often with short-term ‘boomtown’ effects and limited long-term reinvestment in rural futures

A cultural heritage repository …

… tied into perceptions of rural ‘authenticity’ and nostalgia, cultural landscapes and the commodification of place

A food basket …

… as agriculture remains as a dominant land use and function of rural places

A provider of ecosystem services …

… whereby ecosystems provide functions and services essential to human wellbeing, from recreation to flood alleviation or carbon storage

A social space …

… at the scale of everyday life, where people live and interact, often characterised by strong place attachment

Source: Gallent and Scott (2017)

19

Rural Places and Planning

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The practice of rural planning The practice of rural planning, wherever it happens, is already broad in scope.

It is undertaken in various ways by numerous agents; it comprises a range of initiatives, interventions and local actions; and it extends beyond land policy.

Much of what might be considered ‘planning’ actually comprises everyday sociospatial actions – projects, for example, that communities have undertaken for many years (that is, to complement the resources of their own towns or villages), but which are now listed as evidence of a spatial governance shift. Community actions, alongside private investments or charitable undertakings, are often brought together within new institutional arrangements to convey a sense of coordination and strategy, connecting local and extra-local networks and resources, which is then presented as an open system of community governance and planning (Gallent and Gkartzios, 2019).

More prosaically, Gallent et al (2015) and Scott (2021) scope the components of rural planning (see Table 1.3) across a composite of core ‘public planning’ functions (primarily the control of development), normative spatial or territorial planning that brings together a wider range of public and private stakeholders, community action and planning in various guises, the procurement of outcomes through market-based instruments, countryside management (which deals with the spaces beside or between settlements and is often led by farming interests) in general or through public ownership or national parks, and finally the programmes and projects spearheaded by central government departments and agencies (Bishop and Phillips, 2004, p 4), which can include investment in education or health care – among other things.

A community-based focus A very important concern for rural planning has been its engagement with, and framing of, community initiative and action (see Gallent and Ciaffi, 2014). This concern exists at the interface between rural planning and development, with community capacity considered both an important development resource and a substitute for public intervention and private enterprise, in areas with thin service markets and potentially low returns from high per-capita investment. The community-led and delivered component of rural planning is considered both a gap-filler and a product of the closer bonds, resilience and networks that rurality can incubate. Engagement with those networks has been an important policy prescription since the 1990s. LEADER (Liaison Entre Actions de Développement de l’Économie Rurale) programmes, for example, successfully transformed the European Commission’s top-down development interventions, which primarily targeted the farming sector, into a participatory, grass roots approach to rural development mobilising Local Action Groups through partnerships between various stakeholders (EC, 2006; Lapping and Scott, 2019). LEADER has been characterised by its territorial and integrated focus; its emphasis on endogenous processes, centred 20

Introduction

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Table 1.3: The scope of rural planning Components

Functions

Public or statutory land-use planning

National policy Strategic planning for infrastructure and housing Development (settlement) planning Land-use control and other regulatory functions

Spatial or territorial planning

Area visioning Coordination of service investments Coordination of all public/private and third sector initiatives

Community action and planning

Campaigning and lobbying Voluntary delivery and control of services Support for community development and social infrastructure Community visioning Interfacing with public and spatial planning activity

Market-based instruments

Fiscal incentives or disincentives to rural landowners to induce desirable land-use outcomes (e.g. farmland preservation) Incentives to stimulate physical investment or adaptive reuse of the rural built environment Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES)

Countryside management

Farming and stewardship Strategies and actions that focus on the spaces beside or between physical development Strategies for renewable energy, mineral extraction or ‘fracking’

National parks or public ownership

Closely related to countryside management Public ownership of important rural assets by state organisations, for example wilderness areas National parks to manage ‘prestigious’ or culturally significant landscapes Land often remains in private ownership, but strictly managed and regulated by designated park authorities

Other projects and programmes

Governmental and pan-national directives and programmes Departmental or agency-based (sectoral) projects around health, education, transport and so on Development agency interventions Private sector (industrial) programmes and initiatives

Source: Adapted from Gallent et al (2015) and Scott (2021)

within rural communities; its appreciation and use of local resources, tangible and intangible; and by its local contextualisation through active public participation (see Moseley, 1997; Ray, 2000). The combination of both endogenous (for example, local resources) and exogenous forces (for example, state support and funding) with the dynamic of networks to mobilise these forces for the advantage of rural places is often called neo-endogenous development (Lowe et al, 1998; Ray, 2001; Gkartzios and Lowe, 2019). It is frequently held up as an exemplar of rural governance shift (Scott and Murray, 2009; Bock, 2019), although critics point to bias and elitism in the processes of participation (Storey, 1999; Shortall, 2008; Bosworth et al, 2016), with Shucksmith (2000, p 215) arguing that participatory processes often ‘favour those who are already powerful and articulate, and who already enjoy a greater 21

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Rural Places and Planning

capacity to act and to engage with the initiative’. The prioritisation of sectoral or private interest is an ever-present risk when representative democracy gives ground to participatory forms of governance: the unequal capacities of different groups and interests to lead and participate in those processes can undermine the democracy of community initiative and action.

More broadly, rural planning remains a conflicted and political undertaking.

A range of challenges emerge in different contexts and some of these are explored in this book. And because contexts and cultures differ so much from place to place, it is impossible to catalogue examples of good and bad practice. Our aim, therefore, is to use detailed ‘stories from the global countryside’ to explore the interplay between different manifestations of rurality and planning. Rurality and rural places are viewed as composites of the linked capitals introduced in this chapter, while rural planning comprises the multi-sectoral interventions, investments and actions introduced here.

Moving forward Rural places, like other places, are lived, experienced, practised, negotiated and contested. Planning should not be an artificial intrusion in the life of places, but rather an integral part of how those places form and develop. Some aspects of the practice of planning can look and feel mechanical. But aside from regulatory interventions – the legal tools and the processes of control and enforcement – planning also comprises the thinking, discussing and doing of ‘place-making’.

Conceptions of planning have broadened during recent years. The idea of enhanced spatial governance may not be meaningful to many communities, but many would recognise the ambition to embed responsibility for planning – or at least thinking about and visioning future development – within local discourse, and avoid the imposition of outside solutions.

This book narrates stories, that is local case studies from different parts of the world, that illustrate planning’s interface with rural places, in order to learn from processes and interventions that appear to have made ‘better rural places’ and those that have brought negative consequences. Twelve rural planning cases are presented across four chapters, each of which focuses on one of our four capitals, while also demonstrating linkages with all other capitals. These draw on published literature, the goal being to narrate international and globally differentiated situations and outcomes while acknowledging that we are reproducing knowledge, across the fields of planning and rural studies, that has a strong Anglo-centric, Western and Global North bias (Gkartzios et al, 2020). The four chapters start with general discussions of the built rural, the economic rural, the land-based rural and the social and cultural rural. The nature of these capitals is scoped and detailed – and their constituent elements, and likely features, are unpacked. These opening discussions are used to frame the cases.

Chapter 2’s cases – dealing with the built rural – examine local responses to housing needs within a neighbourhood planning framework in England, 22

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Introduction

community support for infrastructure upgrading and the development of smart villages in Finland, and the use of cooperative structures to facilitate community buyouts of essential local services in rural Australia. Chapter 3, which examines the economic rural, begins by looking at heritage-led rural regeneration in Norway.

The focus then shifts to the valorisation of natural resource amenity in the US and onward to the purchase and lease back of farmland in Romania, with the latter examining the practicalities and the dangers of land financialisation and the potential siphoning of local value through international investment and local corruption. Chapter 4 then turns to land-based rural capital. The first of its case studies reconceptualises the role/function of land within a ‘just transition’ from carbon-intensive land uses towards a zero-carbon landscape in Ireland. We then turn to an example of a payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme in China to explore its role in watershed management and supporting sustainable rural livelihoods. The final case in this chapter explores land reform in Scotland and experiments with community ownership of land assets. And finally, Chapter 5 looks at the social and cultural assets of rural places. It begins by exploring the intent and outcomes of a contemporary art festival in rural Japan, showing how culture and the art experience can contribute to making better places. The focus of the second case is the role of networks as nurtured by a LEADER Local Action Group in supporting the local population and building resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. The final case study then explores queer livelihoods in rural Canada and, as such, addresses biases in the production of rurality as a discourse, while dealing with the theme of inclusivity in planning.

Rural planning is, at its best, a collective endeavour that brings together mixed interests in the articulation and pursuit of ‘good places’. A significant goal of this book is to answer Shucksmith’s (2018) call to explore ideas of the ‘good countryside’. That good countryside exists where there is a propitious balance of place capitals that are protected, enhanced and treated as critically interdependent by development strategies, land policies and community projects; where, in essence, the importance of these capitals to rural places is acknowledged. The capitals introduced in this chapter form a heuristic device at two levels. First, they help us make sense of rural places. Second, they provide points or plains of interaction with planning, where planning – however devised – is able to, first, demonstrate its inclusivity and its attention to wellbeing and ecological integrity; second, support integrated land governance; and third, adapt to changing social needs, including the need to rethink governance arrangements and democratic practice.

Our concern in this book is primarily with planning for good rural places.

The problems encountered by planning are well documented. As it operates in a political context, it bends to special interests and is susceptible to power asymmetries. It can also perpetuate privilege (especially middle-class privilege in rural amenity areas) and may set priorities, including land management ones, that reflect a disciplinary bias. And its disconnection from other areas of public policy can accentuate that bias, making planning intervention appear narrow and 23

Rural Places and Planning

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incapable of tackling the challenges confronting rural places in an integrated way.

Planning is also subverted by a number of disruptive forces: these range from dominant neoliberal narratives, populism and radical politics, to clientelism and corruption. But planning, as an idea and as a practice, is an essential part of the unfolding story of place. It takes many forms and should be integral to the life of communities rather than intrusive – part of the everyday thinking on rural place, and a means of imagining and realising better futures. The cases presented, and accompanying analysis, aim to illustrate this ever-present connection between rural places and planning.

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2

The built rural

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Unpacking the capital There was no discrete ‘built capital’ in Bourdieu’s triad of economy–society– culture. But those base capitals become objectified or embodied in material things or human capacities. Modern economies, for example, require an infrastructure of fixed and mobile objects: places of economic production, means of connectivity and transportation, and other apparatus, to enable that production.

Likewise, society is rooted in a material world: places of home, of private and public dwelling, of interaction and the formation of social bonds, which host the development of meaning and shared culture. It was noted in Chapter 1 that later extensions of Bourdieu’s thinking transformed his fundamental capitals into public goods and community resources (Coleman, 1998), tying them to particular places and therefore arriving at the notion of ‘place capitals’. Taking this line of logic further, these capitals became ‘assets’ that advance or restrict the economic, social and cultural lives of different places. How places develop will depend on whether they are asset-rich or asset-poor, whether they have the means to get ahead or are more likely to be left behind. Social capital has become a key signifier of place-based development potential but is often, we would argue, invoked as a shorthand for a constellation of linked capitals, material and non-material. A combination of many things – capacities, skills, knowledge and infrastructures – produces that potential, all of which centre on people, what they do individually and collectively, and what resources they have to hand. Emery and Flora (2006) list only one item under ‘built capital’ in their own expansion of Bourdieu’s triad: infrastructure.

Definitions of infrastructure can be very broad, extending from roads, rail and ICT (that is, communications infrastructure), through water supply, electricity and gas (that is, utility infrastructure) to homes, schools, retail outlets, health care and ‘blue-light’ emergency services (that is, social infrastructure). Everything listed here, extending to places of work, could be labelled ‘economic infrastructure’; and everything interstitial including the wider countryside could be viewed as ‘green infrastructure’. Then, beyond the material, soft structures – anything from formal support networks (perhaps run by charities or voluntary groups) through to neighbourly interest in vulnerable people – can be badged ‘community infrastructure’. Almost everything one might conceive as existing in a place can be understood as infrastructure, in so far as it delivers service (economic, social, environmental and so on) or supports human activity (dwelling, working, socialising, shopping and so forth). Therefore, using the word infrastructure to denote the sum of built capital is at once correct and also excessively vague. Perhaps 25

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Rural Places and Planning

for that reason, Courtney and Moseley (2008) distribute built infrastructures among five capitals: transport and workspace to economic; education (and the ‘objects’ of that education) to human; networks and voluntary sector services to social; heritage (including built heritage) to cultural; and other anthropogenic assets to environmental. Some fusion of infrastructure and capital seems to convey and situate the range of things that constitutes the built rural.

For the purposes of this book, the countryside’s built capital is treated as an assemblage of anthropogenic, physical things that can be examined in a single chapter.

The intention is not to draw boundaries around that capital but rather to use built capital as a vantage point from which to explore contributions to, and linkages across, other capitals. Anthropogenic things have social and economic functions; they embed in a wider natural environment, and they are also instilled with sociocultural meaning. It is important to understand what they are, the functions and meanings they have, how they contribute to place and how they are affected by different actions and interventions. The remainder of this chapter, like the three capitals chapters that follow, is divided into three parts.

The first part provides a more detailed account of the ‘sub-components’ of built capital (what it comprises) and the ways in which those components contribute to the function and experience of place at an individual and community level. The second part then presents three case studies: of housing problems, interventions and outcomes in England; of the development of enabling infrastructure for ‘smart villages’ in Finland; and of cooperative community spaces in Australia.

These are relayed as narratives from which lessons or key observations concerning the ways in which planning interacts with the built rural are drawn in the final part of the chapter.

Exploring the sub-components Generally, the built rural comprises material assets that are assembled in rural places and the wider countryside. But in order to make sense of the many items, assets and infrastructures that constitute this built capital – and therefore more easily link to discussions in the next three chapters – it seems sensible to distribute these infrastructures, for want of a better term, across our three related capitals.

Therefore, the built rural consists of (1) economic infrastructures, (2) environmental or nature-based infrastructures and (3) socio-cultural infrastructures. These categories overlap, with some material assets occupying at least two groups.

