Can anything stop Rural Decline?

blanch152

I came across this fascinating article about Japan

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/japan-rural-decline/537375/

Here is a selected extract that talks about the challenges that other countries will face in the future:

"Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest. Its solutions to combating this decline may be significant for the rest of the world. So, too, may its failures.

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking and aging mirror those in the United States and other developed countries. Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,” John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me. Unlike the United States, which has colleges and universities located across the country, Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return."

The issue of rural decline, and what to do about it, is one that Ireland is going to have to face up to in the coming decades. The current policy, which appears to be to ignore it and fight the decline, will inevitably fail. The key is to manage this decline.

The issues raised cross a wide range of policy areas:

- Rural Broadband provision
- New spatial strategy (the Ireland 2040 plan)
- Regional higher education through IoTs
- Regional medical provision, not just hospitals but medical care centres
- Transport initiatives
- IDA policy

and many more.

However, given the intense attraction to the land in Ireland (born of a post-colonial inferiority complex), is there any chance that the politicians of today are likely to move the agenda away from preserving the rural way of life to the management of rural decline?

Jim2007

Eventually someone will cop on to the fact that the best deal with the housing crisis is to push stuff out to where there is actually land. But the pain level has not yet been reached.

johnnyskeleton

I was looking into why decentralisation didn't work when it was tried before. I think if you want to operate a pro-rural policy you need to lead from the top.

So if I were Taoiseach and wanted to make real change I would give serious thought to moving all government offices to somewhere more central e.g. the Midlands. I don't think there would be any reality to moving the parliament, but the Dail only sits something like 123 days a year (source), which is roughly 3 days a week for 41 weeks.

This way, civil servants wouldn't have an excuse of saying "I have to be based in Dublin because that is where the department/minister is based."

Also, it isn't exactly an arduous journey to travel from Dublin to Athlone or Tullamore or somewhere if the senior civil servants want to remain living in Dublin.

This would have the benfit of bringing jobs to smaller towns and of reducing the demand for housing, traffic in Dublin.

In reality, this is never going to happen. The convenience of having everything in Dublin and the resistance likely to be found towards relocating would mean that it would be a big mess. But it seems to me that this would be the most logical practical step the government could do to resolve a number of matters. It would also vacate a number of prime office locations just in time for Brexit, should any companies want to relocate here.

So basically, if any government were serious about saving rural Ireland they would get behind a massive decentralisation plan and do it properly rather than the half hearted way it was done in the past.

oppenheimer1

blanch152 wrote: »

I came across this fascinating article about Japan

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/08/japan-rural-decline/537375/

Here is a selected extract that talks about the challenges that other countries will face in the future:

"Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest. Its solutions to combating this decline may be significant for the rest of the world. So, too, may its failures.

The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking and aging mirror those in the United States and other developed countries. Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,” John Mock, an anthropologist at Temple University’s Japan campus, told me. Unlike the United States, which has colleges and universities located across the country, Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return."

The issue of rural decline, and what to do about it, is one that Ireland is going to have to face up to in the coming decades. The current policy, which appears to be to ignore it and fight the decline, will inevitably fail. The key is to manage this decline.

The issues raised cross a wide range of policy areas:

- Rural Broadband provision
- New spatial strategy (the Ireland 2040 plan)
- Regional higher education through IoTs
- Regional medical provision, not just hospitals but medical care centres
- Transport initiatives
- IDA policy

and many more.

However, given the intense attraction to the land in Ireland (born of a post-colonial inferiority complex), is there any chance that the politicians of today are likely to move the agenda away from preserving the rural way of life to the management of rural decline?

If you want a sustainable solution to arrest rural decline you have to first understand why rural decline is taking place. The reason for it is largely because of industrialisation where it is far more economic to locate industry and services in urban centres. This is a positive feedback loop, so more development begets more development. I've posted long posts on this in the past but the present rural towns existed largely to serve as markets for agricultural produce of the surrounding land. Since these markets no longer exist, the towns have lost their reason to exist.

To stop the decline in a sustainable way you have to provide a reason for people to stay in rural areas - essentially there has to be an activity that is more economic to be done in a rural area than an urban one. Apart from agriculture, and perhaps tourism, I cannot really think of any economic activity that is more efficient in a rural area.

