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2 Rural Change in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain

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2 Rural Change in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain 2 Rural change in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain 2.1Introduction ‘Whilst it is true that many people still retain some mental picture of an overly romanticised unchanging countryside, the reality is of profound change during the last two centuries and especially post 1945’ (Robinson, 1990, p.XIX) The changes that rural areas in western urbanised societies experienced since 1945 revealed itself in shifts in economic activities, changes in land use, demographic and social cultural changes. According to Clout (1993) ‘Across the whole of Western Europe the days of a traditional, inward looking, rural community are over’. Just after the second World War the rural economy and land use were still one-sidedly focussed on agricultural production. Now rural areas are increasingly integrated into the urbanised society. Agricultural productive functions have gradually made room for non-agricultural ‘consumption’ functions and typical rural traditional values and life-styles are gradually starting to fade away, bringing about important social changes. In this Chapter the rural restructuring process is summarised through three concepts; commodification, urbanisation, and differentiation. These will be discussed for Dutch, British and Spanish examples, which illustrate that the European countryside has experienced the same process although in somewhat different ways resulting in a strongly diversified European rural space. In this Chapter the first research question of this study is answered: 1a. How can the post-1945 rural restructuring process in The Netherlands, the UK and Spain be characterised and how did this affect the residential activities in rural areas? The Netherlands and the UK are representatives of highly urbanised Northern European countries, whereas Spain is representative of the Mediterranean lower income and welfare countries of the European Union. Both The Netherlands and the UK belong to the most urbanised and densely populated countries of the EU while Spain takes an intermediate urbanisation and has the lowest population density in the EU (Table 2.1). Within the UK the population distribution is more polarised than in The Netherlands. Many parts of northern England, Scotland and Wales have a population density that is even lower than the Spanish average, whilst the south-east of England has densities even above the densely populated Dutch Randstad. The urbanisation in the three countries started at different moments in the past. In both The Netherlands and the UK urbanisation began relatively early. This had other causes in the UK than in The Netherlands. In The Netherlands the urbanisation started earlier than in the UK, and speeded up in the Golden Age, when the craft and trade industries expanded in the cities of The western Netherlands. By 1600, more than 25% of the Dutch population lived in a town of over 10,000 inhabitants, whilst this proportion was less than 10% in England (Israel, 1995, p. 113). By 1622 already 54% of the Dutch population lived in cities (Harten, 1972). In spite of the early and rapid urbanisation in The Netherlands, there was no strong concentration on one single location, creating a metropolis comparable to those in most European countries, such as the UK. In this respect, The Netherlands again played a unique role and the result of this is still visible in the relatively even population distribution over the country and the urban structure of The Netherlands (see Israel, 1995). Very large cities do not exist in The Netherlands and the Dutch Randstad, the biggest population concentration in the country, still consists of four main cities; Amsterdam, Utrecht, Den Haag and Rotterdam, which together form a conurbation that does not even reaches the size of London or Madrid1. Britain was one of the first countries where industrialisation started giving an important impulse to the urbanisation process. Consequently, there was a strong population movement from the countryside into the cities where manpower was needed to work in manufacturing and mining. Contrary to the Dutch situation this urbanisation concentrated strongly on one place, i.e. the city of London, and created a 26 27 Rural change in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain 2 Table 2.1 General characteristics of the three research countries and the EU-15 The Netherlands United Kingdom Spain EU-15 Total area (km2) (1) 41,029 241,751 504,790 3,191,120 Population density 374 243 78 118 (inh./km2, 1996) (1) Urban population as % of 89 89 76 n.a. tot. pop. (1993)(2) GDP ECU/inh. 1996 (1) 20,027 15,504 11,891 18,103 % active population employed 3.8 2.0 8.6 5.1 in agriculture 1996 (1) Unemployment rate 1997 (1) 5.1 7.1 21.1 10.7 (%/tot employed pop.) State organisation Decentralised Unitary Federal - unitary state Planning system Not flexible Flexible Medium - (see also Annex 1) Flexible Source: (1) Eurostat (1998) and (2) Worldbank, 1996 n.a. No data available major