Take housing, for example; this multi-functional public/private good is at once social infrastructure (for communities) and economic infrastructure (supporting labour supply). The availability of housing at affordable cost determines social mix and the sustainability of a community, whether, for example, young people can exercise their right to access housing and therefore provide a secure home for their children, or whether housing supply and quality enable older people to remain in a community in later life. But it is equally an economic infrastructure.

Building homes is a productive activity and securing loans on houses feeds the 26

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The built rural

financial services sector and is important for national economies (Gallent, 2019).

Locally, the availability of housing supports labour supply – ensuring that people can work on nearby farms or in rural tourism. Likewise, broadband is often viewed as an economic infrastructure, helping business start-ups and thereafter ensuring that those businesses can reach customers and clients. But it is also a social infrastructure, creating opportunities for interaction via social media and countering the isolation of some rural locations.

The built rural is traditionally presented as a challenge for ‘settlement planning’ and books which take on that challenge generally rattle through a shopping list of concerns: housing, retail, transport and so on. They seldom categorise these built things or think about the integration of their broader functions. Indeed, it is difficult not to deal with the built rural in a compartmentalised way, although an attempt to do exactly that is made here.

Economic infrastructures range from workspaces, income- generating apparatus, supports for labour supply, ICT and conventional transport. Workspaces can comprise small business units, workshops, non-residential farm buildings, shops, food and drink outlets, and so forth. Income-generating apparatus can include energy infrastructure (wind turbines, bio-fuel facilities, solar panels and hydro) that may be community-operated or privately run, circulating capital back into the community. Likewise, social events and festivals hosted in rural areas may require temporary infrastructures for coping with surging visitor numbers. Supports for labour supply is an opaque reference to housing, which is a vital economic infrastructure for all communities. ICT (alongside all ‘utilities infrastructure’ – gas, water and electricity supplies) is essential for economic activity in rural areas, connecting consumers to the suppliers of goods and services and vice versa. And conventional transport – roads, rail, bus stops, railway stations, bridleways, footpaths and so on – connects homes to places of work, and more broadly provides the operating system of any modern economy by enabling the movement of goods and people.

Environmental or nature-based infrastructures are largely the domain of Chapter 4, being mainly non-built. But green infrastructures – from reservoirs providing water and power, to forests acting as carbon sinks – are served by built things including access roads, security and the machinery to control water levels or extract power. Environmental infrastructure also extends to protection for important assets, in the form of fencing or more traditional divisions, perhaps dry-stone walling or hedgerows. Nature-based infrastructures may require fewer built elements – supplying eco-system services from entirely natural assets – but some, including watercourses that have been widened, deepened or had their courses fixed to provide flood defence, may utilise gabions or other artificial channelling. Rural places are replete with environmental infrastructures that have artificial control features. Moreover, nature-based infrastructures can perform a critical role in reducing environmental risks to rural properties and include upstream infrastructures designed to reduce storm runoff in the lower parts of a catchment and thereby reduce the flood risks faced by villages and towns.

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Rural Places and Planning

Socio-cultural infrastructures start with housing – the focus and facilitator of private and public dwelling (see also Gkartzios and Ziebarth, 2016; Gallent, and Scott, 2019) – but extend to all forms of social space, internal and external.

Those social spaces can be purpose-built, including ‘village halls’ or community centres, or they may comprise cafés, shops or similar, otherwise economic and employment spaces that nevertheless have a socio-cultural function. Then there are outdoor public spaces – from village greens, small squares (or incidental spaces), to sports fields and other sites of possible social exchange. Schools can also be listed among social-cultural infrastructures. They provide an essential service for the community and may also provide public venues for out-of-hours activities. All of the above provide spaces for cultural events, from local fairs, through sports, to art exhibitions. This includes homes: in the absence of formal community spaces in some rural areas, Kilpatrick et al (2014) cite examples in Australia where private garages attached to homes become impromptu meeting places. In fact, rural settlements might be viewed as singular social infrastructures, providing the stages on which rural lives are played out and intimately linked to the economies of rural places.

The sum of these infrastructures provides an important dimension of rural place. How they are assembled – and which of these are present and accessible – will contribute to the experience of that place, determining whether happy and prosperous lives can be lived. Of course, rural places are not islands but rather embedded in networks of places, smaller and bigger, that provide different services and opportunities. But through a focus on place – contextualised by those wider connections – it is possible to assess whether those places ‘work’: whether they are good rural places, and what might need to be done to make them better. The ‘good countryside’ is surely a legitimate goal of planning in all its various guises.

In the opening chapter, we drew attention to Shucksmith’s (2018) notion of the ‘good countryside’ and the right mix of place-based assets and capitals that planning can utilise to shape sustainable rural places. In this chapter, it is important to link the arrangement of infrastructures to the experience of place, not only when the infrastructure is up and running but also during the production of built capital – when good countrysides are co-created. To that end, the cases presented in this chapter touch on issues of inclusion, inequality and socio-economic justice, wellbeing, access to and the distribution of land and property, governance and structures of co-production, and flexibility or innovation in policy making and planning. This framing allows us to spotlight how the production and presence of infrastructures contribute to the functioning of a place: so, for example, what does the housing resource need to look like to make that contribution and what sorts of housing situations contribute to delivering inclusivity, justice and wellbeing? It is impossible to cover a full shopping list of built things (sub-components of the overall capital) in this chapter, so the approach taken is to start with core issues, look outwards and explore connections. The overall aim is to consider how sub-components, and therefore capitals, contribute to good rural places. This is achieved by illustrating and investigating contributions through our case studies, 28

The built rural

which also look at the role of planning in facilitating the availability, distribution and access to sub-components that support rural quality of life and quality of place.

Housing, smart villages and interactional community spaces

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Community control of housing outcomes: Upper Eden, England The Localism Act 2011 introduced neighbourhood development planning to England. Together with the revocation of regional plans during the following year, it delivered a fundamental localisation of planning: more responsibility and power devolved to the lowest tier of local government and the promise of broader public involvement in the development of local plans and associated land-use policies and decisions. Neighbourhood planning is rooted in the tradition of parish plans (Parker, 2014; Gallent, 2016), which evolved from local evidence gathering in rural areas from the 1970s onwards. By the 1990s, parish councils were regularly becoming involved in the drawing up of non-statutory plans, which they then struggled to connect with statutory local plans – often because these ‘parish plans’ were little more than unstructured wish lists: accounts of the various gripes over roads and housing, which communities often express to local authorities. For a variety of reasons – from perceived voter distrust of regional bodies, to the desire to project public values in development decisions (or merely protect equity in private homes by rejecting new development) – the Conservative Party in opposition came to believe that informal parish plans provided a blueprint for formal neighbourhood planning. This was seen as a vote winner in the 2010 general election.

With a Conservative-led coalition installed in government, the pledge to introduce neighbourhood planning was delivered. The removal of regional plans tilted power towards local planning – which became the sole focus of housing delivery – and created a context in which community groups could exert more control over the location and form of development. The government introduced a system of light-touch inspection for neighbourhood plans and the right for acceptable plans – compliant with national policy – to be ‘made’ (adopted as) part of the statutory local planning structure.

The content of those plans would really matter and could affect all manner of development outcomes. At the same time, a raft of neighbourhood rights were introduced, potentially giving communities control over some key services and assets. And neighbourhood forums (or parish councils in rural areas) would be able to modify the ‘planning permission’ system for their local area by enacting a development order – potentially waving through developments deemed to be in the interest of ‘the community’. In the English planning system, secondary instruments (subordinate legislation) define land-use ‘classes’ and the requirement for permission to change between uses. Local Development Orders (implemented by local authorities) or Neighbourhood Development Orders (implemented by neighbourhood forums or parish councils) effectively remove some material changes (in land use) from the permissioning system. Within prescribed parameters, neighbourhoods can take control of the planning system.

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Figure 2.1: Landscape near Kirkby Stephen, Upper Eden Valley

Source: https://www.flickr.com/

Eden District is located in the north-west of England in the county of Cumbria, between the Lake District National Park to the west and the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) to the east. Despite the presence of one of England’s most important north–south motorways, the M6, Eden District comprises mainly ‘open countryside’ and is regarded as one of the most rural districts in the country (Figure 2.1). Sturzaker and Shaw (2015) claim that this is typical ‘clientelist’ countryside, using the definition developed by Murdoch and colleagues (2003): a relatively remote rural area, ‘far enough away from major employment centres to make commuting back into those centres impractical/ undesirable for most, a different set of relationships, power structures and local priorities are in place than is the case in areas closer to urban centres’ (Sturzaker and Shaw, 2015, p 594).

The nearby Lake District has a high concentration of second homes and welldocumented affordability challenges (affordability being the ratio of median house prices to median workplace earnings). Policies for advancing local housing interests over those of external buyers have been analysed for several decades (see Shucksmith, 1981 and 1990) and reveal the difficulties faced by rural authorities when confronting systemic problems, related, for example, to the assetisation of housing through its national tax treatment, with area-based local actions (Gallent et al, 2020). Although largely outside the Lake District, Eden faces substantial pressures. The district’s 2015 Strategic Housing Market Assessment (EDC, 2015) revealed a pattern of future household growth (2,000 extra households between 2014 and 2032), an ageing and older population than England as a whole (with a forecasted loss of working-age households and their replacement with retired 30

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The built rural

people) and high rates of activity but low wage levels. The median house price in Eden in 2012 was 7.2 times greater than the average household income. Local incomes are generally inadequate for those wanting to buy their homes, but at the same time, about 7.2 per cent of Eden’s housing stock comprises second homes, many located in the district’s picturesque western and eastern fringes – away from the main towns and the M6 motorway. Thus, Eden displays the typical picture of housing stress shared by many remoter but accessible and attractive rural areas in England. Over successive local plans, the district council has sought to facilitate residential development in service centres and key settlements. This makes sense for a number of reasons: housing is closer to services and many jobs; the council can lever more significant planning gains from larger concentrated developments (which is important as market prices are very high in some parishes, resulting in big spikes in land value when permission for housing is given – which can be captured via conditions attached to planning permission and used to subsidise non-market affordable housing); and concentration, rather than ‘smearing’ development, may preserve the character and amenity of smaller villages and hamlets. But this hierarchical approach to settlement planning, which has been the norm in England for several decades, also creates problems. First, it tends to reinforce spatial segregation: richer second homeowners in the smaller – and increasingly exclusive – villages and local households on lower incomes in the service centres. Second, it starves ‘lower tier’ settlements of workers, generates social imbalance and tends to separate age cohorts: it has a role in spatialising intergenerational inequality. And third, if workers are forced to live away from jobs in local shops then they will also be obliged to back-commute to those jobs, probably by private car. This type of top-down distribution of development tends to enhance socio-spatial exclusivity; increases class-based inequalities; negatively affects the wellbeing of residents by limiting spatial choice; limits the distribution of community assets; and is predicated on traditional models of representative government and executive power, with little in the way of planning and policy innovation.

Neighbourhood planning offers an alternative way of responding to the spatial distribution of housing stress. Upper Eden’s Neighbourhood Development Plan (NDP) was not produced by one parish council but rather by a grouping of 17 parishes clustered in the south-eastern section of Eden District. It is notable for being England’s first formally ‘made’ NDP and had a strong focus on housing, containing a raft of policies that ‘are aimed at making sure that the opportunities that exist for local people to build to solve their own housing problems are positively supported through the planning process’ (Upper Eden Community Interest Company, 2012, p 6). An early study of the NPD was undertaken by Sturzaker and Shaw (2015), drawing on interviews with key actors in 2012 (within a year of the Localism Act). They note that the history of community planning in the wider area stretches back to 2002 when a number of separate parishes undertook local ‘health checks’, all coordinated by the market town of Kirkby Stephen. Eventually, the ‘Upper Eden’ group was formed and produced its first 31

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Rural Places and Planning

collective community plan in 2008, which laid the foundation for the later NDP. The community plan set a number of objectives for the group, including several focused on housing, which responded to perceived challenges and shortcomings in the District Plan: deliver more dispersed housing allocations (contrary to the District Plan’s key settlement approach), promote self-build affordable housing and reuse buildings for housing and employment use. Sturzaker and Shaw (2015) point out that while neighbourhood planning in England is presented by some as a ‘NIMBY charter’, strengthening the hand of homeowners wishing to reject development, there is a history in Upper Eden of communities wanting a greater share of the district’s allocated housing and also wanting more affordable homes.

It is notable perhaps that Upper Eden is away from the highest concentrations of second homes, located mainly in the Lake District National Park. Community and neighbourhood planning has been overseen in Upper Eden by residents whose primary concern is with preventing their villages from falling into the ‘sustainability trap’ described in the Taylor Review (2008): places ‘written off’ by the narrow environmental concerns of formal planning and provided with too few opportunities to house those needing to live locally and no chance of growing services and job opportunities. That type of planning prioritises amenity (for those fortunate enough to already own property) over future need and wider sustainability and social justice.

Rooted in the 2008 community plan, the NDP advanced four key policies that essentially amend policies contained in the District Plan. The first alters the approach to exceptional planning consent for housing on agricultural land.