This leads to the third point, is there any benefit is stopping rural decline? Throughout history settlements have come and gone so is it really a problem? All government solutions will only ever be a sticking plaster or a policy that will hold back overall national economic growth.

ancapailldorcha

Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize for his work on economic migration patterns. Basically, people move to places where they think they will enjoy a higher standard of living. This results in a vicious/virtuous cycle, depending on the observer's perspective. Rural areas suffer a brain drain with property owners experiencing a decline in the value of their assets while city dwellers become wealthier while they have a much bigger pool of staff to choose from. As people become more and more specialised, living in a city almost becomes compulsory from the perspective of gaining employment. Personally speaking, I am basically confined to a few English cities in my current field. Any incentive to relocate to the countryside is reduced ever further.

In terms of rectifying the situation, I think a few things need to happen. I don't know much about decentralisation so I can't comment there. However, I think that Ireland needs massive investment in its infrastructure. If this had already happened, it would be in a much better position vis-á-vis Brexit. It would help to lower house prices in Dublin by making it more feasible to live in the commuter belt and travel to and from Dublin on a daily basis. Dublin will always be the beating heart of the country but investment would reduce the inequality gap somewhat while creating a slew of good jobs. A review of housebuilding regulations would help as well in this regard. Borrowing in this context would be something I support as it's an investment which would result in stable, long term growth. Bringing Ireland's rural broadband up to code would also be a great idea as it would mean that online businesses could move to the countryside, slashing overheards while leaving precious city-centre real estate available for firms who need to be based in the city itself.

ongarite

Decentralisation was a massive failure IMO.
It lead to a.massive brain drain from the civil, public service as employees left either to move to another department that was near their home, family or left for private sector employment.
www.rte.ie/amp/311538

As said before nothing can stop urbanisation, it's the prevailing trend of the 21st century.
You can't force private enterprise to locate in rural areas just in the hope it'll arrest the slide of rural decline.
You could do this in the 20th century with factories producing cars and then low value electronics.
Most of these have now moved out of Europe to cheaper lands.

The 21st century job is highly skilled with a narrow focus on specialised areas requiring like minded people in close proximity to each other. These conditions only exist in large cities. Dublin, Cork and Galway are the only cities that can meet these needs and compete for new jobs in the global market.

oscarBravo

In 2002 a well-designed framework for balanced regional development was introduced, called the National Spatial Strategy. It was an excellent foundation for addressing the tightly-coupled problems of Dublin's inability to cope with its relentless growth, and the decline of the regions. It identified "hubs" - the five cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford, as well as Dundalk, Sligo and Letterkenny - and added a second tier of "gateway" towns, as well as a high-level view of how transport would develop between these hubs and gateways.

Two years later, Charlie McCreevy announced a program of government decentralisation that pretty much ignored the NSS completely, and that set the tone for everything that has happened since.

We have a new framework that also looks promising, but unless it's adhered to, it will go the way of the NSS.

I will say this: in the same way that I've always said that if we want better government, we're going to need better voters; similarly if we want better development, we'll need to be better citizens. NIMBYism is a massive, massive problem. One company (Apple) finally has the courage to consider building a data centre outside of Dublin - what a radical thought! - and it promptly gets mired in years of legal challenges.



All that aside, there are two problems that are often encountered when discussing rural decline: one is the perception that the country is divided into Dublin on the one hand, and farmland on the other. "Rural" encompasses everything from the Burren to Letterkenny town centre, and more besides. It's possible to decentralise development from Dublin without necessarily repeating the catastrophic mistakes of the past, such as widespread one-off housing. That's a legacy problem we're going to have to live with, but at least we've mostly stopped exacerbating it.

The other is the perception that the only employment to be found in genuinely rural areas is in either farming or tourism. There are a great many innovative industries in the least likely places. There's a surprisingly large cluster of agricultural machinery manufacturing in south and east Mayo, for example, and there's a chap in the countryside outside Balla designing and manufacturing innovative recycling systems for worldwide export.

I've often felt that if the government is serious about halting rural decline, there is a cohort of civil servants who'll have to pull on their wellies some time, or else they'll continue to see the problem in an entirely fictional abstract.

