Interface

Exclusive Countrysides? Rural Gentrification, Consumer Preferences and Planning

Over the last two decades, rural localities within advanced capitalist societies have witnessed unprecedented changes and ruptures to local economies, new demands for rural space, and shifting rural politics, leading to a dramatic reconstitution of rural populations and the formation of a new set of rural social geographies (Bell & Osti, 2010; Marsden, 2009). Many rural places, for example, have experienced profound changes to housing and land markets (Smith, 2007) with a growing desire for rural living and an extended spatial mobility that is leading to increased competition for rural resource use. With the demise of dominant productivist agricultural models and the emergence of diverse consumer and societal demands for rural space, spatial planning has the potential to move centre-stage in the regulation of the countryside and managing rural change processes. However, as Campbell asked in a 2003 Interface on rural planning, which and whose countryside are we planning for?

This Interface aims to explore one dimension of this changing countryside, by examining the gentrification of rural space and its implications for planning practice in rural localities. Gentrification, referring to the transformation of an area into a middle-class space, has most commonly been studied in urban contexts in advanced capitalist societies; however, increasingly authors have broadened the geography of gentrification studies to include gentrification processes within suburban and rural localities. While early accounts of gentrification were largely associated with distinctive landscapes of urban renovation and renaissance (Davidson & Lees, 2005) as working class neighbourhoods in global cities were transformed by new social geographies, as gentrification matures, both as a concept and as a process, new spaces of gentrification have emerged, both globally and down the urban hierarchy (Lees et al., 2010). Butler (2007), for example, suggests that the growth of large city regions have created whole new areas that have become desirable places to live, not just in the city, but also in the suburbs and beyond where previous inhabitants have found themselves moving aside for the new expanded post-industrial classes.

Similarly, Phillips (2004) has been critical of the narrow gentrification research focus on urban geographies, while Smith (2002) argues that gentrification is not only apparent in a range of spatial scales, but also manifests at a range of locations—suburban, rural, inner urban and retirement hotpots such as coastal resorts. This has led Smith to call for the need to “widen the spatial lens” of gentrification studies. In this context, Davidson and Lees (2005) suggest four key elements of gentrification not attached to a specific landscape or context: (1) reinvestment of capital, (2) social upgrading of a locale by incoming high income groups, (3) landscape change, and, (4) direct of indirect displacement of low income groups.

From a planning perspective, gentrification raises difficult challenges. Central to gentrification is the consumption of space as part of self or class identity. In a rural context, the acquisition of symbolic capital bound up with notions of “place” in the countryside has proved very alluring for the new middle classes in pursuit of identity, belonging and status (Smith & Phillips, 2001). These middle-class consumer preferences have, in turn, fuelled an increasing demand for a “place in the country”, leading to the “colonisation” of the countryside by an affluent exurban or suburban, middle class of homeowners who seek to create a lifestyle organised around the consumption of nature and rurality, and the subsequent displacement of longer term residents (Darling, 2005). For planning researchers there is a clear need to understand the consumption processes and preferences of the middle class that are central in shaping places: both from a behavioural perspective (e.g. influencing consumer preferences through planning policies), and also in developing effective policies to mitigate the negative consequences of gentrification processes.

Moreover, displacement concerns may also be heightened by local planning policies which (at least in a UK context) tend to focus on the issue of restricting housing supply in rural areas on environmental and landscape grounds (Gallent & Tewdwr-Jones, 2007) rather than a concern for local housing needs or maintaining balanced rural communities. In many parts of the UK and in particular England, the dual pressure of restrictive housing supply and the effects of in-migration, have resulted in acute affordability issues for local communities (Best & Shucksmith, 2006). In the UK case, supply has tended to be outstripped by increased demand from commuters, retirees, second home owners, and those buying properties as holiday homes (Gallent & Tewdwr-Jones, 2000; Shucksmith, 1981; 1990). Those purchasing properties for these purposes tend to be in-migrants to the area, with greater buying power, who can out-bid local residents, resulting in rises in house prices beyond the reach of locals (Gallent & Tewdwr-Jones, 2000; Stockdale et al., 2000). These trends are reinforced in local planning arenas, where newcomers and middle-class interests mobilise to resist any further development in rural areas. An understanding of how dominant planning ideologies may (re)produce social and spatial inequalities is critical in any efforts in developing inclusive and socially equitable place-making strategies.

This Interface draws on both negative and positive dimensions of rural in-migration processes, with examples from a range of spatial contexts. The first paper, by Darren Smith, explores the question: what is rural gentrification? Smith argues that the use of rural gentrification in the literature continues to be pre-anchored to urban-based perspectives of gentrification, rather than attuned to rural contexts, and progress has been gradual in progressing our understanding of the diverse processes of gentrification. To advance debates, his paper outlines recent studies that have grappled with the temporalities, social differences, divergent expressions, and differential impacts of rural gentrification. As many rural places in advanced capitalist societies become the domain of affluent groups, and socio-spatial segregation along axes of affluence becomes more entrenched, Smith contends that rural gentrification provides a powerful conceptual lens to understand a key exclusionary process of change.

The following two papers provide a planning perspective on rural gentrification debates. Firstly, Mark Shucksmith critically examines the role of planners as agents of rural gentrification. Shucksmith highlights the longstanding concern that the British countryside has been characterised by a “remorseless displacement of lower and middle income groups by those with more resources”, leading to acute housing affordability issues in rural localities as planning policy has prioritised landscape protection and urban containment over maintaining balanced rural communities. Shucksmith's paper examines the entrenched preservationist narrative which frames rural planning debates in England, underpinned by romanticised notions of the English countryside together with the new rural middle classes seeking to preserve an exclusive countryside and to enhance their own property values. A key issue raised by Shucksmith is the role of dominant planning ideologies (in this case rural preservation) in producing socially inequitable outcomes and the creation of social and spatial segregation. These themes are further explored by Nick Gallent, who examines how these debates are “played out” within local planning arenas across a range of rural contexts. Drawing on interview and focus group data, Gallent argues that an educated service-class population, often comprising commuting households and affluent retirees, regularly challenge the case for additional house-building in rural localities, seeking to “raise the drawbridge” and shield their investments from what they viewed as unnecessary and unwanted development. Gallent's paper explores key narratives constructed by middle-class interests around “affordability”, “localness” and “local priority” which are deployed within local policy arenas to undermine the case for new development, and speculates how these discourses may influence planning outcomes within the context of the UK Government's localism agenda.

The following two papers provide an alternative viewpoint on rural in-migration processes. Firstly, Keith Halfacree examines a radical form of gentrification through an examination of alternative lifestyles and a “back-to-the-land” movement, whereby a gentrifier may be seeking access to dimensions of a lifestyle that are not found in urban life—a “geographical life-raft” as termed by Halfacree. The paper outlines key features of this “radical rural”, including an emphasis on “low impact development” and the maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems. However, Halfacree also highlights the tension between back-to-the-land movements and resistance by planners and more conventional gentrifiers to accommodating low-impact developments in rural localities. Secondly, Sue Kilpatrick, Susan Johns, Peter Vitartas and Martin Homisan examine middle-class rural in-migration in more remote rural localities, drawing on research from Australia and Canada. In this paper, in-migration is cast as an opportunity for rural areas. Rather than lead to the displacement of lower and middle-income groups experienced in near-urban localities, an influx of newcomers represents an opportunity for remote rural localities as new residents can add new skills, entrepreneurial capacity and political capital. This suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of the role and geographies of middle-class in-migration processes and its implications for sustainable rural communities: from a process that consolidates socio-spatial exclusion to one that adds much needed capital and skills to underpin rural regeneration initiatives.

The Interface is concluded by Trevor Cherrett, a rural planner who served as an expert advisor to the UK's Commission for Rural Communities from 2005–2010. Cherrett returns to the UK context, suggesting an inevitability of the middle-class colonisation of rural space, given the orthodoxies of rural planning and the preservationist ethos of the post-war era. In his paper, Cherrett examines the implications of gentrification processes for planning practice and how practice is likely to respond to new drivers of change. In his commentary, Cherrett reminds us that progress towards the provision of affordable housing in rural areas has been painfully slow, suggesting a more proactive approach is required by planners to alleviate the impacts of gentrification processes.

Introduction: Gentrified Rural Britain, and Beyond?

Over the last four decades, the local population structures of many British rural places have been reconfigured in distinct ways, tied to broader changing socio-cultural and economic relations (Woods, 2007). Various factors have intersected to produce more homogenous rural population profiles of affluent households—dominated by in-migrant gentrifiers. As a result, some previously socially mixed rural communities have fragmented, as low-income households have been replaced by affluent households; the former unable to compete in revalorised, gentrified rural housing markets (Shucksmith, 1990). These trends of rural gentrification are now commonplace across much of rural Britain (Phillips, 2007; Smith, 2007a). One of the key factors has been the inter-linked recommodification and escalating costs of rural housing (Phillips, 2005), fuelled, in part, by the growing demands of affluent households for rural residence and counter-urban lifestyles (Champion, 2001, 2005), and, to a lesser extent, the purchasing of second homes/rural tourism (Gallent, 2009).

At the same time, as many rural places have become the preserve of affluent households, the supply of new-build rural housing has been largely restricted to high-cost and prestigious developments. Indeed, low-cost housing schemes are often successfully opposed by powerful, well-organised groups of affluent in-migrant households, via what Woods (2007) terms a “new politics of the rural”. As affluent in-migrant households use their social, cultural and economic capital to (re)produce idyllic rural places, these exclusionary social practices further compound the decreasing proportion(s) of low-income households in many rural communities (Milbourne, 2007).

Crucially, what these processes of rural gentrification emphasise is the general reciprocity between in- and out-migration in some rural locations. This inter-relationship between migration, population change and exclusion is a key factor in the rise of unidimensional social compositions within gentrified rural places (Cloke & Little, 1990). Moreover, these linkages are a key signifier of rural gentrification; a process which leads to the exclusion and marginalisation of low income households, and, ultimately, the socio-spatial segregation of affluent and poor rural populations. Therefore, policy makers, planners and other practitioners seeking to translate central government aspirations for more sustainable, socially mixed, and balanced rural communities clearly need to fully engage with the issue of rural gentrification.

“Traditional Wisdoms” of Rural Social Change: The “Absence” of Rural Gentrification?

The prevalence of exclusive rural housing markets and exclusionary forms of migration is clearly not a contemporary phenomenon. Since the 1970s, such processes of restructuring have been mapped and analysed by many empirical studies of rural change, such as the pioneering work of Ray Pahl (1964). Other prominent findings include Newby's exposé of changing rural societies in his text, The Deferential Worker. As Newby (1977, p. 322) states, for example:

The “drift from the land” has denuded many villages of a substantial proportion of their former working population and this exodus has in many areas of lowland Britain been compensated for only by the arrival of a car-owning, overwhelmingly middle-class group of immigrant urbanites whose impact upon the local community has been prodigious.

In the subsequent text, Green and Pleasant Land (1979, p. 273–274), Newby comments:

Indeed, the two most important changes [to rural communities] are quite obvious, despite not having always been granted the attention to which they deserve…there is a danger that, as rural England increasingly becomes middle-class England, their [established rural working class populations] plight will be ignored and their needs overlooked.

In a similar vein, Abram's (2003, p. 39) retrospective investigation of rural social change in Buckinghamshire, England, found:

Among those who moved in during the 1960s was a group of professionals… including a number of planners and architects, as well as Business people. A core group created a “Village society” early on with the intention of preserving and encouraging the best of planning and architecture in the village. (p. 39, author's emphasis)

It is notable that such accounts of rural change have not been explicitly conceptualised as a possible rural expression of gentrification, and indeed, there is a legacy to this ambivalence towards rural gentrification; despite narratives often depicting population (i.e. social class) transitions akin to geographies of urban gentrification. Exemplars include Cloke and Thrift's (1987) study of rural in-migrants and intra-class conflict, and Halfacree's (1993, 1995) examination of rural in-migration processes and social change.

This orthodoxy within rural studies, to seemingly disengage or dispense with the term gentrification within accounts of rural change, has been widely critiqued by Phillips. As Phillips (2005) asserts: “rural gentrification appears as a small, restricted and rather unremarkable discursive space” (p. 477). For Phillips, rural scholars need to: “transform the discursive space of rural gentrification into something more akin to that of the urban” (p. 477). Despite this call for rural gentrification to be adopted and taken more seriously within studies of rural change, the concept of gentrification continues to be used in a relatively piecemeal way, with the majority of rural scholars seemingly preferring to use other ideas such as counterurbanisation to describe rural social change (see also Phillips, 2010).