Since the early 1990s, district councils in rural England have been able to permit affordable homes on farmland outside village development envelopes. Providing that landowners are willing to sell land to community or third-sector providers at close to agricultural value, this produces an important land-price discount that can be used to reduce the cost of housing, with that reduced cost reflected in ‘affordable’ rent levels (Gallent and Bell, 2000). Eden District’s Plan stipulated that exceptional permission for affordable homes could only be given on sites close to existing dwellings. This rule had previously limited the number of suitable sites in small villages. Upper Eden’s NDP amended this rule, saying that site suitability should be judged only on visual impact. Moreover, the possibility of converting outbuildings to residential use was opened up by the same policy – but only to meet local needs. The second policy allowed new housing on farms for use by ‘family members, holiday letting or renting to local people’ (Upper Eden Community Interest Company, 2012, p 16). In supporting the policy, it was argued that Eden District Council’s own plan was ‘silent’ on the ‘flexible use’ of farm dwellings, and the NDP intended to create a framework in which the farming economy, and those reliant on it, would be supported. The third policy was concerned with older residents requiring affordable homes in named villages to be reserved for local older people and designed appropriately. The fourth policy addressed the key concern in rural settlement planning noted previously, acknowledging that non-key settlements can be starved of vital development 32

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The built rural

(Gallent et al, 2015; Sturzaker, 2019) and essentially ‘written off’ (Taylor, 2008) by conventional planning approaches. The NDP noted that Eden District’s Core Strategy contained an LSC (Local Service Centre) de-designation policy: the local authority committed to review its settlement hierarchy every two years, potentially removing LSCs on the basis of their judged sustainability.

The direction of travel of the NDP could not have been more different from that of the District Plan. It contended that top-down assessments of sustainability are flawed, ignoring the needs of communities while pursuing amenity, landscape and character goals. It sought an increased housing allocation across the district (Sturzaker and Shaw, 2015, p 597), widening the distribution to smaller settlements and de-designated LSCs. In those de-designated centres, the NDP promotes exception sites to meet local housing needs. Arguably, the district and neighbourhood plans diverge in their thinking on place: the former takes a holistic view of the needs of Eden, developing a housing allocation strategy that discriminates against those places where it views development as inherently unsustainable but is indiscriminate or generalist in its overarching concern for the district. Its focus is the sum of the parts and not the parts. But the latter is fighting for specific places, wanting nowhere ‘written off’, and gives priority to particular places, perhaps over the relationships between places. The district is rational, arguing that residents can live and work in A and B rather than C. But C is given a powerful voice in the neighbourhood planning process and wants its own future, independent, to an extent, of what happens elsewhere. Neighbourhood plans exert the rights of places and therefore at a very local level can promote inclusive planning in process and outcome; deliver cohesion because of attention to detail (for example, the needs of elderly households in the case of Upper Eden, plus the integration of living and work space); think about the socio-economic wellbeing of places in a more focused way; and advance/reconfigure access to resources. They also provide an opportunity to prioritise open government.

Sturzaker and Shaw (2015, p 600) point out that the District Council received 56 and 72 responses respectively when it consulted on its local plan in 2005 and 2007, from a population of 52,000. In contrast, a third of residents voted in the NDP referendum, with 90 per cent supporting its adoption (Sturzaker and Shaw, 2015). There is evidence, at least in Upper Eden, that neighbourhood planning has broadened public interest in a planning process that promises to deliver very targeted interventions in otherwise forgotten places – including outbuilding conversions that support farm incomes or provide homes for local workers, and which have been hitherto barred in local plans. But the picture is not entirely rosy.

Asking local groups to plan in support of the public interest can be an invitation to promote private interest, for groups to become increasingly myopic. In the case of the Upper Eden NDP, what constitutes local need – and who is considered ‘local’ – depends on standard criteria (that is, length of occupancy and employment need) but parish councils have also handed themselves the discretion to validate individuals’ claims of localness for housing allocation. This is a clear risk of abuse with such powers and the prioritisation of patronage over public interest.

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But more generally, the widening of participation that is possible with neighbourhood planning suggests a socio-spatial process firmly anchored in place. In rural contexts, it has been able to challenge conventional approaches to housing delivery, producing more nuanced responses that look beyond amenity and accept the need to work with the multifunctional, or multi-capital, nature of rural places.

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The rise of the smart village: Kuhmo and Suodenniemi, Finland Achieving the ‘smart city’ ideal is now a goal of municipal governments around the world, though what this means in practice remains ‘fuzzy’ and uncertain, according to Caragliu and colleagues (2011, p 67). Building on Hollands (2008, p 308), these same authors draw attention to six features of a smart city. First, networked infrastructure – including ICT – brings to ‘the forefront the idea of a wired city as the main development model and of connectivity as the source of growth’ (Caragliu et al, 2011, p 68). Second, smart cities tend to be businessled: they are neoliberal spaces that prioritise economic performance. Third, there is a clear focus on ‘achieving the social inclusion of various urban residents in public services’ (p 68). Fourth, high-tech and creative industries are assigned special importance in smart cities. Fifth, there is ‘profound attention to the role of social and relational capital in urban development’ (p 68). And sixth, social and environmental sustainability is frequently set as a major strategic goal in the planning and operation of smart cities. Relative to these ideals, outcomes on the ground are sometimes sub-optimal, with urban populations enjoying variable access to the benefits of ‘smartness’: indeed, many cities around the world, ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’ (Murgante and Borruso, 2015), are sites of socio-economic division and injustice.

However, the belief that challenges are rooted in application, rather than in the ideals, lends continuing support to the concept – which has also been rescaled in the idea of the ‘smart village’. However, this newer concept is less developed than its urban counterpart. Sometimes, it seems to refer simply to an alternative service model, less reliant on face-to-face provision and more about online delivery. But in the last few years, there has been movement towards a more comprehensive understanding of the smart village, given momentum in Europe by the launch of the EU Smart Village Initiative in 2017. Zavratnik et al (2018, p 2) begin their own discussion of the concept with the usual disclaimer: ‘definite definitions’ do not exist. But some general features can be identified from various international initiatives.

First, smart villages pursue prosperity by following ‘smart growth’ goals.

These can be broad or narrow. In India, for example, extant literature references technological innovation in the farming sector. In the US, smart growth plans are multi-dimensional, encompassing housing, transport, community development and sustainability. In Europe, the accent has been placed on promoting the ‘knowledge-based economy’ (Zavratnik et al, 2018, p 2). Second, smart villages 34

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The built rural

have a clear ‘digital dimension’ that is often complemented with upskilling and training. Third, smart villages are goal-oriented, always specifying the challenges they aim to address – from wellbeing, through the empowerment of key groups (for example, women) and the promotion of sustainable energy, to reducing inequalities and delivering social justice (many smart village initiatives in India, for example, seek to overcome prejudices rooted in the caste system). These three features – pursuit of smart growth, clear digital dimension and being goaloriented – hint at the nature of a smart village, but Zavratnik and colleagues ultimately propose that the smart village concept overlaps with that of the smart city, albeit rescaled, and embraces those ‘smart infrastructures’ that replace or augment more conventional forms of service delivery and governance. They also fall back on the EU definition: smart villages comprise ‘rural areas and communities which build on their existing strengths and assets as well as on developing new opportunities. In smart villages, traditional and new networks and services are enhanced by means of digital, telecommunication technologies, innovations and the better use of knowledge for the benefit of inhabitants and business’ (EU Action for Smart Villages, cited in Zavratnik et al, 2018, p 3).

Technology and innovation are front and centre in this ‘rural smartness’, addressing key service, business and social challenges. Examples of smart villages tend to focus on one of these dimensions rather than a full spectrum. That being the case, two brief examples of smart village initiatives are presented below, dealing with digital transformations for services and business.

Finland is home to some of Europe’s most remote and sparsely populated rural communities. Isolation may be eased through good broadband connectivity.

Because commercial providers are not always persuaded of the business case of connecting the hardest-to-reach places, this generates both a challenge and an opportunity for communities: an impetus to come together, growing social capital, to find ways to deliver crucial digital services and business support. Villages in the region of Kuhmo, eastern Finland, faced exactly this challenge: ‘due to its sparse population, it has not been commercially attractive for telecommunications companies to invest in broadband and optical fibre infrastructure in the area’ (ENRD, 2017, p 2). The first response of the Finnish government was to offer a subsidy, through its ‘Broadband for All’ programme, to the commercial providers. But this proved an inadequate incentive, prompting the government to upend its approach and direct funding to bottom-up providers, including local cooperatives. The success of this kind of approach depends on the existence of community actors able to steer projects and galvanise local support. In this case, a local ‘researcher and IT enthusiast’ provided part of that steer, championing a demonstration project in 2007 before establishing a local internet cooperative in 2013, which became a recipient of funding.

The cooperative brought together residents across seven villages: Hietaperä, Härmänkylä, Livantiira, Kuusamonkylä, Härmänkylä, Koskenmäki and YläVieksi. Its aim was a straightforward one: to enhance ‘quality of life’ both through improved access to services and by supporting entrepreneurial activities that 35

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Rural Places and Planning

contribute to economic development. An important addition was the inclusion of local people in the initiative, as future subscribers to the service whose support was enlisted for the laying of physical infrastructure: ‘The cooperative started by seeking the commitment and buy-in of the local community. They went household by household and organised village and neighbourhood gatherings.

They explained and discussed the benefits of the “information society” and opportunities of fast internet connections’ (ENRD, 2017, p 2). Once the commitment was secured, two key actions followed: first, the cooperative entered into negotiations with commercial service providers, eventually reaching an agreement with TeliaSonera – a national provider; second, the communities themselves worked on the essential infrastructure, digging the trenches in which cables would be laid. ‘Many local people offered their time and equipment for free. As well as the use of tractors and excavators, the project benefitted from 36,000 hours of voluntary work at the construction phase’ (ENRD, 2017, p 2).

The network was up and running by the end of 2015.

Ultimately, the Kuhmo cooperative delivered a new physical infrastructure comprising 165 km of optical fibre providing very fast data connectivity for the 200 (of 270) households choosing to subscribe to the service. The impacts of this type of project on services and business are explored in another case below, but the process of delivery in the Kuhmo case appeared at least as important as the product. Residents forged a new relationship with each other and with their local authority. Volunteers came together to deliver an infrastructure which would not otherwise have been commercially viable; whether this effort seeded enhanced inclusion and cohesion is not entirely clear but research into the cooperative model in Finland, including Kuhmo, has concluded that: ‘active cooperatives, municipalities, village associations, and companies have in many places together managed to create remarkable local structures of know-how which will offer benefits far into the future’ (Honkaniemi and Luoto, 2016, p iii). Networks and social capital have been crucial building blocks for the Kuhmo cooperative, but whether inequalities in its benefits persist is also unclear. The same researchers, looking across this and other initiatives, also conclude that: Selective differentiation with regard to the distance, solvency, age, participation, and information technology skills, is also evident within the regions and even within the villages. There is an obvious danger that those user groups with the potential to reap the greatest welfare gains from access to a fibre optic network connection are being excluded from the new digitized services. (Honkaniemi and Luoto, 2016, p iii) In their study, which focused on the delivery of digital transformations through Finnish rural cooperatives, they noted a tendency for more advantaged groups to reap the greatest benefit: teleworkers, relocating from urban areas, found it easier to work from remoter rural locations; but already excluded groups – including 36

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The built rural

elderly residents – struggled to access those benefits. Other studies and other cases have highlighted the need to dedicate effort to opening up the opportunities of the smart village to a broader set of potential beneficiaries – through upskilling and training. The Kuhmo case ticks some boxes, being a goal-oriented project with significant potential to deliver a digital transformation in local services and business innovation. It had some very important attributes: a champion or boundary-crosser able to work with commercial interests, community members and local government; a mobilisation of social capital; innovation in policy making and planning, which switched to work with community actors; and at least a potential to deliver justice across different domains, from education and training to rural health care and so on. But efforts to use smart infrastructure effectively are highlighted in other Finnish cases.

Suodenniemi is located in the Tampere region in south-western Finland (Figure 2.2). It has a population of around 1,400 residents and covers an area of just over 220 km2. Once digital infrastructure had been installed, further challenges remained – the supply of digital services, and ensuring people’s ability to use the infrastructure and services: ‘experience has shown that where the infrastructure works the services will follow. Often the weakest link in the chain is people’s ability to adopt new services and technologies, which is especially true of elderly people’ (ENRD, 2018, p II). With that challenge in mind, the Suodenniemi Association launched a ‘Digi-Hub’ with the aim of ‘helping elderly people to Figure 2.2: Community of Suodenniemi

Source: Photo supplied by Suodenniemi-Seura and reproduced with permission (also available at https:// suodenniemi.topoteekki.fi)

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Rural Places and Planning

benefit from digitalisation and rapidly emerging new online services related to health, banking, shopping and social relations, among others’ (ENRD, 2018, p II). The Hub was set up in the public library in 2017 with the twin goals of developing and promoting the adoption of new digital services in a community that has suffered depopulation and the closure of many public and private services during recent years. Key to adoption is the improvement of IT literacy among elderly residents, the project’s primary target group.

With the support of a LEADER Local Action Group (see Chapter 1), an IT specialist was hired to help residents (in two six-hour weekly slots) with everyday technology problems – from e-security basics, to paying bills online and the use of emerging e-health services. The Hub is now part of the national ‘SeniorSurf ’ network of advisory centres. One notable feature of the initiative has been the online return of services – including banks and pharmacies – that had previously closed down in Suodenniemi: ‘public discussion and media attention … created a positive attitude towards digitalisation’ (ENRD, 2018, p II), generating demand for a wider range of services. But while the Hub played a key role in reaching elderly residents, its proponents concede that many of its target groups remain unconnected to e-services. This remains a key challenge for digital transformations: inclusivity requires active promotion – and inequalities between groups, including intergenerational ones, will persist unless there is rigorous and targeted outreach with the community. These sorts of smart infrastructures create the potential to transform wellbeing in rural communities, but considerable investment and effort are needed to turn that potential into reality.

The digital transformations flagged in the earlier cases have been underway in rural communities for the last 20 years, or more in some cases. Although the smart village is about more than technological innovation, with ICT contributing to social capital and network building, there is an increasing focus on the opportunities arising from future technologies. Geospatial ICTs have a range of place-based applications. Social media tools (including smartphones, geotagging and geospatial analytics) alongside sensor-based tools (including remote sensors and sensor networks) generate a range of possibilities for smarter rural places, across the economic, environment, governance, mobility and living domains (see Table 2.1).

