Professor Mark Shucksmith m.shucksmith@ncl.ac.uk

1. Future directions in rural research – a planning perspective.‘Place and space in the knowledge(s) and practices of governance.’ Professor Mark Shucksmith m.shucksmith@ncl.ac.uk

2. A ‘planning’ perspective? • Planning is not only a discipline: also a professional practice and a field or arena of contestation. • RTPI (2003): Spatial Planning “goes beyond critical thinking about space and place” to become “a basis for action and intervention.” It links knowledge to action in the public domain. • New ideas of spatiality & socio-spatial processes: • A modernist project in postmodern times? • Embedded practices of planning systems of C20th. • Castells: “the world has changed, can planning change?”

3. New directions… • From T&CP to Spatial Planning • Understands ‘place’ as a social construct, continually co-produced and contested: “carving out permanencies from the flow of processes creating space, while recognising these are always ‘becoming’ and ‘perishing’.” • Views connections between territories in relational terms rather than in terms of distance and proximity • Sees development as multiple, non-linear, continually emergent trajectories (Amin & Thrift 2002) • Context of network society & multi-scalar governance • Institutional relations: generative not authoritative.

4. New directions… • Healey’s concept of “collaborative planning” as a deliberative process: key challenges for practice: • How to mobilise actors in inclusive ways to develop strategic agendas in ‘diffused power’ contexts? • How to employ new concepts of place and space? • How to reconcile the state’s generative role (building capacity, promoting innovation and action) with its regulatory role? • How to foster new forms of integration and coherence out of fragmentation, and how to be strategic while also enabling? • Political mobilisation required, not planning techniques? • Huge cultural challenge for all actors. • Each of these offers challenges for rural researchers.

5. 1.Place-focused governance and place development • Diverse understandings of place qualities and dynamics, encountering each other in various institutional arenas. • How are conceptions of place (‘rural’) articulated and mobilised in struggles over place qualities, and how are the outcomes embedded in routinised governance practices? • How may hidden power relations be revealed? Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic violence – eg. sustainable communities. • How to build the capacity to act of less powerful in deliberative processes of place-making as well as in other aspects of agency? • How to understand and engage with multi-scalar socio-spatial processes and new understandings of spatiality?

6. Rural Development and Capacity-Building • If rural development is to be an inclusive, deliberative process, then capacity-building is a core concern. • Relational concept of institutional capacity-building (Healey) analysed in terms of: • Knowledge resources • Relational resources (social capital) • Mobilisation capabilities (capacity to act collectively) • Researchers can analyse the institutional capacities developed around an intervention (eg. LEADER, RDP, Objective 1), and assess how far wider discourses which structure policy agendas and routinised practices are transformed. Change agents? • Also examine new arenas, eg. Regional Spatial Strategies

7. 2. ‘Good places’ • Reworking conceptions of the public realm and ‘public interest’. ‘Good countryside’ for whom? • Exclusive countryside and middle-class colonisation. • Do rural places have to attract a ‘creative class’? • A ‘living countryside’ and farming interests. • Stern Report: are rural settlements inherently unsustainable? • Power relations in the construction of the rural. • Alternative visions: constructed by whom? How might these be fostered? Sites and acts of resistance? • Utopian visions v tolerant processes and diversity • Trajectory towards better futures rather than a perfect future?

8. 3. Spatial aspects of policies • Place-blindness of national and EU policies. • What are the consequences of such policies for space and place? Eg. territorial impact of the CAP; policies for sustainable communities; research funding; one planet farming? • How to build new understandings of spatiality and socio-spatial processes into sectoral policies? • Mechanisms such as rural-proofing? • Welsh Assembly’s study of spatial dimensions of policies • City-regions: cities as locomotives of growth…? • How to integrate policies in new context of networked society, multi-level governance and ‘nobody-in-charge’ world?

9. 4. Emergences & Emergencies • How to plan for the unexpected, in both the positive and negative senses? • The state in its enabling role… • How to foster creativity and innovation, allowing things to ‘bubble up’, and more generally how to enable unexpected events and uncertainty? • How to manage risks and emergencies (eg.FMD)? • Is planning incompatible with the unexpected? • Radical remaking of planning practice.

10. Conclusions • Planning is about knowledge into action: planning theory and practice have to adapt to new concepts of space and place – which in turn generate new research agendas. • ‘Collaborative planning’ as a deliberative process: the state exercises generative power to stimulate action, innovation, struggle and resistance. Institutional capacity. • Place-focused governance and place development. • ‘Good places’: reworking conceptions of the public realm. • Spatial aspects of ‘place-blind’ public policies • Planning and the unexpected: emergences and emergencies. • Revealing power relations, and understanding new arenas.