Menelaos Gkartzios

Izmir Institute of Technology · Department of City and Regional Planning

The Routledge Companion to Rural Planning provides a critical account and state of the art review of rural planning in the early years of the twenty-first century. Looking across different international experiences-from Europe, North America and Australasia to the transition and emerging economies, including BRIC and former communist states-it aims...

Rural Places and Planning provides a compact analysis for students and early-career practitioners of the critical connections between place capitals and the broader ideas and practices of planning, seeded within rural communities. It looks across twelve international cases, examining the values that guide the pursuit of the ‘good countryside’. The...

Globally speaking, Asian countries, especially East Asian countries, are facing acute national depopulation situation and severe rural shrinkage development. Based on the continuous surveys of town and village development in Japan, South Korea, and China, this study aims to provide an overview of social policies that have been implemented in the pa...

Rapid urbanization and climate change have created new challenges in metropolitan areas such as urban flooding, urban heat island, air pollution and degradation of natural habitat. To cope with these challenges, green storm water infrastructures have come to the fore as an innovative and sustainable approach. Research that focuses on developing new...

Set in the context of debates over the future of rural areas, and the role of planning in co-delivering a sustainable, inclusive and resilient countryside, this article considers the value of a place capitals perspective for unpacking, firstly, ‘what makes’ rural places and, secondly, the ways that planning can ensure the protection, enhancement an...

Unlocking the digital potential of the UK's rural areas is important for the future of rural businesses, rural communities and the UK economy as a whole. The use of digital technologies is yielding new opportunities for businesses, including those located rurally, to enhance business growth and economic development, which significantly contributes...

Urbanisation has been a dominant trend in Japan over the last fifty years. However, in the context of rapidly ageing and depopulating rural areas, recent research has begun to examine the lives, motivations and difficulties of an apparently increasing number of counter-urban migrants in Japan. Despite this, the extent and policy drivers of counteru...

Rural enterprise hubs are physical infrastructures designed to help rural businesses access tangible and intangible benefits. They generally operate within two main business models: ‘Honey Pots’ (i.e. targeting business-to-customer tenants) and ‘Hives’ (i.e. targeting business‐to‐business tenants). This paper focuses on the former type, Honey Pot h...

While the ‘global countryside’ advocates networked and differentiated rural realities, the platform of discussing and disseminating those is usually, and sometimes inevitably, monolingual. The language of academic research creates its own politics, exclusions and inequalities: ubiquitous and universal uses of the term ‘rural’, particularly in non-A...

Organizing rural art festivals is considered an effective intervention in support of rural revitalization in the face of aging and population decline in Japan. Several studies have identified the impacts of art festivals on economic and social rural development internationally. Little research, however, has focused on the management process of such...

Understandings of socially distributed expertise as being key to living, interpreting and intervening in the world, are increasingly used in development narratives, referring usually to knowledge sharing across multi-stakeholder partnerships. This movement towards the democratisation of expertise challenges the ideological claim of science to be th...

This article presents a unique amalgam across artistic research and rural sociology. We draw on a collaborative art residence programme between a University and an arts organisation in England, which invited an artist to respond to a highly contentious topic in rural England: housing development. The ambition for the residency was, firstly, to prov...

This chapter outlines the context for the detailed discussions that follow on how rurality and rural planning might compound sectional exclusions according to the criteria of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability and age. We first review a recent approach to rural social inclusion, Mark Shucksmith’s ‘good countryside’ drawing on Ash Amin, and th...

This paper stresses the role of language in rural studies research. It does so by exploring conceptualisations of the city and the countryside in a period of mobility transformations and economic crisis in Greece. We use survey data from open-ended questions asking respondents to provide words they associate with the ‘village’, the ‘city’ and the ‘...

Using community resilience and institutional entrepreneurship as conceptual lens, the paper explores whether support for social enterprises in non-metropolitan Greece has led to resilient social systems. Whilst drawing on narratives of enabling a bottom-up response to market failure, rather than radical or reformist adaptation, social enterprise ma...

Drawing on the ‘mobility turn’, research in rural studies has engaged with new explorations of mobilities, beyond the now well-explored counterurbanisation and rural gentrification processes, including local and temporary mobility in diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts. This paper explores past and potential future mobility patterns in two...

