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Planning studies on rural housing are heavily shaped by concepts from urbanized countries with larger populations and attendant conservation pressures on agricultural or otherwise protected land. I...

The present study aims to investigate the effect of configuration changes and activities of rural housing types on the sense of place of residents. For this purpose, 382 houses from two types of ru...

The concentration of population in the major metropolitan cities has again become prominent in public debate in Australia. Politicians and commentators have called for an increase in the population...

The paper reviews four housing typologies designed by Grupo Austral in 1939 for rural regions of Argentina. The design of each dwelling was adapted to the different climatic regions of the country,...

A combination of development constraint, low wages in seasonal employment and market intrusion by more affluent households generates housing access and affordability difficulties in many rural amen...

Urban–rural renewal is an instrument not only to manage urbanization but also for sustainable development. In this process, major stakeholders are affected differentially. The case studied here sho...

This paper explores the role of landscape aesthetics and sustainability in the development of new rural housing prototypes. Historically, rural building forms were largely influenced by immediately...

Levels of housing access in rural areas are determined by economic drivers, including local earnings, constraints on new housing supply, and by levels of market intrusion. This review artic...

More than 60 million homes in India are unfit for decent living. Replacing this stock with decent housing will entail significant costs and increase energy consumption and related CO2 emissions due to both upfront and long-term energy requirements. This paper assesses the life cycle costs (LCC), life cycle energy (LCE) and CO2 emissions impacts of filling the current housing gap with different building materials and technologies, and maintaining reasonable standards of indoor temperature and humidity. These outcomes are assessed under different climatic conditions and residential behavioural patterns, using urban and rural housing archetypes, and considering conventional as well as low-cost materials and energy-savings measures. The results demonstrate that stabilized-earth blocks are a preferred solution to the prevailing norm of fired bricks. Along with filler slab and roof insulation, they offer a win–win solution to reduce both LCC by 18% and LCE by 17% compared with conventional techniques in bridging the housing gap. LCE savings can be further increased to 28% without increasing the investment cost compared with conventional solutions. The insights provided by this study on abatement costs and efficacy can be used by policy-makers for affordable housing and climate-related policies.

Much of the current debate on Australian housing affordability suggests that it is a new ‘crisis’. Yet Australia’s housing history is littered with a series of housing crises, and since the early d...

Tourism is a strong business sector in Spain. In terms of tourist accommodation, in addition to hotels, guesthouses and rural housing, more and more private dwellings are increasingly being transformed into tourist dwellings. Thus, in 2014, lodgings offered by these tourist dwellings were nearly twice the lodgings offered by hotels: 2.7 million compared to 1.4 million. This phenomenon is being greatly facilitated by new online platforms known as ‘collaborative economy’ – e.g. Airbnb or HomeAway. Barcelona, in particular, experiences a high concentration of tourist dwellings in certain neighbourhoods, as it is the fourth-ranked destination in terms of Airbnb guests. And in addition to the positive economic impact on the city and households, this phenomenon has also brought some negative side effects, even more in a country where 66.5% of the population live in flats (the highest amongst EU Member States), which are normally organised as condominiums. The aim of this article is twofold. First, to present th...

Drought is a complex, slow-onset phenomenon that imposes serious challenges on human beings and ecosystems. The vulnerability associated with drought may vary at different social, geographical and temporal scales. These differences emphasize the need for regional-level vulnerability assessments, which in turn helps to formulate efficient adaptation policies and strategies that are suitable for the region to mitigate the drought risk. The objective of this paper is to quantify the livelihood and socio-economic vulnerability of rural households that are affected by drought in rural India. The Livelihood Vulnerability Index and Socioeconomic Vulnerability Index were applied to analyse the vulnerability of rural households. A sample size of 157 rural households from the state of Odisha in India was surveyed in 2015. Socio-demographic characteristics such as low literacy rates, high dependency ratios and weak housing structures make people more vulnerable, whereas access to social networks plays a significant ...

Rural housing is a small eco-system consisting of ecological structures, ecological behavior and ecological concepts, which interact with one another and coexist in a symbiotic manner. Based on eco...

