Rural Planning in the Twenty-First Century: Context-Appropriate Practices in a Connected World

Abstract

Rural regions and their communities are principal locations for a range of crucial planning issues, yet the practice of rural planning has remained at the margins. In response to growing interest, we explored the current state and future possibilities of rural planning by conducting interviews with ten highly experienced US and Canadian rural specialists. Inductive analysis of their responses, which we supplemented with relevant literature, yielded contemporary definitions of “rural” and “rural planning and development.” The study highlights the major rural planning challenges, and opportunities in terms of “context-appropriate” practices attuned to rural communities and regions, globalization, and multilevel governance.

Keywords

globalization governance North America regional rural development

Introduction

The rural areas of North America are at a vital transition point in the early years of the twenty-first century. They are experiencing fundamental shifts in the nature of their economies. Agriculture and natural resource production continue to become more and more capital intensive; many rural places are shifting from being sites of production to consumption, driven by their natural amenities; and others are losing their economic raison d’etre altogether (Hibbard, Senkyr, and Webb 2015). These economic shifts correspond with demographic shifts. The widely commented on reverse migration of retirees and telecommuters from urban to rural places has had important local effects but has not reversed the long secular trend toward metropolitanization. “Advanced economies over the past two decades have both urbanized and suburbanized, with traditional rural societies and ‘ways of life’ being increasingly marginalized” (Marsden 2006, p. 4). The prevailing pattern, not only in North America but worldwide, is that people migrate from rural to urban areas in search of greater opportunities for work in modern, increasingly high-tech economies (Colocousis and Duncan 2007). The US population was 60 percent rural in the 1900 census; by 2010, it was less than 20 percent rural. Even this is somewhat deceptive, however. The rural population has hovered at around sixty million since 1980, making it a declining share of a growing total population (US Census Bureau 1995, 2010).

The significant but declining rural fraction of the population occupies 97 percent of the US land area as measured by census blocks (Cox 2013). Importantly for the planning field (discipline and profession), the rural landscape is a principal location for a range of crucial issues, from climate change to food and energy security to biodiversity to ecosystem services to amenity for recreation and tourism to environmental justice (Morrison, Lane, and Hibbard 2015). As well, there are documented long-standing tensions with the typical land use planning approaches used in rural areas (Crowe 2011). These and other problems challenge the abilities of rural regions and their communities to respond. Despite their urgency, the planning field seems reluctant to engage them in their specifically rural manifestations (Tonts and Haslam-McKenzie 2005). In their recent comprehensive review of the rural planning literature, Frank and Reiss (2014) point out that planning largely approaches rural communities as scaled-down cities, as cities-in-waiting, or as obsolete, dying places. And the most senior figures in the field in the United States use “fragmentation, conflict, and slow progress” to characterize rural planning (Daniels, Lapping, and Keller 2013).

Given the importance of the rural landscape, what is and could be the place of rural planning in North America? We explored the current state of rural planning and the possibilities for its future through in-depth interviews with a small, purposively selected set of eminent US and Canadian rural specialists in planning and related fields, both scholars and practitioners. As well, we used a survey of the relevant literature, including the comprehensive review by Frank and Reiss (2014), to support and add substance and depth to the interviews. The study adds to existing scholarship by complementing current understanding of rural planning with the unique methodology of rural specialist interviews and by inductively creating a framework for future possibilities.

After this introduction, we describe in more detail the methods used to conduct our interviews. Following that, we report our findings on the state of rural planning in North America, drawn from the interviews and the literature. Then, we propose a framework for thinking about the future of rural planning. Finally, we offer some concluding comments.

Methods

This is an inductive study. It started with no a priori assumptions. We modeled our research design on Flyvbjerg’s (2006) concept of the paradigmatic case study. A paradigmatic case study aims to identify and highlight the general characteristics of the domain with which the case is concerned—rural planning in this instance. No standard exists for the paradigmatic case; it transcends any sort of rule-based criteria. In keeping with this, we approached the topic open-endedly with regard to questions and nonrandomly with regard to sources.