What this means for rural studies per se is that the high level of intense scrutiny and critical debates of gentrification that have taken place within urban studies (e.g. Lees, 2000) have not been replicated within rural studies. For instance, recent dialogues between urban scholars about the proliferation of new-build housing (as part of urban regeneration schemes) tied to the rolling out of “positive” gentrification as urban policy (e.g. Lees, 2008), and the implications of the production of this new-build housing for conceptual understandings of gentrification have generally bypassed rural studies. Of course, a factor here may be that the magnitude and scale of (gentrified) new-build rural housing is less intense when compared to urban locations.

Rural gentrification therefore continues to be utilised in uncritical ways by rural scholars, despite Phillips's calls (e.g. 2004) for a more nuanced treatment of the term. As a result, conceptually, gentrification as an expression of rural change is generally employed in line with well-established “tiered” definitions of urban gentrification such as Warde (1991) and Davidson and Lees (2005) (see Table 1).

Table 1. Tiered definitions of gentrification

Change	Warde (1991)	Davidson and Lees (2005)
Social	A process of resettlement and social concentration, a process of displacement of one group of residents with another of higher status, entailing new patterns of social segregation.	The social upgrading of a locale by incoming higher income groups; direct or indirect displacement of low income groups
Economic	An economic reordering of property values, a commercial opportunity for the construction industry, and generally, an extension of the system of private ownership of domestic property.	The reinvestment of capital
Cultural	A gathering of individuals with a putatively shared culture and lifestyle, or at least shared, class-related consumer preference.
Physical	A transformation to the built environment, via building work, that exhibits some common distinctive, aesthetic features and the emergence of certain types of local service provision.	Landscape change

Of course, this is not to argue, as noted above, that rural scholars have overlooked the need to critically question the conceptual meaning of the term. On the contrary, empirical studies have demonstrated how rural gentrification takes differential forms and follows different trajectories in different rural places—as epitomised by Phillips's discussion (2002) of “other geographies of rural gentrification” (p. 5). Rather, it is being argued here that if rural gentrification is to be more effectively employed as a term with conceptual power to make sense of contemporary (and emerging) rural social change(s), it would be valuable for more grounded, empirical evidence to inform the drawing of the conceptual boundaries of rural gentrification (and potentially gentrification more broadly). To some degree, this is the direction that is being followed by scholars of urban gentrification (e.g. Lees, 2011); an approach that would undoubtedly strengthen the conceptual prowess of rural gentrification to deepen knowledge of contemporary rural social change.

The Diversity of Rural Gentrification: Some Recent Empirical Evidence?

In a landmark paper that set the impetus for subsequent empirical studies of rural gentrification, Phillips argues that “rural studies would appear to lag behind urban studies in recognising the diversity of ways one can interpret and understand gentrification” (1993, p. 138). Nearly two decades on, it can be hypothesised that this statement has considerable, and arguably increasing, resonance to the current context. There has been a limited body of scholarship that has heeded Phillips's call for rural scholars to draw out the commonalities and differences between rural gentrification in various rural localities. This is notable as Phillips stresses the importance of delimiting precisely “how one is conceptualising the term gentrification” (1993, p. 138), and this sentiment clearly warrants the fuller attention of rural scholars. Positively, some recent studies have substantiated, in an empirical sense, the diversity of rural gentrification, emphasising the temporalities, social differences, divergent expressions, and differential impacts of rural gentrification. These four themes are discussed, in turn, below.

The Place-Specific Temporalities of Rural Gentrification

Nearly, a decade ago Smith (2002) contended that understandings of gentrification per se could be deepened by the incorporation of a more nuanced temporal perspective of gentrification. It was argued that this would allow scholars to more fully unpick the ways in which gentrification is an inherently dynamic process of change with distinct individual biographies tied to specific socio-spatial contexts; epitomised by sequential phases involving different expressions of economic and cultural capital, and different actors and institutions at particular stages of the process. Smith argued that this standpoint would enable researchers of gentrification to more fully understand the histories, diversities and different geographies of gentrification (within and between different places), and therefore to construct more robust theorisations and conceptualisations of gentrification.

Within studies of rural gentrification, this approach has reaped many benefits, exemplified by Phillips's (2002, 2005) studies of rural gentrification in Berkshire and Norfolk, England. A more recent contribution here is Stockdale's investigation of six gentrified Scottish study areas (2010). Using a novel analysis of a household survey to investigate annual (pre-tax) income of heads of migrant and non-migrant households, Stockdale is able to draw the conclusion that rural gentrification “is not a neat process easily fitted into a standard stereotypical view” (p. 39). Rather, Stockdale argues that rural gentrification “is a multifaceted process evolving through different stages and giving rise to different outcomes” (p. 39). For Stockdale, the temporal and geographical phases of gentrification “have direct relevance to how we define gentrification” (p. 31).

Understanding the effects of the temporalities of gentrification processes is crucially important if scholars are to be more alert to identifying rural places that are witnessing the (pre-)embryonic stages of rural gentrification, and to track, perhaps via longitudinal approaches, how the trajectories of processes of rural change mutate over time. Equally, there is merit in investigating rural places where more mature processes of gentrification are entrenched, to understand what happens in “overwhelmingly gentrified rural places”, perhaps considering the pertinence of the concept of super-gentrification in some rural contexts. To date, there have been limited studies of these latter forms of rural gentrification, and our knowledge of the social and economic processes associated with both the emergence and deep penetration of rural gentrification are lacking.

Such points may be particularly pertinent to the current temporal context given the profound effects of the economic recession and changing political conditions (i.e. austerity politics and state debts) will have major bearings on how, when and where processes of rural gentrification unfold. Research is warranted to explore, for example, whether processes of rural gentrification have stagnated, or whether the processes have been transformed in existing gentrified rural locations. Equally, it would be intriguing to examine whether the current socio-economic context provides new opportunities for rural gentrification to emerge, or be stimulated by institutional actors, perhaps in different socio-spatial rural contexts. It is possible, for instance, that new geographies of rural gentrification will appear, underpinned by different social, cultural, economic and political relations.

The Social Differences of Rural Gentrification

Arguably, one of the current gaps in our understanding of rural gentrification is that rural gentrifiers have tended to be treated as socially (and to a lesser extent, culturally) “homogenous lumps”, often portrayed as affluent families with children, or affluent couples at pre-family forming stages of their lifecourse. There is limited understanding of the socio-cultural and economic diversity between different groups of rural gentrifiers, particularly in terms of social cleavages such as ethnicity and race, disability, age and lifecourse, social class, lifestyle and living arrangements, and sexuality, and so on.

The value of more fully interrogating these social (and cultural and economic) differences within processes of rural gentrification is emphasised by Smith and Holt's (2005) study of lesbian migrants in the gentrified context of Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. As Smith and Holt argue, a focus on the links between rural gentrification and sexuality “disrupts conventional representations of gentrified rural locations as the preserve of heterosexual, new middle-class households, and emphasises the need to transcend heteronormative interpretations of gentrification” (p. 320). Clearly, their suggestion for scholars of rural gentrification to examine “how different lifestyles and identities intersect within rural gentrification” (p. 320) can be equally transposed to studies of rural gentrification and ethnicity and race, disability, age and lifecourse, social class, lifestyle and living arrangements. As Smith and Holt argue:

What remains to be done, of course, is to establish a more significant wealth of empirical data to rural gentrification and sexuality to deepen understandings of wider constellations of other geographies of rural gentrification. (p. 321)

Different Forms of Rural Gentrification

In tandem with urban studies, the normative view of rural gentrification is of a process that is fixed to permanent “bricks and mortar” housing. Yet, residential properties encompass a range of different forms of housing within some rural contexts (e.g. caravans, mobile homes, barges), and longstanding ideas of what constitutes a house/home are likely to be increasingly refined as institutional, ideological and other societal forces for greener and more sustainable ways of living encroach within society. Particularly relevant here for exploring the links between rural gentrification and new forms of residence and living arrangements may be recent work on back-to-the-land movements (e.g. Halfacree, 2006; Halfacree, this issue).

A recent study of rural gentrification that illustrates how understandings of the boundaries of conventional gentrified housing could usefully be extended is Smith's (2007b) examination of marginal social groups residing in houseboats within Shoreham-by-Sea, East Sussex. It is shown how a counter-cultural social group with a “predilection for a self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyle, anti-consumerism, a sense of community, and closeness to nature and natural elements” (p. 53), acquired and self-renovated disused barges in the estuary of the River Adur. This allows the marginal group to find “an economic loop hole into the wider gentrified housing market of Brighton and Hove” (p. 53). Describing the more recent regulation and commodification of living on the water, Smith notes how some of the marginal gentrifiers have recently been displaced by processes of gentrification, whereby “the supply of ‘ready-made’ boat lifestyles and the concept of ‘living-on-the-water’ points to the maturity of the gentrification processes within Shoreham-by-Sea” (p. 64). Smith contends that these exclusive processes of rural gentrification “may have resonance with other coastal, dock, river and canal waterfront locations, whereby the cultural capital of marginalised groups has been intentionally converted into economic capital by institutional actors” (p. 64). Scholars of rural gentrification are thus urged to seek out these “other” geographies of rural gentrification, and this may be one of the key ways that scholarship on rural gentrification can more fully inform wider understandings of gentrification in other socio-spatial contexts.

“Thinking Outside the Box” of Conventional Definitions of Gentrification

Enduring definitions of gentrification, as outlined in Table 1, hinge on the ways in which the processes bear out simultaneous social, cultural, economic and physical transformations. One of the key ways in which studies of rural gentrification have disrupted these rigid understandings is via a focus on the links between nature, environmental change and gentrification. A key proponent here is Martin Phillips, with his more recent writings (2005, 2007) revealing the centrality of nature, ecological factors, and environmental change to processes of rural gentrification. Potentially most influential is Phillips et al.'s (2008) use of social science and natural science theories and methods to illustrate that “nature is a significant presence in village space, with green vegetated space forming both a quantitatively significant amount of village settlement envelopes and also being of clear significance to inhabitants” in the case study location (p. 54). What these findings typify is the need to critically consider the salience of urban-based definitions of gentrification for understanding the social restructuring of rural places, or if different conceptualisations are required for gentrified rural contexts.

This point formed the basis for Smith and Phillips's (2001) suggestion of the term “greentrification” to emphasise that the presence of green space(s) (and other appeals tied to the natural environment) marked out a major distinction between processes of rural and urban gentrification. Although this term has been critiqued for over-privileging consumption practices (e.g. Darling, 2005), the term was initially constructed within a structurationist framework, placing an emphasis on the inter-related ways in which green space and social constructions of the natural environment are often (re)defined, (re)produced, and consumed within many gentrified rural contexts (Smith, 1998).

Nevertheless, issues of ecology and the natural environment clearly mark out a major difference between rural and urban gentrification, although, of course, these issues will have important manifestations within various urban contexts (e.g. urban gardening, allotments). In this way, deepening knowledge of the link between rural gentrification and nature/environmental change may be a key way in which debates of rural gentrification can influence broader debates of gentrification.

Moving Forward: Signs of Engagement with Rural Gentrification

The examples cited in the previous section clearly reveal that some advances have been realised within scholarship on rural gentrification, and there are rich opportunities for rural scholars to make a difference to broader debates of gentrification. Yet, overall, perhaps it can be argued that the general pace of the delivery of empirical studies of rural gentrification has not gained a suitable momentum, whereby the meaning of what constitutes rural gentrification can be critically informed and redefined according to empirical evidence. As a result, it would appear that the utilisation of the term rural gentrification continues to be adopted in ways taken for granted, seemingly plucked from the urban studies scholarship.

One very recent positive direction is that more and more scholars of rural change are embedding notions of rural gentrification into their analyses of social rural change, and are thus, albeit implicitly, engaging with debates of rural gentrification. A recent exemplar here is Gallent and Robinson's (2011) investigation of housing affordability and rural planning, which explicitly notes: “Theories of gentrification are as relevant here as in urban contexts” (p. 299). Other striking developments within the scholarship include the gamut of writings on rural housing developments and social exclusion in Ireland (e.g. Bullock et al., 2011; Gkartzios & Scott, 2010a, 2010b), which have gathered impressive momentum during the last few years. It is essential that this renewed activity continues to flourish if understandings of rural gentrification are to be advanced, particularly in light of changing social, economic and political contexts.