The aim of this paper is to discuss co-productive and collaborative processes in rural housing construction in Sweden. The ‘wicked problem’ addressed here is why it is so difficult to build new homes in Swedish rural areas. Our analysis shows that horizontally organised competences may be used in order to form innovative and creative spaces for dialogues around the realisation of house building. These spaces for dialogues are transformed into collaborative and co-productive social events for reconfiguring thoughts and actions in relation to ‘wicked problems’. Using Fagered, Sweden, as a case study, our results show that timing, as well as understanding the motivation of local groups and acknowledging the slowness of planning processes, are crucial for making change.

During the nineteenth century, working-class dwellings in Britain became the focus of a series of reports which served to highlight poor living conditions in both town and countryside. Sub-standard housing was believed to be responsible for a variety of physical and social ills. Until the late nineteenth century, rural housing reforms were addressed by individual landowners who sought to provide or encourage improved tenant housing. An important aspect of housing reform involved the introduction of various types of physical segregation. These included the segregation of byre and dwelling, of working and domestic areas, of living and sleeping spaces, and of males and females. This paper examines the role of segregation in rural housing reform in the Isle of Lewis during the nineteenth century, and considers the reasons why attempts at housing reform during this period were generally unsuccessful.

The rise of the Irish economy since the 1990’s is transforming the Irish landscape. The increase in personal wealth has created a strong demand for “rural housing”, the Irish term for detached sing...

This paper attempts a synthesis between housing and rural development research through the lens of resilience thinking. Drawing on Ireland as a case study characterised by a pro-development and laissez-faire ethos in housing policy, we argue that resilience thinking opens up new perspectives and provides the potential to ‘re-frame’ rural housing practices. Ireland provides an insightful case study to discuss resilience given its shifts from economic boom to crisis and austerity, inextricably linked with the housing sector. Firstly, the paper provides a conceptual understanding of rural resilience, before applying this framework to Irish rural housing issues, particularly relating to settlement form, family and tenure, cultural predispositions regarding housing construction and with reference to specific rural housing policy examples. Two key contributions of resilience are identified: firstly, resilience offers alternative analytical methods and insights for rural housing, particularly ideas of pa...

Housing markets and mortgage lending played critical roles in the ‘Great Recession,’yet the ways in which this recent and acute economic crisis have played out within rural and small town America are poorly understood. The narrow research and media focus on overheated housing markets in rapidly growing metropolitan areas such as Las Vegas or Phoenix is understandable, yet housing plays a somewhat distinct role in rural communities where a larger share of the population owns their own home, and a larger proportion of the workforce is employed in the home construction sector. This paper draws on an array of publically available data sources to examine various dimensions of nonmetropolitan subprime lending and housing markets at different spatial scales over the time period leading up to and following the ‘Great Recession. ‘ At the county level, analysis revealed striking regional variation in nonmetropolitan subprime lending. Individual-level analysis highlights the racial, economic, and geographic ...

Since 1970, the Foundation for Rural Housing, Inc. (FRHI), has addressed housing issues in rural Wisconsin. This non-profit has been creative, cooperative and persistent in working with the very po...

Rural settlements, especially in developing countries, are disproportionally vulnerable to natural hazards due to both biophysical and social vulnerability. Building hazard-resistant houses requires a thorough understanding of hazards and institutional and financial resources. However, it is equally important for planners and policymakers to know how rural residents make the tradeoff between various housing attributes when provided with the resources such as low-interest housing construction loans. In this study, we use a choice experiment (CE) to examine rural households' preference for earthquake resistance when building houses. A total of 300 households from randomly selected villages in central districts of Guilan Province in Iran were recruited for a CE study in which they had to choose between a number of houses that differed in terms of the required construction loan, resistance to earthquakes, size, and exterior and interior designs. Our results show that the average resident preferred larger hous...

