Track 10 RURAL PLANNING

Track chairs: Nick Gallent, Menelaos Gkartzios, Benedetta Baldassarre

Rural areas have undergone significant transformations, characterized by new land uses, mobilities, politics and multi-scalar governance arrangements, resulting in contrasting global ruralities. The aim of this track is to explore how these emergent and complex ruralities intersect with planning intervention and care. How might rural areas respond to global challenges and crisis phenomena (including climate risk, wildfires, biodiversity loss, pandemics, changing demography and acute inequalities), conflicts over rural land use (including new demands for data centres and existing pressures to mediate between production and resource extraction, waste and carbon storage, ecosystem restoration, energy generation, housing, and local development objectives) and the injustices of capitalist consumption (manifest in unsustainable patterns and levels of tourism, gentrification and land grabbing)? We invite contributions that examine inclusive, participatory and creative rural planning practices against the backcloth of just and sustainable decarbonization, rooted in human-nature solidarity.

Keywords: rural planning; rural development; rural governance; land use conflict; planetary ruralities; spatial justice; sustainable rural transformations; rural housing; energy; rural mobilities; the right to rural; ecological reciprocity