A place for grazing livestock in defining rurality?

Concepts of rurality are necessary to underpin important practical matters such as policies for planning and rural development. Landscape ecologists have devised approaches based on multivariate statistics applied to environmental and socio-economic data (e.g. van Eupen et al., 2012) while geographers have employed paradigms whereby rurality was ‘equated … with particular spaces and functions’ (Cloke and Thrift, 1994), but the use in policy documents of terms like ‘intrinsic character’ (see the Introduction) raises the question as to whether rural districts have emergent properties that are not captured by a purely statistical or formulaic approach.