Countryside Recreation, Access and Land Use Planning

Description

In this book, Nigel Curry gives a full critical appraisal of policies and plans for countryside recreation, and proposes, in the context of rural restructuring as a whole, a range of new directions for policy that will better serve the needs of both the public and the countryside to the turn of the century. Countryside Recreation, Access and Land Use Planning has been structured around five main propositions: that the fragmented nature of the way in which agencies responsible for rural leisure are organised has inhibited the development of coherent policies and plans; that there has been a confusion between the responsibilities of the public sector and those of the market place and provision has been piecemeal and unco-ordinated as a result; that policies and plans have, in the main, ignored the social composition of recreation participation and have failed to take people's preferences into account; that policy and planning have been concerned with the rights of the landowner and a fear of a recreation explosion rather than the development of recreation opportunities and as such, have been unduly restrictive, and that policies and plans for recreation and access have been given an unjustifiably low priority in pressures for change in the countryside, particularly in relation to those in the conservation interest.