Abstract

While rural concerns were central to the emergence of planning in the last century, during the second half of the twentieth century planning theory and practice have been dominated by urban challenges, with an increasingly unimaginative rural planning regime driven largely by a dominant agricultural agenda. This productivist agenda continues to relegate potentially progressive rural planning debates behind farmland preservation, amenity protection, and a minimal approach to socio-economic issues (Lapping, 2006). However, the continued impacts of urbanisation, demographic changes, the decline of the traditional rural economic base, the emergence of multi-functional rural landscapes, and deeply contested new demands for rural space suggests an urgent need to reinvent rural planning for the twenty-first century.