Our purpose was to identify and describe current issues in rural planning, with a view to gaining some ideas about its future. In that vein we chose in-depth, qualitative interviews for this study, enabling us to gather information directly pertaining to our research question. It is one of the most data-rich methods because the open-ended, semistructured format follows a general protocol yet keeps the interviews somewhat conversational, allowing participants to prioritize and describe in detail the components of the questions that matter most to them and expand on their areas of interest and expertise (Charmaz 2014).

We began by brainstorming a preliminary set of open-ended questions, based on the literature and our own professional involvement in rural planning and development. To field test the preliminary questions, we conducted telephone interviews with five rural planners—both scholars and practitioners—with whom we had established professional connections. In addition to the preliminary questions, we also asked their advice about what questions to ask to understand rural planning and the challenges faced by rural planners. On the basis of that experience, we developed a semifinal interview guide, which each of the coauthors field-tested on an additional rural planner. We then finalized the interview guide. It asks a variety of questions about the current condition of rural planning and development, aimed at drawing out their views of the major planning issues and the problems and opportunities for rural planning (see Appendix A).

To answer our questions, we did not pursue a random cross section of rural planners. Rather, we purposively selected a limited number of people who are prominent in rural issues nationally and internationally, people with deep current, practice-based knowledge and not necessarily planners. We used an informal reputational process to select respondents, identifying names through the scholarly and professional literature, supplemented by suggestions from the field test interviewees. We sought a range of perspectives: people working in the United States and Canada; people working in planning, development, and design; and people working in government, universities, and NGOs. We invited eleven people to participate, based on those criteria. Nine said yes. Another felt she or he was not the best person to be interviewed and recommended someone else in her or his place; this person said yes. One person did not reply. Thus, we conducted telephone interviews with ten respondents, with each person giving consent to participate in the study via the protocol approved by the lead author’s institutional review board (IRB). Five are primarily academics and five primarily practitioners, though all of the academics have deep practice experience. Two are currently based in Canada and eight in the United States, though four of the latter have extensive Canadian experience (see Appendix B).

We sent the interview guide to the respondents in advance of the conversations and encouraged them to think about their answers. We conducted the interviews in February–April 2014. Each lasted from 30 to 90 minutes. We made extensive notes during each conversation, including verbatim records of the more acute comments. Then, immediately following each interview we prepared a summary memo.

Consistent with the paradigmatic case study approach, this is an effort to frame the issues, not to measure the extent of various views. In our analysis we looked for areas of broad consensus or near consensus among the respondents with respect to the current state of rural planning, areas that would help us to identify and highlight its general characteristics. We tried to avoid what Tribe (1973) calls the tyranny of false precision. We did not formally code and count topics, search for contradictions and conflicts, or the like. We used a close reading of the notes, memos, and verbatim reports to identify general characteristics and patterns, and exemplary quotes to illustrate them. We present and discuss them in the following two sections.

Current State of Rural Planning

Rural planning has occupied an uncertain place in North American urban and regional planning from the beginning. The pioneering Scottish planner Thomas Adams was an important early voice for the notion that planning is urban oriented (Caldwell 2011; Meyers 1998). A leading proponent of the Garden City movement, Adams helped found what is now the Royal Town Planning Institute before moving to Canada where, inter alia, he authored Rural Planning and Development (1917) for the Canadian government; subsequently, he took up the position of Director of Plans and Surveys for the first Regional Plan of New York (1929). Adams advocated for comprehensive land use planning in urban and rural areas and, expressing a view that is still widely held, he called for “planning rural communities that offer the same promises as their urban counterparts” (Caldwell 2011, p. xvii). More recently, a celebration of the centennial of the first National Planning Conference (JAPA 2009), the event that is generally recognized as the launch point of the field of planning in the United States, unequivocally affirmed that the subject matter of planning is cities, while rural planning went unacknowledged.

But another policy event almost concurrent with the first National Planning Conference presented an entirely different view of planning as it pertains to “the rural.” The Report of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission, issued in March, 1909, called not for rural communities to take on the characteristics of cities, but for their development on their own terms—in Roosevelt’s words, to make the rural region and its communities “what it should be, and what I believe it ultimately will be—one of the most dignified, desirable, and sought-after ways of . . . living” (Country Life Commission 1909, p. 17). This latter view is also still current, with many rural specialists insisting that rural communities have to be seen not as mini-cities but on their own terms.