This kinda reminds me of Trump's obsession with saving coal-mining and "blue collar" (read: crap) jobs. Mechanisation, automation and robotics are supposed to get rid of such jobs, it's always been the dream, leaving people more time, healthier and happier.
Another thing I wonder though, is there another country in the EU that transfers as much to rural areas as Ireland does? There are some rural areas doing badly, though figures are hard to come by (not many farmers' kids who don't get the college grants :pac: ). I can think of one area where every house has 2 cars (plus 0.5 per grown child) and the vast majority of households have one person working. These people wouldn't consider themselves well-off despite what seems to me to be upsides.

oscarBravo

oscarBravo wrote: »

I will say this: in the same way that I've always said that if we want better government, we're going to need better voters; similarly if we want better development, we'll need to be better citizens. NIMBYism is a massive, massive problem. One company (Apple) finally has the courage to consider building a data centre outside of Dublin - what a radical thought! - and it promptly gets mired in years of legal challenges.

Yup, scream and shout for development then scream and shout that there won't be enough "local" benefit.

djPSB

Get proper broadband to rural areas to allow for businesses to operate in these areas and also facilitates people to work from home.

ongarite

djPSB wrote: »

Get proper broadband to rural areas to allow for businesses to operate in these areas and also facilitates people to work from home.

Working from home in what industry?
Because the IT model is moving away from this to large centralised campuses with collaborating in large groups.
Google, Apple, etc are all building huge campuses as they have found it to be better & more efficient.

Fr Tod Umptious

The thing about Ireland is that it's quite small, so balanced regional development should be easier than in larger countries.

There is a motorway linking the two largest airports in the country, both with capacity for long haul.

Getting industry and people to develop along this corridor should not be difficult.

In a few months Limerick and Galway will be connected by motorway, as will further north to Tuam.

That makes living and working in either city far more viable than it has previously been.

The obvious delay is Cork to Limerick motorway but once that is done the whole area between Tuam and Cork will be linked making it far more attractive for investment.

The whole Decentralization plan from the early 2000s was a typical FF stunt to come up with a headline in an otherwise unattractive budget, it was never thought out to any great degree.

LeinsterDub

ongarite wrote: »

Working from home in what industry?
Because the IT model is moving away from this to large centralised campuses with collaborating in large groups.
Google, Apple, etc are all building huge campuses as they have found it to be better & more efficient.

I'm not sure Google and Apple building new head offices supports your hypothesis. Do you have anything concert which supports this claim?

Fr Tod Umptious

LeinsterDub wrote: »

I'm not sure Google and Apple building new head offices supports your hypothesis. Do you have anything concert which supports this claim?

It is actually the case

Read an article about it a few weeks back, a lot of big US companies are trying to get people back into the office.

LeinsterDub

Fr Tod Umptious wrote: »

It is actually the case

Read an article about it a few weeks back, a lot of big US companies are trying to get people back into the office.

https://www.forbesmiddleeast.com/en/working-from-home-in-2017-the-top-100-companies-offering-remote-jobs/

“The results of this year’s list are in line with the overall growth trends we’re observing in the flexible job marketplace, with increasingly diverse companies turning to the ‘TRaD’ (or telecommuting, remote, and distributed) model of work as an integrated business practice,” said Sara Sutton Fell, founder and CEO of FlexJobs

hytrogen

I read somewhere, think on a facetube column, recently about how Italian millennials are moving away from the busy metropolis for a sedate lifestyle in rural Italy, basically how housing is so much cheaper, they take up small tillage farming etc. Because they realise the metropolis are too crowded and have so many more social problems than perks.. perhaps a model we should be considering and abaiting land horders

djPSB

ongarite wrote: »

Working from home in what industry?
Because the IT model is moving away from this to large centralised campuses with collaborating in large groups.
Google, Apple, etc are all building huge campuses as they have found it to be better & more efficient.

People in a number of industries work from home. Not full time but one or two days a week.

This is where there needs to be some joined to thinking in this country. All the country's bigger problems are linked and have a knock on effect on each other.

Broadband availablity in rural towns facilitates business in those areas which also has a positive knock on effect for other local shops etc. in those areas. You cannot run a business without access to proper broadband.

It means less people have to commute into the larger cities every day, reducing current traffic bottlenecks. The volume of cars driving into Dublin every day at the moment is ridiculous.

It reduces the number of people that need to live in the bigger cities easing the burden on the current housing crisis.

