Nick Gallent

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• BSc PhD
• Professor at University College London

Nick Gallent and Andrew Purves report on a survey of resource constraints affecting rural planning authorities in England, and the impacts on small local needs housing projects

Network-based rural development approaches, rooted in neo-endogenous or nexogenous models and aiming to mobilise the development potential of local assets and address local needs by connecting to broader external actor-networks, have been emphasised in rural development policies worldwide. Since the introduction of its National Rural Revitalisation...

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

affordable rural housing-tackling the ' land question ' on rural exception sites Phoebe Stirling, Nick Gallent and Iqbal Hamiduddin report on research into the development of affordable homes on rural exception sites in England and the increasing complexities around cross-subsidy support and incentives for landowners, which risk inflating land pri...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been presented as a critical change driver for rural amenity areas, precipitating urban flight and a decentralisation of housing choice and investment. House prices in both near-urban and more distant rural markets saw considerable growth in 2020 and 2021, linked to a mix of second home investment, expanded demand for holi...

Village Housing explores the housing challenge faced by England’s amenity villages, rooted in post-war counter-urbanisation and a rising tide of investment demand for rural homes. It tracks solutions to date and considers what further actions might be taken to increase the equity of housing outcomes and thereby support rural economies and alternate...

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on working, travel and residential location patterns have attracted much commentary from scholars and practitioners interested in the future of cities and regions. Focusing on Europe, we discuss how pandemic-fuelled remote working and tourism practices have increased the demand for short-term rentals and second...

i>Neighbourhood Planning offers a critical analysis of community-based planning activity in England, framed within a broader view of collaborative rationality and its limits.

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...

Second homes have almost invariably been painted as the wreckers of rural communities in Britain. One of the most trenchant critics of second home purchasing, the journalist George Monbiot, argued that owners of second homes were ‘amongst the most selfish people’ in the country (Monbiot, 2006). In earlier analyses of the topic, he had drawn a direc...

This book is about housing in rural Britain: the countrysides of England, Scotland and Wales. As its title suggests, it focuses on what can broadly be described as the ‘rural housing question’. But what is this question and why is it important? Is the question about the quantity or quality of housing being planned for and being supplied in rural ar...

One of the most revealing tactics for addressing housing supply pressures in rural areas is the selective targeting of ‘local’ needs. It involves giving priority access to ‘local people’ – households with a ‘local connection’ or those working locally – for new homes, whether these are for rent, for shared ownership or for outright purchase. Priorit...

Neither in Britain, nor in its sister states in the EU and OECD, nor indeed globally, is concern for the downward trajectories of many rural economies a new phenomenon. In the rapidly urbanising, developing world, rural depopulation has been seen as an almost inevitable correlate of national economic progress. For many of these countries, there is...

We began this book by posing a series of questions about the supply of housing in Britain's countrysides, its quality, its location, its connection with the state of rural economies and rural society, and whether patterns of supply deliver social equity as well as sustainability. We asked also about some of the key pressures on housing resources, e...

A key theme from the previous chapter was that the provision of a wide range of options to rent or buy, or to acquire property on an intermediate basis, would help to facilitate access to housing for lower-income groups in rural localities. Part of this range of options stems from the privately rented sector (PRS). From the 1980s onwards, policy-ma...

That the need for affordable housing in rural areas is recognised is not in doubt, but policy instruments for achieving an accelerated supply of new homes have been overshadowed by a broader and pervasive philosophy of ‘protecting the countryside’ in response to a long-standing ‘resource’ perspective of rural areas, given new impetus by claims that...

An ageing society represents a particular set of challenges and opportunities for Britain's countrysides. The population of rural areas is ageing more rapidly than in towns and cities. Although urban centres are likely to eventually catch up, there is pressure to respond more rapidly in the countryside in terms of how services may be configured in...

Renewed support for direct housing provision by local authorities, noted in Chapter 12, appeared to be gaining momentum in policy and academic circles in the early years of this century (Monk and Ni Luanaigh, 2006). In the rural context, having a wider variety of mechanisms available is valuable, not just an attempt to lever a higher rate of non-ma...

In the early decades of the 20th century, the majority of rural areas were losing population. This pattern of change in some parts of Britain had been established much earlier on. In Highland Scotland, for example, many clan chiefs who had come to see themselves as landlords forcibly cleared their former clanspeople from their homes seeking general...