Four themes characterizing the current state of rural planning emerged from our interrogation of the in-depth interviews and associated literature review: defining rural; defining rural planning and development; understanding the impacts of globalization on rural areas and rural planning; and dealing with the challenges of government and governance. We take up these themes in turn.

Defining Rural

Nearly all our respondents mentioned the importance for rural planning and development of the formal definitions of rural by such agencies as the US Census Bureau and Statistics Canada, which are based largely on population size and density. They also pointed out the difficulties inherent in what would seem to be a very concrete approach to defining “the rural.” For example, rural planning is unnecessarily complicated by different US government agencies using different measures of size/density to distinguish “rural” from “urban” or “non-metropolitan” from “metropolitan” (Cf. Isserman 2005).

The respondents saw such definitions as necessary but not sufficient. Some dismissed them as overly dichotomous—urban versus rural—and argued for a continuum from very urban (large, dense population; highly developed infrastructure) to deep rural (small, scattered population; minimal infrastructure) that would enable opportunities to establish urban–rural linkages. Others offered more environmentally or socially based definitions. “Rural is where the economy is based on the environment—where people make their living from the land in one way or another.” “Rural is where there are more cows than people, where land uses are dominated by ag and forestry.” “It’s a frame of mind, in which you prefer rural amenities rather than urban amenities—a walk in the woods rather than a night at the opera.” “If you think you’re rural, you’re rural.” Several pointed to the subjective nature of the concept, noting for example, that “a rural community in Connecticut—as defined by population, density, or isolation—might be considered urban in Idaho.”

It is interesting to compare these unrehearsed comments to the literature. Defining rural has been a surprisingly thorny project. Jess Gilbert (1982) observed more than thirty years ago that there is a tendency to think of rural as a residual category; rural is whatever is not urban. Two British geographer/planners recently offered the same characterization, defining rural as the “interstitial spaces lying between metropolitan areas” (Harrison and Heley 2015, p. 1). But that approach does not get us very far toward a substantive understanding of what it means to be rural. Black (2005) identified three substantive categories of definitions of rural in wide use:

certain sociodemographic characteristics, such as small settlement size and low population density;

certain predominant forms of economic activity and/or land use, such as farming, grazing, mining, and logging; and/or

certain sociocultural characteristics, particular values and kinds of social relationships.

As with the size/density definitions, there are difficulties with each of these. Rather than a precise definition, our respondents’ thinking seems to be more in line with the approach suggested by Michael Bell (2007). He encourages us to understand rural as having two dimensions, materialist and idealist, in the philosophical sense of those terms. In the materialist sense, rural is characterized by low population density, primary production, and closeness to nature—“the rural everyone knows as rural” (p. 408). In the idealist sense, rural is a set of associations, the perceived rural influences on people’s lives regardless of where they live. Examples of rural influences include the value of neighborliness, self-sufficiency, outdoor lifestyle, and fear of isolation. It is important to recognize that not all these associations are positive: For example, rural Kansas is the locale for In Cold Blood as well as The Wizard of Oz.

In this view, rural seems to be a way of life, in both the materialist and idealist senses, and is context-specific. Particular places, practices, and people come to be identified as rural. One respondent said the definition should be left up to each community, another that “I know it when I see it.” Despite, or perhaps because of that soft-focus view, there was general agreement that, as one of our respondents put it, the challenge is to “resist external control and maintain a separate local identity” and, as another said, to “enable a decent quality of rural life.”

Defining Rural Planning and Development

If rural planning and development is the practice of enabling rural quality of life, according to many respondents it starts with having a “rural perspective,” understanding rural realities, limitations, and challenges, and being able to work on any and all rural issues from land use to economic development to infrastructure to natural resource management and the environment. It is not simply “planning in rural places.” The emphasis is on practices to holistically understand and value specific rural places, empower their residents, and coordinate their constituencies (cf. Frank and Reiss 2014).

