See also
External links
Phase 1 Rural England Today
Phase 1 of the RERC research programme is set out in detail in the original consortium research proposal to Defra, though this has evolved as new issues for research have been identified.
The main ideas behind our approach to rural social and economic research from an interdisciplinary perspective can be summarised as follows:
- in a relatively small country well served with transport links such as England, the health of the ‘rural’ economy is now inevitably bound closely with the economic health of towns and cities,
- at the same time, we recognise that the diversity of rural England in terms of settlement, society and economy, has been shaped by centuries of changing agricultural and industrial activity,
- we are concerned with social variation not only between but within rural places where peripherality and well-being may have different meanings for different social groups, and
- we are sensitive to the analytical and policy issues that arise from the lack of visibility (and audibility) of individuals and groups whose ‘rural’ character is defined primarily by their geographical dispersion.
These concerns demand approaches to research that (a) build on the possibilities offered by the new rural definition and (b) try to go beneath even the small (census) areas in which the definition is cast to examine and compare the structure of rural settlements.