Existing research on the foreclosure crisis tends to focus on national trends or on metropolitan areas. Few studies focus on rural areas, and none look at Appalachia in particular. Existing research on rural housing issues suggests that rural communities face unique challenges in the wake of the foreclosure crisis due to capacity constraints, lack of qualified counselors in rural areas, and lack of funding availability. This study investigates the impact of existing policies upon Appalachian communities and households—analyzing whether communities suffering from widespread foreclosures lack the governmental and nonprofit resources necessary to adequately utilize funding and other resources to respond to the crisis. This paper presents findings from a survey of housing counselors serving the Appalachian region, which suggests that lack of directed federal funding is preventing counseling agencies from getting distressed homeowners aid in a timely manner or helping them to make modifications to their mortga...

Housing development in rural localities represents one of the most visible and contested indicators of landscape change, as many European rural landscapes that are regulated by weak planning regimes are transformed by incremental suburbanisation. However, scant attention has been given to understanding stakeholder perceptions and interpretations of the physical processes of landscape change and preferences towards accommodating new housing development in rural areas among stakeholder groups. We address this deficit by drawing on a series of stakeholder focus groups undertaken in Ireland addressing: 1) stakeholder perceptions of landscape change and 2) attitudes towards future change scenarios based on digitally manipulated images of landscape change. The focus group analysis suggests a nuanced interpretation among rural residents of the impact of accommodating housing development, particularly in balancing local demand for rural housing with preferences for maintaining a sense of ‘rural character’...

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Researchers have explored public housing in large U.S. cities in great detail, including its history, design, effect on neighborhoods, role in urban renewa...

Rural gentrification represents an emerging research agenda in the context of social transformation of rural localities. Having as a case study the Republic of Ireland, which provides a case of a laissez-faire planning system, this paper first addresses supply-side factors that have provided key preconditions for gentrification to take place. Then, using survey data in case study localities, we examine the extent that gentrification is a factor in rural residential mobility. We argue that the changing rural condition of Ireland provides essential preconditions for gentrification to take place. However, the gentrification literature provides only a partial angle of rural residential mobility, given the nature of rural in-migration observed in our case studies (that is blue-collar and return rural in-migration) during a period of substantial rural housing growth.

Safe and affordable housing is accepted as a basic right in the modern world. Studies on transitional societies have demonstrated how politicized the housing market can become and how housing consumption is determined by both economic forces and public rules. Rural housing in China offers a unique institutional environment. While residential land is collectively owned and allocated, villagers have the freedom to make decisions with regard to construction space. Drawing on a large national survey, this paper provides the first systematic analysis of the consequences of these different institutional rules. In terms of housing resources, residential land is distributed in a relatively equitable fashion, but the building of structures on that land is defined by a higher degree of social stratification. These findings extend the current literature and confirm the power of institutional rules in housing consumption.

The aim of this paper is to explore how collective memories of place have framed contemporary planning conflicts in a rural arena. Specifically, the paper charts the emergence of the Irish Rural Dwellers Association (IRDA) as a vocal campaigner for private property rights and a laissez-faire approach to accommodating new housing development in the open countryside. For the IRDA, postcolonial narratives and national(ist) identities provide an important vocabulary for protest and opposition to state regulation by: 1) providing a discursive device to create a shared storyline of rural struggle; 2) providing an exclusionary device, whereby drawing on ‘memory’ and representations of rurality creates an insider/outsider discourse where some voices are cast as illegitimate; and 3) providing a frame for placing emotional knowledge at the centre of planning and landscape policy-making. This paper questions the authenticity of this policy narrative and addresses the validity of self-acclaimed knowledge wit...

Senior Cohousing is a type of cohousing that specifically focuses on adults aged 55 or older by accommodating varying levels of physical abilities as well as varying levels of financial status (The...

Many nonprofits and government entities model the standard for housing affordability set by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, which states that housing costs in excess of 30% of gross household income are unaffordable. Families require a minimum level of basic consumption after housing costs are made which must then be purchased with the remaining 70% of their gross income. Hence, an increasing number of studies have examined how these competing needs factor into the government equation for housing affordability using national datasets. This study uses data from the Rural Families Speak project, a multi-state research project focused on rural, low-income families with children. The percent of income families spent on housing is compared to their ability to fulfill basic needs to answer the question: Do low-income rural families that are not housing cost burdened perceive themselves to be able to meet more basic needs than families that are housing cost burdened ac...