Discussion and Conclusion

To return to the main aim of this paper—what is rural gentrification?—It is fair to say that answering this specific question has become less straightforward than in the past. Indeed, perhaps this is a promising sign of academic progress within rural studies. Without doubt, the conceptual boundaries of rural gentrification are increasingly becoming more blurred and fuzzy as the considerable diversities of rural gentrification become more apparent. What is particularly striking is the identification of more and more incommensurabilities between urban and rural gentrification, although as Smith and Higley's (2011) discussion of education-led rural gentrification in the North Weald, Kent, shows, there are also important inter-connections between urban and rural processes of gentrification that need to be more fully understood and theorised.

In this paper, it has been argued that more empirical accounts of rural gentrification, such as comparative analyses of the differences within and between gentrified rural places, are required to pin down more accurately the delineators of rural gentrification. Recent developments within urban studies may offer a fruitful starting point for this potential agenda of a “comparative ruralism” lens, such as Lees's (2011) recent discussion of geographies of (urban) gentrification and scholarship on comparative urbanism.

One approach to trigger studies of rural gentrification may be the adoption of a more encompassing definition of rural gentrification, which is not explicitly wedded to the tiered urban-based definitions of gentrification. In the rural context, the prerequisites of such a definition will need to capture the fundamental signifiers of the processes, which include:

•	a sense of inter-connected in- (replacees) and out- (displacees) migration flows,
•	population change(s) that gives rise to the formation of more socially homogenous profiles dominated by relatively higher income groups,
•	the reduction/exclusion and/or marginalisation of low income groups due to economic constraints in the local housing market, and
•	the entrenchment of revalorised and exclusive rural housing markets.

New-build housing developments on agricultural, brownfield, and other forms of vacant rural land may pose difficult questions for these conceptual markers, as per debates within urban gentrification scholarship about the possibility of gentrification without the presence of direct displacees from the processes of change (e.g. Davidson & Lees, 2005). It is likely that rural scholars may need to embrace these debates, particularly as some national governments seek to dispose of existing land and building assets to stimulate new income streams, which may give rise to more new-build rural housing developments. Scholarship that has recently investigated the glut of new-build rural housing developments in Ireland and social exclusion (e.g. Scott, 2008; Scott & Murray, 2009) will provide an invaluable entry point to develop these emerging debates of rural gentrification.

To conclude, somewhat lamentably, Phillips's (1993) call “that comparative work should be undertaken to draw out both the commonalities and differences between rural and urban gentrification and also within gentrification in various rural localities”, has perhaps as much currency in the 2010s, as the 1990s. In a similar vein to the processes of change that are producing more exclusionary rural societies, the challenge to deliver a more critical scholarship on rural gentrification is here to stay.

In 2007 the BBC broadcast scenes of Northumberland residents' delight that their villages had been officially labelled “unsustainable communities” in the approved Tynedale Local Development Framework Core Strategy. To the ordinary viewer, this must have seemed somewhat paradoxical. Why would anyone wish their community to be labelled unsustainable? Surely this wasn't how residents of the Durham “D villages” had reacted in the 1960s to plans that their communities should have no future?1

These celebrations were because no further development would now be permitted, so ensuring that these villages become ever more socially exclusive, enhancing property values and extending their social distance from poorer groups in society. Limiting new development in rural areas is one way in which the privileged increase the value of their assets and store these such that inequality can be transmitted from one generation to the next. Perhaps this is the “dark side” of sustainability?

Exclusive Rurality

Numerous authors have drawn attention to changes in the social composition of rural England, with the remorseless displacement of lower and middle income groups by those with more resources (Barlow & Savage, 1986; Cloke & Thrift, 1990; Murdoch, 1995; Pahl, 1965; Phillips, 1993, 2007; Shucksmith, 1981, 1990a, 1990b, 2000; Sturzaker & Shucksmith, 2011). Often this has been described as a process of “gentrification”, with rural England presented as increasingly “middle-class territory” (Buller & Lowe, 1990, p. 27) or subject to service-class colonisation (Thrift, 1987).

One indication of this process is Britain's uniqueness amongst the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)countries in having rural house prices well above urban house prices: indeed, house prices rise systematically as settlement size decreases (CRC, 2010; Sturzaker and Shucksmith, 2011). Both the Affordable Rural Housing Commission (ARHC) and the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) have identified significantly higher “affordability ratios” (the ratio of house prices to incomes) in rural areas than in urban areas (ARHC, 2006; CRC, 2007, 2010; but note Bramley & Watkins, 2009). Generally most researchers acknowledge the unaffordability of housing as an issue in rural England (Satsangi et al., 2010). The most recent CRC (2010) analysis of government statistics on average house prices and affordability, according to the Government's official definition of rurality, is shown in Figures 1 and 2 respectively.

Figure 1 Average house prices for rural and urban England, 2000–2009. Source: CRC (2010).

Figure 2 Lower quartile housing affordability, 2006–2009. Source: CRC (2010).

Figure 1 shows that average house prices in rural areas have exceeded those in urban areas of England by around 25% every year since reliable figures first became available in 2000. Furthermore, the smaller the settlement size, the higher the price. Figure 2 presents a measure of housing affordability for lower income households, which is the ratio of house price to income for a household in the lower quartile of income buying a house in the lower quartile of house prices. So, for example, the price of a (lower quartile) house in the smallest settlements in sparsely populated areas in 2008 was 10.7 times (lower quartile) household income on average. Since 2007 affordability has improved (i.e. the ratio has fallen) but remains worse in rural areas than urban, systematically worse still in smaller settlements and sparser areas, and well beyond lower income groups' ability to pay. Moreover, the CRC analysis (CRC, 2010) also shows that household incomes are systematically higher the smaller the settlement, whether in sparse or less sparse areas.

These social changes, and whether they can usefully be described as gentrification, are discussed in more detail by Smith in this Interface. The issue for this paper is to what extent planners and planning have been agents of, or complicit in, this process of spatial exclusion (Sturzaker & Shucksmith, 2011).

Mark Shucksmith

AddressMarkShucksmithSchool of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK, markshucksmith@newcastleacuk

School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK

Planning as Agent of Rural Gentrification

Ever since the 1940s, planning for rural England has given the greatest priority to urban containment. In the immediate post-war period the justification for this was the protection of farmland to ensure food supplies and the prevention of urban sprawl. When in the 1980s the Government determined that too much land was being farmed, the justification for urban containment changed first to protection of the countryside for its own sake, and then to sustainable communities and an urban renaissance. It is important to note whose interests are served by such policies. In their seminal study in 1973, Hall and his colleagues saw urban containment deriving from an “unholy alliance” of urban councils seeking to divert resources to the cities together with the rural middle classes seeking to preserve an exclusive countryside and to enhance their own property values. The major gainers were identified as wealthy, middle-class, ex-urbanite country dwellers and the owners of land designated for development. The principal losers his team identified were non-home-owners in rural England (including future generations) and people forced to live in dense urban areas despite the widespread aspiration to rural, or at least suburban, living. Summarising, they concluded that the effects had been regressive in that “it is the most fortunate who have gained the benefits from the operation of the system, whilst the less fortunate have gained very little” (Hall et al., 1973, p. 409).

Newby (1985) saw this as a consequence of the 1942 Scott Report and the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. He observed that “the rural poor had little to gain from the preservation of their poverty but were without a voice on the crucial committees which evolved the planning system from the late 1930s onwards.” It was no surprise, then, that “new housing was to be restricted—in both the public and private spheres—so that a planned scarcity of housing duly emerged … By the 1970s not only was public housing in rural areas in short supply, but so too was cheap private housing. In the case of both development control policy and housing policy, attempts to preserve the rural status quo turned out to be redistributive—and in a highly regressive manner” (Newby, 1985, p. 220). Moreover, Newby (1985, p. 187) is adamant that these outcomes—a low-wage economy and unaffordable housing—“have not been haphazard nor the result of some immutable natural law, but the result of policy decisions quite consciously pursued.”

Sturzaker and Shucksmith (2011) argue that these processes reveal the first and second faces of power, in Lukes's (2005) terms, whereby powerful groups prevail in planning decisions and less powerful groups are generally excluded. But they go on to argue that there is also evidence of the exercise of Lukes's third face of power, through which people's perceptions are shaped discursively in such a way that they accept certain things as natural or inevitable. In other words, people subscribe to the values which oppress them. This can be explored further in terms of Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity” (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 167). Urban containment, and the protection of the countryside “for its own sake”, have become so ingrained in our thinking that any alternative is literally unthinkable: it is seen, not only by planners but even by those who are in desperate need of rural housing, as natural and fair that housing must not be built in the countryside. It has become doxa.

In the 1940s the overall stance of urban containment and prevention of rural development was informed by “a hopelessly sentimental view of rural life among nature-loving ramblers and Hampstead dwelling Fabians” (Newby, 1985, p. 225). This dominant discourse has been refreshed and strengthened over the years by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and other preservationist groups, most recently through becoming deliberately linked to new agendas of environmental sustainability. The CPRE, as its raison d'être, has always sought to prevent house building in rural areas, deploying a range of symbolic concepts to pursue this objective, including “urban sprawl”, “concreting over the countryside” and “light pollution” among others. Through analysis of documentary evidence and interviews with former and current CPRE staff, Murdoch and Lowe (2003) revealed the various ways in which CPRE has managed to set the agenda for rural planning since the 1940s, when they first promoted the idea of a rural/urban divide and the desirability of separating nature from society, as exemplified in green belts and urban containment policies. During the 1980s, they altered their tactics to take advantage of growing environmental awareness. Thus they sought to “ecologise” their arguments by positioning an environmental case for containment, essentially through the exercise of discursive power over the concepts of sustainability and sustainable communities, ensuring these are now widely understood as (urban) places where people might not need a car. One CPRE staff member told Murdoch and Lowe that the 2000 Urban White Paper was the key arena they targeted to ensure anti-development policies were implemented in rural areas, and indeed this did recommend higher urban densities and stronger protection of greenfield sites. Another CPRE policy officer claimed: “We invented all the key planks in PPG3. PPG3 is basically CPRE policy”2 (Murdoch & Lowe 2003, p. 327).

In this way, the overall stance of urban containment and prevention of rural development has been strengthened through becoming linked to new agendas of environmental sustainability. In this approach, found by ARHC (2006), Sturzaker (2010) and others to be widespread throughout rural England, local authorities have been categorising rural settlements into those which they regard as “sustainable” (and therefore suitable for new housing) or “unsustainable” (effectively red-lined), on the basis of crude checklists of service availability, despite central government advice to the contrary. Critics have viewed this dualistic construction of sustainable communities as an acceptance in planning policy and practice of a discourse of sustainability which privileges the environmental over the social, and of exclusivity over inclusion (Best & Shucksmith, 2006; Owen, 1996; Satsangi & Dunmore, 2003; Taylor, 2008).

Planners as Agents of Rural Gentrification: The Role of Councillors and Planning Officers

Planning has therefore acted as a crucial arena for class formation and social exclusion in rural England, operating generally in the interests of the privileged and against poorer, marginalised groups. We have seen how this derives partly from discursive, power-infused constructions of rurality and sustainability. However, this is also facilitated by the ways in which planning processes, notably public participation and consultation, are operationalised so as to advantage middle-class interests. What role have planners (both councillors and planning staff) played in this? How far have they been found to challenge these processes of exclusion, or have they tended to be complicit in enabling and reinforcing social injustice?

Shucksmith et al. (1993), in a study of planning for housing in rural Scotland, found that councillors usually saw their role above all as representing their constituents, but that in practice this proved to be highly partial. They gave the greatest weight to representations from higher status home-owners, farmers and landowners, and they tended only to hear from anti-growth interests. Thus, non-owners interviewed in this study tended to support new housing developments in rural areas, but none had ever made their views known to councillors or planning officers. In contrast, home owners were active in their opposition to further housing, often lobbying councillors and officers in person and lodging formal objections. Councillors and planning officers therefore perceived only opposition to new housing.

