Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
reliance upon primary activity; conflicts between presentation of certain
landscapes and development of a variety of economic activities; and
conflicts between local needs and legislation emanating from urban-based
legislators. Key characteristics of 'rural' are taken to be extensive land
uses, including large open spaces of underdeveloped land, and small
settlements at the base of the settlement hierarchy, but including
settlements thought of as rural.
(Robinson 1990:xxi-xxii)
Therefore, research on rural recreation and tourism needs to recognise the essential
qualities of what is 'rural'. While national governments use specific criteria to define
'rural', often based on the population density of settlements, there is no universal
agreement on the critical population threshold which distinguishes between urban and
rural populations. For the developed world, Robinson (1990) summarises the principal
approaches used by sociologists, economists and other groups in establishing the basis of
what is rural and this need not be reiterated here. What is important is the diversity of
approaches used by many researchers who emphasise the concept of an urban-rural
continuum as a means of establishing differing degrees of rurality and the essential
characteristics of ruralness. Shaw and Williams (1994:224) advocate the use of the
concept of a rural opportunity spectrum, where the countryside is viewed as the location
of a'wide range of outdoor leisure and tourist activities, although over time the
composition of these has changed'. Harrison (1991) highlighted the speed of change in
rural areas, with the settings and activities undertaken in such areas changing rapidly in
the 1970s and 1980s. Even so, such studies do little to establish a meaningful concept of
what is meant by a rural setting.
In contrast, Hoggart's (1990) provocative article 'Let's do away with rural' argues that
'there is too much laxity in the treatment of areas in empirical analysis…[and] that the
undifferentiated use of “rural” in a research context is detrimental to the advancement of
social theory' (Hoggart 1990:245), since the term 'rural' is unsatisfactory due to
interrural differences and urban-rural similarities. Hoggart (1990) argued that general
classifications of urban and rural areas are of limited value. For this reason, recent
advances in social theory may offer a number of important insights into conceptualising
the rural environment and tourism-related activities.
According to Cloke (1992), rural places have been traditionally associated with
specific rural functions: agriculture, sparsely populated areas, geographically dispersed
settlement patterns, and rurality has been conceptualised in terms of peripherality (for a
discussion of tourism and peripherality, see Page 1994c; Hall and Boyd 2005),
remoteness and dependence on rural economic activity. However, new approaches in
social theory have argued that rural areas are inextricably linked to the national and
international political economy. As Cloke (1992) rightly argues, changes in the way
society and non-urban places are organised and function have rendered traditional
definitions of rurality less meaningful due to the following changes:
• increased mobility of people, goods and messages have eroded the autonomy of local
communities
• delocalisation of economic activity makes it impossible to define homogeneous
economic regions
