ABSTRACT
Food security is a global challenge, and its recent re-emergence as a focus in public policy adds to a long and complex genealogy of rural planning concerns, from agrarian community welfare, through to agricultural modernisation, global commodity production and the concurrent land use and values conflicts emerging within multi-functional landscapes. Each has offered a vision for rural futures and attendant dilemmas for planning, whether concerns of farmland and landscape protection, the need to protect ‘community’ in the face of agricultural globalisation, or dissenting views of agriculture within the variegated scale and character of contemporary farming systems. Dilemmas for rural planning practice are often most acute in peri-urban areas where competing notions of farming and landscape futures collide. Rural governance in this setting reflects the consequences of globalising economies and food preferences, as well as emerging expressions of rural lifestyle and re-localised food systems. Using examples of land use conflict in Australian peri-urban regions, this chapter will focus on contrasting visions for agricultural systems and food security, the increasing scale of intensive agriculture and the formation of localised and differentiated farming systems, all of which present challenges for planners. It will then consider the dilemmas these create for representations of rural place and the practice of rural planning.