Another factor is the professional ideology of planning officers. Shucksmith et al. (1993), in the same study, found that planning officers worked with reference to a very strong professional planning ideology of urban containment which guided their advice to elected members; indeed, “it became apparent that officers sought to control councillors by bringing their thinking more into line with the dominant professional ideology” of urban containment (Shucksmith et al., 1993, p. 252), which remains after all “the critical mission of rural planning” (Satsangi et al., 2010, p. 20). Even where councillors had been elected on a manifesto of promoting new housing development and voted to adopt this as council policy, planning officers found ways to subvert this and to maintain pre-existing policies which accorded more closely with their professional ideology. In development control, likewise, when officers feared councillors might overrule their recommendation for refusal, they informally encouraged “call-in” of applications. Sturzaker (2010) found similar professional ideologies in his more recent study of several English rural planning authorities, in sharp contrast to the views of housing professionals within the same authorities. This finding is endorsed by Satsangi et al. (2010) who argue that these cultures of control and restraint amongst rural planners have “survived beyond their time, creating a raft of difficulties” for rural communities (Satsangi et al., 2010, p. 19).

This raises the question of what role planners should play when caught between the potentially conflicting claims of localism, containment and social justice. For many years a core tenet of planning practice has been that it should be concerned only with the use of land and not the user, playing a technocratic and “objective”, value-free role. Yet it is inevitable that there will be tension between an embedded professional and historic mission to prevent rural development; a democratic requirement to serve the wishes of locally elected representatives; a national planning policy framework which embraces a presumption in favour of sustainable development; and often a personal commitment to social justice. After several decades of social change in the countryside, it is no surprise that most rural residents now oppose new housing to the exclusion of lower and middle income groups. As Newby anticipated, “policies which systematically disadvantage the rural poor can now, therefore, be assured of local democratic support” (1979, p. 497), such that any action to address rural poverty must principally come from national, not local, policy. Planners might therefore become caught increasingly between their personal values, a core professional ideology of urban containment whose social consequences are only too evident, and local electorates minded to celebrate as more and more of rural England is labelled “unsustainable” and exclusive.

Despite the growth and dominance of cities in the western world and elsewhere, counter-urbanisation and its many consequences are a feature of rural areas in numerous countries. Over many decades, the perceived qualities of rural living (Fielding, 1982)—together with a broader idealisation of the countryside and anti-urban motivations (Champion, 2000)—have magnified the demand for rural property (Mitchell, 2004). In England, the accumulation of personal wealth in “escalator” areas —a product of rising disposable incomes and equity growth in property—has encouraged some households to export their wealth to “importing” regions and to join the steady flow of migrants to nearby rural areas, or venture further afield in search of investment opportunities. Darling (2005) has drawn attention to the significant economic returns on refurbishment and extension of rural dwellings and agricultural buildings, with similar returns being noted by researchers in the 1990s, encouraging many British households to export their wealth to rural France (Buller & Hoggart, 1994). Hence, commentators have been able to apply the ideas of Glass (1964) and the notion of a “rent gap” to the analysis of social change in rural areas, and to the exchange of people and of lifestyles that has been witnessed over an extended period. Gentrification—the influx of an educated service class and the consequent displacement of a residual working class—is not a recent rural phenomenon.

As long ago as 1937, the topic received an airing in UK parliamentary debate, with the Member for Barkston Ash asking the Minister for Health if he was aware of the “growing tendency for town dwellers to rent or buy rural workers' cottages for occasional occupation, and that this is leading to an acute shortage of houses in many rural areas near industrial centres?” (Hansard, 20 July 1937, 326, c1983w). The response was that there would be an inquiry. There have been a great number of such inquiries since that time, all focusing on the frailties of rural economies, on the affordability of housing for those on local incomes, and on the social reconfiguration of the countryside, especially countryside areas close to centres of disposable income and wealth (Satsangi et al., 2010). These inquiries, or commissions, have frequently pointed to the role that planning and urban containment plays in increasing the investment potential of “small village locations”, adding to their exclusivity and making them potentially more attractive to gentrifiers (Phillips, 2000). The strength of the investment motive—not only economic investment but also investment in a particular lifestyle (Buller et al., 2003, p. 24), combined with a tightly defined view of how the countryside should be, now and in the future—often plays out in a rigorous defence, by gentrifiers, of what many researchers have referred to as the rural “idyll” (Woods, 2005). This idyll is experienced by those with money, who are able to exercise political power through local and parish councils, and who do so in a way that sees them characterised as NIMBYs, raising a metaphorical drawbridge against those who might introduce change, either through development or their mere presence. The empowerment of these elements is a result of their numerical dominance in many areas. As Newby observed in the 1970s, newcomers did not enter villages as “lone individuals” but in “large numbers—perhaps due to the building of a new housing estate by a local speculative builder.” Newby's “newcomer” therefore “found himself [sic] one of many others whose values, behaviour and life-styles were similarly based upon urban, middle-class patterns of sociability” (Newby, 1979, p. 165).

Such new developments were often the products of structure plan allocations, with “key settlements” absorbing intra-regional counterurbanisation (Cullingworth, 1962, p. 15), but these same key settlements were more frequently the destinations of households displaced from the more picturesque villages, which had become the focus of investment demand or home to the wealthier newcomers, who sought exclusivity and viewed traditional, archetypal, homes in the country as fitting expressions of their social status and wealth. Gentrification in such locations became a key feature of the rural shift in the 1960s and 1970s (Parsons, 1980; Spencer, 1997), accentuated by key settlement polices which diverted all development away from these highly desirable villages (Cloke, 1979). Thus the mould was set and the foundations laid for a large part of the current rural housing debate.

Counterurbanisation, or an “inversion” of the “traditionally positive relationship between net migration and settlement size” (Buller et al., 2003, p. 8), has remained a potent force, driving rural social change. It added about 250,000 residents to Britain's rural population between 2001 and 2010. During the same period, an economic shift towards the service sector continued unabated, with a greater proportion of jobs dedicated to serving the needs of relative newcomers and tourists. Whilst Newby (1979) observed a general behaviour pattern associated with households moving into villages and market towns, it would be unwise to ascribe all newcomers to a single outlook. Since the 1970s, the motives of people moving to rural areas have been carefully dissected. Whilst some continue to invest in the countryside, and defend these investments, others may be downshifting or seeking qualities that may not necessarily be diminished by additional development on any reasonable scale. However, the metaphor of the “drawbridge” retains some currency. In a study of international amenity migration in New Zealand, Woods (2011) illustrates how pro-development interests may accuse incoming investors and elites of “shutting out local people by buying up property and opposing new housing.” In that instance, local politics were said to be confronting the forces of globalisation. At a more localised scale, the debates played out in extended travel-to-work areas in England may see established newcomers closing out “last comers” (Cadieux, 2006, p. 10), portraying themselves up as “local households” defending community amenity.

Whilst debates play out in political fora, in parish councils and local authorities, opposition to development begins with the construction of a discourse to counter some of the normative claims of policy makers: claims concerning rural housing affordability, localness, local priority, and the legitimate purpose of priority assistance (including the provision of social housing to address “local needs”). In the remainder of this paper, it will be suggested that an educated service-class population, often comprising commuting households and those retiring from city/finance jobs, regularly challenge the case for additional house-building by deconstructing key claims, namely that:

•	local policy interventions should be triggered by low levels of housing affordability;
•	further, that such interventions can distinguish easily between “local” and “non-local” residents; and
•	that priority policy should be normatively determined, by local authorities.

Insights into this deconstruction were picked up in a series of community focus groups conducted as part of a wider study into rural housing challenges in England linked to rising property prices and market exclusion (Gallent et al., 2010). A total of eight focus groups were arranged in villages located in a selection of area types drawn from Lowe and Ward's (2007) socio-economic classification of local authorities in rural England. The types were: “deep rural” and lacking net migration gains; “rural retreat” comprising popular retirement destinations; “dynamic commuter”, dominated by a professional class out-commuting to urban jobs; and “transient rural” close to urban areas, also dominated by commuters, but with commuting not implying high incomes. The studies in each of these areas were expected to contribute insights from residents exhibiting many of the characteristics of incomers, deriving or having derived incomes from urban jobs, being articulate and—in the case of those from the “dynamic commuter” area—being “well-connected into networks of power and influence” (Lowe & Ward, 2007), and highly mobile. The studies all pointed to a reflective understanding of rural housing debate amongst incoming households who, if viewed more pejoratively, displayed all the features of newcomers “raising the drawbridge” and shielding their investments from what they viewed as unnecessary and unwanted development. In the sections that follow, their counterviews to normative perspectives on gauging affordability, on localness, and on priority housing policy are briefly examined, illustrating the deconstruction of policy discourse noted above.

Affordability

The traditional “policy view” of housing affordability links an area's lower quartile house prices to annual lower quartile incomes. It is generally expressed as a ratio and used to identify critical reductions in affordability at different spatial scales. National governments have tended to argue for interventions to address affordability that create social balance and deliver choice, allowing lower income households to reside in proximity to those with greater wealth (DCLG, 2006). But the analysis of housing needs across broader “housing market areas” (Coombes, 2009), as a basis of intervention, suggests a more pragmatic approach to dealing with affordability: one that connects higher to lower demand areas and says that housing needs in one location can be addressed through accelerated housing delivery in a nearby, less popular, area. This suggests that households should not assume the right to live a particular place, but rather accept the need to move within a market to find a home that suits their purse. Bramley and Watkins (2009) argue that policy favours this “outward” view of affordability, focusing not on where people clearly cannot afford to live, but instead identifying opportunities within a bigger market area. But this view has clear implications. It may cause a stretching of social and economic networks as lower-income households need to commute back to service-sector jobs, or visit relatives by private car when they were previously able to simply walk down the street. This may mean that an outward affordability goal has an associated cost, increasing the financial burden on households. It will also do little to address gentrification. Rather, by joining desirable villages to service centres and key settlements, such policy—when expressed through planning—may reinforce the social segregation which has long been associated with the orthodoxies of rural settlement policy. The answer is often to seek an element of new housing in smaller village locations, not to challenge the general un-affordability of such locations, but simply to create a modest number of access opportunities for those in need. These “local needs” schemes respond to evidence of an affordability problem that is often contested by residents.

Acceptance of the “policy view” of affordability was regarded in the case studies as potentially dangerous: as a green light to possible development. In the dynamic commuter and transient area studies, there was a clear preference for talking not about “affordability” but about ensuring that households “get the homes they need”. The notion that “need” exists in a given location simply because of an observed spatial intersection between high property prices and low lower quartile incomes was dismissed as ignoring the very “personal nature” of such need, which cannot be understood through statistics alone. It has to be shown that “named individuals” need to live in a particular location and would suffer hardship if obliged to live elsewhere. Careful consideration should be given to personal circumstances, with commuting participants often calling on those “claiming a need to live in a village” to embrace mobility: to live elsewhere if need be and commute back to village jobs (though few of these were thought to exist). Once mobility is embraced in this way (i.e. once people acknowledge the realities accepted by commuting households) and once all but the most clear and acute needs are discounted, high property prices in certain villages have no clear downside, largely because it is jobs, not homes, that people generally need in the countryside and these are concentrated in larger centres where access to homes is far easier. Top-down interventions, as well-intended as they might be, can trap households in a state of poverty: either this, or genuine need migrates (to where jobs are located) and the “local needs” housing provided is misdirected to less legitimate beneficiaries (who are not “local”—see below). Where such interventions are expressed in additional planning permissions—supported by spurious planning and housing policies—these simply result in unnecessary development and big profits for outside interests, and is never accompanied by essential investment in infrastructure. Quite rightly, infrastructure investments should go to big towns, and so too should the associated housing. Here, the discourse begins to align with planning policy, though its starting point is not sustainability, but the defence of personal interest. The coincidence, however, between the two, puts those subscribing to these views in a strong position, with “right” and discursive power on their side (Sturzaker & Shucksmith, 2011). However, the rejection of development was not universal across the studies. In the “retirement retreat” some growth was anticipated as services need to be expanded to meet the requirements of an ageing population. In that study, one of the villages already comprised a larger service centre and was isolated from larger towns. It was generally true, across the four area types, that proximity of a village to a larger centre resulted in greater resistance in that village to development: it was contended that affordability could be addressed in the wider market, there being obvious development opportunities nearby. This aligned with the “outward” view of affordability (Bramley & Watkins, 2009), which, depending on context and whether there is somewhere to direct the bulk of development, can provide a rationale for sidestepping the challenge of providing homes in smaller village locations. Yet, where there are accepted needs, this challenge remains. On this issue, commuting participants were most critical of existing policy orthodoxies (in 2009) and saw “community” or parish control as a means of delivering against “genuinely local need”, and not simply in response to a statistical trigger. It is this area of community discourse, concerning local need and “localness”, that some of the fundamentals of planning policy are challenged.

