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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.
We began this book by articulating the ambition of making future rural places better or at least thinking through the different ways in which those places might become better through actions that respect the unique characteristics and dynamics of place. Our approach to analysing current rural places and place-based interventions has been guided by Bourdieu’s theory of capitals (1986) – and especially by the proposition that social energy, transmutable from economic resources, is at once a source of development opportunity and spatial and social inequalities. More broadly, and like other researchers (for example Castle, 1998; Emery and Flora, 2006; Courtney and Moseley, 2008), we have explored the ‘placing’ and spatial interaction of a broader array of capitals as a basis for unpacking the complex realities of rural places – their materiality, symbolism and socio-economic practices. We have sought to understand how the ‘spatial energy’, rooted in capitals, can be channelled by planning and brought centre stage in the co-production of rural places with communities.
The book has been structured around four capitals that ‘make’ rural places: built, economic, land-based and socio-cultural capital. Our efforts to break these capitals into their constituent parts (a task undertaken in each thematic chapter) illustrates how each is inextricably linked to the others – the built with the economic, land with socio-cultural and so on. There can be no compartmentalising of these capitals; and yet in order to see how the smaller pieces, the assemblages, come together in the whole, it has been necessary to expose the individual parts and map the connections through case studies that hopefully reveal something of the nature of place capitals and also draw attention to the role of planning in its many guises, as a connective tissue that bonds and mobilises such capitals, framing the actions of different groups.
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.
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 February 2010, the UK Government published Fair Society, Healthy Lives: Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England Post-2010, better known as “The Marmot Review” after its lead author Professor Sir Michael Marmot. The very first words of the report are a variation on a quotation from Pablo Neruda:
“Rise up with me against the organisation of misery” Marmot et al, 2010, p 2
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean writer, a left-wing politician, and a confidant of president Salvador Allende; he died within days of August Pinochet’s coup. An official British document that begins with a quotation from a revolutionary communist would seem to promise unusually radical content.
The Marmot Review (2010) received extensive coverage and acclaim from London’s Guardian newspaper and was covered, albeit more briefly, in the Times and the Daily Telegraph, but few of the initial commentators seemed to believe that any of its main recommendations would actually be implemented. These included improving prenatal and early years provision, better drug addiction treatment, and raising social security payments. Rather than anticipating real progress in tackling health inequalities in the wake of the financial crash, one journalist suggested that:
“This grim situation makes those few Marmot recommendations that need not involve great public expense, such as better workplace procedures to deal with stress at work, all the more important, and every one should now get behind these.”(Guardian, 2010, March 15, p 30)
If all that can be done to reduce Britain’s grievous and persistent inequalities in health is to try to abate stress in the workplace, what does that say about the commitment of the British (government, academics, public health professionals, and public alike) to truly creating a fairer and healthier society?
The Marmot Review (2010) followed an earlier report also led by Sir Michael.
Figure 1 charts the share in annual incomes received by the richest single percentile of Britons as recorded between 1918 and 2005, both pre- and post-tax. The richest percentile of people in Britain receive some of their income from earnings, but a greater proportion from interest on wealth, dividends and shares, and the returns on investments made in stocks and rent on their land. At the end of World War I, one in every 100 people lived on about a sixth of the national income, 17 or 18 times more than the average family, 100 times more money than the poorest 10th saw in a year.
From 1918 through the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the share of national income the affluent received fell. As many of the heirs to great estates had died in the Great War, the government taxed the aristocratic families, but just as crucially, the ‘great’ families became just a little more lax over who they slept with and subsequently married. The arithmetic of homogamy (assortative mating) is simple. Should you be a member of a family in the top percentile of income earners in 1918 you might expect to receive around £150,000 a year in today’s money, or 18 times average individual incomes. If you are careful and ignore 99 potential life partners in every 100, you might in theory meet and only choose from the one percentile like you. Because social networks were so limited it was not hard to avoid at least 90 of the other 99, or meet and mistreat them only If you are very rich you are told ‘be careful’, should your eye stray and you find a young man or woman from the bottom of the top decile more attractive, or caring, or just more understanding or interesting, and you had successfully ignored 90 out of 100 other possible suitors, but not the 91st, and you pair up, then you as a pair will drop out of the top percentile.