The last two chapters have explored how representations of the countryside have been translated into national and local planning approaches – informing the system of statutory landscape protection and shaping attitudes to ‘preservation’ – which lend support to protection in a context of increasing consumption of the countryside. However, interwoven...

This appendix provides an overview of what we mean by rural areas in Britain. The basis of our argument in this book has been the paucity of development of housing that is inclusive of all sections of the population, and which can help facilitate the economic potential of rural localities. The thrust of this argument is that housing development for...

An important tactical solution to the shortage of reasonably priced housing in some locations is the use of the planning system to procure affordable homes through development control. An obvious answer to the basic question of how affordable housing (affordable to median local wage-earners) should be provided, where it is needed, is surely through...

Until the early 21st century, the movement of international migrants into rural areas of Britain had been a limited feature of any population gains. However, the arrival of migrant workers subsequent, in particular, to the enlargement of the European Union in 2004 significantly reshaped the patterns of international migration flows. A key dimension...

Although no country of Britain is yet entirely a ‘nation of homeowners’, each has seen a movement in this direction for several decades. The level of home ownership in Britain as a whole is one of the highest in Europe, built on (until the 2007/08 credit crunch) accessible mortgage credit and fuelled by a housebuilding sector that has perfected the...

Taking an integrated approach, this book provides an analysis of the complexity of housing and development tensions in the rural areas of England, Wales and Scotland.

Historical tradition and popular myth concerning the British countrysides have had a powerful impact on policy discourse. The countrysides of England, Scotland and Wales have been shaped not only by economic forces, but also by the values of those who believe that rural areas should be used and enjoyed in a particular way. Understanding of the coun...

Popular conceptions of rurality are not accidental, nor are they natural representations of fact. Rather they are evolving social constructs, based in part on received remembrance of a past, and in equal part on antipathy to the dual opposite of the urban set against idealisations of the rural. The media – literature, painting, film, TV, radio and...

Previous chapters have highlighted not only the roles played by different tenures, but also some of the mechanisms for bringing forward greater housing choice for lower-income groups. One of the costs of not providing sufficient housing is the number of people who fall out of, or can never gain access to, mainstream housing in the countryside. In t...

Taking an integrated approach, this book provides an analysis of the complexity of housing and development tensions in the rural areas of England, Wales and Scotland.

In the mid-1990s, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown commissioned a report on planning, housing supply and the economy. The Barker Review (HM Treasury, 2004) was prompted by concern that Britain's economic performance was being held back by planning constraints affecting particularly the allocation of land for housing. The Review, and a n...

How does the situation in England, Scotland and Wales compare with that found in other countries? In particular, how do different governments address their own rural housing questions; what are the prevailing attitudes to rural resources and rural development; and are approaches found elsewhere rationalised by a broad developmental or environmental...

The provision of new housing in rural Britain has, apart from during a very short period, been the result of private sector activity. Councils, housing associations and other registered social landlords have of course commissioned new housing but have done little direct building themselves. The structure, conduct and performance of the private hous...

The Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government, in power since the UK General Election of 2010, has presented ‘localism’ as a clear alternative to over-centralised decision making – and as an antidote to dissatisfaction with existing democratic processes – to be delivered partly through a return of responsibility to ‘town halls’ and partly...

Tensions between communities and policy actors are ever-present in representative democracies, with strategic decisions at all levels often bringing local consequences that communities find it difficult if not impossible to live with. Over time, a build-up of pressure for greater bottom-up input into decision making is inevitable, but even when gre...

In this chapter and the next, the focus is placed on communication between parish councils, policy actors, service providers and other bodies external to the communities. Reflecting the distinction drawn between bonding and bridging tactics, this analysis has been divided into two chapters. The current chapter considers direct links to the local au...

All the chapters detailing the discussions that took place with community groups and service providers in Ashford are intended to offer an insight into the dynamics of relationships, and into outcomes, at planning's critical interface between policy producers and user communities. This interface looks set to become more critical in the years ahead...

The degree to which parish councils authentically relay local views and local aspiration has been a key debate for those concerned with community governance issues for a number of years. Parish councils are frequently ridiculed as elitist, out of touch and parochial bodies that lack any real connection to the communities they serve (see Mitchell, 1...

The political and policy framework in which local government operates, and which determines its relationship with key policy actors and with community and interest groups, has been heavily amended over the last 15 years. Successive Labour governments from 1997 drove forward a programme of state modernisation and local government reform that appeare...