Localness

Planning policy and practice in rural areas has long sought to identify “local need”, formulating policies designed to help those who might otherwise be displaced by market forces. Although significant success has not been achieved in this area (Hoggart & Henderson, 2005), the intention of setting local priority, and restricting the occupancy of new housing, has been heavily criticised (see Hutton, 1991) though justified in turn by reference to public policy's underlying aim of combating social exclusion, and planning's goal of helping create balanced communities, in support of local schools, amenities and so on. Whilst being formed by association, communities can be conceived as organisms, constructed from distinctly different parts—with the young supporting the old and vice versa—and needing these parts in order to function. Localness entered the discourse on community need in the 1970s and 1980s, being viewed as a quality that should be prized, linking to continuity and counter to those social configurations that might disrupt social balance and function. A characteristic needs to be defined before it can be defended, and it has been local authorities who have defined what it means to be local, for policy purposes. Some of the discourse on localness has of course played to local electoral interest, blurring the boundary between rights and needs in an attempt to win support for development, prioritising the “rights” of existing residents above those of future residents. Such rights appear to link logically to ancestry, identifying those rooted in a place by birth or family association. But today such views seem archaic and may not help the functioning of the “organism”, and neither may they deliver social justice if they ignore aspiration or people's legitimate need to move into an area for employment or personal reasons. Therefore, the policy view tends to be a more purposive one, with localness linked to economic and service needs, embracing key workers in schools, post offices, shops and so on. But still, those supported need the right geographical credentials. Burnett (2008), however, argues that these are often fuzzy, connecting to a sense of things indigenous and to functional areas rather than fixed boundaries. But it is the fixed boundaries that appeal to policy, with lines drawn on maps, even when communities themselves define localness by association or shared history. For planning authorities, a characteristic needs to be objective and externally verifiable: length of residence in a bounded area, or whether someone was born, has family, or now works in an area, in a prescribed profession or trade.

Such traditional measures enjoy variable levels of local support. They tend to favour the settled, long-standing population so are welcomed in certain area types, for example the “deep rural” in this study. But elsewhere, especially where there are concentrations of commuting or retiring households—whose direct employment connection to an area is weaker, and length of residence shorter—there is a tendency to construct an alternative, more qualitative, narrative of localness. Whilst these different perspectives commonly co-exist and compete, one often appears to dominate. In the deep rural area, the normative tests of the local authority enjoyed wide support and these included length of residence, having attended a local school, being employed locally, having been born and raised in the area, or with parents in the area that now needed caring for. Because the area appeared relatively “settled”, and subject to a low level of population churn, these tests made sense to people, the majority of whom felt themselves to be local in this normative and quantitative account of localness. But in the transient and commuting areas, such fixed criteria came under fire. An older group of residents, many of whom had spent their working lives commuting to London, argued for an “active citizen” view of localness, arguing that it is those who “get involved in village life” and contribute to a “community good” and to a “sense of place” who should be considered local. The emotional ties associated with family history or childhood experience were viewed as adjuncts to contribution in a world that is today characterised by extended social networks and heightened mobility. “Enlightened self-help” creates and sustains a community, built on active citizenship which should be supported and rewarded by planning and housing policy, on those rare occasions where support is needed.

Perspectives on this issue vary depending on “who's calling it”, as one participant observed. Longstanding residents support a “policy view” as it serves their claim to localness and priority. Relative incomers may feel a need to legitimise their presence or create an alternative narrative as the initial step to “raising the drawbridge”, often as members of parish councils, the first ports of call for many active citizens in rural areas.

From Local Priority to Localism

What does all this mean for the setting of local priority, for planning and housing policy, and for housing provision, social exclusion, and gentrification? Local needs policies have been viewed as a means of resolving the conflict in rural areas between landscape protection and development (Shucksmith, 1990) by convincing communities that growth will be limited and that it will serve their interests. But these interests are contested, with the foundations on which existing local needs policies are built being challenged in many areas. Rogers (1985) suggested that such policies begin life as a political expediency, and a few years later Shucksmith (1990) saw them as a sweetener, and a means of achieving “a politically acceptable rate of housing development” (p. 64). Continuing gentrification in many rural areas has resulted in a discourse that rejects the top-down imposition of rules and regulations that appear asynchronous with a changed social reality. There is a desire to replace the normative with something more flexible, grown out of local discourse, frequently because past development outcomes are disliked. In the dynamic commuter area, the dominant view was that “communities” (or at least elites within those communities) rarely benefit from imposed development, and gains to individuals (i.e. those housed in local needs schemes) should be questioned if broader employment and social needs are not being serviced. Problems begin with the mode of delivery, from the top, by distant authorities or their agents, including “housing associations”. Their strategic priorities are not adequately informed by local understanding, cause conflict and disrupt an otherwise harmonious community dynamic. Local priorities have not in fact been local, but external, dressed up to confuse, confound and push through development. In both the transient and dynamic commuter areas it was argued that “successful” community development can only follow on from a devolution of responsibility and priority setting, tailored to local circumstance. In England, a “Localism Bill” aimed at shifting control from the centre to the local—currently making its way through parliament—promises rural and urban “neighbourhoods” a bigger say in setting housing priorities and shaping local planning policy. This may be welcomed in some areas, but for very different reasons. When the Bill becomes an Act, neighbourhoods will be able to seek additional housing for local need, subject to national planning policy, above allocations for general need. In the retirement retreat examined in this study, communities may push for additional housing in support of enhanced services. In the deep rural area it is quite possible that parish councils will be taken more seriously as they try to assist external bodies deliver more of the right kind of affordable housing. But in those areas keen to “raise the drawbridge”, the opportunity to do so may be helped by greater community control. Where there is to be new housing, this will go ahead as local development plans will retain their primacy. But the “active citizens”, who have constructed a particular discourse of affordability, localness and of course sustainability, may not seize the opportunity to break planning's restrictive grip on development in small village locations. Rather, the discourse highlighted in this paper—one constituted to serve a narrow view of community interest—will support the continued gentrification of those villages that have already seen significant social change, and will certainly not help reverse such trends.

Introduction: “Radical” Rural Gentrification

As this Interface confirms, rural gentrification—as with gentrification in general—is not usually seen as either expressing any form of “radical” critique of contemporary capitalist society nor of producing the kinds of alternative spaces that practically express such a critique (for example, Phillips, 2010; Smith, 2002; Stockdale, 2010). Of course, rural gentrification is “radical” in the sense of the economic, social and cultural changes that it is associated with within a changing rural society but this re-organisation is itself more congruent with the evolutionary “creative destruction” of capitalism in general than with any challenges to this condition. Nonetheless, this short intervention argues that there are such challenges expressed within the whole “rural gentrification” universe. Furthermore, the practices of planning and planners can have important influences on the extent to which these challenges come to be expressed.

The idea of radical spaces of gentrification is presented in the next two sections from divergent directions. First, it is argued that greater attention needs to be paid to critical expressions contained within the underlying motivations—and from the resulting experiences—that encourage people to move into the countryside. Second, there are also examples of rural lifestyles that may sometimes be seen as expressing a radical form of rural gentrification, at least given the predominant class background of many of those involved, in the guise of back-to-the-land migration. In the third section attention is paid to the role of planners and planning in facilitating or inhibiting both of these expressions. A conclusion reflects briefly on the presence of common ground between both expressions of radical rural gentrification and planning.

Motivations for Rural Gentrification

In line with the gentrification literature in general (Lees et al., 2008), whilst more structural reasons for rural gentrification must be acknowledged, the intentions, desires and hopes of those involved—typically urban-to-rural migrating “counterurbanisers” (Phillips, 2010)—also merit attention. In particular, much of this migration is underpinned by “social representations of rurality” (Halfacree, 2011a) or the culturally, socially and experientially inscribed imaginations of the rural and rural life. Furthermore, although these representations—not least that “product of the bourgeois imaginary” (Bell, 2006, p. 158) the “rural idyll” —may have a very problematic connection to “actually existing” twenty-first century rurality, this does not mean they should not be considered as efficacious, from their entanglements with the material restructuring of rural places (Bell, 2006; Halfacree, 2011a) to what Jacob (1997, p. 85) terms the “mindfulness experiences” that rural gentrifiers subsequently receive.

Idyllic representations of rurality, especially as expressed in the UK, can be summarised as inscribing a quasi-utopian rural space through a set of desired physical and social dimensions. The appeal of such an everyday experience can be interpreted in a number of ways (Halfacree, 2010). First, it may be seen as a part of a discourse of denial, a reactionary response to the everyday realities of, for example, hypermodern urban life. A house in the country—mimicking the residential practices of Victorian industrialists—provides an escape, a metaphorical “bolt-hole”, from key realities of an everyday world that this same consumer is, of course, intimately and inextricably entangled (Heley, 2010). Furthermore, this bolt-hole may then go on to become a “castle”, with the rural gentrifiers pulling up their “drawbridge”, not least through engagement with anti-development pressure groups, to protect their idyllic rurality. Such a reading ties in, of course, with the dominant perspective taken on rural gentrification, namely how it is a form of elite, exclusive and exclusionary consumption.

Nonetheless, a second way of reading, developed elsewhere in the context of second home consumption (Halfacree, 2011; 2011b), suggests a need to look again at what is both sought after and gained through rural gentrification. Notably, although rural gentrification may be expressed through the dominant textures of capitalist society—class, commodity, alienated consumption—this is not the full picture. There is more to consumption than its dominant commodity marketplace framing can lead us to note. Following Miller (1987, p. 190, my emphasis), in “the period of time following the purchase or allocation of the item … the situation is radically transformed.” That which is being consumed may even turn on and seek to negate the alienated relationships within which it is originally set:

far from being a mere commodity, a continuation of all those processes which led up to the object … the object in consumption confronts, criticizes and finally may often subjugate these abstractions in a process of human becoming.” (Miller, 1987, pp. 191–192)

From such a perspective we can read those desired, perhaps even utopian, aspects of rural gentrification differently (Gibson-Graham, 1996). Taking this perspective does not necessarily lead us down the road of over-romanticising elite consumption practices—although this is an ever-present danger—but allows the “impulse” towards rural gentrification to be shaded in more countercultural and radical colours. In short, what rural gentrifiers seek may at least be a geographical “life-raft” (Halfacree, 2010) to enable them to try to cope with some of the existential challenges of everyday life through a promotion of a greater “connection with land, nature and community” (Bunce, 2003, p. 15). Substituting second home consumption with rural gentrification, moving to a rural location may enable the gentrifier to access “aspects or dimensions of lifestyle that are not offered in … ‘ordinary’ [urban] life” (Bjerke et al., 2006, p. 88).

Going beyond this existentially consolidatory role, however, one may go further and associate rural gentrification with attempts to find a temporary “line of flight” or an “escape from places where lines of power squeeze out the sense of being alive” (Winslade, 2009, p. 338). Rural gentrification practices, with their (attempted) connection to an alternative “ruralised” universe of meanings and practices, thereby disclose some of the existential inadequacies within everyday life, whilst remaining rooted in and connected to that same everyday life. These practices seek “connection with a more ‘natural’, grounded ‘outside’ or [set of everyday] experience[s]… that mainstream everyday life undermines and evicts yet paradoxically also seeks to re-engage through promoting existentially compensatory consumption practices, including those associated with [rural gentrification]” (Halfacree, 2011b, p. 150).

In summary, rural gentrification, albeit very unevenly in terms of applicability in individual cases, contains within it a heterotopic expression that is at least partly inscribed through the rural spaces lived through. The term heterotopia is taken from Michel Foucault (1986), reflecting his desire to emphasise the continued heterogeneity of space in the present. He defined it as “real places … something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia” (Foucault, 1986, p. 24). Hetherington (1997) expressed them as “spaces of alternate ordering” (p. 53). Whilst rural gentrification, being so entangled within the capitalist socio-economic mainstream, cannot inscribe some kind of pure heterotopic space, it may still suggest an alternative expression of the everyday to that encapsulated by urban capitalist life.

Countercultural back-to-the-land

In contrast to the call to re-read and get “under the skin” of relatively conventional rural gentrification in order to tease out radical expressions contained therein, “back-to-the-land” practices are typically counterculturally emplaced from the outset. “Back-to-the-land” here refers to the adoption of a lifestyle—again often following migration from (sub-)urban origins—that seeks to combine farming or horticulture at the (sub-)smallholding scale, typically attempting a degree of food self-sufficiency, with strong environmental/green ethics.

