ABSTRACT
The development-plan policies for rural settlements represented in many ways a unique opportunity to create planning strategies than were unfettered by policy precedent. Indeed this first stage of the heterodox model of the planning process suggested in figure 1.2 was absent at this time apart from the rather feeble attempts to produce planning schemes under the 1932 Act. Thus, the various agents of policy preparation leading to the written development-plan policies played a peculiarly formative role during this era of planning history. The various factors involved in policy preparation have been detailed elsewhere (Cloke, 1979; Woodruffe, 1976) but their overall effects can be clearly traced. Indeed, given the weight of government advice in favour both of rural conservation and of the need to concentrate services and resources within the rural settlement pattern, it is hardly surprising that the first crop of development plans after the 1947 Act differed only in the degree of rationalization proposed rather than in the actual decision between concentration or dispersal of investment. Rural planners in this early period were encouraged by a simple logic:
The greater the concentration of population the easier it would be to support local facilities, to support economically the water supply and sewerage schemes being installed as a matter of government policy, and to support public transport between rural settlements and the towns. (Green, 1966, 31)