Combinations of these have the potential to contribute to the good rural place, delivering new economic possibilities, enhancing human wellbeing and reducing inequalities. E-education and e-health stand out as particular contributors to the good rural place (OECD, 2019, p 15) but are now being joined by other possibilities. Autonomous vehicles may ‘ease access to physical services and social networks’. 3-D printing may ‘reduce the market dependence of rural areas on mass-manufactured goods’. And drones may ‘improve access to goods’ and ‘boost productivity of rural businesses’ (OECD, 2019, p 14). But all of these things are dependent on ensuring ‘quality broadband connection’, which remains the essential foundation for all technological innovation and the smart village. However, the longer-term development of that technology is difficult 38

The built rural

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Table 2.1: Smart possibilities for rural places Domains

Illustrative examples

Smart rural economies

• Utilising local and ICT networks for organising and adding value to supply chains • Enhancing existing rural assets with ICT, for example, digitisation of cultural heritage for tourism • Real-time management of the circular economy through more efficient connecting of supply and demand • Creative economy clustering • Creating a rural ‘marketplace’ of ideas for the knowledge economy • Attracting new ‘creative economy’ in-migrants and mobile capital attracted to the rural living environment, enabled by ICT infrastructure

Smart rural environment

• Real-time management of rural resources, for example, visitor numbers to fragile habitats • Combining sensor technology and mobile technology to enhance resilience to natural disaster risks, for example, flooding, wildfire • Volunteered geographic information for environmental management • Real-time monitoring of ecological data • Novel methods for raising public ecological awareness

Smart governance

• ICT based methods for accessing public services in rural localities • More efficient methods of service delivery through smart technologies • New methods of public engagement between policy makers and rural citizens and the adoption of a citizen science approach to utilise local knowledge in co-design of rural development pathways • Smart community decision-making for community-based ownership, for example, blockchain distributed ledger tools for managing community owned schemes (e.g. applied to local energy schemes), e-voting decisions and managing local voting rights, and mixedfinance tools including crowdfunding • Participatory e-platforms • Networked activism for local civil society

Smart mobility

• Real-time technologies and geospatial tools to encourage carpooling, car-sharing and other ‘sharing’ formulas in rural locations • Combination of different types of services for cost reduction • Dedicated smart mobility initiatives, for example, tourism • Real-time technologies and geospatial tools for the more efficient and flexible management of public transport provision – overcoming traditional deficiencies in serving a dispersed rural population with public transport

Smart living

• ICT enabled information infrastructures to manage energy usage in buildings and public spaces • New health and social care delivery through smart and real-time technologies • Enhancing cultural life, for example, heritage virtual databases, archiving local story-telling or minority languages • Connecting local education institutions with online delivery, for example, adult education and training • Remote working including from shared cooperative spaces, for example rural digital hub locations

Source: Authors

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to foresee: 5G and its successors may eventually substitute for fixed connections if bandwidth issues cannot be resolved. More broadly, many rural places are developing the infrastructure needed to become smarter. Voluntary community action, with top-down supports, often provides a model for that development, with effort then expended on equipping otherwise left-behind groups with the skills needed to benefit from the smart village. This approach – community-led rather than technology-driven – appears to provide a process and a formula for fully realising the potential of this built capital.

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Cooperative community spaces: Kaniva and other asset ‘buy-outs’, Australia Rural places need a physical focus – spaces where people can come together, interact, socialise, share ideas, develop know-how and become a community.

Spaces for interaction – community spaces – are critically important and part of an ‘interactional infrastructure’ that comprises, more broadly, ‘opportunities and structures for interaction in a community’ (Kilpatrick and Loechel, 2004, p. 4), which include social networks, institutional structures (for example, a community council or association), leadership (able to bring people together) and communication sites (Kilpatrick and Loechel, 2004, p 7). In the smart village examples outlined earlier, all of these interactional infrastructures were present: the boundary-crossing IT expert in Kuhmo, the relational networks, the institutional structure (the cooperative) that coalesced and the library (in Suodenniemi) that became a critical communication site (joined eventually by virtual sites on the internet and, later, smartphone apps such as WhatsApp).

But conventional communication sites comprise meeting places: ‘halls, meeting rooms, malls, main streets and skate parks’ (Kilpatrick and Loechel, 2004, p 7).

A longer list might include a range of commercial (shops, workspaces hired out for community use, cafes and bars – or public houses in Ireland and the UK), public (civic or village halls, schools or libraries) and private spaces (homes and annexes/outbuildings such as garages). Communication sites can be indoor or outdoor, with the latter including village greens or public squares, sports or recreation grounds, school playgrounds and private gardens – anywhere that people might be able to gather. These are a key component of the built capital of rural places and might be thought of as ‘third places’, being neither (primarily or only) spaces of home life or work life, but rather focal points for social activity (see Oldenburg, 1989). Sometimes they are in short supply owing to population decline and the closure of commercial and public facilities (shops or schools) that can serve this purpose. In response, communities may find new ways to sustain their community spaces, either creating multifunctional hubs (that mix commercial, public and community uses) or resorting to ad hoc private spaces in which to host gatherings. It is difficult to conceive of a good rural place without interactional space: without the opportunity to build social cohesion, address training and learning needs, or deliver the open governance structures that incubate policy and planning innovation.

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The built rural

Business failures – and the closure of essential infrastructure – can have a profound impact on rural places. It is not only the services themselves – banks, post offices, shops, petrol stations and so forth – that are lost but also the focus and opportunity for social interaction, which the physical spaces of those businesses provided. In some countries, the response has been community-led buyouts, followed by community or cooperative control of the service and community space. In the UK, for example, the Plunkett Foundation has been supporting the creation of ‘community businesses’ since 1919, helping communities whose shops or cafes are closing to take over those services and run them for the benefit of local people (Gallent et al, 2015, p 190-1). The Foundation provides ‘practical advice, support and training’, including advice on funding sources and options.

Elsewhere, the support structures for community buyouts are sometimes less developed, but there has been recent rapid growth of this model from a relatively low base.

In rural Australia, a number of community buyouts have been spur-of-themoment, ad hoc and unsupported events. But their success has prompted the development of support networks and the roll-out of advice to others considering taking over failing businesses. A recent surge in buyouts over the last 20 years has been triggered by rural restructuring: Not many people in the city realise it, but for years a semi-depression has afflicted many rural communities across Australia, apart from the occasional good years for agricultural yields and exports. Changing global agricultural markets; lack of employment; centralisation of health, education and energy; drought and fire; low birth rates; and an exodus to the city or more preferred towns all play a part.

(Montgomery, 2006, p 31) A key driver of business closure has been demographic ageing and the outflow of younger people. It was reported in the 2000s that nearly a half of current rural business owners were planning to retire in the next five years (Montgomery, 2006, p 31). In many cases, those businesses were unlikely to attract a buyer due to their marginal profitability but were nevertheless important for the communities they served: ‘buyouts tend to gather steam in social hotspots where the community “stop and chat”’ (Montgomery, 2006, p 31).

The small town of Kaniva, Victoria had a population of just over 800 residents at the 2016 census. It is a farming community with a third of its workforce engaged in the sheep, cattle and grain industries. In 2004, Mobil decided to sell the franchise for the town’s petrol station and roadhouse. Responding to community concern, the local authority – West Wimmera – brokered a deal that would see the roadhouse operating until a buyer could be found. A coalition of residents and businesses came together as a ‘buyer of last resort’: they formed the ‘Kaniva Community Roadhouse Pty Ltd’ (KCR), a proprietary company that aimed to purchase the roadhouse but only if an alternative buyer did not come forward.

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Rural Places and Planning

‘Residents not only feared a 90 km round trip for a fill-up at the next town’ if the business folded, ‘but [also] community spending going elsewhere and the slow death of the town’ (Montgomery, 2006, p 31). The proprietary company raised $82,000 from its 18 members – well short of the estimated $400,000 needed to buy the roadhouse, which prompted a rethink. The first reaction was to expand the proprietary company and try to raise additional investment: 200 Kaniva residents had signalled interest in contributing to the project. However, a proprietary company can have no more than 50 non-employee shareholders.

Therefore, the group engaged the assistance of Co-operative Development Services (CDS) – based in Victoria and established in 1999 by an employee of the state government who had been involved in the setting up of numerous cooperatives – with a view to exploring other options. The director of CDS proposed that the company convert to a cooperative, which would remove the shareholder restriction. However, KCR would first need to be deregistered and this would take time, meaning that the roadhouse would face a period of closure, during which time business might be lost. To expedite the process, it was decided that a trading cooperative should be created, with KCR becoming a subsidiary.

Action to save this community asset centred initially on one person – a town councillor, who was also a mechanic. He was then joined by three other residents: a farmer, a teacher and a local grocer, who – following the advice of CDS – came together to form the Kaniva Community Co-operative (KCC), which was formally registered on 14 December 2004 (Marino, 2004). A week before its registration, 200 people – a quarter of the town’s population – had attended the cooperative’s formation meeting (the 200 that signalled initial interest) and pledged $280,000 towards the purchase of the station: individual investments ranged between $500 and $10,000. With further investments over the next few months, the station was purchased and reopened in May 2005. Its status as a communityowned asset resulted in a new level of pride and patronage: ‘it’s become a focal point. The community meet there, have dinner and spend more money at the station because they are shareholders’ (Montgomery, 2006, p 31). The Kaniva Community Roadhouse is certainly a hub, of sorts. It is a meeting place (with a restaurant and rear meeting/dining room which hosts a photographic exhibition and local history display), but it also occupies a pivotal position in the economic life of the community (directly employing 12 people but also retaining spending in Kaniva for reasons noted below).

Many Australian small towns are adversely affected by the centralisation of services. A lack of regular public transport and the spacing of towns means that residents are reliant on private cars and will gravitate towards centres with ‘fuel retailers’ (hence the special interest in the community buyout of petrol stations and roadhouses in rural Australia: see CDS, nd), often spending money and doing business in those places. Some cooperative buyouts in Australia have catalysed service revivals, internalising spending and seeding a wider pattern of business investment. While cooperatives can be viewed as investment vehicles, the growth of activity they generate may also result in the creation of ‘community 42

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The built rural

transaction centres’: ‘a place where all services – child care, doctors, banks – go under one space, a CTC’. Whether this happens will depend on the size of the host community, its proximity to other service centres and its attributes (including existing service mix – that is, its attractors) relative to those of other centres.

Montgomery (2006, p 32) notes the example of an early community buyout in Nuriootpa in South Australia, which has a resident population of 6,500. A local department store was purchased by the Barossa Community Co-operative Store (Nuriootpa) Ltd in 1944. Since the buyout, the cooperative has expanded its operation, opening a number of other businesses and morphed into the ‘Barossa Regional Shopping Centre’, which now employs 250 people. Nuriootpa is a key settlement, facing different challenges from Kaniva and similar villages. What constitutes a hub, or valuable community space, differs depending on scale and context. The Kaniva experience is being repeated across rural Australia, especially as knowledge is gained and shared and as local governments become increasingly involved in community projects, sometimes providing seedcorn funding or ‘matched government subsidies’ (Montgomery, 2006, p 32). An example similar to that of the Kaniva Community Roadhouse is that of Yackandandah, again in Victoria, where the community’s enthusiasm for buying and keeping the local petrol station going (for very similar reasons to those faced in Kaniva) was galvanised by a shire council contribution of $120,000 towards the $412,000 price tag.

The loss of the Kaniva Community Roadhouse would not of itself have deprived the town of community space. Kaniva has a school (Kaniva College, which provides for primary- and secondary-age children from around the wider area), a shire hall, a railway station and an annual show run by the Agricultural and Pastoral Society. Because it serves a wider hinterland, it retains a number of key services despite its relatively small population. The roadhouse was crucial to the service economy of the town. Had it disappeared, traffic on the Western Highway – connecting Melbourne with Adelaide – would have stopped elsewhere, threatening spending and the retention of services. Smaller communities, however, have been handed a lifeline by the cooperative model. Walbundrie in New South Wales, for example, has just 200 residents and has seen its population and essential services drain away during recent years. The Walbundrie general store closed in 1974 but following discussions with a cooperative based in the town of Albury, 50 km to the south, reopened as a branch of the Albury Rural Co-operative Ltd. That arrangement, however, was short-lived and the store closed again in early 1977. The second closure provided the cue for the Walbundrie residents to set up their own cooperative, enabling the community to purchase and reopen the store. Since the late 1970s, it has expanded into a ‘one-stop shop’, providing post-office services, groceries, takeaway food, newspapers, fuel and a range of financial services including over-the-counter banking. Walbundrie is far smaller than either Kaniva or Noriootpa: the loss of the store would have left its 200 residents with only the Walbundrie Hotel and Pub (Figure 2.3), which is (at the time of writing) currently available for purchase at an asking price of $330,000.

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Figure 2.3: Walbundrie Hotel and Pub, New South Wales

Source: https://www.flickr.com/

Whether the Walbundrie Co-operative Ltd might orchestrate another community buyout is unclear, but the current owner appears to have been looking for a buyer for a number of years (dropping the asking price from $400,000 in 2018).

If none is found, then there is at least a chance (given its past track record) that the community will step in again to save another important community space.

These examples of cooperative buyouts of important community assets – which are both communication sites and also key economic infrastructures – illustrate how place-based solutions can counter the exogenous forces of rural restructuring.

Local authorities often recognise the limits of private enterprise in weak service markets but are nevertheless unable to bring assets into public ownership: instead, they provide encouragement and bridging grants where they can. But overall, it is residents – in these Australian examples, and also in other rural areas around the globe – that employ social capital to understand legal apparatus and options and thereafter take control of key assets and, more broadly, their livelihoods.