Living in the countryside/rural areas has, in recent decades, become a matter of personal choice for many people. Various researchers have investigated people's motivations for wanting to make this move. However, there has been rather little investigation of the factors that cause people to choose one type of rural property or rural location over another. This paper reports on research undertaken in Ireland in which discrete choice experiments are combined with other survey data to examine the relative influence of factors such as house design, house location and journey times. The paper provides insights into the relative strength of such considerations, including the influence of the 'rural idyll'. The results have potential implications for planning in rural areas and the type of properties that could be needed to encourage moves to more nucleated settlements.

Ensuring that rural areas of the UK have sufficient affordable houses in reasonable condition has long challenged policy makers. Previous research shows that rural housing has demand characteristics and faces supply constraints that have proven difficult to balance. The paper reports on the reasons why an innovative subsidy has achieved some success in overcoming barriers to provision in rural Scotland. It is argued that the subsidy has boosted effective demand and tackled a major supply constraint, namely land availability. Empirical material is drawn from a systematic evaluation of the mechanism. The paper concludes with reflections on its implications for the wider literature and for rural housing provision in the evolving financial and political context.

Drawing on policy texts and a series of interviews conducted with rural public housing officers in 2005, this paper extends understandings of rural governance by shifting the focus on experts from one of being statically understood as the arbiters of rural government-at-a-distance processes to viewing them as more complex actors in these governmental processes. In particular, as governmentalities change at the centre, rural experts need also to be understood as being vulnerable to becoming targets of governmental problematisations and reforms. The paper does this through analysing how policy discourses during the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries problematised the delivery of public housing services by housing officers in Australia and New South Wales (NSW). It then provides insight into how resulting reform processes impacted on rural housing officers from four areas in rural NSW. The paper shows that rural governance understandings can be usefully extended to include...

This article draws on the ongoing reconstruction in Wenchuan earthquake areas and studies how a new world of private property rights affects post-disaster reconstruction. In addition to analysing particular problems related to rural housing, urban housing and housing finance, I argue that (1) more decentralised reconstruction planning might be needed for rural housing reconstruction, which is decentralised by nature; (2) the homeowners association may not be an efficient vehicle for urban housing reconstruction; (3) writing off all remaining mortgage balances is not fair to everybody. I also discuss three general themes related to post-disaster property rights. First, post-disaster reconfiguration may be an important opportunity for major change in the property rights regime, including the decline of informal or communal property rights. Second, the reconstruction approach is path-dependent and the trade-off between liability rules and property rules depends critically on how eminent domain is executed. T...

The massive migration flows from rural to urban areas in China, combined with an expected decline in the total population over the next decades, leads to two important challenges for China's housing: the growth of its urban housing stock and the shrinkage of rural housing. The rural and urban housing systems in China were analyzed using a dynamic material flow analysis model for the period 1900–2100 for several scenarios assuming different development paths for population, urbanization, housing demand per capita, and building lifetime. The simulation results indicate that new housing construction is likely to decline for several decades due to the fast growth over the past 30 years and the expected increased longevity of dwellings. Such an oscillation of new construction activity would have significant implications for the construction industry, employment, raw material demand, and greenhouse gas emissions to produce the construction materials. Policy and practical options for mitigating the negative impa...

The objective reality is that for most rural residents in Northumberland, the housing situation was worse in 1841 than it was in 1801. Where matters improved, the main explanation was a reduction in pressure due to absolute population loss or a reduction in total numbers. Some large landowners did carry out significant improvement but the overall impact of this was actually rather limited. Furthermore, as the example of Norham shows, improvement in one area could have been accompanied by, and possibly related to, relative deterioration in an adjacent area. Through their sheer scale and the public awareness attracted, the massive problems of urban growth in the nineteenth century have, arguably, masked many of those rural areas.

