Discuss with reference to academic literature and policy making on defining rurality: Rural Development Essay, UCC, Ireland

Questions

1. “The varied functions and meanings that have been attributed to rural space have made the rural into an ambiguous and complex concept”

1). Discuss with reference to academic literature and policy making on defining rurality.

2. Drawing on countries that you are familiar with, how has rural planning evolved over the 20th Century?. Brenner and Schmid (2014) argue that we increasingly live in a so-called ‘urban age’ – does rural planning still matter for the 21st Century?.

3. What are the characteristics of the rural economy in contemporary Ireland? Describe and discuss opportunities and limitations for diversifying the rural economy.

4. Discuss the key social and demographic transformations of rural communities within advanced economies in the last 50 years. What are the implications of these changes for spatial planning practice?

5. ‘Since the 1990s, the rural policy has shifted from sectoral policy to territorial and integrated rural development. Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement with reference to exogenous and endogenous models of development.

6. Outline and critically discuss the key challenges for sustainable planning and design at the village scale.

7. Describe how ‘environmental justice’ can be used to frame and understand conflicts over rural resource use and extraction (100 marks). LANDSCAPE

8. While many accept that society needs to shift to more renewable sources of energy and agree in principle that more onshore wind energy schemes may be required, at the point of implementation local communities often oppose the siting of wind energy schemes due to perceptions of local costs

Critically discuss a range of possible planning/policy tools that could potentially be applied to resolving wind energy conflicts. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each approach you identify?