Recent years have witnessed an increasing emphasis placed on planning systems in most advanced capitalist societies to develop a more sustainable urban development pattern, resulting in policies to increase residential densities. Although belief in the virtues of the compact city approach is now widespread among the policy community, questions remain relating to the 'sustainability versus liveability' implications of compact city environments. In this regard, while the public may support sustainability principles, there is a perception that high-density development poses too great a cost on individuals' quality of life. Combining both quantitative and qualitative research data, this paper evaluates the relationship between high-density living and neighbourhood satisfaction within the central city. Findings suggest that, in many instances, it is not high density per se that is the source of dissatisfaction for respondents, but rather other related factors such as environmental quality, noise, lack of community involvement, traffic and lack of services and facilities.compact city policy, sustainable development, neighbourhood, quality of life,

This paper examines the concept of resilience and its increasing application within rural studies in the face of both economic uncertainty and ecological crisis. Two approaches to resilience are firstly explored: an equilibrium (or bounce‐back) approach, based on ‘return to normal’ assumptions, and an evolutionary (or bounce‐forward) approach characterised by an emphasis on adaptive capacity and transformation. While resilience overlaps with the existing literature within rural studies and rural development, the paper argues that resilience thinking opens up new perspectives and provides the potential to ‘re‐frame’ rural studies debates, provides a bridging concept. Two key contributions of resilience are identified: Firstly, resilience offers alternative analytical methods and insights for rural studies, particularly when drawing on evolutionary economic geography ideas of path dependencies and path creation, a relational perspective of rural space, and identification of place attributes which may enhance or undermine resilience. Secondly, resilience provides an alternative policy narrative for rural development practice. This includes an emphasis on adaptive networked governance, embedding ecological concerns into rural development practices and a call for blending the local and global in rural development processes. The paper concludes by identifying future research directions for rural resilience.

In recognition that the coming century will see a substantial majority of the world's population living in urban areas, the World Health Organisation and the United Nations have developed policy frameworks and guidance which promote the increased provision of urban green space for population health. However, these undertakings do not provide specific guidance for urban policy in terms of the particular design attributes required to tackle lifestyle illnesses and to promote well-being in urban populations. Furthermore, green spaces have generally been treated as a homogenous environment type. In order to address these weaknesses, this paper collates and reviews the evidence linking health, well-being and green space using a lifecourse approach. The literature generally endorses the view that urban green spaces, as part of the wider environmental context, promote health and well-being across the life course. Based on the evidence, cohort-specific and cross-cutting design interventions are identified and a general integrated green space framework for health and well-being is proposed. This analytical lens facilitates distillation of a vast quantum of research and the formulation of specific planning and design guidance for the provision of more inclusive green spaces that respond to the varying needs of people across all life-course stages.

Publication informationTown Planning Review, 85 (5):

This article focuses on rural mobility and rural housing using three case studies in Ireland. It is argued that while rural change and rural in-migration have been in the spotlight in academic literature, there has been a very limited interlinking between rural mobilities and population movements and spatial planning and housing research. This is surprising given the current policy framework in local and regional spatial planning, which in many cases adopts narratives of counter-urbanisation. This article investigates the extent and types of rural residential mobility, including counter-urbanisation, ruralto-rural migration and local movements. Then, it examines the reasons driving residential mobility and finally it explores the relationship between mobility and new house building in rural areas. The article concludes that an understanding of rural mobilities is necessary for planning and housing policy, in not only providing background information for an evidence-based approach in policy making, but also in exploring new policy interventions when dealing with rural housing demands.

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This article aims to address the disconnect between housing and rural development research. We do this by examining models of rural development (exogenous, endogenous and neo-endogenous) in the rural housing context. Drawing on in-depth documentary analysis of planning and rural development policy and research in the Republic of Ireland, we demonstrate a series of policy failures in implementing exogenous and pseudo-endogenous approaches to housing policy in rural areas. Subsequently, we propose a neo-endogenous framework for a more effective integration of housing and rural development theory and practice. In an international context Ireland represents an insightful case for studying the relationship between rural development and housing, due to the emphasis on housing development in rural areas, which in essence has represented a 'quick fix' for development, as evidenced by the country's liberal planning regime during an extraordinary housing boom period until the more recent property crash. While the article focuses on Ireland as a case-study, lessons and a framework for a neo-endogenous model of rural development and housing are also drawn internationally.

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