This study examines the announcement affect of a proposed wind farm development on an 11,000-acre ranch in Northern Colorado on surrounding rural housing prices. This study analyzes 2,910 single-fa...

Drawing on a series of interviews conducted with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous public housing tenants in 2005, this paper investigates the way in which racialised discourses were used to construct rural public housing spaces and Indigenous tenants in the inland city of Griffith in south-western New South Wales (NSW). Informed by the literatures on ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of racism, the paper identifies three separate, yet interdependent, discursive strategies used by interviewees. These include discourses that: (1) racialised Griffith's public housing spaces; (2) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as receiving ‘unfair privileges’; and (3) constructed Indigenous public housing tenants as ‘ungovernable’. Furthermore, the employment of the ‘denial’ or ‘disclaimer’ as a discursive tactic in ‘new’ forms of racism was found to be used strategically as a means of maintaining such constructions. The paper ultimately seeks to contradict arguments, made by both Australian media outlets and po...

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (formalized with the publication of the Irish National Spatial Strategy), as well as the level of housing construction that has been observed in an increasingly post-productivist countryside (triggered by counter-urbanization flows, increased affluence and demands for second holiday homes, etc.). The paper reviews all policy instruments that have been used to manage rural housing at various scales (from national strategies to local level development plans). It is argued that while spatial planning adopts an integrative vocabulary, as policy moves down the spatial scale hierarchy, multi-dimensional spatial goals are implemented through traditional, narrow land-use...

This paper explores the interaction between rural development policy and planning policies for rural housing within the context of Ireland. Drawing on an interpretive approach to policy analysis, the paper examines competing narratives of ‘the rural’ within the policy arena that underpin a fragmented approach to rural sustainable development. The evidence points to a disconnection between these spheres of public policy marked by a strained relationship between rural communities and regulatory planning, not least with regard to the preferred shape of the rural settlement pattern. It is argued that any housing policy for rural areas must give full regard to the social, economic and cultural attributes of rural life and not just the criteria of environment and landscape. In this context, partnership based local planning processes would enable the exploration of competing rural narratives to be re-orientated towards local needs, capacities and the perspectives of local people and the adoption of cultural, env...

An American specialist on Russian agriculture examines that country's agrarian policy, as well as the agricultural sector more generally, one year into the presidency of Dmitriy Medvedev. Focusing on the three key policy issues—state financial support, state intervention in the grain market, and international food trade policy—he assesses the extent to which current policy represents a continuation of that prevailing during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. The author discusses the appointment of a new Agriculture Minister in 2009, which may signal a different approach to the management of the sector, and concludes with an assessment of the impact of the global financial crisis. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F130, Q100, Q170, Q180. 2 tables, 63 references.

Migration from metropolitan to non-metropolitan areas has become an area of emerging interest for geographers. In recent times research has been directed towards ex-urban migration to coastal communities and increasingly rural localities. This paper considers one small semi-rural community that has been constructed by local and external stakeholders as a site of treechange, a specific type of ex-urban migration. This paper discusses the impact of new arrivals on local housing markets and the potential effect on housing affordability. Housing affordability and stress literatures have focused extensively on metropolitan spaces, excluding the range of consequences that small changes in housing markets can have on existing residents in rural or non-metropolitan places.

A key aspect of planning for the future housing supply in rural areas of England is the demographic context of an ageing society. Older people have a very diverse range of aspirations and needs in relation to their housing and wider sense of well-being. Planning is part of a wider policy response to facilitate a range of housing options for older people, including age-specific housing and in the mainstream housing stock. A key factor in responding to future aspirations and needs is the design of new housing. The government has signalled its intention to move towards the application of lifetime homes standards to all new housing in the future, firstly by encouraging take up of these design standards in the private sector, but with the option to review progress and the possible need for regulation in 2013. This very positive policy development would help to enable older people to exercise greater choice and control over their circumstances. However, a consideration of the prospects for increasing t...