The ‘localism’ of the UK coalition government is rooted in some of the ideas introduced in the last chapter. It connects with a participatory and collaborative (or ‘iterative’) understanding of how the structures of governance should function (Corry and Stoker, 2002; Stoker, 2004, 2007) and, like other collaborative approaches that operate at the i...

Neighbourhood planning is rooted in community dynamics, in the relationships and interactions that bind people together. These interactions may create what Tönnies (1887) described as a ‘unity of will’ and a sense of shared identity (see also Cohen, 1985), although they can also be a source of division, as fractures form between competing groups an...

There has been an ebb and flow of interest in strategic regional planning in the UK (Tewdwr-Jones, 2004), with the strategic perspective and control at the regional level enjoying notably greater support under some governments than others. Planning at this level has its origins in the 1940 Barlow Report (Barlow, 1940), which gave rise to the post-w...

[W]e will create a new system of collaborative planning by: giving local people the power to engage in genuine local planning through collaborative democracy – designing a local plan from the ‘bottom up’, starting with the aspirations of neighbourhoods. (Conservative Party, 2009, p 3, emphasis added) The earlier chapters of this book outlined how t...

In Chapter Nine, ‘intermediaries’ were characterised as ‘brokers’, negotiating a relationship between the community and policy actors. It was suggested that such intermediaries bridge the potential divide between community groups looking to put together plans, and either the planning authority – that might be looking to use the neighbourhood perspe...

The experience of producing and using parish plans in England provides the empirical focus of this book. It is this experience, along with the community governance context for parish plans, that is held up as a mirror to the emerging process of neighbourhood development plan production, introduced at the end of this chapter. It is also this experie...

The purpose of this and the next chapter is to reappraise some of the lessons arising from community-based parish planning in England, and to use these to illuminate the path of future local government reform and how networked community governance, of the type unpacked in the last 13 chapters, might realise its full potential in the years ahead. Th...

i>Neighbourhood Planning offers a critical analysis of community-based planning activity in England, framed within a broader view of collaborative rationality and its limits.

In the last three chapters, we explored, through a review of past studies and also through an initial presentation of local case study material, some of the practical building blocks for collaborative action: the networks that provide the context for consensus building and which give community groups the capacity to work with others in the pursuit...

It is through the production of plans and statements that communities may seek to shape not only individual decisions but also the policies on which those decisions are built. Plans articulate a community’s aspirations. Their production can be viewed as an exercise in channelling local energies, and as key to capacity building. But it can also be s...

The Covid-19 pandemic has been presented as a critical change driver for rural amenity areas, precipitating urban flight and a decentralisation of housing choice and investment. House prices in both near-urban and more distant rural markets saw considerable growth in 2020 and 2021, linked to a mix of second home investment, expanded demand for holi...

Reconceiving the current housing crisis in England as a ‘wicked’ problem, this book situates the crisis in a broader range of socio-economic issues and calls for a change in how housing is produced and consumed.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been marked by urban flight in England, with people moving to the countryside for space and greenery. But there are now signs of a reversal. Families have been heading back to the cities, and particularly to London. In this short comment, I suggest that three factors are potentially at play. First, the return of old workin...

England is in the grip of a housing crisis marked by rising property prices, declining affordability (relative to workplace earnings), falling rates of homeownership and rising levels of long-term renting, homelessness and general housing inequality. London, where demand for residential property outstrips market supply and where price increases hav...

The picture presented in Chapter 1 was of housing stress primarily affecting generation rent – young people, with no prior history of property ownership, unable to buy homes and stranded long term in the private rented sector. The plight of generation rent is a regular focus for the British press – aspiring homebuyers locked out of the property-own...

Reconceiving the current housing crisis in England as a ‘wicked’ problem, this book situates the crisis in a broader range of socio-economic issues and calls for a change in how housing is produced and consumed.

The last chapter explored the housing crisis's broader economic context. There are important structural reasons why capital has switched into property and housing: new capital pathways, which are now well established, are key drivers of national and local housing stress in many advanced economies. But it is also the case that, over a long period of...

Housing – or, more specifically, achieving broader equality of access to housing – is a wicked problem. The purpose of this chapter is to explain why, and also to show how the anatomy of the housing crisis shares many, if not all, of the core characteristics of such a problem. The housing stresses briefly introduced in the last chapter are generall...

