Rural Revival?

How, if possible, to re-populate declining rural and regional areas? This book examines this crucial and complex issue in relation to Australia, and the manner in which a particular organization, Country Week, has emerged and developed as one means of stimulating the repopulation of declining or stagnating areas. While this is a problem shared by many other developed countries in Europe and North America, Australia's 'Country Week' programme puts forward an innovative range of strategies that challenge rural decline and urban migration and can offer new techniques which could be adopted more widely. The book extends ideas on counter-urbanisation, reflects on contested notions of rural gentrification, and traces the processes of rural place marketing to examine how these merge together into an innovative, organized place-marketing activity that simultaneously involves cooperation and competition among participants. It takes geographies of mobilities beyond any simple urban-rural dichotomy by critically examining an annual event that is focused on one of the most important of the broad range of mobilities - the movement of people from urban to rural areas through centralized and localized place-marketing strategies. While there have been several studies in many countries of both aspects of 'sea change' where households, often at or close to retirement, take themselves to usually coastal locations, and 'rural gentrification' where (usually) commuters colonise formerly agricultural villages and small towns, there has been no effective analysis of the complex strategies used to encourage the location of working families and individuals in what may sometimes be seen as less attractive rural and regional destinations. This book focuses precisely on this issue. Despite trading on similar images of rural idyll (countryside, community, space, free time, security etc), the resultant more obviously directed/encouraged population movement is therefore quite different from earlier processes of rural gentrification and counter-urbanisation. The emphasis in Country Week on employment opportunities and reduced housing costs means that a working class population, often unable to afford the costs of big-city living, is attracted to rural areas. This raises questions about rural identity, the understanding of socio-economic status in rural migration, the role of strategic marketing and the significance of scale, and ultimately emphasizes the considerable challenges in redirecting population change 'against the flow'.