Back-to-the-land as a whole cannot be seen as “rural gentrification”—and its practitioners would be horrified at such an appellation. Not all exponents take the pioneer gentrifying path to middle-class “respectability” outlined by Smith and Phillips (2001) for the “hippie” settlers of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s, for example (also Smith, 2007). Nevertheless, many if not the majority of back-to-the-landers do come from middle-class backgrounds (Halfacree, 2006), thereby linking them in crude class terms not only to the aforementioned “conventional” counter-urbanisers but also to the rural class reconstitution this in-migration in general is bringing about. However, in capital terms their power is usually more in terms of cultural than economic resources.

Although once again “idyllic” rural representations are important underpinnings of back-to-the-land (Halfacree, 2006), today's expression can be seen as closely entangled with “radical rural” (Halfacree, 2007) representations. Channelling the spirit of writers such as Peter Kropotkin and William Morris, via the influence of John Seymour (for example, Seymour, 1975), these representations articulate several key principles. First, there is “economic localisation” or a disposition expressed through policy, everyday practices and social reflexivity that “actively discriminates in favour of more local production and investment whenever it is … reasonable and conveniently possible” (Woodin & Lucas, 2004, p. 69). Second, the rural is seen as rooted in land-based activities with “Rural culture… rooted in the earth” (Fairlie, 2001, p. 10). In addition, radical rural representations are imbued with a strong “community” discourse, present land and what lives upon or within it beyond simply that of a “means of production”, and celebrate the rewards and values of physical labour; all steeped in eco-centric and deep ecological beliefs (Halfacree, 2007).

In terms of the key spatial practices associated with radical rural representations, besides back-to-the-land migration itself, there is first of all “permaculture”, or “the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems” (Bill Mollison, quoted in Laughton, 2008, p. 81). Second, there is low impact development (LID) (Pickerill & Maxey, 2009). Simon Fairlie (2009, p. xiv), a figure closely associated with this concept, defines LID as development “which, by virtue of its low or benign environmental impact, may be allowed in locations where conventional development is not permitted.” Key characteristics a LID should possess include being temporary (easily dismantled), small-scale, unobtrusive, constructed mostly of local and renewable materials, generating little road traffic, and producing positive environmental benefits.

In the UK and more generally in the global north, the last two decades have seen a resurgence in back-to-the-land experimentation. Not only are those starting the lifestyle less dilettante than in the 1970s but they come across as much better informed and networked. In short, back-to-the-land today is both very deliberative and strongly outward-looking. This is expressed in its engagement with the enduring challenges of attaining ecological, economic and social sustainability (Halfacree, 2006; Jacob, 1997; Sargisson, 2001). Thus, in her practical account of living off the land which also drew on visits to back-to-the-land initiatives in France and the UK, Laughton (2008) found people “usually driven by a desire to address some of the pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, such as climate change, biodiversity loss and soil erosion” (p. 13).

Back-to-the-land, one might conclude, has increasingly come of political age—from dropping out to perhaps even leading on (Halfacree, 2006). To reinforce such a conclusion, back-to-the-land today seems much more strongly embedded in a network sense than in the 1970s. An expression of this is the often considerable outreach efforts made to spread the message of what they are about practically. This takes many forms. There are links, to university courses, such as Machynlleth's Centre for Alternative Technology offering Master's courses validated through the University of East London (Halfacree, 2011c). However, demonstrative and educational outreach is more commonly expressed through hosting courses, typically those promoting permaculture and low impact building techniques; providing physical spaces to environmental organisations for training in direct action; engaging with local ecology projects in the wider community; and hosting visitors and holding open days (Dawson, 2006; Sargisson, 2001). Outreach, of course, can also provide a vital income stream.

Finally, therefore, something must be said about income generation. This remains a critical challenge (Dawson, 2006; Laughton, 2008) for the success of the back-to-the-land lifestyle, notwithstanding an emphasis on reducing consumption and attaining greater self-sufficiency through land work. As Jacob (1997) expressed it from a US perspective: “The stress points of a life off the land center to a large extent on the elusive quest for “enough” money, rather than on the physical encounter with the natural environment of farmsteads” (p. 77). Back-to-the-landers are rarely able to rely solely on land work and, in part reflecting the changing uses of the countryside in favour of consumption issues (Halfacree, 2006), frequently engage with various types of ecotourism. They also utilise often considerable resources of cultural and educational capital in other imaginative ways (see Halfacree, 2011c on “alternative” rural Wales).

Radical rural Gentrification and Planning

So, what then of the intersection of and encounters between “radical” rural gentrification and land-use planning? Does planning tend to facilitate, to remain neutral, or to obstruct radical rural gentrification experiences and practices? This issue will be considered by addressing the two broad families introduced above in turn.

It might seem at first that planning and planners have nothing very specific to say about the suggested radical critical current expressed within more mainstream rural gentrification. This is because planning is overwhelmingly concerned with land-use issues and not with the meanings or effects that the consumption of rural through residence might bring about.

Nonetheless, if the rural does express—no matter how partially or inadequately—some kind of heterotopic space for (some) gentrifiers (further research is required in this area) then attention can be paid to the landscape features of that space that express this “alternative ordering”. Here, crucially, planning's longstanding attempt to maintain distinctiveness between urban and rural—its “strategy… of separation” (Fairlie, 2009, p. 9)—seems critical (Murdoch & Pratt, 1993). Even rural preservationist attitudes, often seen as inherently conservative and even reactionary, may through their attempt to maintain elements of rural distinctiveness (such as “nature”) also somewhat paradoxically help to maintain some of rurality's heterotopic resources.

Reinforcing rural distinctiveness through planning, at least in land-use and appearance, may broadly if unintentionally help support the radical aspect of mainstream counterurbanisation but in so doing it does not of course help broaden the socio-economic base of those able to residentially migrate to the countryside. Indeed, the association between counterurbanisation and rural gentrification (Phillips, 2010; Smith, 2002) is reinforced further, as access to rural housing becomes increasingly exclusive. And whilst an intention to “protect” land for land-based lives and practices may be congruent with radical rurality's spatiality, this can prove highly problematic for radical back-to-the-land projects more generally; the “devil”, as the saying goes, is in the detail.

First, given the centrality of LID to radical ruralities, those attempting to get back-to-the-land are highly likely to have to engage with the planning system, either from the outset or when a planning violation is detected. This necessity is reflected directly both by Fairlie's 1996 book, reprinted in 2009, Low Impact Development, and in the related organisation Chapter 7, that campaigns for “access to land for all… through environmentally sound planning” (Chapter 7 , 2011). It is unlikely that LID exponents will have access to existing residential buildings—mostly due to their scarcity and high cost but also because they may be poorly suited to “conversion” to LID configuration.1 Instead, a common practice is to purchase land and then seek to live and build on it, necessitating obtaining planning permission. As already suggested, there is longstanding resistance from both planning and other rural residents, not least the more conventional rural gentrifiers already discussed, to allow such development.

Second, however, the latter observation can be qualified by noting that housing related to agricultural or other explicit land-based economic uses, such as forestry, is regarded more favourably by the planning system. The challenge, though, is to make the case that the LID project proposed conforms to what is understood to be “legitimate” or bona fide “agriculture”. Typically, this involves estimating the income to be generated from the proposed land-based activities. Such income, especially if coming via permaculture projects that seek internally contained cyclical flows of energy and matter more than the high outputs (and high inputs) of “linear” conventional agriculture (Laughton, 2008), may be relatively small, thereby working against the likelihood of having planning permission granted. Furthermore, the necessity of living on site, as opposed to commuting to the smallholding, possibly from a nearby town, is also a case that must be made convincingly.

Third, a further issue of planning concern is the general aesthetics of LID projects and radical ruralities generally. Practices such as LID and permaculture are rooted less in the abstract, neat, tidy, manicured “landscape” aesthetic of the rural idyll, incorporating the conventional farmstead with its standardised farm-buildings, surrounded by medium-large fields. Instead, they are rooted more in an everyday practical ethics of environmentalism and sustainability, where aesthetics, although important, appears less centre-stage.

Fourth, it is not just the planning system that poses a variety of bureaucratic hurdles to LID and back-to-the-land projects. There are a host of other regulations and official bodies that have to be negotiated, not least those concerned with detailed building regulations (related to health and safety, building control, etc.), sanitation and animal and plant health issues.

Conclusion: Potential for Unity?

This paper has for clarity largely kept separate the two suggested expressions of radical rural gentrification but this concluding section attempts some integration or at least entanglement. A central issue is the extent to which the radical gentrification expressed through some aspects of both counterurbanisation and back-to-the-land can converge, and the extent to which any such convergence can also connect with planners and planning. A robust alliance seems unlikely but the three groups do have common ground. In particular, retaining “rural distinctiveness” in terms of land use, appearance and so on at one level may be said to unite rural gentrifiers, back-to-the-land migrants and planners. All seek to produce, consume and/or regulate a space that is dominated in land-use terms by broadly defined “agricultural” and related activities. This remains, in short, overwhelmingly the dominant underpinning of rural space (Halfacree, 2011a).

Fairlie has recently re-classified LID into three sub-categories (Chapter 7 , 2009, p. 59):

•	Landworkers: derive a substantial part of their livelihoods from land-work;
•	Lifestylers: part-time engagement with land-work;
•	Homeseekers: no interest in land-work but want affordable, sustainable housing.

Whilst landworkers comprise the “classic” back-to-the-land category, one can perhaps see some potential rapprochement between the other two categories and counterurbanisers/rural gentrifiers seeking a greener lifestyle (as compared to other counterurbanisers; such as Heley's (2010) “new squirearchy” that speak to different priorities through their rural consumption, albeit still often valuing “rural space and rural nature” (p. 328)).

Finally, two decades ago, Chris Hamnett (1991) identified one of the reasons why urban gentrification was of such interest and significance to researchers as being because it presented a key ideological and theoretical “battleground”. As this series of Interface papers demonstrates, this observation seems equally true today with respect to rural gentrification and its entanglements with planning. Within the fray, this paper has sought to make the case, first, that rural gentrification can express politically radical or countercultural values and practices and that, second, planning cannot but be implicated in the extent to which such values and practices are sustained or suppressed. Which way this goes is clearly a political choice to be made.

In some developed countries such as the UK, in-migration to rural areas is seen as a challenge for community cohesion as affluent newcomers move to accessible rural areas where they displace “locals” from affordable housing. However, in more remote locations, an influx of residents with new skills, entrepreneurial capacity and political capital can represent an opportunity for rural communities. In this paper, we discuss an alternative perspective from the UK experience, by exploring the positive dimensions of in-migration in more remote rural localities.

Global forces are driving industry and demographic restructuring outside metropolitan Australia. Skills shortages present an onging critical challenge for rural community and rural industry sustainability (Hall et al., 2007; Han & Humphreys, 2005). Many small rural communities with ageing populations and limited opportunities for young people are not attracting skilled workers but have a flow of skilled people through the community such as locums, seasonal workers or contractors. GPs no longer spend their working lives in one country town; short-term locums who work in one place for two or three years are becoming the norm. Teachers are highly mobile. Sea/tree change1 and downskilling phenomena are seeing people move to or retire to rural areas, often to move on again after a few years. Active retirees or “grey nomads”, some with high level skills, roam the Australian countryside. One of the ways rural communities can address capacity issues is to tap into the growing body of highly skilled workers who transit through rural communities.

Innovative communities have higher proportions of residents who have lived elsewhere, and professionals who come to live and work in rural communities have the ability to boost economic activity (Florida, 2003; McGranahan & Wojan, 2007). Skilled newcomers can contribute to economic, social and environmental development (Curry et al., 2001; Cvetkovic, 2009; Kalantaridis & Bika, 2006). They make significant contributions to community vitality and energy (Burnside, 2007; Plowman, 2006) and help to initiate interest and sustain community momentum in relation to community change. Kalantaridis (2010) notes that the impact of newcomers to rural areas is cumulative rather than transformational, and is influenced by the number of in-migrants to a particular community, their education levels and the extent of their networks. Because of their status as newcomers, they are not seen as being aligned with particular groups or community agendas, and can help to bring the community together to find common ground.

Skilled newcomers can participate and take a leadership role in community groups and activities (Johns et al., 2004b; Kilpatrick et al., 2002, 2009), using their networks to assist the community to access information and resources. Boundary crossers have been identified as playing an important role in leading and encouraging community interaction. These people move freely between two or more domains and have the trust of both (Kilpatrick et al., 2008). Curry et al. (2001) reported on the boundary-crossing role of more established alternative lifestylers in one rural community; they helped newcomers to become involved in environmental groups and community projects. Research has shown that the nature and extent of community networks influence community development, highlighting the importance of horizontal and vertical linkages, or bonding and bridging social capital (Falk & Kilpatrick, 2000; Taylor et al., 2008; Woolcock & Narayan, 2000). Skilled newcomers to rural communities have the capacity to develop and strengthen community social capital.

