Accommodating New Housing Development in Rural Areas? Representations of Landscape, Land and Rurality in Ireland

Abstract

Housing development in rural localities represents one of the most visible and contested indicators of landscape change, as many European rural landscapes that are regulated by weak planning regimes are transformed by incremental suburbanisation. However, scant attention has been given to understanding stakeholder perceptions and interpretations of the physical processes of landscape change and preferences towards accommodating new housing development in rural areas among stakeholder groups. We address this deficit by drawing on a series of stakeholder focus groups undertaken in Ireland addressing: 1) stakeholder perceptions of landscape change and 2) attitudes towards future change scenarios based on digitally manipulated images of landscape change. The focus group analysis suggests a nuanced interpretation among rural residents of the impact of accommodating housing development, particularly in balancing local demand for rural housing with preferences for maintaining a sense of ‘rural character’; however, there were variations across rural space dependant on the extent of development experienced in recent years.

Key Words:

• Rural housing
• contested landscapes
• focus groups

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the Environmental Protection Agency’s ERTDI Programme (Project: Sustainable Rural Development: Managing Housing in the Countryside) for funding this research. Also we wish to thank the anonymous referees for their very helpful comments.

Notes

1. Respondents’ comments are categorised by unique identifier; by urban/rural, by duration of residency (ST = short-term, LT = long-term), by location (urban, KIL = Kildare, TIP = Tipperary and CLR = Clare). Farmers are also identified by their focus group location. Professionals are categorised by their profession.

2. There were three rural focus groups, one urban and one professional focus group. The responses from the rural focus groups were divided by three to be able to compare the relative preference across the three different stakeholder groups.