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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 neo-endogenous 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 context-specific attributes of different spatial pathologies. This rural myopia also impacts planning policy and practice, which privileges urban and metropolitan contexts in research and policy.
Rural areas produce most of the world’s food and textile fibre. They are the source of most of its energy, minerals, water, and timber for construction and for paper pulp. They host the vast majority of the planet’s plant and animal species … Importantly, rural areas are undergoing a major transformation and are the locus of many of the most pressing planning issues, from climate change to biodiversity loss to land-use conflict to rapid market fluctuations.
Extensive land-based resources, in addition to the amenity and heritage dimensions of landscapes, are a key point of departure and substantive focus for planning in rural contexts.
Classical economics traditionally identifies land as a key capital stock, as a productive resource with value, for example for agriculture, mineral extraction or for absorbing waste (Chenoweth et al, 2018).
Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’.
The book presents rural planning – rooted in imagination and reflecting key values – as being embedded in the life of particular places, dealing with critical challenges across housing, services, economy, natural systems, climate action and community wellbeing in ways that are integrated and recognise broader place-making needs. It introduces the breadth of the discipline, presenting examples of what planning means and what it can achieve in different rural places.
the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition – or in other words, to membership in a group – which 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.
Cultural capital can exist in three forms: in the embodied state, i.e., in the form of long-lasting 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 realization of theories or critiques of these theories, problematics, etc.; and in the institutionalized state, a form of objectification which [for example educational qualifications] confers entirely original properties on the cultural capital which it is presumed to guarantee.
In establishing what housing costs should be, market price has been the dominant norm. Indeed, commentators working within the neoliberal perspective maintain that, if a tenant does not pay a market rent, they are subsidised even if the tenant has paid the historic cost (and more) for his/her accommodation. As examples, Davis and Field (2012, p 9) state:
The subsidy for social housing rent varies by region but is substantial. Social rents are well below market rents, ranging from around 60 per cent of private rents in the North to less than 40 per cent in London.
While Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne asserted ‘social housing is subsidised because the price of private rental stock is the real price, reached by logic of the market’ (Osborne, 2015a). Thus, when assessing ‘affordability’, market price has become the dominant benchmark with the state intervening – via consumer subsidies, debt extension measures, deposit raising support and other means – to make housing more ‘affordable’. An alternative approach would be focus on reducing housing production costs. Box 6.1 sets out the historical forms of state housing market intervention aimed at reducing housing costs. According to Fears, Wilson and Barton (2016, p 3):
Currently, the most commonly referred to definition of affordable housing is set out in Annex 2 to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). This is the definition that local planning authorities apply when making provision within their areas to meet local demand/need for affordable housing.
The National Planning Policy Framework (DCLG, 2012a, p 50) defines affordable housing as ‘Social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing, provided to eligible households whose needs are not met by the market.
There are three principal reasons for engaging in comparative studies.
First, cross-national comparison offers the opportunity to identify possible global factors in housing policy development and thereby highlight specific national housing policy determinants. This involves exploring broad structural trends and the contribution of relationships between the state, the market and civil society in particular countries. Nonetheless, identifying cross-national policy trends is bedevilled by complexity in national policy interventions. Policy inputs are diverse ranging across intricate and constantly changing direct subsidies, cheap loans and tax breaks to producers, often applied at regional and local level, to the state’s regulatory activities and complex consumer assistance systems in the forms of tax concessions and means-tested allowances. These policy interventions interact and are embedded in the pathways established in specific national historical contexts. Housing policy is not ‘path determined’ (Murie, 2016b) but it is ‘path dependent’, characterised by Bengtsson (2012, p 161) as:
... if, at a certain point in time, the historical development takes one direction instead of another, some, otherwise feasible, alternative paths will be closed, or at least difficult to reach at a later point.
Second, examining housing policies in other countries can supply ideas to apply in the UK by identifying what policies are in operation elsewhere and, perhaps, assessing their effectiveness. Stephens (2013) regards this function as the most important comparative housing studies purpose, but insists that the comparisons must be embedded in particular housing systems and their interactions with wider social and economic structures. Thus, for example, it is unwise to advocate the transfer of the German rent control system to England (Labour Party, 2015) without appreciating its German policy context: long-term support for private landlords; a far higher proportion of direct institutional investment in the sector; and success in controlling house price inflation thereby reducing the investment dimension in renting/owning decisions.
This chapter examines various answers to the ‘housing question’ organised under the perspectives set out in Chapter One and, in so doing, explores the strengths and weaknesses of each standpoint. Not all the solutions fit neatly into the approaches and they are not related directly to political party policies. Contemporary political parties have adopted programmes, not in accordance with policy rationality or ideological purity, but to win elections.
The financial institutions’ misdemeanours in generating the housing boom and bust gave cold comfort to neoliberals. There was no rational supply/demand calculus driving the credit explosion – it was the product of fees to be harvested from each ‘securitisation’ stage, passing liabilities onto others (Financial Services Authority, 2010) and that ‘risk-taking was given priority over and above the imperative of protecting the capital of the banks’ (Brown, 2010, p 101). The orthodox neoliberal response to the credit crunch would have been to allow to market to wreak revenge on the culprits, but the banks were ‘too big to fail’. With the Royal Bank of Scotland about to join Northern Rock in going bust, Alistair Darling (2011, p 154) told his Treasury officials:
I feel a deep chill in my stomach. If we don’t act immediately, the banks doors would close, cash machines would be switched off, cheques would not be honoured, people would not be paid.