metropolis surrounded by a large rural and small town hinterland. In Spain urbanisation was delayed which only started about 40 years ago. The rural to urban population movement has mainly been focussed on the six largest conurbations (Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Sevilla, Zaragoza and Málaga) and was strongly stimulated by the late but accelerated ‘exode agraire’ (Camarero, 1993). The per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in The Netherlands is highest, whilst Spain has a lower per capita GDP. Although Spain belongs to the lower income countries of the EU it still has a higher GDP than Greece and Portugal. In terms of recent economic growth, Spain is performing well. Many regions in Spain have experienced an increase in per capita GDP exceeding by far the increase rates of most of European regions. However, this increase did not go together with a decrease in unemployment. Hoggart et al. (1995) explain this presumed contradiction by the one-sided attraction of capital intensive industries. Spain’s unemployment rate is the highest of the EU; suggesting that there is a low welfare level in part of the Spanish population. It should also be realised that the contrasts in welfare level between regions within Spain and the UK are also much bigger than in The Netherlands. The state organisation and the legal and administrative systems are different in the three research countries. This has led to important differences in the way governments administer in rural areas, the flexibility of the rural planning system and the distribution of power between the central and the lower tier governments. As The Netherlands and the UK are both unitary states, the overall planning competence is with the national government. In Spain, with the introduction of the new constitution in 1978, most of the planning competence shifted from the national level to the regional level, to the level of the autonomous government (so-called 2 Rural change in The Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Spain ‘autonomias’). This is however only applicable to the regional and town planning competence while at this moment the national government still retains responsibility for National Parks. Another important discriminating feature of the planning systems of the three countries is the rate of flexibility. If mutually compared, the British planning system is most and the Dutch is least flexible. In The Netherlands every parcel of land is under a detailed planning regulation, whilst in the UK and Spain, local plans are not worked out in such great detail for every unit. Officially, the influence of local government on planning matters is greater in the Dutch and Spanish systems than in the UK. This is linked to the special status by law on which the local planning authorities in The Netherlands and Spain can act. In practice however, the Spanish local authorities have more autonomy in steering the land use developments in their territory than the Dutch. This is because the conformity of the local plans with higher order plans is very strict in The Netherlands, leaving little scope to the local authorities to develop the plans according to their own requirements. In Spain however, the higher order plans have not always been available when making local plans, giving the municipalities many possibilities to make autonomous decisions about certain land use prescriptions. A further and more detailed description of the planning systems can be found in Annex 1. When studying the rural development in the three case study countries, the wide diversity in the European countryside becomes apparent, which is the result of the different ways planning proceeded. The decline of the agricultural sector, both as an economic activity and as a land-use activity, population movements, social cultural changes and rural policies have been playing a central role. The agricultural sector has ‘made room’ for other activities. People who worked in agriculture left the countryside and other people moved from urban to rural areas. Commuters, retired people, second-home owners and other people of all ages and social-economic classes have moved into the countryside. The complexity of the rural restructuring and the difficulty to detect uniform developments or regularities is also confirmed by observations of Cloke and Goodwin: ‘rather than searching for one movement from Fordism to post-Fordism, we should look to understand rural change as a whole series of movements between the differing practices and procedures of various strategies of regulation operating at overlapping scales. When successful, in achieving partial and contested stability, these help to form a particular structured coherence. This allows us to see rural regions undergoing a series of diverse and contested changes and developments, all socially constructed, rather than leaping from one ideal typical stage to another’ (Cloke & Goodwin, 1992, p.22) In spite of the complexity of the rural restructuring process, in the next Sections the similarities and differences in the rural development of Dutch, UK and Spanish areas become readily apparent.
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