Community cooperatives in Australia are part of the wider interactional infrastructure: the community-based trading cooperatives examined here are distinct from the consumer or producer cooperatives centred on farming (see Lyons, 2001; Balnave and Patmore, 2008) or more specialist cooperatives focused on housing or finance. But for small rural communities, they often galvanise around leadership, strengthen institutional infrastructure and – of most interest here – secure the 44

The built rural

futures of important communication sites while buffering rural economies against the loss of critical infrastructure.

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What can be drawn from these cases?

This chapter has been primarily concerned with the built capital of rural places – illustrated with housing, smart village (broadband) and community-controlled essential infrastructure examples. Two obvious messages emerge. First, built assets are integral parts of social and economic realities in rural places: housing is an essential socio-economic infrastructure that shapes rural economies and determines wellbeing; smart villages are built on a physical infrastructure that generates a broad range of opportunities and future possibilities; and essential services – which are also community spaces – are contributors to both the economic and social lives, themselves inseparable, of rural places. These are obvious points but worth underscoring. Second, rural places – if they possess the initiative resources and motivation – are often best placed to formulate solutions to critical development challenges. Being best placed means understanding placebased challenges, having the relational networks needed to mobilise social capital and skills and having the desire to innovate in order to resolve sometimes simple problems that nevertheless confound top-down interventions.

The three cases presented here share this place-based community focus: taking control and adapting the formal planning system in England, direct delivery of infrastructure and training in Finland, and orchestrating community cooperation in Australia. All three are examples of community action in the face of rural restructuring, with that community action becoming the instrument of planning, framed by national policies – statutory land-use planning in England and legal cooperative frameworks in both Finland and Australia. But in all cases, those frameworks did not provide the initial impetus for action. That arose from existing relational networks and institutional structures, which had taken shape over many years. It was also grounded in the realisation that external actors could not be relied upon to ‘intervene’. Extra-local intervention, on its own, is often not a feature of ‘good planning’ in rural places. Some European countries realised some time ago that it is local populations through successful networks and partnerships who need to step in and help themselves in rural, difficult-to-reach, places: there is a strong culture of ‘do-it-yourself ’ planning, which has been slower to take root in Australia. ‘Australians like to think the state should step in and look after its citizens, which effectively precludes community finance from mushrooming’ (Montgomery, 2006, p 32). And yet, all three examples illustrate the potential of ‘socio-spatial’ forms of planning for rural places, which deliver a mix of direct and indirect benefits.

It was noted in the introduction that our concern with both the production and presence of key infrastructures in rural places would likely lead us to issues of inclusion, inequality and socio-economic justice, wellbeing, access to and the distribution of land and property, governance and structures of co-production, 45

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Rural Places and Planning

and flexibility or innovation in policy making and planning. In relation to these concerns, some broad conclusions can be drawn. Neighbourhood and cooperative action are inclusive, or at least more inclusive than intervention. Inclusivity has at least a chance of seeding social cohesion and in all three cases, there was evidence of wide participation in the different projects: although communities are, in their nature, fractured by competing interests – and so the coming together of people should not always be interpreted as deeper cohesion. All three cases sought to deliver socio-economic justice in some form: affordable housing for lowerincome and retired households, broadband connectivity (with a focus on access by vulnerable groups) and the preservation of essential community infrastructure (the loss of which would have impacted disproportionally on the vulnerable).

And in all three cases, there was a clear sense of what constituted contextspecific wellbeing: community balance, connectivity and sustained livelihoods.

Cooperatives recycle and reinvest value within a community (among shareholders who further recycle that value through local spending) rather than allowing it to be ‘extracted’ by external investors: the cooperative model is directly concerned with access to and the distribution of community resources, being built on a foundation of open governance and delivering resilience through an economic model that draws in local energies and retains benefit locally. Likewise, the housing example seeks, through modification of standard planning approaches, to widen the distribution of resource, potentially addressing intergenerational inequalities.

The resilience of a rural place, to external shocks, will depend on its internalised capacities, meaning that the mobilisation of social capital, and self-help in all its forms, is crucial to rural resilience. The cases presented here involve community actors adapting solutions to local problems from a toolbox of standard frameworks.

There is no suggestion that these approaches and the solutions formulated guarantee or signify a good rural place. However, the production, presence and defence of key infrastructure – and retention of built capital – is an important piece of a bigger jigsaw, helping sustain the socio-economic and cultural vitality of communities.

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3

The economic rural

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Unpacking the capital Within Bourdieu’s (1986) essay on forms of capital, economic capital refers to material assets that are ‘immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalised in the form of property rights’ (Bourdieu 1986, p 242).

Economic capital includes all kinds of material resources such as financial resources or resources with exchange value including land and property. However, key to Bourdieu’s analysis was his observation that other forms of capital (social and cultural) can be convertible to economic capital through enabling processes, such as education or social obligations or connections. Moreover, economic capital afforded opportunities for developing or acquiring further stocks of social and cultural capital, providing a positive feedback loop, suggesting that the complex interplay of economic, social and cultural capital could be mutually reinforcing.

Understanding and exploiting this complex interplay between economic capital and other forms of capital has been hugely influential as both an explanation of the differential economic performance of rural places and also for rethinking rural development policy and practice. This implies moving beyond traditional economics to focus on the economic potential of tangible and intangible resources or assets. The variable economic performance of rural regions and localities has been the focus of much debate over the last two decades or more. As recorded

by Bryden and Munro (2001), differences in economic development success between rural localities may be explained by the interplay of global and local factors. The external environment of rural regions, for example, is affected by current globalisation processes and by macro-economic conditions. These relate to international trends and conditions – including global economic growth, exchange rates, interest rates, global commodity prices (energy costs and so on), and domestic supply side issues – including international competitiveness, wages and broader input costs, and regulatory burdens (Riordan, 2005). However, increasingly both academic literature and policy makers have focused on territorial dynamics to denote a set of specific regional and local factors that influence relative economic performance (Terluin, 2003). These factors include developing both tangible and intangible aspects of local development and enhancing ‘non-mobile’ and ‘less mobile’ assets in the form of exploiting economic, social, cultural and environmental capital which are specific to individual rural localities (Bryden and Munro, 2001).

This thinking has also been translated to rural development practice. From the post-Second World War era until the late 1980s, rural development policy was dominated by a rural modernisation agenda with a focus on agricultural 47

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Rural Places and Planning

productivism and a ‘deficits’-based approach, which focused on addressing the perceived limitations of rural geographies, such as peripherality, infrastructure deficiencies, inefficient land management, poor living conditions or educational opportunities, and a lack of competitiveness or a limited industrial base (Lowe et al, 1998; Woods, 2010). Moreover, these deficits were to be addressed by topdown government interventions and exogenous development models. While these modernisation approaches still dominate policy discourses in emerging economies and China, in the Global North the 1990s witnessed a shift in thinking away from deficits to assets as a way of building rural economies from the bottom up. This approach focused on the use of local resources and endogenous (that is, ‘emerging from within’) development approaches in combination with the mobilisation of local and extra-local networks (often discussed as neo-endogenous rural development) (Gkartzios and Lowe, 2019), exemplified by the OECD’s New Rural Development Paradigm (OECD, 2006) and in Europe, as already highlighted in Chapter 1, by the European Union’s LEADER Programme. This policy direction focused on the revalorisation and exploitation of place-based capitals (social, cultural, environmental and so on) to identify local place-based specificities as a means of generating new competitive advantages within the context of spatial and territorial development and nurturing the so-called new rural economy (Scott, 2019) as outlined in Table 3.1. In this sense, these capitals are recast as rural resources to be invested in and from which a stream of benefits may be drawn.

The original emphasis on place-based rural capitals to foster local development as a singular pathway has faced criticism for neglecting the influence of external forces and actors in shaping the fortunes of rural places. For example, Ward and colleagues (2005) suggest that relying solely on local factors is naïve, arguing that the notion of local rural areas pursuing socio-economic development Table 3.1: The new rural economy The new rural economy

Linking economic development to the revalorisation of place-fixed rural resources. Examples include: • tourism based on rural heritage and cultural assets; • payments for ecosystem services and environmental goods; • renewables and the low-carbon economy; • adding value to food production through local traditions or placebased identity; • the ‘circular’ rural economy: where the value of products, materials and resources is maintained in the economy for as long as possible, and the generation of waste is minimised (CEC, 2015), for example the reuse of agricultural waste in energy production; • the ‘eco-economy’: viable businesses and economic activities that utilise the varied and differentiated forms of environmental resources in rural areas in sustainable ways (Kitchen and Marsden, 2006); • multifunctional agriculture characterised by on-farm diversification, on-site added value and landscape management.

Source: Adapted from Scott (2019)

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autonomously of outside influences may be ideal but is not a practical proposition in the context of globalisation and external trade. Indeed, a rich vein of research has emerged in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008 illustrating the uneven impacts on rural places of global financial instability. Rural areas have been far from immune to these changing global financial and economic conditions, with rural scholars charting how rural places have been reconstituted through market forces and globalisation in the context of the global financial crisis (Papadopoulos, 2019). This includes research on neoliberalisation and rurality (Dibden et al, 2009; Tonts and Horsley, 2019), the impacts of austerity measures on rural places (Black et al, 2019; Faulkner et al, 2019), and the influence of financialisation on shaping rural futures (for example Murphy and Scott, 2014; Gallent et al, 2018). However, the ability of rural places to mobilise local resources and capitals enables places to cope, respond or adapt to external influences, whether an abrupt shock, such as the global financial crisis of 2008 or the economic consequences following the global COVID-19 pandemic, or slower-burn change processes, such as an ageing rural population or the longerterm impacts of the climate crisis.

Exploring the sub-components Within the rural development literature, place-fixed capitals are generally framed as assets to generate economic development and to support the new rural economy (as outlined in Table 3.1). However, the precise nature of economic capital itself is rarely explored in detail. In other words, while theory and practice suggest that social, cultural capital and so on can be converted to economic prosperity, the actual make-up of economic capital is often neglected. However, the nature of wealth or economic assets generated through place-based development has implications for wider rural quality of life outcomes, raising questions over the fair distribution of prosperity, or how economic capital is reinvested in other forms of capital.

Generally, economic capital refers to liquid assets (money, bonds, stocks) or assets that can be directly converted into money or financial assets (for example, material assets such as land or property). However, to operationalise economic capital as a place-based framework for development, we broaden the conceptualisation of economic capital beyond an individual or household scale to examine economic assets within a rural locality. Before breaking this down into sub-components, it is important to recognise that economic capital is not considered as an end point or end goal within this book, but instead as a means to enhance rural quality of life and wellbeing and to create the ‘good countryside’. Second, it is critical to understand the relationship between economic capital and other capitals. To generate economic capital requires the valorisation of tangible and intangible social, cultural, environmental and built capital. These capitals require conversion through enabling factors, which is the ability to mobilise these capitals for economic development. Economic capital, along with the other capitals explored in this book, 49

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provides a resource for enhancing rural quality of life, which can be reinvested into each form of capital, creating a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. However, the generation of economic capital also has the potential to erode, rather than reinforce, other forms of capital. For example, this might be through unsustainable natural resource exploitation (thereby degrading environmental capital), the hoarding of assets (for example, land banks among volume housebuilders), the extraction of resources for profit without any local reinvestment or increasing local social inequalities through inequitable economic outcomes. To break down economic capital into its sub-components, we identify three categories that underpin rural prosperity: (1) physical productive infrastructure as material assets for direct conversion to money; (2) enterprise infrastructure, which captures entrepreneurial culture, existing businesses and business links; and (3) community wealth-building capacity, which identifies the outcomes of enhancing rural prosperity such as sustainable livelihoods and how wealth can be directed back into the local economy.

Physical productive infrastructure overlaps with the economic infrastructures outlined in the previous chapter. These are material assets with potential for direct conversion to money and also assets with use value to generate economic development. At a basic level, this includes land, with an attached value, as the most fundamental rural resource (further considered in Chapter 4), which underpins the traditional land-based rural economy of food and fibre production and fuel and mineral extraction. Such rural land values vary considerably, depending on either productive capacity (for example, compare a vineyard in Bordeaux with a marginal hill farm in Wales) linked to wider environmental factors (weather, soil quality and so on) or its potential for conversion to non-farming uses such as residential development, which will depend on location. These resources are often institutionalised through, for example, property rights and inheritance rules and taxes. Or the potential use value may be institutionalised through the planning system and the regulation of land use, whereby the zoning of agricultural land for residential purposes may vastly increase the value of a landholding (which may or may not be subject to land value tax on unearned increases in value). However, within a capitals framework, land resources are also revalorised as nature-based capital (discussed in Chapter 4) with, for example, the potential for generating PES, as a repository of cultural and natural heritage essential to attracting tourists, or as sites for the renewable energy sector. The reform of land ownership (for example, land trusts) and direct community ownership of land assets have the potential to generate immediate local resources through collective ownership of rural assets (for example, housing) whereby surplus capital (rents or sales profits) can be recycled into new community projects that redistribute wealth for collective purposes.

Property is a further economic resource at a household level. As explored in the previous chapter, the housing sector is central to asset accumulation, for example through intergenerational transfer of assets and value appreciation. However, these resources are unevenly distributed and may reinforce inequitable outcomes where housing supply is scarce. Beyond land and property, physical productive infrastructure at the scale of the local economy also includes workspace, transport 50

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and ICT infrastructure, which interact with a wider regulatory environment such as land-use planning and communications regulation. Similar to land-based resources, at times these resources (for example, workspace, local shops) may be community-owned or community-operated assets, particularly as a collective approach to address market deficiencies (as highlighted in the previous chapter).