Small rural communities are not always welcoming of newcomers, and so communities may not be making the most of the opportunities that skilled in-migrants bring. Community identity can be diluted as identification is strongly linked to socialisation in traditional activities such as sporting clubs in which newcomers do not necessarily participate (Smailes, 2002). Communities may be divided, with a culture that makes it difficult to take advantage of skills that mobile workers may bring (Gray & Sinclair, 2005). Rural community norms may stifle the creativity of newcomers (McGranahan & Wojan, 2007).

We investigated how rural communities can optimise economic, social and environmental outcomes from mobile skilled workers; how they can capture the advantages from these highly skilled mobile workers, and how these workers can be encouraged to stay for extended periods (Kilpatrick et al., 2011). The qualitative study used a multiple site case study design. There were six Australian sites and one Canadian site. The seven sites represented variation in terms of size, location, degree of remoteness, and rural industry base. No site exceeded 12,000 people. Mobile skilled workers were attracted to the sites predominantly by either lifestyle factors or employment opportunities. Data were gathered through individual, semi-structured interviews with key informants and mobile skilled workers. A total of 28 key informants and 89 mobile skilled workers participated from across the seven sites.

We found the benefits rural communities derive from mobile skilled workers are many and varied, and can be broadly grouped as environmental, economic and social. They include participation in the community, use of professional skills, provision of local employment and training opportunities, introduction of new perspectives, increased quality and choice of services, recreation and other activities, and access to external networks. In terms of a legacy of enduring benefits, mobile skilled workers build the capacity of rural communities, and increase community confidence and sense of identity. This is a lasting legacy that extends beyond their specific involvement in community groups and activities, and beyond visible reminders of their stay. Acting as bridges or boundary crossers, mobile skilled workers build community social capital by creating and strengthening linkages amongst individuals and groups within the community as well as externally.

A common theme running through many of the mobile skilled worker stories was their desire to make a difference and an expectation that they would contribute to their new community. Community settings and, to a lesser extent, policy, make a difference to mobile skilled worker integration and community participation. Community settings such as culture, leadership and interactional infrastructure, defined as networks, events, meetings and communication sites, along with procedures, rules and precedents (Kilpatrick & Bound, 2005; Kilpatrick & Loechel, 2004), influence the integration process for mobile skilled workers. The effectiveness of the integration process determines the nature and extent of mobile skilled worker contribution to the community.

Many mobile skilled workers commented on the importance of feeling a sense of belonging which is fostered by positive community settings that assist them to develop social networks, such as a formalised welcome or induction process, or an invitation to join a community group. Local community members who act as boundary crossers play an important role in linking mobile skilled workers to the community. Community culture could also exclude, intentionally or otherwise.

Leadership is critical in developing interactional infrastructure and is closely aligned to community culture. A community leadership process where the contributions of all community members are valued is a powerful signal to mobile skilled workers that their involvement is both expected and appreciated. While it is important to capture the talents and skills of people who come to work and live in a community, communities also actively build their capacity by mentoring others.

There is a clear leadership role for specific groups and organisations within rural communities, such as local government, schools and workplaces, to build interactional infrastructure. The findings demonstrate the importance of the workplace and the employer to mobile skilled worker integration into the community. Employers play a number of roles that assist mobile skilled workers to integrate into the community, including promoting and supporting community involvement by their staff.

Community settings that influence mobile skilled worker involvement and contributions also influence their decision to stay or leave. Communities that wanted to attract, involve and retain skilled newcomers were proactive in developing and marshalling their resources to attract and integrate in-migrants. Mobile skilled workers were drawn to, wanted to be part of, and wanted to stay in communities that were innovative, embraced diversity, accepted newcomers, and reflected a general air of community confidence and sustainability.

The reasons for choosing to stay in or leave small rural communities fall into four groups: work and career factors; personal and family factors; community factors; and policy settings. Work and career factors, and personal and family factors, may be prioritised differently, depending on the stage of the worker's life cycle. People in rural communities and those who employ highly skilled mobile skilled workers can influence these factors to varying extents.

Retention was more likely where mobile skilled workers had been helped to create a sense of place, which in turn promoted a sense of belonging. Mobile skilled workers were likely to stay longer in rural communities if their families were also supported to integrate and become meaningfully involved. This included assistance in finding voluntary and/or paid employment for spouses and partners, along with proactive approaches by community groups to assist the family in integrating into the community.

There was a stronger focus in the communities we studied on recruitment and retention than on integration, illustrated by various incentives offered to mobile skilled workers to encourage them to enter rural communities and to stay longer. Community and policy settings that focused largely on retention may have been too late for some mobile skilled workers, who had already decided to leave the community because of their early unsatisfactory rural experience. Financial incentives needed to be coupled with social support programmes in an effort to provide an overall positive experience and satisfaction with a rural lifestyle.

Actions needed by rural communities and policy makers to assist in capturing the maximum benefit from professional and other highly skilled workers fell into two broad areas: development of a primary social contract (Moghaddam, 2008) between mobile skilled worker and community; and the need for a coordinated and strategic approach. Early support to assist mobile skilled workers form a primary social contract was vital, particularly during the first three months following arrival, so that their initial impressions and experiences in the community were positive. This is a community-wide responsibility; however, there was only limited evidence of collaborative policy and practice.

There needs to be a combination of right person, right community setting, and right integration process. Mobile skilled workers need to have the right characteristics and attributes to integrate into rural communities. Mobile skilled workers who integrated successfully had an affinity with rural life, a sense of community commitment, and were adaptable and flexible in their approach to fit with and build on the culture and values of their new community. While skill levels and capacity to fulfil employment obligations are important recruitment criteria, employers and HR managers need to look beyond these criteria when recruiting staff to rural positions. They need to assess the capacity and willingness of mobile skilled workers and their families to become involved in community life outside the workplace.

Communities need to be proactive in facilitating a match with mobile skilled workers, suggesting a leadership role for individuals, groups and organisations. Communities which were proactive in identifying the particular skills of mobile skilled workers and then engaging them in community activities where those skills were needed and valued, contributed to a positive integration process. A positive integration process is likely to make mobile skilled workers feel valued and encourage them to stay longer.

The integration process can be viewed in terms of a mobile skilled worker lifecycle, with identifiable stages and points of transition, starting with research before the worker enters the community. All mobile skilled workers appeared to move through this lifecycle, although the rate of progression differed, depending on individual and community characteristics. Communities that understood the position of the mobile skilled worker in the cycle were better able to match actions and supports accordingly. A crucial stage is “breaking in”; if this is unsuccessful mobile workers start to look for an opportunity to leave. A clear implication of the research is that rural communities should facilitate the formation of a primary social contract with each mobile skilled worker.

Rural communities that make the most of the available pool of skills can increase community capacity, resilience, identification and uptake of opportunities such as new enterprises, good practice in natural resource management, enhanced social and leisure opportunities, and quality and range of local services. Communities that welcomed newcomers, acknowledged their skills and gave them the opportunity to contribute and feel valued were places where mobile skilled workers integrated easily and were more likely to contemplate staying.

The research presented in this paper found little evidence of “gentrification” of rural communities as reported particularly in European literature. Rural communities, particularly those with skill shortages, should perceive in-migration as a valuable resource, and develop relocation programmes that target skilled migrants who have the right characteristics and attributes to integrate into their community.

From Local Priority to Localism

What does all this mean for the setting of local priority, for planning and housing policy, and for housing provision, social exclusion, and gentrification? Local needs policies have been viewed as a means of resolving the conflict in rural areas between landscape protection and development (Shucksmith, 1990) by convincing communities that growth will be limited and that it will serve their interests. But these interests are contested, with the foundations on which existing local needs policies are built being challenged in many areas. Rogers (1985) suggested that such policies begin life as a political expediency, and a few years later Shucksmith (1990) saw them as a sweetener, and a means of achieving “a politically acceptable rate of housing development” (p. 64). Continuing gentrification in many rural areas has resulted in a discourse that rejects the top-down imposition of rules and regulations that appear asynchronous with a changed social reality. There is a desire to replace the normative with something more flexible, grown out of local discourse, frequently because past development outcomes are disliked. In the dynamic commuter area, the dominant view was that “communities” (or at least elites within those communities) rarely benefit from imposed development, and gains to individuals (i.e. those housed in local needs schemes) should be questioned if broader employment and social needs are not being serviced. Problems begin with the mode of delivery, from the top, by distant authorities or their agents, including “housing associations”. Their strategic priorities are not adequately informed by local understanding, cause conflict and disrupt an otherwise harmonious community dynamic. Local priorities have not in fact been local, but external, dressed up to confuse, confound and push through development. In both the transient and dynamic commuter areas it was argued that “successful” community development can only follow on from a devolution of responsibility and priority setting, tailored to local circumstance. In England, a “Localism Bill” aimed at shifting control from the centre to the local—currently making its way through parliament—promises rural and urban “neighbourhoods” a bigger say in setting housing priorities and shaping local planning policy. This may be welcomed in some areas, but for very different reasons. When the Bill becomes an Act, neighbourhoods will be able to seek additional housing for local need, subject to national planning policy, above allocations for general need. In the retirement retreat examined in this study, communities may push for additional housing in support of enhanced services. In the deep rural area it is quite possible that parish councils will be taken more seriously as they try to assist external bodies deliver more of the right kind of affordable housing. But in those areas keen to “raise the drawbridge”, the opportunity to do so may be helped by greater community control. Where there is to be new housing, this will go ahead as local development plans will retain their primacy. But the “active citizens”, who have constructed a particular discourse of affordability, localness and of course sustainability, may not seize the opportunity to break planning's restrictive grip on development in small village locations. Rather, the discourse highlighted in this paper—one constituted to serve a narrow view of community interest—will support the continued gentrification of those villages that have already seen significant social change, and will certainly not help reverse such trends.

If the term “gentrification” was originally coined for the process by which middle-class people take up residence in a traditionally working-class area of a city, thereby changing the character of the area, then there can be little doubt that this description applies equally well to much of rural England since World War II. The causes and effects of this process have been well documented, not least by Mark Shucksmith and Nick Gallent in this Interface. In this paper I want to reflect briefly on the meaning and implications of rural gentrification from a policy and practice perspective; how it is likely to respond to new drivers of change and governance; and finally, to explore the implications of this analysis for rural policy and practice in the future.

With hindsight, the post-war gentrification of rural England seems to have been inevitable, given the steady loss of local land-based jobs and income, the dominant cultural attachment to the countryside (“what we fought for”), and a raft of planning policies which served to protect that countryside from further development. Housing formerly occupied by local workers rapidly changed hands. In came people from the towns, including new commuters leap-frogging the Green Belt to rural towns and villages beyond, people retiring to a “place in the country”, and later, second home owners, all aided and abetted by much higher incomes, cheap motoring and the search for a more pleasant environment. Out went local people who no longer had jobs in the fast mechanising farms, or the incomes to afford the rapidly rising prices of the limited housing stock.

In this way gentrification became widespread across most of rural England—albeit at different rates and with different characteristics and motives (as Halfacree notes in this Interface) and in different patterns of socio-economic characteristics (Lowe & Ward, 2009). It has also changed over time, in that local land-based workers have been replaced gradually by successive waves of incomers with varying levels of income and lifestyles. To some extent existing “locals” may have become “gentrified” themselves, securing better paid jobs and changing their aspirations, in line with socio-economic changes which have taken place in the country as a whole. Arguably the initially straightforward process of population exchange characteristic of gentrification has been replaced by more complex but entrenched patterns of social segregation more or less defined by house prices. “Gentrification”, as Darren Smith discusses in this Interface, has morphed into a general occupation of rural areas by the “middle classes”, especially in the “near country” of the English lowlands characterised by strong employment and recreation linkages to urban areas. But overall, English rural society has been more or less turned on its head over the last 60 years or so: a majority of land-based (and sea) workers populating rural towns and villages, presided over by a small coterie of “gentry”, has generally been replaced by a small minority of “locals” living cheek by jowl with a majority of wealthier incomers.

