ABSTRACT
Rural America consists of nearly 84 million hectares, thousands of administrative jurisdictions, and some 60 million people who live in a diversity of geographic regions, economic conditions and changing land-use patterns. The variety of America’s rural areas - from remote wilderness to the rapidly developing rural-urban fringe - has made different planning programmes necessary and a high degree of programmatic idiosyncrasy has been the result. State, local, and federal government policies ali have some impact on the use and management of rural land. But the three levels of government have produced considerable fragmentation in the public attempt to foster and yet Control rural development. This fragmentation has often frustrated both public officials and private citizens by producing either weak or heavily bureaucratic planning programmes which work against either local interests or the public at large. Land use in the United States has traditionally involved a
minimum of government intervention, and land-use Controls have been shaped mainly by local town and county govemments. At the heart of the struggle for effective rural planning lies a deep-rooted feeling that a landowner should have considerable discretion over the future of the land. This belief tends to predominate at the local level. By contrast, recent state and federal programmes affecting the rural environment tend to favour the broader public interest, variously defined.