Our respondents’ comments can be organized into three topics with which rural planning and development are concerned: physical development, economic development, and social development. Physical development consists of land use and infrastructure, the siting of future growth, “what gets built where,” design of the built environment, and the provision and “appropriate scaling” of “necessary services.” Several respondents cautioned that while physical development is not a uniquely rural activity, it raises different issues in urban and rural areas. One respondent commented that it is important to “respect the aspirations of rural people, who don’t necessarily want an urban level of services.” Another gave a more spatial emphasis, stressing that urban design is about shaping public spaces while rural design is concerned with larger, landscape-scale issues.

Some respondents contrasted physical development, which they categorized as planning, with economic and social development. As one put it, “rural planning guides physical development and provides the needed infrastructure for it.” Another observed that the practice of rural development has economic connotations—access to economic opportunity, while rural planning is about land use planning. However, the respondent was quick to note that the land use and economic development conversations too often take place in isolation from one another, that they are or ought to be interrelated and interdependent and considered in relation to one another. There were various elaborations on that point, primarily aimed at bringing in the role of resources and the natural environment. One saw rural development as facilitating community and regional resilience to provide stewardship of resources and real livelihoods. Another said that “rural development operates at the intersection between the natural and built environment to create prosperity, maintain and enhance healthy ecosystems, and provide a high quality of life.”

Concepts such as economic opportunity, prosperity, and quality of life bring in the dimension of social development as well. “Rural development recognizes that people are embedded in and depend on the environment. The goals of rural development are economic security, healthy ecosystems, and social inclusion.” According to these respondents the aim of economic development is not maximizing individual or community wealth; rather it is creating prosperity as understood by a community and its people, “increasing life choices so people can derive better satisfaction.”

An additional concern in social development is to increase community problem-solving capacity. Nearly all the respondents explicitly or implicitly mentioned the importance of employing processes that are participatory, aim for community control, and are based in “the subsidiarity principle”—the EU notion that decisions should be made at the smallest, lowest, or least centralized level of authority capable of addressing it effectively, the level closest to those who will be affected. Consistent with that view, many of the respondents seemed to understand rural planning primarily as a process. For example,

“Planning is the vision of what should/could happen.”

“Planning is preparing to achieve a desired future, and taking action towards that, using community engagement and capacity building.”

“Planning is helping people make good decisions about their collective future.”

“Planning is participatory and aims for community control.”

To sum up, according to our respondents, rural planning and development is concerned with increasing opportunities and life choices in rural places, through physical development, including the built as well as the natural environment, socioeconomic development, and the interaction and mutual influence of physical and socioeconomic development in support of community resilience and sustainability.

Understanding the Impacts of Globalization on Rural Areas and Rural Planning

Many respondents highlighted the impacts of globalization on the rural economy, land use, environment, and society. The globalization theme appeared voluntarily, without the researchers specifically asking about it. Respondents cast the cumulative impacts of globalization as largely negative for rural areas. As one respondent said, “Rural areas in the U.S. have been a bathtub that’s draining, extracting people and resources,” tasked with providing resources and mitigating the impacts of the industrial and postindustrial economy to regional and global systems. Other respondents highlighted the consequences to rural areas of the “neo-liberal myths about the highest, best use of resources” that result in the “extraction of resources, people, and money of a rural place” and the “centralization of everything.” Respondents pointed to the industrialization of agriculture and forestry, which has led to the downsizing of the rural labor force, landscape changes, the consolidation and privatization of government services, and the spread of large corporations “from hospital chains to Walmart to Amazon.”

The majority of respondents described impacts on rural areas from large-scale environmental stresses, such as watershed modification and climate change, population and demographic shifts (especially aging and immigration), and rapid development at the urban fringe and in high-amenity places. The respondents noted that many of these changes have led to mismatches between labor forces and employers, lowered the quality of life and threatened the health of those who remain, and eroded local institutions, finances, and civic capacity, lessening the ability to improve the situation. “People living in rural areas are disenfranchised from making decisions about the natural resource base.” “We have become more of a developing country in the rural areas. . . . The root of poverty is isolation from the mainstream economy, healthcare, and wealthier neighborhoods.”

