Gavin Parker

Local food: understanding consumer motivations in innovative retail formats

Purpose – This paper sets out to profile the activities and consumers of a unique and successful local food retail outlet in the UK that is based on weekly community markets.Design/methodology/approach – The seminal literature on local food in the UK is reviewed prior to providing a case study on a local food outlet, the True Food Co‐op. This is followed by the results from a detailed survey of its customers.Findings – The increase in availability of and interest in local food over the last decade has been matched by new research findings. Although there is a consensus on the reasons why people buy local food, there are significant gaps in other areas of ones understanding, such as the lack of a clear definition of what local food is. This is frustrating further developments in the sector.Research limitations/implications – Business development strategies that rely on niche markets, such as local food, in fast‐moving consumer goods categories are enjoying rapid growth. However, there are many difficultie...

‘Digging-up’ Utopia? Space, practice and land use heritage

Abstract In this paper we explore history and heritage mobilised to do service for marginalized interests. We discuss how resources, such as, place, texts, artefacts and practice are drawn upon to forward particular political interests. Touching on recent work in non-representational theory we suggest that more attention be paid to the micro-politics of doing and link more formal action to that of ‘everyday’ practice. The examples used show how particular actors draw on history and heritage to advance their positions and how their performances reinforce claims based on alternative practices. The examples used illustrate how this involves the notion of ‘reclaiming’ historical action, historical texts and historical place. In particular how this relates to land and specifically in this paper the metaphor, representation and practice of ‘digging’.

Why Bother with Good Works? The Relevance of Public Participation(s) in Planning in a Post-collaborative Era

The concern to ensure public participation or community engagement within and in support of spatial planning has been an ongoing and widely aired topic since at least the 1960s. The basis and justification, however, for academics and policy-makers in agonizing over this issue and the practices of participation has been variously questioned. Similarly, exhortations to understand the motives and limitations of different interests and their positions or relative power have also beenwidely debated. Works looking at participation have also ranged widely and many have been critical of the merits or benefits of participation in planning and more broadly in local governance. This special issue of Planning Practice & Research aims both to engage with these debates and to reflect on the direction of travel of current researchwithin the continuously evolving landscape of the theory and practice of participation. As such, this edition was prompted by several factors, starting symbolically at least with the 40th anniversary of two significant publications relating to participation: firstly, the Skeffington report on people and planning, which underscored the need for public engagement in planning in Britain (see, for example, Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1969; Rydin, 1999); and secondly, Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) seminal paper that featured the widely cited ‘ladder of participation’ and highlighted a range of different participatory ‘opportunities’ and their conceptualization in terms of differential empowerment. These may simply be coincidental milestones yet 40 years on the paradox revealed by the juxtaposition of these documents between enthusiasm for participation and a questioning of its potential remains. Increasingly, reflections on participation are tempered by a recognition of the challenges that ‘meaningful’ participation faces and the limitations of much past practice. Moreover, the world has changed and is ultimately more complex, prompting a crisis of participation in some sense, underlined by the challenges of ‘seeing from the south’ and moving away from a western-focused perspective. Equally the lessons that are drawn or applied from

The role of the consumer‐citizen in environmental protest in the 1990s

This paper links market‐based ‘protest’ strategies, as used recently by environmental protest groups and other sociations, to citizenship theory, seeking to open a debate about the role of the consumer‐citizen. It is suggested that such consumer‐citizenship, whereby protest and political action are encouraged through market mechanisms, and limited through state action, is an important feature of late‐modernity. The paper seeks to illustrate how advanced capitalist societies are producing reworked forms of rights relationships. This is discussed within the context of the rhetoric of ‘active’ citizenship as used in UK politics and through examples of recent environmental protests and other consumer‐citizen strategies.

Reshaping Spaces of Local Governance? Community Strategies and the Modernisation of Local Government in England

The preparation of Community Strategies (CS) has been required of Local Strategic Partnerships and local authorities in England since the passing of the Local Government Act 2000. The authors examine the process and content of two CSs in southern England as part of an ongoing project to understand their impact and explore ways in which CSs may be prepared in a meaningful and effective manner. They critically evaluate a number of dimensions of CS formulation, including: the important role of local political and cultural context; the extent to which they reflect and reproduce a shift from representational to participatory forms of democracy; the impact of national policy agendas; the role of place identity; the relative influence of local government officers and members; and the dynamics and implications of particular forms of conflict mediation and consensus building. They conclude that the process of CS formation studied illustrates the tensions and opportunities contained within the Labour governments modernisation agenda. Governmentalities of active citizenship and participatory democracy mingle with more representational and managerial modes of local governance, creating hybrid structures, processes, and outcomes that shape the process of strategy formulation. All this is set within a context of a dynamic and variable set of place identities and pervasive resource (inter)dependencies which both close down and open up the range of issues and interests that are drawn into the process of CS formulation.