It is evident to many people that England is in the midst of a sustained housing crisis. The rapid decline in homeownership and spiralling private rents suggest that the crisis, measured in extraordinary affordability ratios between housing costs and stagnating workplace earnings, is deepening. An increasingly large part of the population, includin...

This chapter is concerned with the wider economic canvas introduced in the first two chapters and with the transformation of homes into assets – a focus for investment and a source of income and capital appreciation. The housing crisis is situated in this canvas, and more specifically in the changing profile of the economy and a capital switch into...

The most significant episode in the assetisation of housing (underpinning its financialisation) is often understood to be the economic restructuring that took place during the 1980s – particularly deregulation of the banking sector and credit liberalisation. Research has reported on the housing ‘investor subject’ that emerged during this time, as a...

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...

In the life-cycle of community action, the act of planning – or the broader tendency to become future-orientated – is not automatic. The actions that communities take may be time-limited, restricted to a specific response to a particular set of circumstances: to crises and immediate needs, or the need to provide a specific service over the longer t...

The first series of case-study based chapters focus on the contexts in which community action takes root, and the drivers which push it towards particular goals. These chapters explore four different contexts: the role of neighbourhood associations in Spain in negotiating the transition to democracy in the 1970s, and the way they subsequently playe...

The experience in many countries is that community action and planning should not automatically be viewed as an attempt to shape the policy environment or to influence political decision-making. Those engaged in such action are often motivated by a desire to achieve outcomes on their own, without the strings that are often attached to external supp...

Global land ownership patterns have been shifting in recent decades, as institutional and non-traditional investors redirect capital into rural areas. Such investment is a stimulating alternative for innovative profit-driven land uses that move beyond agriculture. This paper explores how ‘new money’ economies have created place effects in three rur...

This practice review examines some of the early evidence, and reporting, of housing market change in England prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Taking a transect from central London, through surrounding near-urban areas, to the countryside beyond, it looks at the possibility and implications of more dispersed housing market choices and what sorts o...

An intermediary turn in housing studies has argued that professionals like estate agents are causally significant to housing market outcomes. This theory leans on the concept of ‘professionalism’ in two ways. Firstly, agents’ professional identities build in them both the capacity and the motivation to affect the price setting mechanism. Secondly,...

This paper explores the linkages established by second home developers and owners with local residents in host communities, and further discusses how these extra-local linkages stimulate amenity-led change and rural restructuring. Research, comprising a mix of semi-structured interviews and site visits, was conducted in Xingfu village, China. That...

This paper compares planning and funding arrangements for public infrastructure delivery in support of new housing development in the UK, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, the US, and Hong Kong/Mainland China. It examines the roles and responsibilities of different levels of government, the extraction of financial contributions from the...

This document is the response from nineteen academics based at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL) to the government’s White Paper Planning for the Future. The Bartlett School of Planning is one of the world’s leading centres for planning education and research. This response draws on the research and understanding of s...

Although housing crises are rooted in both demand-side pressures and supply-side blockages, perceived regulatory impediments to building new homes are the softest target for policy reform. Critics argue that the English planning system’s case-by-case consideration of development applications hands excessive power to existing homeowners, who regular...

A combination of development constraint, low wages in seasonal employment and market intrusion by more affluent households generates housing access and affordability difficulties in many rural amenity areas. In response, residents’ groups and public planners have sometimes sought to prioritise ‘local needs’, restricting the occupancy of new housing...

The causes of 'housing crises' are acknowledged to include both supply-side blockages and demand-side drivers. On the supply side, there are a number of reasons why not enough new housing is being built in some parts of the UK. It is argued, for example, that the permit-based planning system and its case-by-case consideration of applications encour...

Looks briefly at the 'flight' to second homes observed around the world as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Focuses on the overloading of services now and also on longer term questions over the benefits and drawbacks of second homes in rural areas, ending with some UK policy reflections

Although the literature on the financialization of housing pays most attention to mortgaged and securitized homeownership and the penetration of capital into subsidized rental housing, forms of financialization are varied. In China, housing commodification and privatization has underpinned a growth in homeownership. One of the outcomes of financial...

Levels of housing access in rural areas are determined by economic drivers, including local earnings, constraints on new housing supply, and by levels of market intrusion. This review article briefly examines these drivers before situating rural areas in contemporary housing access (and housing crisis) debates in England. It examines different opti...