Most recently, the pace of change, the magnitude of the stresses, and the greater awareness and opportunities for involvement, have prompted innovations in rural planning practices that have come to be associated with the field and indicate its future possibilities. One respondent made the interesting observation that emerging ideas about rural planning practice may have more in common with international development than with North American urban and regional planning. The international development literature reflects important parallels with our respondents’ thoughts about rural planning and development. For example, Nobel Prize–winning international development economist Amartya Sen (1999) defined the purpose of development as increasing economic, political, and social freedom, expanding their control over the things that matter most to them in their own lives. Likewise, de Paula and Dymsky (2005) summarized the practice of development as privileging context; seeking to be institutionally specific, historically informed, and able to incorporate local cultural processes.

Understanding the Challenges of Government and Governance

Despite the tremendous planning needs in rural areas, the respondents uniformly agreed that national and state/provincial leadership and institutional/financial support for rural planning and planners was insufficient, and in some respects declining. US respondents noted the absence of comprehensive policies for rural areas. Of the policies applying to rural areas, local, state, and federal policies stemming from different agencies (e.g., growth management vs. agriculture) are often uncoordinated and even contradictory. Attempts at coordinating or integrating sectors under a single “rural” roof have typically failed, seemingly a casualty of politics and reluctance of higher level government to truly share power and resources with local communities (Frank and Reiss 2014). Respondents also observed problems with “one-size-fits-all” rural policies due to potentially opposite needs and strategies, such as seen in the comparison of the rapidly growing urban fringe to the economically depressed deep rural areas.

The Canadian respondents described stronger influence of higher-level government. In Canada, “there are strong vertical linkages” for land use planning at the provincial level; for example, “the creation of new non-farm lots in [a deep rural area] is not permitted. Sometimes local townships grumble, but they still have a legal obligation to conform.” “Development has historically meant sending people out to rural areas to help with technology, knowing the land and what it will grow; it was top–down.”

The US and Canadian respondents noted many challenges of local and regional governance for rural planning and development. Respondents in both countries observed that rural communities may not value, and sometimes even oppose, planning and planners. For example, a Canadian respondent said “some officials never get there,” that is, understand the value of planning. These challenges stem from the association of “planning and planners” with numerous undesired biases from a rural perspective, including serving nonlocal interests, being urban biased, privileging a rational approach, and being governmental and professionally intensive.

In US rural areas, respondents described a suspicion of government, an overriding concern for property rights, and a high regard for “rugged individualism,” all of which get in the way of collective action—of planning. It is an attitude that reinforces “often self-imposed isolation that keeps rural communities from learning from one another and supporting one another.” “It makes sense to have intelligent use of land and sustainability, but how we zone won’t matter, since we don’t have the top–down regulatory control.” “Unfortunately, the political old guard of county commissioners like the way things are currently done, which is ‘back door.’”

In Canada, a respondent described the recent “push-back to centralized government . . . by local residents over wind turbines,” which raised the philosophical issue of “different public interests [planners] must work through” during global changes. A second respondent from Canada stated, “There are debates in rural areas in Canada about ownership, land claims and treaties, around who owns, inherits, and plans the land and resources. In the coming decade, these debates will become a major part of the discourse about what rural is and who has obligations and authority to plan.”

Beyond the issues of competing interests, respondents noted limited rural planning capacity. “Most rural governments lack the resources for good, long-range, advance planning. As a consequence they act opportunistically rather than strategically.” “Unfortunately, rural planners, municipalities, and agencies in Canada are not going beyond the minimum requirements of the planning law, even though legislators intended the law to be a starting point. There is not much time to engage beyond land use regulation.” Additionally, “The community needs a vision about where they want things to go, which requires leadership and readiness to try something different. Both are in short supply in many rural areas.” “Local attitudes and forces can get issues framed in the wrong way, making it impossible to move.” “[The political old guard of county commissioners] tends not to embrace new ideas.”

To sum up the challenges of government and governance for rural planning, on one hand there is a reported need for coordinated and mutually supportive policy directions from the top, from the central government; and on the other hand there is a desire for flexibility, situation-specific strategies, and local control. The latter is problematic because the limited resources and anti-urban bias of rural areas make it difficult to conduct any planning efforts beyond the minimums required by the central government.

If rural planning is about enabling a decent quality of rural life in a globally connected world, and if rural planners have learned from international development that the purpose of planning is increasing people’s control over the things that matter most to them in their own lives, it would seem that the future direction of rural planning should be toward context-appropriate practices.