Enterprise infrastructure relates to factors which underpin local entrepreneurial activity. This includes the range and quality of local businesses in existence along with past investment by these local businesses in terms of productive infrastructure and human resources (skills, attracting new labour). The quality of local business networks and business-to-business links is also a critical factor, particularly in terms of creating local value chains or by developing a rural-based circular economy, where the value of products, materials and resources is maintained in the economy for as long as possible, and the generation of waste minimised. Access to business support is a key dimension of enterprise infrastructure in a rural context, particularly given the prevalence of microenterprises as well as small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

These supports include training and financial advice, access to capital such as private investment, bank loans or public funds (for example, LEADER grants), suggesting a mix of private and public resources is required. Human resource is a further dimension of enterprise infrastructure. This relates to three key aspects. First, the ability of a rural place to retain entrepreneurs and potential entrepreneurs. Second, the ability of a rural place to attract newcomers or new residents who can add new skills, entrepreneurial capacity and political know-how, adding much-needed capital and skills to underpin rural regeneration initiatives (Stockdale et al, 2000; Kilpatrick et al, 2011; Mitchell and Madden, 2014). Bosworth (2010) terms the influence of in-migrants on the rural economy as ‘commercial counterurbanisation’, linking demographic counterurbanisation with new rural in-migrants stimulating local economies through new business start-ups, new entrepreneurial activity and embedding new enterprises into local business networks. Finally, the existence of social enterprises that can perform a key role in bridging local skills gaps through training or providing not-for-profit local services is also crucial.

Community wealth-building capacity is the ability to generate wealth defined as the stock of all assets that can contribute to wellbeing and can be considered as an output of the aforementioned sub-components or as an outcome when built, social/cultural and land-based capital are converted to economic capital and monetised in some form. The generation of local income is of critical importance and created through local business profits or through local employment (both new job creation and sustaining existing jobs) and wages. In this regard, the types of jobs created/retained and levels of pay will vary considerably across sectors within the local enterprise base, raising questions of who get the jobs, under what working conditions and at what wage levels (Ratner and Markley, 2014).

A key issue is how to retain local income within a locality through supporting local services, spending locally or reinvesting, particularly when local services and retail are being eroded by the competition from e-commerce. A further aspect of this sub-component is the generation of external income within a rural place, 51

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either through income from external visitors and tourists or through the ability of local enterprises to generate income and profits from non-local markets. In this context, rural places that are outward-looking and foster regional connections have the potential to develop complementarities or a collaborative network to develop a critical mass needed to access, support or develop local supply chains, therefore developing greater local economic closure through, for example, the (re)localisation of food supply chains, thereby enhancing local transactions or creating business clusters (Scott, 2019). This approach may also facilitate the use of a regional or territorial identity in promoting goods and services through place-marketing or branding of products. Strengthening urban–rural partnerships to enable the integration of rural and urban economies, especially for rural localities within urban functional areas, also offers opportunities, for example, to promote relations between rural and urban enterprises, urban markets and rural suppliers, rural areas as consumption areas for urban dwellers, and rural areas as suppliers of natural capital for urban areas. This approach, therefore, facilitates rural economies to mobilise extra-local resources suggesting a more outwardlooking approach across spatial boundaries. For instance, urban–rural partnerships and a regionalisation of food supply chains may open new market opportunities and provide alternative pathways to dependency on large supermarkets for food products (Morgan and Sonnino, 2007). Finally, an important element of community wealth creation is the capacity to redirect or redistribute wealth back into the local economy, placing more control and benefits into the hands of local people (Kelly et al, 2016). On the one hand, this relates to enhancing the local tax base, including tax on residential properties or second homes, specific tourist taxes and local business taxes, which may be reinvested in a locality to maintain local services or to redistribute wealth. However, this also suggests emphasising the importance of local and plural ownership of the economy, creating a just local labour market, and promoting socially productive use of economic capital assets.

Taking a place-based perspective illustrates that economic capital is inherently interlinked to place-based attributes, resources and the mobilisation of other forms of capital – social/cultural, built and environmental. The aforementioned economic capital sub-components are dependent on reappraising the traditional rural resource base embedded within a capitals framework. However, central to this process are enabling or conversion factors, which are critical to place-based rural development strategies. These include the importance of: • the local and wider regulatory environment, including the regulatory planning system; • the quality of local institutions and institutional and political capacity, including the ability to adapt, or foster and mobilise, extra-local resources; • human resources, particularly relating to entrepreneurial culture, creativity, innovation and a local skills base; • digitisation and technology, as a disruptive force capable of reframing market access or labour mobilities.

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While the aforementioned sub-components are often conceived at the individual level (such as land and property ownership), a key dimension of reducing inequalities, creating place-based prosperity and contributing to rural wellbeing is to consider alternative models of asset ownership and wealth creation. This includes experimenting with diverse land ownership models, such as direct community ownership, land trusts or ownership by environmental local nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), which can achieve a more equal distribution of benefits or prioritise the reinvestment of economic capital and thereby contribute to a wider range of wellbeing outcomes.

Heritage-led rural development, the new natural resource economy and financialisation of rural assets Making use of heritage for rural regeneration: Røros, Norway For rural communities facing depopulation, erosion of local services and higher levels of unemployment, heritage-led rural development offers a potential pathway towards generating economic activity. Historic rural landscapes and settlements are critical repositories of cultural heritage, not only in their buildings, townscapes and living and working landscapes but also for their intangible features, such as creating local identity and a sense of place. Historic rural landscapes have been formed through incremental change over many years in response to shifting economic, social and environmental dynamics to produce a complex and highly differentiated rural fabric in terms of structure, ownership and the historic periods represented, creating place distinctiveness. In this case study, we examine how built heritage assets have been revalorised to form the backbone of a local rural economy.

The instrumental use of heritage for economic regeneration is not new.

Pendlebury (2009, 2013), for example, provides an extensive review of the ways that built heritage has been revalorised for its economic potential and how the reuse of historic buildings or environments has provided a foundation for wider local regeneration efforts. Moreover, Pendlebury also highlights how heritage actors themselves have incorporated these values into official heritage discourses as a means of positioning heritage vis-à-vis wider government objectives regarding the economy. In this case study, we examine the role of heritage actors in protecting a historic built fabric and cultural landscape in Røros, Norway, and how this has enabled the locality to transform from its historic role of copper mining towards local wealth creation underpinned by heritage. This includes direct benefits through attracting tourists and visitors to the area, in turn enabling webs of local businesses to develop while maintaining local services, and second, through fostering place identity that has been critical in building a reputation (and brand) for the local speciality and organic food sector, which is based on local traditions and collaborative networks of food producers and processors.

The municipality of Røros is in southern Norway, located in Trødelag county. The area covers approximately 2,000 km2 and is a sparsely populated mountain region with a mix of forests, mountains, agricultural lands and small settlements. There is a 53

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population of approximately 5,500 people, with around 3,800 people living in the historic mining town of Røros. The town, along with its surrounding landscape, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site designated for the cultural legacies of its 350-year history of copper mining. This activity has resulted in a unique land-use system and interaction between resource use and landscape change, and an extensive assemblage of well-preserved buildings protected for their universal cultural value (Kaltenborn and Bjerke, 2002). The history of Røros is intrinsically linked to copper mining in this mountainous region. The town was founded around the establishment of copper mining in 1644, with production peaking during the 19th century, before declining from the early 1900s and ceasing operations in 1977 (Guttormsen and Fageraas, 2011). The town was completely rebuilt after its destruction by Swedish troops in 1679, leading to the development of a distinctive townscape assemblage, characterised by wooden one- and two-storey houses, with blackened wooden façades (and often with turf roofs), giving the town a medieval appearance (UNESCO, 2020). Around 2,000 wooden structures dating from the 17th and 18th centuries survive today, located within a distinctive townscape comprising a single street, with houses around courtyards, where residents traditionally kept cattle in sheds to supplement their income from mining – the last farmer only moved out of the town centre in 2002 (Lillevold and Haarstad, 2018). Figures 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 provide illustrative examples of the built heritage in Røros.

Figure 3.1: Røros and its surrounding mining and agricultural landscape

Source: Photo supplied by Dag Kittang and reproduced with permission

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Figure 3.2: The distinctive wooden structures in Røros, along with its prominent masonry church

Source: Photo supplied by Dag Kittang and reproduced with permission

The conservation of built heritage in Røros was initiated in the first half of the 20th century, with the first legal protection given to historic structures in 1923.

Lillevold and Haarstad (2018) note that the initial preservation efforts were driven from the national rather than local level, coinciding with the establishment of the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage. Early preservation initiatives were given further impetus after the well-known Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg produced several paintings of Røros’ distinctive streetscapes, infusing heritage with further symbolic cultural capital. However, despite these early efforts, the townscape continued to suffer from decay and dereliction, mirroring the wider demise of the town’s mining industry.

Today, the town’s fortunes have been revived following UNESCO’s listing of Røros and its industrial heritage as a World Heritage Site in 1980. Initially, only the actual town of Røros was selected as a World Heritage Site – being viewed as a historical townscape representing an important technological phase in European history (Bye, 2008). However, a second application was ratified in 2011 to significantly extend the area to include the wider mining and cultural landscape. The World Heritage Site now comprises ‘Røros Mining Town and the Circumference’, which includes the town’s built heritage, the surrounding cultural landscape (including both derelict mined areas and 55

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Figure 3.3: Røros in winter

Source: Photo supplied by Dag Kittang and reproduced with permission

agricultural lands), the Femundshytta smelter and water management system for transporting copper ore to nearby smelters, and the ‘Winter Transport Route’ used to transport copper including ice routes over Lake Korssjøen. This wider assemblage of tangible heritage assets was identified by the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage (2009) in its submission to UNESCO as demonstrating the full relationship between the wider mining landscape and 56

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the town, particularly how the mining operation adapted to its cold and mountainous location.

Preservation of the historic structure of Røros has been critical in developing a post-mining economy. Unsurprisingly, given the international recognition of its heritage value, tourism is now a significant economic activity in the town and its rural hinterland, with approximately one million visitors per year. Røros is marketed as a living museum, with its unique townscape being the major draw for visitors (Bowitz and Ibenholt, 2009). However, the town’s wider industrial heritage has now become part of an expanded tourism product, aligned with the extension of the World Heritage Site. This includes museums focused on the mining experience and ‘mining safaris’ to explore the extensively scarred landscape and remaining slag heaps. In addition to tangible heritage assets, the place identity of Røros is widely used as an inspiration for events and the branding of local products, specifically local food products (further discussed in the following) and Røros tweed. The town has used events and festivals to generate income throughout the year, including outdoor theatre, outdoor music festivals and markets, all using the historic townscape as a backdrop (Lillevold and Haarstad, 2018). The most important event is the Rørosmartnan, an annual winter market in February (held every year for over 165 years), which now attracts around 70,000 visitors over five days.

Related to tourism and its heritage ‘brand’, Røros has also developed a strong identity connected to food quality, organic food and speciality products.

Two key initiatives have emerged since the early 2000s – the start-up of Røros Meat Ltd and Røros Dairy – with both companies seeking to capitalise on the brand recognition of Røros as a distinct cultural landscape to create locally embedded products with the wider aim of developing Røros as a food region based on local production, traditions and clean production (Münchhausen et al, 2017). The development of these two food production enterprises has, in part, stemmed from an alliance of producers and local NGOs concerned with the food-health-environment nexus. They have joined forces to create a network of local stakeholders in an organisation called ‘Food from the Mountain’ (Kvam and Bjørkhaug, 2015a). Key stakeholders in this network include primary producers, local food processors, the local authority and consumers, who share the goal of supporting local food production. Røros Meat was established in 2003, underpinned by the efforts of the Røros organic farmers’ cooperative and a partnership with Røros Abattoir, creating new chain partners and supply chain integration (Münchhausen et al, 2017) and selling organic products under the brand of Røros Food to local hotels and restaurants in the region, and, more recently, through a retail chain. Røros Dairy is a private company founded by a cooperative of milk producers, the Røros municipality and Innovation Norway.

Røros Dairy specialises in traditional and distinctive local organic products, such as tjukkmelk (thick sour milk), skjørost (similar to cottage cheese) and songraut (porridge), and, more recently, introducing new milk, cream and yoghurt products also using traditional production methods (Kvam and Bjørkhaug, 57

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2015b). Similar to Røros Meat, Røros Dairy also sells directly to local restaurants and hotels and has also linked up with the supermarket chain, Coop. Kvam and Bjørkhaug (2015b) note that Røros Dairy directly employs around 20 people (with 12 employees owning company shares) and, additionally, the dairy is connected to 35–40 local organic milk producers.

The success of Røros has been nurtured through a mix of local and extralocal actors. The preservation of the town’s built heritage has generally been led by ‘expert’ conservation professionals. This included the initial protection of historic structures in the 1920s, through to the efforts of the Norwegian Cultural Heritage Directorate in its application for UNESCO World Heritage Site listing in the 1980s and extended in 2011. Typically, conservation practitioners are motivated by preserving the authentic built fabric for its artistic, cultural and universal value. However, the preservation of built heritage in Røros has also laid the foundations for a wider economic renewal, combining these tangible heritage assets along with intangible heritage factors, including place identity, reputation and food-producing traditions. Lillevold and Haarstad (2018) claim that almost everything in Røros is connected to the historical layers of the town and its cultural landscape. This ‘authenticity’ is critical for traditional crafts, local food production, adventure experiences, local retail and restaurants, sightseeing, festivals, plays and outdoor theatre, in defining the cultural and economic life of Røros (Guttormsen and Fageraas, 2011).

While external actors have been critical, Røros municipality plays a key role in supporting heritage preservation through its physical planning strategy. Protecting heritage is one of the overarching priorities of the municipality with the objective of strengthening the historic centre and fostering the historical characteristics, qualities and traditions as a driving force for business development, cultural activities and good living conditions (Lillevold and Haarstad, 2018). Heritage is framed as a key source of wealth creation, and residents see themselves as ‘caretakers’ of the historic built fabric, much of it in private ownership (Bye, 2008). In this regard, the municipality requires that houses owned in the historic core of Røros must be used as permanent residences, preventing the hollowing out of the historic built environment by second homes and holiday lets. Røros municipality has also played a key role in fostering Røros as a centre of speciality and quality food, developing networks of food producers to develop the ‘Food from the Mountain’ alliance. The emergence of Røros as ‘Norway’s local food capital’ has been a bottom-up process, building on the cooperation of local producers, processors, the local authority and retailers to build a brand for local specialities and organic products. Farmers’ cooperatives have also been central in this process, stimulating the creation of local value chains to add value to local farm produce that draws on local traditions and production methods. While the development of a local food sector draws on the heritage brand of Røros and the name recognition of the area within Norway, local food production and processing provides an important diversification of the Røros economy, which has now extended beyond the tourism market to establish supply links throughout Norway.

