Understanding the diversity of European rural areas - Transition Pathways towards Sustainability in Agriculture: Case Studies from Europe - page 36

can be very difficult to distinguish. In other regions of Europe, hobby farming is often
dedicated to vegetables and fruits but olive oil and vines often provide a recreational
activity that can also be semi-commercial at times (Arnalte-Alegre and Ortiz-Miranda,
2013; Pinto-Correia et al. , 2014).
The third source of diversity which frames European farm adjustment is that created by
proximity to other forms of economic activity. Over 200 years ago, von Thünen became
acutely aware of the impact of an urban centre on the intensity and type of surrounding land
use. The geography of the industrial revolution based first around water power and then
coal and steel production in 19 th century Europe, created powerful demand hubs in the
Ruhr, central and northern England, south Wales, central Scotland and later in north-east
Spain and northern Italy. The emergence of these hubs had huge impacts on regional labour
markets, drawing in a workforce from the surrounding countryside; but they also created a
demand for food, met partly by local supply and, increasingly in the case of the United
Kingdom, by imports from countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Over
time and with enhanced mobility, their rural hinterlands provided rural retreats for wealthy
industrialists and others, particularly in high amenity landscapes and who often entered
farming as much for leisure as for profit.
By the new millennium, de-industrialization and new technologies had begun to
reshape the nature of urban centres. The service economy has replaced manufacturing as
the dominant force in post-industrial urban development with its own geography of
concentration and it is this, built on a legacy of medieval market towns and cities and
industrial revolution decay and urban regeneration, that creates the patterns of
contemporary population in Europe. Although some rural areas retain many features of
socio-economic decline, others have become highly prosperous with some of the highest
living standards in Europe.
As well as taking the farm household as the unit of analysis it is possible to
hypothesize different types of countryside and explore change at a regional or sub-regional
scale. Marsden et al. (1993) proposed a four-fold classification of types of rural area which
included the following categories: productivist countryside; contested countryside;
preserved countryside; and paternalistic countryside. Regional (or sub-regional) agriculture
will arguably be shaped by the dominance of one type of countryside. These are ideal types
rather than observable realities on the ground but they encapsulate the diversity of pressure
and process within an increasingly differentiated countryside. Holmes (2006, 2012) and
Copus and Hörnström (2011) offer a more contemporary take on types of region and have
mapped such areas using socio-economic datasets.
The policy context
Contemporary European agriculture is not just a product of food and fibre markets and
leisure consumption. Its development trajectory has been significantly mediated by policies.
Initially, those policies evolved primarily around agriculture but more recently
developments in the farm sector are increasingly mediated by changes in the wider
economy. Further, environmental policy and spatial and regional planning policy have
become growing influences on agriculture. Some would also argue (Peters, 1991; Primdahl
and Swaffield, 2010) that macroeconomic policies also impact greatly on the farm sector.