Future Possibilities: Context-Appropriate Practices

Our interviews and the literature point to great challenges in the current situation of rural areas, challenges that denote a significant future role for rural planning. The respondents described rural people and communities as determined to resist external control and maintain a separate local identity, yet the erosion of local institutions, finances, and civic capacity suggest rural needs for support.

As highlighted in the Current State section, the relevant contexts for rural planning are the rural places and communities themselves, as well as the major phenomenon of globalization, and multiscalar governance practices and institutions. Context-appropriate rural planning practices lie at the intersection of rural needs, opportunities provided by various contexts, and the capacities of the planning field. The rural specialists we interviewed described context-appropriate practices, not only because they understood the contexts, but also because we asked questions about rural planning, and respondents based their answers on knowledge of the planning field, including its strengths and weaknesses. The resulting framework of context-appropriate practices can guide the planning field and practitioners toward important aspects to address in rural planning. While some of the suggestions may lie on the fringes of the current planning field, most are familiar, with the main differences being matters of application and emphasis. As one respondent stated, “Many planning topics translate to rural areas, such as economic development, residential land use, water and sewer. And agricultural management goes beyond asking what crop to grow to include . . . regulation and planning activities. However, the planning profession does not recognize these activities as such.”

Rural Context

The rural context is focused on rural needs and opportunities, and from this perspective, rural planning is concerned with problem-solving and empowerment. The definitions of planning that resonated with the respondents were oriented toward decision making and creativity: “We need to explain that planning is about understanding and choosing among different options.” “I see planning as preparing to achieve a desired future, and taking action towards that.” Rural planning means “using design as a problem-solving process, also known as ‘design thinking.’” According to respondents, planning is “not limited to the plan,” and those involved in planning are not limited to planners: “Everyone, including planners, becomes educated about the design process.” There is encouragement for this approach within the planning field: “I was invited to speak in a symposium at the national APA conference. Planners came up to me delighted to have this discussion about the rural perspective and rural design.” One person extended the roles to ensure the decisions and designs are implemented: “Rural planning should include aspects of implementation, evaluation, budgeting, and coordinating resources.”

Problem solving in the rural context attends to the unique sociodemographic, economic/land use, and sociocultural aspects, and in materialist and idealist terms. “[Planning] isn’t just land use planning.” Rural planning involves the “tackling of issues not normally addressed by planners—immigration, food sector, environmental standards, agricultural sector.” Respondents also stressed that the rural context necessitates a higher degree of integration among physical, economic, and social development, including the traditional sectors of land use planning, design of the built environment, and economic development. For example, a respondent described: “At our center we have a project that looks at how the landscape affects health and wellness, specifically virus transmission.” Problem solving in the rural context means that “the rural planner has to be a jack of all trades.”

Empowerment strategies for rural communities described by the respondents were closely tied to economic development, governance, and social development. A key principle of empowerment was for rural communities “to attract investment that they own and control . . . [to] shift away from place-based to people-based wealth.” A respondent recommended that local ownership and control be achieved through endogenous entrepreneurialism based on available assets, rather than through “smokestack chasing.” Toward this end, “planning and design can help citizens understand the aspects of a place and what is great about it.” The role of planning in land control was of particular interest to another respondent, because rural people are generally “land rich and cash poor,” and property ownership is tied to local land control and financial investment. In terms of social development for empowerment, one suggested strategy was for planning to support disadvantaged groups: “I see some communities recognizing that immigrant, migrant workers are important to agriculture, there are social and cultural aspects, and that there is strength in diversity.”

Globalization Context

Rural problem solving and empowerment can be further aided by recognizing concerns and opportunities occurring with the global context. One respondent went so far as to see the rural problem as “how to transition to globalization.”