On hearing about a 37% reduction in mortgage lending the prime minister declared ‘these figures made my blood run cold’ (Brown, 2010, p 35).
It took nation state involvement, augmented by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Investment Bank to prevent the crisis becoming a catastrophe.
Most local authorities adopted the model bylaws for building new homes set out in the 1875 Public Health Act and subsequent local authority building regulations meant that new houses were ‘decent’ according to the norms of the time. However, because dwellings deteriorate and standards change, governments have established minimum housing benchmarks and attempted to ensure the existing dwelling stock meets these requirements.
Cuming (2016, p 24) states that ‘the first citation of the word slum “in a dictionary of slang” was in ‘James Hardy Vaux’s Vocabulary of the Flash Language (1812) –where it refers to a room as well as a criminal racket or “rig”’. ‘Slum’ was also applied to an entire area and its surrogates were ‘plague spot’, ‘rookery’, ‘mean streets’, ‘Abyss’ and ‘Labyrinth’ with the term retaining its association with criminality. Manchester’s Angel Meadow – ‘Victorian Britain’s Most Savage Slum’ (Kirby, 2016) – contained all the slum’s ‘externalities’. Its slaughter houses, gasworks, boneyards and catgut factories created a stench than ‘even in a hard frost was sickening’. Its men were ‘malnourished and short, squat and sallow’ and its women ‘stunted and pale’. Cholera attacked the area with ‘extraordinary venom’ (Kirby, 2016, pp 8, 9, 32). ‘Putty shops’ where criminals fenced their stolen goods and drinking dens were common, ‘scuttle’ gangs were at war and Angel Meadow inhabitants were well represented in the frequent riots.
From the 1830s, attempts were made to deal with the ‘nuisance’ caused by individual unfit dwellings and legislation sponsored by authorities in Liverpool and Manchester made it possible to close cellar dwellings.
Margaret Thatcher had little time for ‘governance’. According to Rifkind (2016, p 1) ‘Once, when asked whether she believed in consensus, she replied she did and then added ‘There should be a consensus around my convictions’. She governed, albeit to strengthen the market as a resource distributor. John Major edged towards a ‘governance’ agenda with his Citizen’s Charters placing emphasis on a mixed economy of welfare, value for money and state directed performance benchmarks. For New Labour, ‘governance’ was also a mantra under which market forces could be combined with modest state direction. Words and phrases such as ‘enabling’, ‘what works is what counts’, ‘targets’, performance indicators’, ‘partnerships’, ‘joined up government’ and ‘modernisation’ entered its lexicon. Under the ‘Big Society’ banner, the coalition government abandoned New Labour’s ‘target-setting’ approach, promoting ‘localism’ and voluntary sector involvement in service delivery. Nevertheless, despite ‘Big Society’ rhetoric, the nationally determined social objectives dearth was an act of government and the coalition promoted market provision and efficiency improvements via expenditure cuts. As the Conservative Party tightened its grip on coalition policies it governed to enforce its agenda being at ease in letting market outcomes rest where they fell. This mindset continued into the 2015 Conservative government although Theresa May’s speeches after she became prime minister (May, 2016a; 2016b) indicated a possible change in approach (see Chapter Eleven).
Some commentators have identified a different policy attitude in the devolved governments. A ‘Scottish style’, ‘which refers to the ways in which the Scottish government makes policy following consultation and negotiation with pressure participants such as interest groups, local government organisations and unions’ (Cairney et al, 2016, p 337), has been detected with collaborative objectives formed thereby enlisted ‘pressure participants’ in implementation.
Meanings attached to the term ‘homelessness’ influence estimates of the problem’s extent and the causal notions ascribed to it. Three main definitions are current in the UK. Homelessness can be equated with rooflessness, and can only be legitimately applied – to quote the definition suggested by the government in 1994 – to ‘those who have no accommodation of any sort available for occupation’ (DoE, 1994, p 4). On this meaning, homelessness is often interpreted as ‘rough sleeping’, the ‘homeless’ count will be relatively low and homelessness may be construed as a personal matter, located in an individual’s lifestyle, rather than a ‘social problem’ caused by structural factors. The 1996 Housing Act definition is somewhat broader. It defines homelessness in terms of whether a person has a legal right to occupy a dwelling, qualified by clauses such the accommodation must be ‘reasonable’ to occupy and the person can secure access to it. On this definition, despite the obstacles homeless applicants have to overcome before being accepted as homeless and an accommodation offer made, there were 73,120 homeless households living in temporary accommodation in England in 2016. Such a high number makes it difficult to link homelessness to personal, lifestyle problems although this has not deterred such attempts.
Including ‘home’ in the term ‘homelessness’ indicates a third definition. As Waldron (1993) suggests, humans, as social beings, require a private and secure base in which to carry out functions such as washing, sleeping, reproduction, socialising, and so on. especially if using public space for performing such functions is forbidden.