Land, Rights and the Gift: The Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 and the Negotiation of Citizenship

The Countryside and Rights of Way Act came into force at the end of 2000 with,as part of its content, new provisions relating to public access to the English and Welsh countryside. In this paper we review the main elements of the Act and assess its meaning in relation to citizenship, territoriality and the place of land in English law and society. We invoke Mauss’s (1954)concept of Gift to explain the process of brokerage being made over access and rights in the countryside. In conclusion we reflect on the Act as being indicative of a wider move towards Bromley’s (1998)post-feudal scenario for land and its governance.

Networked space? The challenge of meaningful participation and the new spatial planning in England

Over recent years there has been a series of government initiatives that have impacted directly and indirectly on the United Kingdom (UK) planning system. These include a programme of regional devolution, the introduction of significant shifts in regeneration policy and funding and the increasing emphasis placed on partnership working and community engagement at the local level. These changes have now fed through into some far-reaching changes that are being wrought in the planning system itself. While many in planning and the development industry stress the opportunities that should arise from the government’s modifications to the planning system (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), 2003a), it is certain that they also hold challenges and involve a number of as yet unresolved issues. In this article we explore those challenges, opportunities and issues in relation to the theme of community involvement. In doing this we concentrate on the relationship between ‘community strategies’ (the government’s flagship policy vehicle for taking forward a ‘new localism’ in governance) and the government’s expectations for community involvement in the new system of local plans (now called ‘local development frameworks’). We build our assessment on initial findings from research into community strategy development in England and our assessment of the emerging spatial planning strategy in Reading, Berkshire. Our conclusion is that spatial planning intimates a degree of complexity that needs to be well organised if such complexities are to be reflected in plans and strategies (cf. Byrne, 1998). Our view is that the changes to community involvement will present real difficulties for many local planning authorities, but also offer opportunities for sustained, good-quality, integrated and resourceefficient community involvement. We suggest that an effective approach to handle the new spatial planning regime is to integrate different ‘policy networks’ (Marsh, 1998; Selman, 2000a; Doak & Parker, 2002) and seek the construction and maintenance of what we term a new ‘spatial planning network’.

Citizenships, Contingency and the Countryside : Rights, Culture, Land and the Environment

Part 1: Society, Culture and Rural Land Part 2: Unpacking Citizenship Part 3: UK Politics and the Citizenship Debate Part 4: On Being Modern: Consolidating Citizenship in the Countryside Part 5: Enacting and Contesting Rights through History Part 6: Political Expediency, Localness and Active Citizenship Part 7: Citizenship and the Countryside as Consumer Space Part 8: Citizenship, Contingency and the Countryside

The negotiation of leisure citizenship : Leisure constraints, moral regulation and the mediation of rural place

Abstract This paper extends the constraints of leisure literature by demonstrating how materials are circulated to regulate and constrain leisure behaviour in the countryside. It is argued that constraints in the form of moral regulation should be recognised as part of the constraints literature. The development of the Country Code in England 1 is regarded as part of a long‐term and ongoing effort to extend governance and control by means of informal and semi‐formal codes of conduct. Crucially, however, the Code has changed over time and may act as a means of placating different interests in the countryside as much as observably constraining them. The Code is seen as a constraint project mediated between groups and is found to be contested and reworked over time. Drawing on key concepts expounded in Bourdieu’s post‐structural social theory it is argued that actors occupy positions within social fields and draw on their own habitus, other dispositions of power and imaginations to co‐construct leisure regulation and behaviour. Such conceptual devices should more properly be viewed as contingent dispositions that are subject to challenge and revision. As such the more diffuse and circulatory constraints affect practices differentially. A need for more attention to this in leisure studies research and a recognition of how different constraints are experienced and responded to is needed.

Networks, Agency and (De)stabilization: The Issue of Navigation on the River Wye, UK

This paper assesses the way in which an actor network presiding over the management of the River Wye has stabilized through accepting a particular view on the issue of navigation. The paper provides an account of how the network was challenged by a dissonant actor who, through reviving an old company, developed a counter network. It is argued that network stabilization is a form of consensus-building and it is contended that the way in which an issue is defined is crucial in terms of the successful enrolment of actors. The paper illustrates some of the conflicts and complexities encountered in resource planning, suggesting that research of this nature should trace actors back through time as well as through space if dynamics between actors involved in rural planning and management are to be effectively understood.