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Natural resource amenity as an economic pathway: Fannin County, Georgia, US This case study is located in the Appalachian Region in the US, an area historically associated with poverty and depopulation. Appalachia is made up of 420 counties across 13 states and spans 205,000 square miles, from southern New York State to northern Mississippi. The region’s 25 million residents live in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and all of West Virginia. The economies of many counties and sub-regions in the Appalachian Region have historically depended on a few dominant industries such as mineral extraction and related manufacturing, which have been in decline over recent decades (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2019a). Despite rich coal and copper resources, there has been a long-standing recognition of the region’s deep-seated poverty throughout much of the 20th century, including when the influential President John F. Kennedy commissioned a study to evaluate social and economic conditions in the region in 1964. While resource-rich, commentators have questioned the extent to which the region’s extractive economy generated local wealth and prosperity. For example, Marshall et al (2020) note the long-term absence of local reinvestment from the extractive sector and the continued extralocal control of resources and land. These structural factors have tended to sustain poverty through exporting profits, inhibiting economic diversification, leading to lower growth and eroding resilience to external economic conditions through exposure to volatile energy and mineral markets.

Despite the establishment of the Appalachian Regional Commission in the 1960s and top-down investment in the region’s physical infrastructure, throughout the 1970s the dominance of extractive industries remained, defining the region’s economic fortunes. This economy is particularly susceptible to cycles of boom and bust and dependant on external global market conditions. However, as Marshall et al (2020) highlight, the loss of employment in Appalachia during periods of cyclical decline exceeds the gains during growth periods, resulting in long-term decline across many Appalachian localities. Consolidating this long-term spiral of decline in employment in the extractive sector, the region has also experienced a decline in its manufacturing base, often in the face of intense international competition, leading to a deepening of disparity between the region and the rest of the US in terms of lower-than-average wages, higher poverty rates, lower educational attainment and health inequalities, including high rates of substance abuse (Pollard and Jacobsen, 2020).

The Appalachian Region is, in many ways, emblematic of many of the challenges facing rural regions in the US, and for understanding the ‘larger political economy affecting rural communities across many parts of America, and of the debates why poor, rural communities at the blunt edge of inequality … appear to engage in increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Gaventa, 2019, p 442).

Rural areas such as these have attracted much media and academic attention in 59

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recent years, particularly following the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. These areas have been described as ‘hollowed out heartlands’ (Edelman, 2021, p 1) or as places and people ‘left behind’ (Ulrich-Schad and Duncan, 2018, p 29), characterised by a ‘geography of despair’ (Johnson and Lichter, 2019, p 5) evident in depopulation, deindustrialisation, poverty and chronic health inequalities. Edelman (2021) further identifies these types of rural places in the US as ‘sacrifice zones’ to capitalism, where wealth has shifted upwards (in class terms) and outwards (in geographic terms), while local institutions and resources have been diminished and eroded, such as local banking services, retail functions and local media.

Our case study, Fannin County, is located in north Georgia’s Appalachian communities, close to the borders of Tennessee and North Carolina. The population of Fannin County is approximately 26,000, with its largest urban centre, Blue Ridge, populated by fewer than 1,400 people. The wider sub-region is mostly rural and mountainous, with the topography of the area adding to the isolation of north Georgia’s rural communities, and in many ways has made regional development efforts difficult particularly in transportation, infrastructure development and delivery of education services (State of Georgia, 2019). Fannin County is an area in transition. Historically, the area’s economy was related to timber extraction and copper mining, and later the production of sulphuric acid (as a by-product of copper extraction pollution), which ceased in the 1980s. The area also suffered the closure of the Levi Strauss plant in 2002 after 40 years of operation (Northwest Georgia Regional Commission, 2017). Manufacturing in surrounding counties has also been impacted by two interrelated external factors. First, manufacturing in this sub-region has centred on products for the construction sector, with demand falling dramatically following the great financial crisis of 2008 and the national collapse in housebuilding. Second, while demand is returning, the jobs have not been replaced due to a shift in production methods to automated manufacturing (State of Georgia, 2019). Faced with these challenges, the local economy in Fannin County has been transitioning from an extraction and production-based economy towards an amenity-based economy, built on the sustainable consumption of the area’s natural resources. This shift was initially centred on natural amenity-based tourism, but also underpins the county’s efforts to attract new entrepreneurs to live in the area through a live-work-play strategy.

Despite the deindustrialisation within Fannin and neighbouring counties and the fall-out from the global financial crisis ten years ago, job growth has remained resilient over the last decade (with 43 per cent of the working population selfemployed) along with above-average population growth for north Georgia (Appalachian Regional Commission, 2019b).

Early success in developing a tourism economy was based on capitalising on visitors to the nearby Chattahoochee National Forest (attracting two million visitors per year) with 40 per cent of the county’s land incorporated into the publicly owned forest park. The area also contains natural springs and high-quality waters, leading to its designation as Georgia’s trout fishing capital. The Blue 60

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Ridge Lake, dam and reservoir also serve as a focal point for tourist activities, with a marina and canoe and kayak launch site below the dam to provide access to the Toccoa River, with Class I and II rapids (that is, classed as suitable for novices) following regular dam releases. Early tourism-related businesses served the outdoor recreation market and tended to be small, locally owned and operated enterprises, and with the additional development of tourist infrastructure (for example, the marina), they have now developed into a key growth sector for the local economy. For example, the county’s largest town, Blue Ridge, is now a key centre for tourism-related enterprises with over 60 businesses located in its downtown, including outdoor recreation shops, sports equipment hire stores, restaurants, motels and craft shops (see Figure 3.4). Managing and promoting tourism is now a collaborative effort coordinated by Fannin County’s Chamber of Commerce, which has been key to developing business-to-business links, creating local value chains and maximising tourist spend in the area, which combined with small, locally owned and operated businesses, ensures a local distribution of income. The Chamber’s mission is to ‘support existing businesses, promote positive economic development and tourism, while preserving our community’s natural resources and enhancing our community’s character, natural resources and quality of life’ (Fannin County Chamber of Commerce, nd.).

Figure 3.4: Blue Ridge downtown’s tourist economy – an example of bar/restaurant business

Source: Photo supplied by Jan Hackett (President, Fannin County Chamber of Commerce) and reproduced with permission

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Box 3.1: The Fannin County tourist product • Hiking, fishing, mountain biking trails, horse-riding and related outdoor activities • Water sports: canoeing, white-water rafting, tubing and kayaking • Aerial adventure park (highline climbing, zip lines) • Working farms and farm shops (particularly related to orchards), with direct selling of agricultural products to visitors • Weekly farmers’ market in Blue Ridge – direct selling of local farm produce to visitors and locals • Three local wineries and four craft breweries, including tours • Arts-based tourism: Blue Ridge is designated as an Arts Town and includes art galleries, craft shops and arts festivals • Music festivals over the summer months • Blue Ridge Scenic Railway, connecting Blue Ridge with surrounding towns through a historic mountain rail line • Diverse accommodation options: cabin rentals, lodges, motels, an RV park and bed and breakfasts Source: Compiled by authors

Much of the area’s soft and physical tourist infrastructure is developed by the Chamber of Commerce, including marketing, online resources for visitors and a visitor centre, funded through local accommodation tax revenues (ensuring local reinvestment of revenue). The Chamber now represents over 800 businesses across the county, indicative of a local entrepreneurial culture, with a board of 20 representatives from public and private bodies, and a further six committees reflecting the public–private composition of the board. In addition to a tourism committee, other committees deal with developing the area’s external political relations, fostering new business leads and an ambassadors committee to mentor and promote local enterprises.

With enhanced local capacity and know-how, the local tourism product has developed and diversified as indicated in Box 3.1. It is noticeable that local enterprises have developed webs of complementarity (for example, clustering of outdoor sports retail along with equipment hire and activity organisers), while revenue is maximised through business-to-business linkages. This has been beneficial to local farmers and local producers selling directly to visitors through a weekly farmers’ market and supplying local businesses with produce, encouraged by a state-wide ‘Georgia Grown’ food labelling scheme for supporting agri-business.

While the Fannin Chamber of Commerce has been an important enabler, their work has also been supported by the county’s Comprehensive Development Plan, which has provided a key strategic tool in the careful management of the 62

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county’s environmental and cultural resources. The most recent Comprehensive Development Plan (2018–28) (North West Georgia Regional Commission, 2017) was adopted in 2017 and prepared by the North West Georgia Regional Commission in collaboration with the mayor’s offices in three of Fannin County’s key towns along with a county-wide commission, a planning committee of elected representatives and support from four local stakeholder-based planning committees. In addition to this direct stakeholder engagement and wider public meetings, an online community needs platform was developed to input into the planning process. Core to the planning strategy is protection of the county’s natural amenities, with policies targeting the protection of key waterways with detailed environmental assessment criteria. Protecting the wider rural landscape is also included as a key strategic goal within the plan, related to protecting biodiversity, enhancing the rural experience for visitors and maintaining a high-quality environment for local food production. Thus, the plan avoids the false dichotomy between economy and environment to stress the importance of a healthy environment for the local economy and emphasising economic activities which minimise impacts on this environmental quality. The planning strategy also supports wider tourism activities, including the provision of tourist accommodation, prioritising facilities for artistic development and protecting public space for the farmers’ market.

While the tourism sector has provided the backbone to the new rural economy in Fannin County, its comprehensive plan also recognises the need for further economic diversification to increase long- term economic stability. These policies are aligned with natural resource protection through seeking to attract new permanent residents and to bring in new entrepreneurs to encourage local business start-ups, recognising the importance of creating a local entrepreneurial culture through attracting new social capital, human resources and skills into the community. The comprehensive plan prioritises small businesses that are siteappropriate, supported by local zoning policies. As outlined in the plan: The benefits of this would be many, including people being able to work where they live, local high school graduates returning to the county after completing college, and residents having access to more services in the community. With good planning, a diversified economy would contribute to the rural, small-town culture that residents and visitors love. (2017, p 4) This planning approach is further supported by the Fannin County Development Authority, which markets the area for potential new business development based on the county’s natural amenities, emphasising the potential to live-work-play through its aspirational slogans such as, ‘grow your business naturally’ and ‘unwind, relax, create’. The development authority also acts as a key enabler. In addition to marketing, the authority is responsible for identifying serviced workspaces and sites (within the context of the comprehensive plan) and for providing ready-made 63

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Figure 3.5: Workspace provision in Blue Ridge – serviced site with three tenants

Source: Photo supplied by Christie Gribble (Executive Director, Fannin County Development Authority) and reproduced with permission

solutions for new start-ups or for businesses relocating to the area (see Figure 3.5 for an example of workspace provision). It also focuses on ‘soft supports’ for relocating businesses (and new residents) to the area, including broader quality of life information on local schools and services, and is currently participating in Georgia State’s Remote Work Ready Pilot Program to attract new residents through marketing to mobile workers.

This case study is indicative of a rural economy shifting from a long-standing emphasis on production and extraction towards consumption. Key to Fannin County’s emerging new rural economy has been a positive reappraisal of its natural resources as key to economic development, recognising ‘the positive economic value of the presence of a healthy environment’ (Hibbard et al, 2019, p 39). This has included direct benefits in terms of attracting visitors and also more indirectly through attracting new residents and businesses thanks to the area’s rural and outdoor-oriented lifestyle. This echoes Hibbard and Lurie’s (2019, p 3) observation that a ‘robust locality development strategy needs to start by recognising the web of economic and social ties in which rural people are entangled, based largely on the landscape and in the way they use it’. However, central to any success has been the importance of key enablers and good local governance, which assisted in ‘converting’ environmental capital to economic capital and local prosperity. This includes a collaborative local planning strategy that emphasises environmental protection and connects environmental quality with local prosperity, and a local development authority capitalising on local amenities to attract new residents and entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the local chamber of commerce has played a pivotal role in fostering a local 64

The economic rural

entrepreneurial capacity through an outward-facing approach (for example, building external political networks, attracting new social capital, human resources and skills) and by developing local webs of locally owned enterprises (for example clustering of business, local supply chains, collective marketing and reinvesting capital).

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Financialising economic capital: Dobromir, Romania Mazzucato (2018) argues that modern capitalists are ‘takers, not makers’, extracting profit from fixed assets – real estate and the land it sits on – rather than generating new value. Productivity (making) has been eclipsed in the recent past by a form of ‘voodoo economics’ that delivers no added value but extracts profit (taking) via ‘new-fangled financial engineering techniques’ (Christophers, 2010, p 106). The financialisation of fixed assets has been long in the making. In its simplest form, the creation of debt – and the levying of interest on that debt – constitutes the extraction of profit through a financial channel. If someone buys the debt (or a bundle of debts attached to a portfolio of assets) then that profit will be captured by a third party – an investor in ‘debt securities’. This type of financialisation has been a feature of financial markets for the last hundred years, but in the more recent past, forms of financialisation have become increasingly varied, with research highlighting its application within commercial development (Weber, 2015), infrastructure (Pike et al, 2019), housing (Aalbers, 2016), land in general terms (Ryan-Collins et al, 2017) and more specifically applied to farmland and the apparatus of agricultural production (Gunnoe, 2014).