Whatever successes were enjoyed by post-war planning policies—and it could be fairly claimed that the objectives of increasing agricultural production and preventing urban sprawl were substantially achieved—there were clearly social impacts that were less desirable, as Mark Shucksmith's paper amply illustrates. Rural people were forced to move out. Affordable housing emerged as a major rural problem within decades. Local services, previously supported by local populations without majority access to private vehicles, declined steadily.

Some of these consequences were foreseen, notably in the minority report to the 1942 Scott Committee by Professor Dennison (Curry, 2008), but the extent to which they were intended is a matter for debate (Curry & Owen, 2009). It could be argued that post-war rural policies can be traced from both the strategic imperative to produce food after the war, and a dominant planning bias towards urban development, initially through slum clearance from the bombed cities and towns, and the development of new towns. From this policy perspective the social and economic consequences for rural communities were essentially the bastard offspring of two separate national policies from two different sectors which together created a powerful bastion of protection from development.

However, the roots of these policies are both deep and complex. Producing more food more efficiently was manifestly a priority for a country still suffering the effects of war. Planning policies, on the other hand, were reflecting a widespread love of the rural landscape (and access to that landscape through the designation of new national parks), a compelling if mythical belief in the idyll of the English countryside, and a revulsion against ribbon development and the advance of metro-land. Some would argue that these anti-urban and pastoral traditions transcend social class structures,1 and resonate with the motives and feelings of many different aspirants to rural life, including those who seek genuinely sustainable lifestyles, as Halfacree notes in his paper.

It is also fair to say that many of the social and economic consequences of prevailing rural planning policies were well recognised by the state as far back as a previous Conservative Government's Rural White Paper in 1993, which for the first time brought together the two big departments involved. Yet despite this and successive attempts to introduce more positive rural policies, culminating in the Taylor Report of 2008 and the formation of the Rural Coalition,2 serious rural problems remain, especially the shortage of affordable homes.

So why are these rural problems, especially the “rural housing question” (Satsangi et al., 2010), so persistent? Despite the research, the reports, and the policy rhetoric; despite more flexible planning policies which encourage economic diversification and limited housing development;3 and despite a succession of disasters such as BSE, foot-and mouth disease and a vituperative but essentially irrelevant debate (to our concerns here) on fox-hunting, all of which must have taken some of the gloss off the rural idyll: despite all these anni horribili, English rural planning policies remained essentially protective,4 to an extent which has arguably thwarted much-needed development (OECD, 2011). And this protective policy is generally supported by politicians and the public at large, exemplified by the ongoing clamorous defence of the “green belt”.5 Here the case for powerful interests usurping rational policy through political influence and control becomes more compelling.

Meanwhile the provision of affordable housing remains painstakingly slow, especially in smaller villages which rely largely on the “exceptions policy” invented in the 1980s (Satsangi et al., 2010). It is perhaps significant to note that the rural housing crisis has lasted much longer than the initial phase of gentrification, as it has grown from a purely locational issue to a generational issue—it now affects the sons and daughters of the earlier incomers. But at the same time there is no reason to suppose that the “Nimbys” and “Bananas” (build absolutely nothing anywhere now or again) will go away—many rural towns and villages will have become more or less exclusive havens for the better off, and will wish to remain so.

Yet looking to the future, the drivers of change also continue to persist, and indeed grow. Demographic pressures on rural England have increased in terms of growing numbers of households (Holmans & Whitehead, 2011, CRC, 2010) generated by a continued desire to live in the countryside (reflected in net migration from urban to rural areas) and an ageing population. Meanwhile the economies of rural England have shown potential for modest growth (CRC, 2008), and some flexibility in planning policies and practice to accommodate new enterprises are emerging—a policy response which has been sharpened by the aftermath of the economic recession. At the same time, despite being overshadowed by economic crises, climate change remains a critical issue which rural areas must address, both in terms of helping to meet the carbon challenge but also in meeting the resource needs of the future—for example food, water, flood control and recyclable energy.

So how will rural England respond to these drivers of change and apparent problems? The technical and professional answers to this question will depend very much on the policy responses to the requirements for “sustainable development”. The Taylor report and others (Rural Coalition, 2010; TCPA, 2011) have criticised the simplistic “tick-box” approach to the allocation of development in rural settlements, focusing on the location of existing jobs and services in larger towns and villages on the assumption that this will reduce the need to travel. They argue that the potential for smaller villages to provide these jobs and services, and the very mobile nature of rural populations, has not been properly factored in. Rightly or wrongly, local plans tend to concentrate development in selected towns and villages in a way which is likely to continue and even intensify the gentrification of smaller settlements.

The processes by which these policy responses will be made have of course been radically changed. The advent of “localism” under the new UK Coalition Government, with its rejection of national and regional spatial policy and a new focus on planning at the local government and community level, places planning policies and decisions into a new context of governance, with the Localism Bill currently making its way through parliament. It will be the role of local “core strategies” to set the spatial policy framework for development, with the active engagement of local communities in the formulation of that framework—and its implementation through a raft of new planning measures at neighbourhood level.6

At the national level, the Government's recently published National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) has emphasised a presumption in favour of “sustainable development”, but without defining that term in any detail (DCLG, 2011). In terms of rural policies it has supported more positive policies for rural enterprise, and some affordable housing. But as it stands, much will depend on local interpretations of what is acceptable as sustainable development. The statements in Local Planning Authorities' (LPA) core strategies, and the views of local neighbourhoods and communities, will be critical. So too will be the judgements of planning inspectors at the inevitable planning appeals, especially where planning applications are made in the absence of an up to date local plan.7

Quite how this will all work out in practice is a matter of conjecture. Given the difficulties facing the national economy and a new planning regime generally favouring development, the attractions of rural towns and villages for new enterprises (especially those related to providing crucial resources, eco-management and new energy) may overcome many of the blanket restrictions to rural development, along with significant increases in a range of mixed price housing schemes. On the other hand, the deep-rooted antipathy to building in the countryside, nourished by a historical cultural celebration of the pastoral idyll, and the protective instincts of those who live there now, may continue to support planning policies which limit new development to all but the most modest additions. Meanwhile the technical arguments surrounding the principles and practice of sustainable development will continue in the background with greater or lesser impact.

How will gentrified rural England, in all its types and styles, respond to these challenges? In economic terms it is likely that the important contribution which rural areas can make to creating new jobs, especially green jobs, is weakened by a protective, gentrified rural England (likewise the homes for people to serve the gentrified towns and villages). The loss of land-based jobs was critical for the role of rural towns and villages, and the creation of new enterprises, whether land-based or not, will be equally critical to generating a new sense of purpose for rural areas. Fundamentally, there has to be a compelling economic raison d'être to challenge the protection of the countryside “for its own sake” as the dominant longstanding cultural and political position. Whether a space will open up for new entrepreneurs to realise the many benefits which rural locations can offer, and take advantage of a new planning regime with a presumption in favour of sustainable development, in genuinely sustainable ways, is a key question for the decades ahead.

Socially, there has long been an argument for more “balanced” communities in which a mix of ages, incomes and ethnic backgrounds can provide a richer and more varied contribution to life and work. More recently, the urban riots in England may heighten the fears of rural dwellers and strengthen their motivation to limit new growth, creating even worse divisions.8 Alternatively, the strong social capital characteristic of many rural communities could show how a more tolerant and generous society might be created. Clearly this is a policy debate which goes well beyond the boundaries of this paper, but in which rural gentrification has a crucial part to play.

Environmentally, much will depend on whether the policy arguments mounted by the Rural Coalition and others to support rural development as part of a positive strategy for fostering sustainable communities are counteracted by the dominant cultural paradigm of protecting the varied and distinctive landscapes of the English countryside.

From a planning policy perspective, what should and could be done? It is disappointing that national planning policy is declining to take a firm lead—there is no vision in the draft NPPF of what sustainable rural development might look like. It appears that local planning authorities will be firmly in the “box seat” through the preparation of core strategies, and it is crucial that they fully engage local communities in formulating local rural strategies which define the principles and practice of “sustainable development”, using the best evidence available to them (e.g. Tym et al., 2008). This should be a profound technical and political discussion, involving local elected members, parish councils and elected members. Much will also depend on the “case law” judgements of planning inspectors, to which many of these decisions will inevitable fall.

There is a real opportunity here for genuine ‘bottom up’ planning, which engages local people in the future of the place they live, work and play in. Local planning authorities have an important responsibility to help make this work, as do local communities themselves, if they are to provide an effective plan within which new development can take place in a way which meets local needs, and which respects local distinctiveness. Standard policies and decisions do not fit each and every rural town, village and hamlet within the very diverse landscapes and peoples of rural England, and the “new localism” offers a genuine opportunity to formulate individual solutions to individual places. But it will not be easy. Neighbourhood planning is likely to be complicated and expensive, and local communities may be put off. Local planning authorities may fail to genuinely engage local people beyond the conventional treadmill of “consultation”. Gentrified rural England may remain suspicious.

Yet if it does not work, rural England will be vulnerable to ad hoc market-led speculative development, especially given the absence of national or regional policies, and a default presumption in favour of vaguely defined “sustainable development”. If the discarding of normative, hierarchical polices can be likened to planning finally going “postmodern”, it might leave the kind of decision space which, as Edward Docx argues within a cultural discourse (Docx, 2011), will be filled by the operation of the market.

In principle, the locus of power will move from central and regional government to local and community governance, tempered by decisions on appeal by “independent” inspectors. Much will depend on specific interpretations of what constitutes “sustainable development” and to what extent such definitions can steer or override the way in which the market will interpret it. Either way the advent of “localism” means that “gentrified” rural England, in all its shapes and sizes, is being put to the test. It can either shut up shop and cling to an exclusive model of the rural idyll, relying on towns and cities for employment and services; or it can embrace a new economic role based on the land and its capacities for delivering a more sustainable future, on the potential for rural communities to create new jobs based on new growth enterprises, and new services designed to meet their varied needs, supported by more and better sustainable transport (e.g. demand-responsive public and/or community transport). Given the major demographic, economic, social and environmental challenges facing the country today, the nature and quality of that response will be critical.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Aileen Stockdale, Queen's University Belfast, for her helpful advice in developing this Interface section and for her comments on an early content outline.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of DEFRA and the contribution of other colleagues to this work: Steve Robinson at Allerdale District Council, and John Siraut, Ryan Emmett and Chelsea Dosad, all at Colin Buchanan and Partners.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of DEFRA and the contribution of other colleagues to this work: Steve Robinson at Allerdale District Council, and John Siraut, Ryan Emmett and Chelsea Dosad, all at Colin Buchanan and Partners.

Notes

1. For a review of different interpretations of historic English national identity and the importance of the pastoral myth, see Sandbrook (2011).

2. The Rural Coalition was established in 2009 by six leading national bodies, chaired by Lord Matthew Taylor, to promote and develop the recommendations of the Taylor Report. It published The Rural Challenge in 2010. It was facilitated by the Commission for Rural Communities and now comprises over 15 national organisations.

3. These are included in previous central government Planning Policy Statements, and the Coalition Government's draft National Planning Policy Statement in 2011.

4. For a summary of rural polices in the core strategies of local plans in England, see Cherrett (2010).

5. Although the Green Belt was invented to prevent urban sprawl and the coalescence of existing urban areas, it has of course achieved popular status with the public and politicians as a catch-all policy of prevention of new development in green fields. It often comes as a surprise to many people in rural areas that there are no local Green Belt designations.

6. These include a Neighbourhood Plan, a Neighbourhood Development Order, and a Right to Build, but all tempered by the right to undertake a local referendum, and by the “strategic framework” of the LPA Core Strategy.

7. The NPPF's presumption in favour of sustainable development, especially where local plans are “absent, silent, indeterminate, or out-of-date” will raise serious questions about what constitutes “sustainable development” in any given location without a valid local policy framework.

8. For a discussion of the growth of inequality in the UK and its geographical segregation, see Miles (2011).

1. ‘Sea change’ and ‘tree change’ are terms coined in Australia to describe amenity-based migration movements towards coastal and rural localities.

1. Relative avoidance of already existing houses further qualifies any association that can be made between back-to-the-land and gentrification in terms of the direct displacement of more working class households, although such displacement at a larger scale might also constitute gentrification.

1. In 1954 Durham County Council planners allocated settlements into four categories, with Category D villages scheduled for no further investment, and ultimately for demise. Some were bulldozed. The policy was heavily criticised for ignoring residents' views, and was abandoned in the 1960s. (See Barr, 1969).

2. PPG 3, Planning Policy Guidance on Housing.