Planning on the edge: England’s rural-urban fringe and the spatial planning agenda

Planning at the edge of cities has, in the past, largely been concerned with containment, with the promotion of more compact urban form, and with the planned separation of rural and urban land use and activities. However, there has been some inevitable blurring of these uses, to create a unique landscape—an interface between town and country—sometimes labelled the rural – urban fringe. This landscape has been created more by fortune than design: less favoured urban uses—sewage works, mental institutions, asylum centres, breakers’ yards, etc—have been pushed away from residential areas. Rural uses, mainly farming and forestry, have become mingled with this particular assemblage of urban activities to create a hybrid landscape. Planning, however, has been a relatively inert force at the edge: seeking to contain (perhaps through greenbelts) but not seeking to improve or to manage. In England, our principal focus in this paper, a number of commentators have expressed a concern for this apparent inertia, arguing that planning could do more to ‘manage’ the fringe, creating new social, economic, and environmental opportunities. We draw on a review of policies and programmes affecting the fringe, and argue that spatial planning—able to integrate land uses, and different activities and interests—may create such opportunities. We highlight what planning might seek to achieve at the edge, and how any programme of change might be driven forward.