Gavin Parker

This commentary piece discusses how time and temporalities have, to date, not been paid enough attention or sufficiently understood and researched in planning theory and practice. The article argues that a wider recognition of time in and for planning is needed and highlights the emerging interest and potentials for greater research activity investigating this aspect of planning and urban governance. The main purpose of the article is to set out an agenda for future inquiry.

In the context of change and pressures to reconfigure formal planning education, the article draws on Bourdieu’s field theory to frame the experience of graduates in initial planning education in the UK. The research situates education in a contested professional context. The findings hold import for the profession given that relevant knowledge is expanding and core knowledge must be retained and instilled early, while training about specific policy or process can be maintained over a longer run. Greater integration and coordination of education and training must be developed if the profession is to maintain quality and integrity, as well as relevance.

This chapter synthesises critical learning from the practice cases presented in Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7, shifting the focus from that critical learning to an understanding of the potential of planning to co-produce the good countryside. The contemporary countryside is a product of land enclosure and private accumulation: a status quo that, if retained, is likely to limit progress towards more sustainable and just futures. Alternatively, the commoning of resources, alongside social enterprise, might scaffold a different rural future, that is not founded on enclosure and private accumulation, viewing rural assets, including land, as resources to be shared. From that starting point, the chapter links the extraction of social value, rather than private profit, to more just and better rural futures. It argues that planning should mediate between capitals to achieve this end and offers a framework for thinking about effective planning and the link to the good countryside. Effective planning is said to be guided by clear evidence, rationalised by care for place, delivered through a praxis of co-production, and measured against the achievement of social value.

Rural Planning Futures charts the critical societal challenges that are reshaping rural places across the UK and Ireland. The book evaluates current planning processes and explores the prospects for an enhanced, cross-sectoral and holistic future practice that mediates rural change towards more resilient and sustainable outcomes. Rural places and planning have, for too long, been viewed as marginal to both the theory and practice of planning. However, rural places are central to addressing critical global challenges – from climate action, through nature recovery, energy transitions, and food security, to water quality – while also facing more localised conflicts around housing, the siting of infrastructure, and the challenge of sustaining local services. The policy response to these complex challenges has too often been fragmented, siloed, and fixated on the short-term. By illustrating how key 'rural capitals' are linked and integrated, this book argues for a reset of the rural planning narrative and for the urgent disruption of established ways of working. Using innovative case studies, the chapters detail how planning for rural places must be guided by the pursuit of social value rather than protecting private interests. This book is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students in planning, geography, rural studies, landscape studies, and regional studies.

Rural planning policy across the UK and Ireland comes from a common base in parallel to the emergence and institutionalisation of modern planning systems, with similar aims and planning tools. However, practice in the years since the Second World War has evolved very differently, for social, cultural and practical reasons. Through analysis across significant common topics, including housing, placemaking and the environment, the chapter explores how the policy and governance systems are similar and different, and the implications of the extant policy landscapes for rural places and people. It concludes that those policy landscapes, and the governance architecture that underpins them, are grossly inadequate for addressing the contemporary challenges of the countryside – an inadequacy exacerbated by significant cuts to public spending over the last decade and more.

Rural change is increasingly contested in terms of balancing economic, environmental and social goals and through balancing local priorities (e.g. housing, employment, recreation) with critical global imperatives (including climate action, nature restoration, renewable energy transitions, food security and water quality enhancement). Within this context, this chapter asks: are planning systems, policies and practices across the UK and Ireland fit for purpose in managing rural change and steering rural places towards more sustainable futures? The chapter examines the evolution of planning for rural places across the 20th century, identifies current rural planning approaches and instruments, and raises critical challenges for future planning theory and practice. The chapter concludes by introducing a rural capitals framework (to examine built, economic, land-based and social-cultural capitals) as an evaluative framework used in the following chapters.