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2010). Notwithstanding the revitalization of marginal farming areas like Tuscany, with its
privileged location near many cultural centres, its resurgent rural tourism and second home
occupancy, there are also many parts of southern Europe, for example in parts of Spain,
Portugal, Greece and Cyprus where 'desertification' proceeds apace and cultural landscapes
contingent on high levels of manual labour (such as cultivation terraces) are falling into
disarray and decay. The reversal of this decline, in the shadow of the growing threat of
climate change, remains a major European challenge.
In between the extremes described above many possible combinations may exist,
reflecting not only differences in the farming sector per se , but also differences in the
present balance between production, consumption and conservation drivers (Holmes, 2012;
van Eupen et al. , 2012) and the specificities of regional character in the different parts of
Europe.
The typology of rural modes of occupancy proposed in this chapter aims to gauge the
weight of the dimensions proposed by Holmes (2006, 2012) in different rural areas, so as to
identify the likely trajectories of these areas. Figure 3.1 shows the balance between
production, consumption and protection drivers in each of the six types of areas identified.
Figure 3.2 shows the distribution of these types in Europe, at the NUTS 2 level.
Fig. 3.1. The interplay between production, consumption and protection drivers in the rural
space, in different types of regions in Europe. Here, the absolute role of each of these
drivers is not reflected but rather their relative importance in relation to other drivers.
Cluster 1: Consumption countryside; Cluster 2: Mixed countryside; Cluster 3: High nature
value and consumption; Cluster 4: Consumption in the agricultural countryside; Cluster 5:
High nature values; Cluster 6: Specialized agriculture (Source: authors).
 
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