Gunnoe (2014) has drawn attention to the particular appeal of farmland in transition economies and other places where land values remain relatively low. This, he argues, has resulted in the consolidation of landholdings by investment banks and financial service providers (both of which create tradable investment funds, backed by land assets). Other research has observed the same phenomenon in North America (Newell and Lincoln, 2007), Australia (Magnan, 2015) and the Global South (Robertson and Pinstrup-Andersen, 2010; Cotula, 2013). There has been a great deal of recent concern for the impacts of this form of financialisation on rural places, especially if the practice of ‘taking’ reduces the ‘the extent to which economic action is embedded in structures of social relations’ (Granovetter, 1985, p 481). In other words, economic activities centred on or supported by extra-local investors may be placeless and disconnected: their objective is to extract value rather than recycle that value locally in support of communities and places. The beneficiaries receive ‘income’ and ‘accumulation’ returns on quarterly spreadsheets, and financial service providers, competing against others, extract as much as they can for their clients. They operate in a neoliberal framework, expanding the commodification not only of land but also ‘rural products and rural labour’ (Haroon Akram-Lodhi, 2007, p 1437). Literature on ‘land grabs’, in the Global South (and also in affected transition economies), notes low levels of embeddedness and a range of repercussions for communities arising from 65

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corporate regimes of food production that prioritise profit maximisation above any social goals (Loris, 2016). Indeed, this form of financialisation has ‘diverse implications for poverty and inequality in rural societies through the concentration of landholdings, growth of wage labour, new classes of accumulating elites, and rising landlessness’ (Hall et al, 2015).

Dobromir is a commune in Constanța County in the very south of Romania, on the border with Bulgaria. At the 2002 census, it was the only commune in the country with a Turkish Muslim majority. There are six villages within Dobromir, including the village of Dobromir itself. The overall population was just under 3,000, falling to 2,600 in 2012. It is notable for few reasons apart from being one of the most deprived local government areas in Romania (Mitrică et al, 2020) and also a focus of agricultural land investment by Rabo Farm. Rabo Farm is part of Bouwfonds Investment Management, the real estate asset manager of the Netherlands-based Rabobank Group. Established in 1898 by Dutch farmers looking to pool resources and support farm modernisation and improvement, the group is now a financial services provider which claims to be an ‘ethical investor’ that takes care of the people and places that become a focus of its investment activity. Rabo Farm ‘initiates, structures and manages funds that invest in farms and agricultural production’: it is a vehicle for investing in farmland and farm infrastructure (including ‘building, storage, drainage, irrigation and liming’), and arable crops such as grains and oilseeds. Besides delivering returns to investors, linked to farm yields and appreciating land values, it also aims (or claims) to support ‘local social and economic development’ (Rabofarm.com, cited in Gallent et al, 2019, p 69).

For investors, Rabo Farm offers two funds focused on farmland and agricultural production: ‘Europe Fund I’ (drawing on investments across the EU) and ‘Fund II’ (focused on Central and Eastern Europe and established in 2014). Rabo Farm is an intermediary between investors (to whom it provides financial services) and farmers (to whom it provides, among other things, purchase and leaseback schemes, which release equity for farm upgrading). The leaseback model works in one of two ways: farms are purchased by Rabo Farm and either leased back to the vendor/owner or to a new tenant farmer. The expectation is that capital raised from the sale should be invested in ways that will increase productivity, enabling the tenant to service the rent to Rabo Farm and run a profit. New farmers entering the sector avoid the capital outlay of purchase, presumably leaving them with cash to spend on machinery and labour. Rabo Farm, therefore, ‘provides long-term access to farmland and cooperates in further developing its productivity and efficiency’ (Rabofarm.com, cited in Gallent et al, 2019, p 69) through farm de-leveraging (when farmers are unable to generate sufficient profits to attract more debt to grow their business); through enhanced productivity (when farmers do not intend to buy and own more land but prefer to use cash to operate and lease farms); through sale and leaseback (when farmers want to generate cash to invest in livestock, machinery and so forth, or when they want to finance their own working capital so that they are in a better position to manage the volatility 66

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of the market); through succession (when farmers hand over their farms to a successor who lacks the financial resources to buy from the current owners); and through upgrading (when farmers cannot afford the cost of upgrading their farms, for example drainage, soil improvements, farm base redevelopment). In short, Rabo Farm acquires assets (using investors’ capital), levies rent (correlated to rising productivity) and directs income back to its investor. It holds land as collateral in the event of rent default.

By 2015, Rabobank had committed €315 million to its Europe Fund II, purchasing 21,000 ha of farmland across Romania (from 2011 onwards). It targeted a return on its investment of €900 million within a 10 to 15-year time horizon.

From the point of view of investors (those holding portfolios which include income or accumulation from Fund II), their relationship with the Romanian farms is indirect, via Rabobank (and Rabo Farm), and certainly passive. They have no involvement in the investment strategy or the way Rabobank manages these assets. The income is most likely reported in quarterly statements and credited to ‘Rabobank Europe Fund II’ or perhaps subsumed into an aggregate package of agricultural investment (or just ‘emerging markets’), bundled together by another asset manager. Those managers may switch investments in or out of such funds depending on their performance relative to other bundles, perhaps moving their client’s money to ‘global smaller companies’ or ‘listed infrastructure equity’. Trust is placed in the financial services provider, the hope being – for many investors – that practices are ethically sound while meeting their expectations in terms of risk and return.

Rabo Farm’s leaseback scheme led to the acquisition of farmland in and around 51 Romanian villages in the rural south of the country, including Dobromir.

Investigations by the European Union (and by local journalists) revealed that Rabo Farm’s leaseholders included local politicians and individuals convicted of crimes including modern-day slavery, theft and bribery. Others were ‘local oligarchs with strong connections to corrupt officials’ (Dale-Harris and Semeniuc, 2015, np). Prior to the arrival of Rabo Farm, expectations of the future value of farmland around Dobromir were linked to the prospect of EU membership.

That membership would give farmers access to the EU subsidy regime, which prompted localised land grabs. Dale-Harris (2015) reports on how, in 2006, groups of older villagers were ‘herded’ into vans, taken to the city of Constanța and forced to sign legal documents in darkened rooms in return for envelopes of cash. They had parted with their land for €90 a hectare, which was then bought

by Rabo Farm six years later for upwards of €2,000 a hectare. Indeed, ‘since 2012, Rabobank has bought at least 939 ha of land in Dobromir: the vast majority of which they lease out to the village mayor’ (Dale-Harris, 2015, np). Rabo Farm purchased land around Dobromir for two reasons: first, its fertility, and second, its price (€2,000 to €3,500 per hectare is only a fraction of the cost of farmland in western Europe and is expected to triple in value within a decade).

But the land grab that happened in Dobromir predated Rabo Farm’s arrival.

Demand arising from impending EU membership seemed to offer many farmers 67

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Rural Places and Planning

an escape route from poverty. A great many were reliant on state benefits and the sudden demand for land gave them a quick way of making money. Not all were coerced into selling. But Dale-Harris (2015) notes that all the land purchased in Dobromir and neighbouring villages was acquired by three intermediaries, who used ‘strong arm’ tactics to encourage more recalcitrant villagers to part with land.

The intermediaries engaged local mafia for this purpose, led by a man with links to Dobromir’s former mayor (who was voted from office in 2012).

When Rabobank arrived, it used one of its own subsidiaries to purchase land from the three intermediaries and another company registered overseas – ultimately in Liberia. Dale-Harris’ investigations revealed a number of links from that company to individuals involved in illegal land deals, and land grabs, in various parts of the world, some of whom had faced corruption charges in their own countries. Dobromir’s former mayor became mired in mafia links and became the face of the local land grab. He was replaced, in 2012, by a new mayor who promised to combat local corruption.

But that new mayor now controls more than 3,000 ha of land around the village, including 882 ha on a leaseback contract from Rabo Farm. There has been a huge shift in the pattern of land ownership in the area, triggered firstly

by EU membership and then by Rabobank’s purchase and leaseback scheme.

Dale-Harris (2015, np) asked Rabobank to explain its involvement in this shift: The due diligence process for land acquisitions foresees a check on sellers and intermediaries. These processes have led in a number of cases to the cancellation of cooperation with intermediaries. We take the allegations seriously. We will use any new information to review our business relationships and terminate should your allegations prove to be correct.

But at the time Dale-Harris was writing, the intermediaries were still acquiring land in the area, and Rabobank’s subsidiary was still purchasing it. While there was no suggestion that Rabo Farm and Rabobank were complicit in the theft of land, its offer to landowners incentivised the dispossession of poorer farmers and their substitution with new owners ready to do business with Rabo Farm.

In this way, an extra-local, Dutch multinational bank became implicated in local corruption and land grabbing in eastern Europe.

Constantin et al (2017) have examined the extent of land grabbing and the problems of land rights – and land transfer practices – in transition and posttransition economies. It is the opacity of local practices – alongside EU rules on grant support for farming – that create the context in which dispossession becomes a problem. New leaseholders (including Dobromir’s mayors) are able to claim single farm payments from the EU as a guarantee against rents. It was unclear, in some instances, whether rents were being serviced from incomes derived from more efficient and productive farms or whether EU payments were becoming a substitute for those incomes and were leaking out of the local area and going 68

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The economic rural

straight into the hands of investors. But in the case of Dobromir’s mayor, DaleHarris notes significant modernisation of farming practice: a shiny and efficient farm, with new equipment and ‘vast corrugated steel warehouses’ that would not be out of place in France or the Netherlands.

Transition economies are vulnerable to such practices given the potential uplift in land values that investment can bring and given the apparent inability of legal frameworks to keep pace with the speed of transition. Romanian agricultural values remained low in the post-transition period (Mancia, 2014). This, combined with the enthusiasm of investors to exploit emergent markets and the weaknesses of legal protection for poorer landowners, seems to have caused a perfect storm in which Rabo Farm was caught out. The EU has undertaken its own study of ‘farmland grabbing’ in the EU, noting the problems arising from Rabo Farm’s investment (Directorate-General for Internal Policies, 2015). The trust placed in intermediaries was perhaps Rabo Farm’s undoing, or rather the undoing of villagers. The financialisation of farmland runs the risk of siphoning off value from rural places and depositing it in the hands of international investors, but that risk is nothing compared to the dangers of dispossession, which in the case of Dobromir has indeed created ‘new classes of accumulating elites’ while advancing ‘landlessness’ (Hall et al, 2015). The new money in rural areas that financialisation brings can be used to deliver increased productivity, wage growth and rising wellbeing (Gallent et al, 2019). But weak governance practices, locally and institutionally, conspired against such an outcome in Dobromir, a case which scores badly against all our measures of a good rural place.

What can be drawn from these cases?

This chapter has focused on economic capital, conceptualised as comprising: (1) physical productive infrastructure; (2) enterprise infrastructure; and (3) community wealth-building capacity. Together these sub-components provide assets and the capacity to generate local wealth creation. Underpinning this potential is the valorisation of place-based assets and capitals that can be ‘converted’ to economic capital through key enabling factors, such as human resources, good governance or new technologies.

The first two case studies in this chapter demonstrate the potential for converting place-based assets to local wealth creation. The revitalisation of Røros in Norway has been based on the preservation and exploitation of tangible and intangible heritage as a means to generate local economic opportunities. In this case, extra-local specialised knowledge and skills within the heritage sector were key in recognising the potential value and uniqueness of the built fabric in Røros.

However, these efforts at preservation and importantly the designation of Røros as a UNESCO World Heritage Site has fostered a local entrepreneurial culture to not only attract visitors but also to develop local value chains in terms of local crafts and foods. Collectively organised events and local branding enable local businesses to thrive while developing connections with local supply chains. The 69

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unique heritage of Røros has also fostered the growth of local speciality and organic food, developed through new alliances and networks and building on the brand recognition of Røros and consumer trust in its heritage image.

In Fannin County in the US, key to its economic success has been an emphasis on its natural resource amenities and environmental capital. Like Røros, tourism has been the backbone of the new rural economy in Fannin; however, further diversification is now central to the area’s plans to attract new residents, entrepreneurs and businesses to the area based on the appeal of its natural amenities and rural lifestyle. The Røros and Fannin County cases illustrate the importance of good governance and the role of institutions in enabling economic development. Whether drawing in expertise from national and regional levels or creating collaborative local alliances, effective governance and local leadership are central to local wealth creation. This includes the ability to foster local ownership of enterprises (thus retaining profits locally), business-to-business links in creating local value chains and retaining local know-how to mentor new entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, many of these attributes were absent in the third case of Dobromir in Romania. Rather than utilising land assets for local wealth creation, the value of land is being extracted from the area through an often opaque process of financialisation overseen by financial institutions operating at a panEuropean or global level. There are parallels here with past resource extraction in the Appalachian Region, whereby land and mineral resources were owned by external operators, leading to profit extraction and a lack of reinvestment of capital within local places, which in turn sustained local poverty. More plural and local forms of ownership provide greater potential for more equitable wealth creation than is possible where economic activities are structured by the interests of distant investors. In Dobromir, this external ownership of key local resources was compounded by weak local governance, providing limited opportunities for enhancing local quality of life.

In both Røros and Fannin County, spatial and physical planning strategies have been critical in providing an institutional framework for place-based development.

Too often, planning is viewed as a barrier to economic growth in rural places, or as a means of stopping things happening through restrictive regulation (Scott, 2019).

However, both these case studies demonstrate that planning has played a critical role in protecting rural assets that now occupy centre stage within a reimagined rural economy. Thus, both cases have avoided the outdated dualism of economy versus protection through understanding the economic potential of heritage assets or natural amenity and preventing the erosion of these assets through insensitive development. This ethos, along with community-focused wealth creation, is critical in avoiding what Mitchell (2013) terms ‘creative destruction’ (borrowing from Schumpeter) in amenity or heritage-rich areas, whereby a narrow focus on private economic gain can often lead to faux-authentic or consumable landscapes with limited local benefits. Instead, generating economic capital should be valued in terms of creating communities and good rural places where people want to live.

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