Recent major policy innovations require each English region to agree the allocation of new housing between sub-regional housing market areas (HMAs). Allocations are to be based upon Housing Market Assessments that consider variation between and within HMAs, which will often embrace both urban and rural areas. Measures of the supply/demand balance within HMAs are to determine the distribution of new housing supply but these measures will be sensitive to the way HMA boundaries are drawn. The policy is inclined to direct new housing into urban areas on sustainability grounds so the way the new housing policy affects a rural area can critically depend on whether the HMA it is in is mostly urban. Yet the policy guidance on how to define HMAs leaves many questions unanswered. This paper examines these questions and shows that some can be resolved by critical examination of the policy logic, while others are more technical and call for further developmental work to be done.

Land availability for affordable housing in rural areas is tied to competing discourses of sustainability that are set in the context of constructed idylls. This paper argues that the dominance of these myths owes to their support networks of power relations that govern the availability and use of key resources, amongst them land. The paper questions what happens to power relations when the land tenure regime changes and how this change impacts on the discourses of sustainability. It interprets the results of an initial investigation of community land buy-outs. The paper suggests that community purchase leads to a continuous renegotiation of power relations and to a rebalancing of the dimensions of sustainability. Community land trusts therefore emerge as sustainable models for tackling the question of land availability.

Rural housing policies in England tend to focus on the generality of ‘rural areas’ or ‘rural regions’, leading to broad policy responses, or a concentration of effort (in dealing with the issue of rural housing affordability) in larger centres. Whilst there have been some attempts to focus on the needs of villages (notably through the planning exceptions approach), government has been accused of ‘lacking conviction’ in its response to recent dramatic changes in the ‘social composition of rural areas’, driven largely by concentrated gentrification in smaller village locations. This paper examines the means by which government seeks to provide affordable housing, and increase general affordability, in rural areas. It argues that a strategic approach to achieving housing affordability (triggering additional land allocations) that gave villages their a ‘fair share’ of development, coupled with continuing support for ‘planning and affordable housing’ polices and greater emphasis on working through com...

This article examines recent evidence on affordability, the need for affordable housing and patterns of housing supply across the urban–rural spectrum in England. It uses adapted versions of several models derived from previous research but incorporating relatively recent data to illuminate these issues. It is found that, whether measured at the local authority or ward level, rural areas are more affordable than urban areas, within broad regions and overall. Rural areas in the North and the Midlands have greater net needs mainly because of migration and a lack the supply of social housing. Rural areas (especially further north) have seen much more new building and net gains in housing stock over the past 10–20 years, and prices grew less in rural areas over the whole market cycle, despite evidence of continuing demand.

The papers presented in this special edition were all prepared, in an earlier form, for a session at the 2007 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Conference in London supported by the Rural Geography ...

Nigeria's Kainji Dam, completed in 1968, displaced 44,000 people from 239 settlements. Three housing forms were designed to provide for urban, semi‐urban, and rural settings, respectively. Forty years later, the urban and semi‐urban forms are integrated into the community while the rural form, modeled after a grain storage structure (rumbu) has been less successful. Five lessons are derived from this scenario: cash compensations are an inappropriate strategy for resettlement; traditional institutions are vital to the success of the process; designs must be relevant to the locality; new housing must allow room for occupants to recreate; and there is more to traditional housing than shape.

Given the emerging social stratification of post-agrarian small-towns, potential effects are apt to be exacerbated for rural poor families such as those residing in mobile home parks, a now characteristic rural neighborhood form. Although a mobile home park offers affordable access to rural residence, social costs are attached to such access. This paper examines the intersection between mobile home park residence and social disadvantage. Drawing on an ethnographic field study in rural Oregon, findings reveal distinct conditional features of place that determine the nature of how rural inequality is emerging and the implications for poor and working-poor families.

This paper aims to define and illustrate the ways in which a change in land tenure can impact on housing provision. It looks in particular at rural Scotland. The paper interprets interview data gathered on the isle of Gigha, a small island off the west coast of Scotland in the spring of 2005. Three years earlier, Gigha had been purchased by its residents from a single, private landowner. The paper finds that the process and nature of ownership change have fundamentally reshaped economic, social and political relationships governing housing provision. The paper concludes by reflecting on the significance of the findings.