In terms of problem solving, respondents saw a major role for rural planning to help manage the negative impacts of globalization. Several respondents specifically spoke in terms of rural planning strategies to increase awareness of “how the status quo is costly” and to counteract the negative impacts of extraction, centralization, and degradation. A respondent found optimism in the fact that “planning becomes possible in times of stress,” such as high population growth or disaster response. Respondents described a vital role for planning in rural areas that are experiencing urban growth pressures. Several respondents had devoted much of their careers to conserving natural and farm lands, mitigating sprawl, and establishing quality communities. One person summed up the practices: “There’s a renewed commitment to efficient infrastructure and physical development [in rural areas . . . and] a conscious effort to create community by building gathering places.” Another said, “In growing areas, planning should focus on preserving what has made the place attractive and special, and not allowing growth to overwhelm the character of the place.”

A number of respondents noted that planning goals and approaches should be different if a rural area is declining. “If losing population, planning should ask, ‘how do we facilitate growth, provide labor retraining, develop and retain the agricultural sector?’” The approaches were soundly in the realm of economic development: “Finding a new economic reason to exist as their old economy disappears.” “Thinking in terms of competitive advantage.” “Preparing people for the jobs of tomorrow.”

The respondents indicated that the global context presented opportunities for both preservation and development of rural areas, as rural areas are increasingly valued for their multiple functions/services to the world. “Rural areas [can] make the case, ‘If you invest with us, such as healthy food, you will get a return on investment.’” The emerging opportunities may translate into competing demands and hence the need for intelligent, negotiated management for “multi-functionality,” “investment rather than consumption,” “sustainability and inclusivity,” and “a new goal of fostering resilient communities.” As one respondent said, “We should work towards building rural assets, without undermining the others.” To do this, rural areas would not only address expanding opportunities to meet the global demand for essential resources of food, water, and energy, but also functions that preserve the assets, such as ecosystem services and bio-based products.

Respondents reported emerging strategies of rural development based on regional rural–urban and rural–rural linkages. A respondent in Canada described, “[in my province] we have identified four geographic-economic rurals.” Another said, “My job isn’t to revitalize rural planning; it is to better understand reciprocity and relationships between urban and rural.” This respondent was concerned that “if rural is seen as a separate entity, we are not going to get there.” “We have been seeking to reposition rural areas to be seen as valued and essential parts to urban and suburban areas. . . . We need to make clear that people in cities need food, fiber, and recreation, energy; things provided by rural areas. . . . No one is an island. We need to identify the self- and shared interests of each and develop an economy in sustainability.”

Governance Context

The interaction between the planning field and the governance context currently creates barriers to effective rural planning, however respondents identified ways in which planning can fulfill needed governance roles at local (rural) and higher levels.

When discussing the possible “leadership gap” in rural communities, a respondent advised that planners use political savvy: “Technical analysis is only one input into a decision. [Planners] might be more effective if they helped officials identify the common ground around an issue.” Another recommended: “My projects have steering committee groups with broad representation, which is the way to overcome the old guard.” Several respondents noted the need for more planning training for rural “citizen planners,” including planning/zoning commissioners and county commissioners. Respondents saw a prominent role for planning to assist disadvantaged rural people in accessing power via reciprocal relationships, through brokering and evening the playing field. Several rural specialists remarked that much of the innovation in rural practice is in “engagement of communities” and processes that “lead to citizen-selected solutions.”

Several respondents proposed that “small communities in a region can work together to develop and advance a collective agenda.” They believed that rural communities have significant power to organize regionally due to their “culture of self-help, self-reliance.” A respondent reported examples of grassroots regional programs: “local food movements, local special service districts, and formal and informal helping networks.” Another had observed challenges: “We need to build [regional] systems . . . but nobody owns that.” This respondent recommended that nonprofit organizations with rural planning and development missions be transformed to “hold the big picture and facilitate, to discover shared interests.”

Respondents across the board expressed a multilevel governance view, a need to stimulate connections among market, governmental, and nonprofit institutions, and for public and private subsidization of rural areas as public goods. For example, “government may want to intervene in the market for social justice reasons. Some companies may also provide services as part of corporate responsibility.” Respondents saw the planning field’s association with institutions as an asset that could be used to create both horizontal and vertical governance linkages with dominant economic and political systems. In particular, rural specialists in Canada described evolving relationships between the rural communities, provincial governments, and the planning field. “Now there is more emphasis on self-help and the local economy, but there is still a provincial role.” One Canadian rural specialist is seeking ways “to streamline government structures to make planning work better,” while simultaneously finding ways to “intensify rural planning resources.” One such innovation in deep rural Canada is “regional government ‘go centers’ that people can access remotely or in person.” This respondent also discussed the need to make tough decisions at the state or federal level about the viability of rural economies: “There has to be some sort of triage to assess opportunities and identify rural centers that should (and should not) be supported.”