This paper investigates aspects of farmers' wellbeing in the context of their participation in an agri-environmental scheme (AES), the North Yorkshire Cornfield Flowers Project (CFP) in the North East of England. Recent developments in wellbeing studies have informed data collection and analysis. Ethnographic data was gathered via observation, fiel...

This paper aims to examine rural population/residential movements through a mobilities perspective to provide an inclusive analysis of the diverse processes of movement that (re)produce rural places beyond the dominant counterurbanisation narrative. We seek to contribute to the literature in two ways. Firstly, we examine a sample of rural residents...

The Malaysian community has recently become more aware of the benefits of organic food and its potential advantages for human health. Organic food may also contribute to achieving more sustainable food production and have a positive impact on national food security. However, in Malaysian situation, even though various strategies have been implement...

This paper makes an original contribution to our understandings of the relational role of artistic practice as part of rural community development. Art-led initiatives are now commonplace in rural development strategies. However, the effects of art in rural community, particularly beyond economic development, have received little attention. In this...

Remoundou K., Gkartzios M. and Garrod G. Conceptualizing mobility in times of crisis: towards crisis-led counterurbanization, Regional Studies. This study makes a novel theoretical and empirical contribution to the counterurbanization literature. Firstly, the research offers a new conceptualization by drawing on the potential for a crisis-led count...

This paper attempts a synthesis between housing and rural development research through the lens of resilience thinking. Drawing on Ireland as a case study characterised by a pro-development and laissez-faire ethos in housing policy, we argue that resilience thinking opens up new perspectives and provides the potential to ‘re-frame’ rural housing pr...

In this paper, we explore the link between counterurban mobilities and a potential emergent cultural economy in rural locations, associated with the economic crisis in Greece. Drawing on a quantitative survey of Athenian residents and qualitative interviews with counterurban migrants, we observe that in the context of the economic crisis in Greece,...

Rural planning and housing have provoked challenging debates in Ireland and England through periods of economic growth and, more recently, crisis and austerity. In this paper, we comparatively review an extensive literature in both countries relating to the formation of their planning systems and cultural predispositions surrounding rural housing d...

In this paper, drawing on qualitative interviews with a small number of Irish architects, we explore the discourses that architects use to produce the rural social world and the vernacular. The academic literature has explored discursive representations of rurality as well as power relations of various stakeholders in the rural housing policy arena...

This article aims to address the disconnect between housing and rural development research. We do this by examining models of rural development (exogenous, endogenous and neo-endogenous) in the rural housing context. Drawing on in-depth documentary analysis of planning and rural development policy and research in the Republic of Ireland, we demonst...

In the mid-1980s, fiscal incentives were introduced to encourage the construction and refurbishment of residential developments in declining inner-city districts in Ireland. These were abolished in 2006 but, during the intervening period, their focus was extended to include: large towns, small towns and a large rural region. Concurrently, the conte...

Rural gentrification represents an emerging research agenda in the context of social transformation of rural localities. Having as a case study the Republic of Ireland, which provides a case of a laissez-faire planning system, this paper first addresses supply-side factors that have provided key preconditions for gentrification to take place. Then,...

Fiscal incentives were introduced in the mid 1980s to encourage new private residential construction and refurbishment in the inner areas of Ireland's main cities. These were subsequently extended to include the city suburbs and large towns. At the same time, the economic context for their implementation changed radically as an economic and populat...

This article examines the governance of rural regeneration in the Republic of Ireland, through the case of the Rural Renewal Scheme (RRS), which provided fiscal incentives to subsidise the construction and renovation of housing and business premises in a declining rural region. It reveals that the RRS has been successful in achieving two of its key...

Living in the countryside/rural areas has, in recent decades, become a matter of personal choice for many people. Various researchers have investigated people's motivations for wanting to make this move. However, there has been rather little investigation of the factors that cause people to choose one type of rural property or rural location over a...

This paper focuses on counter-urbanisation flows and explores their implications for spatial planning, through case study research in the Republic of Ireland. Based on a household survey, the paper focuses on a sample of counter-urban in-migrants identified in a high growth rural area within the Greater Dublin region. The paper seeks to address the...

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (...

This article focuses on rural mobility and rural housing using three case studies in Ireland. It is argued that while rural change and rural in-migration have been in the spotlight in academic literature, there has been a very limited interlinking between rural mobilities and population movements and spatial planning and housing research. This is s...