Conclusion

Rural planning could be headed for a renaissance, as a result of the intensifying needs in rural communities and regions, and movement within the planning field toward sustainability. Currently, though, rural planning lies at the margins of a discipline that largely identifies with cities. In order to characterize the current state and future possibilities of rural planning at this critical time, this study used an alternative methodology to complement the existing literature: interviews with ten expert rural specialists across the United States and Canada. To tap into the rural specialists’ extensive experience-based, contemporary wisdom, we broadly asked for their impressions of rural areas, and rural planning and development. Inductive analysis of the responses led to insights about priority issues, current barriers, and promising approaches for rural planning. The major findings of the “current state” concerned definitions of “the rural,” interpretations of rural planning and development, the impacts of globalization, and governance challenges. The “future possibilities” of rural planning were based upon context-appropriate practices within the multiple dimensions of rural communities and regions, global systems, and multilevel governance.

Collectively, the responses conveyed deep understanding and judgment about existing and aspirational rural planning, including its relationship to the planning field. Many of these insights reinforced the literature, while others highlighted new considerations. Taking a rural perspective was confirmed to be vital for rural planning. We elaborated on what this means, and elucidated the similarities with Amartya Sen’s empowerment approach to international development. The study portrayed the extent to which the planning field has fallen short of taking the rural perspective, and the price that has been paid in terms of rural resistance and missed opportunities. Overall, the respondents gave credence to the planning field’s reputation and strengths in physical development, especially land use and urbanization (including protection from it), and government institutions. The planning field’s weakest areas, in relation to rural needs, appeared to be its limited attention to concerns of poverty and disenfranchisement, and the related goal of empowerment. These weaknesses matched those of Frank and Reiss (2014), who noted that the planning field paid greater attention to growing rural areas than to those in economic and population decline. The study’s respondents, however, envisioned specific techniques for rural empowerment that could overlap with the planning field’s fortes.

The study highlighted problem solving as both a rural need and planning field strength, which is consistent with emerging literature (Frank and Reiss 2014). The respondents explained that rural problem-solving necessitates expertise in a wide variety of substantive topics—across the rural, globalization, and governance contexts—some of which are unfamiliar to planners. Similar to the literature, respondents viewed rural areas as part of the globalized economy, and they identified rural–urban relationships as a key domain for planners. The study also found that individual rural planners would be most effective if they applied diverse skills and mechanisms (beyond “plans”). The respondents’ optimism for the idealized rural planning was tempered, however, by their encounters with planners who were inflexible and unable to take a rural perspective. One subtle difference of opinion among the respondents seemed to revolve around the extent to which the planning profession should take the rural perspective and adapt, versus rely on its existing strengths. Another observed difference was Canada’s greater top–down government influence of rural planning, which added provincial interests as an important context that sometimes competes with local (rural) interests.

A vision of rural planning in the twenty-first century has taken shape. Rural planning entails context-appropriate practices for community and regional problem solving and empowerment. These practices resonate with the planning field’s strengths. Given the past marginalization of rural planning, the diverse substantive and procedural skills requested, and the lack of resources and other barriers, progressing toward this vision is a tall order. Yet, this study found evidence of a quietly building momentum. We believe that engaged, reflective rural specialists, those we interviewed and others like them, hold the keys to the future of rural planning.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Appendix B

Acknowledgements

We thank the ten rural specialists who graciously participated in the study. Their expertise provided the foundation for this article. And we appreciate the helpful suggestions of the three anonymous reviewers.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Kathryn I. Frank is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Florida. Her research integrates the fields of rural planning, governance, and regional sustainability in the face of global change.

Michael Hibbard is professor emeritus at the University of Oregon Department of Planning, Public Policy & Management. His research focuses on community and regional development, with a special interest in the social impacts of economic change on small towns, Indigenous communities, and rural regions in the United States and other industrialized nations.

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