As an example, a professional IT business close to my local town employing 20 people almost had to shut down and relocate to Galway City due to broadband speed being so poor. That's detrimental for small towns and crippling their future.

blanch152

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

Paul Krugman won a Nobel Prize for his work on economic migration patterns. Basically, people move to places where they think they will enjoy a higher standard of living. This results in a vicious/virtuous cycle, depending on the observer's perspective. Rural areas suffer a brain drain with property owners experiencing a decline in the value of their assets while city dwellers become wealthier while they have a much bigger pool of staff to choose from. As people become more and more specialised, living in a city almost becomes compulsory from the perspective of gaining employment. Personally speaking, I am basically confined to a few English cities in my current field. Any incentive to relocate to the countryside is reduced ever further.

In terms of rectifying the situation, I think a few things need to happen. I don't know much about decentralisation so I can't comment there. However, I think that Ireland needs massive investment in its infrastructure. If this had already happened, it would be in a much better position vis-á-vis Brexit. It would help to lower house prices in Dublin by making it more feasible to live in the commuter belt and travel to and from Dublin on a daily basis. Dublin will always be the beating heart of the country but investment would reduce the inequality gap somewhat while creating a slew of good jobs. A review of housebuilding regulations would help as well in this regard. Borrowing in this context would be something I support as it's an investment which would result in stable, long term growth. Bringing Ireland's rural broadband up to code would also be a great idea as it would mean that online businesses could move to the countryside, slashing overheards while leaving precious city-centre real estate available for firms who need to be based in the city itself.

The question the article raises is whether we should bother with attempting to rectify the situation.

The argument is that rural decline is inevitable and that we should manage that rather than try to reverse it.

ancapailldorcha

blanch152 wrote: »

The question the article raises is whether we should bother with attempting to rectify the situation.

The argument is that rural decline is inevitable and that we should manage that rather than try to reverse it.

That was my point. Hampering cities will just hurt the economy. It would be a better idea to earmark some capital specifically for improving rural areas. The problem is that spending on cities yields a higher return on investment thereby reducing the incentive for politicians to try to justify a perceived waste of taxpayers' money.

djPSB

blanch152 wrote: »

The question the article raises is whether we should bother with attempting to rectify the situation.

The argument is that rural decline is inevitable and that we should manage that rather than try to reverse it.

The infrastructures of our cities are no where near good enough to facilitate abandoning rural Ireland.

Public transport systems are deplorable and housing is already a massive issue in the larger cities.

djPSB

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

That was my point. Hampering cities will just hurt the economy. It would be a better idea to earmark some capital specifically for improving rural areas. The problem is that spending on cities yields a higher return on investment thereby reducing the incentive for politicians to try to justify a perceived waste of taxpayers' money.

What funding do rural areas need exactly outside of current resources? If rural areas were provided with broadband to facilitate business, the rural economies would kickstart automatically with employment and spending increasing in those areas.

blanch152

djPSB wrote: »

The infrastructures of our cities are no where near good enough to facilitate abandoning rural Ireland.

Public transport systems are deplorable and housing is already a massive issue in the larger cities.

My solution is quite simple, cancel the rural broadband scheme and invest in public transport in the cities.

blanch152

djPSB wrote: »

What funding do rural areas need exactly outside of current resources? If rural areas were provided with broadband to facilitate business, the rural economies would kickstart automatically with employment and spending increasing in those areas.

It doesn't happen like that, and hasn't happened like that anywhere in the world.

All countries are seeing greater urbanisation and rural decline.

djPSB

blanch152 wrote: »

It doesn't happen like that, and hasn't happened like that anywhere in the world.

All countries are seeing greater urbanisation and rural decline.

Sounds like a great idea. Best of luck with the food shortage when you abandon rural areas!

oscarBravo

blanch152 wrote: »

My solution is quite simple, cancel the rural broadband scheme and invest in public transport in the cities.

Better yet, cancel all investment in Ireland and focus on Frankfurt. But I guess not: it's always amazing how people think the perfect place to invest is wherever they happen to be.

There is no rural broadband scheme. There's a National Broadband Plan, which aims to bring a world-class broadband infrastructure to the entire country. If you want to cancel that, you might as well propose that we stop upgrading and repairing the national grid outside of the greater Dublin area.

This idea that everyone in the country should live in a maximum of one or two cities is beyond bizarre to me. Have you ever flown into a German airport at night? The entire countryside is a dense patchwork of towns and villages. I haven't seen anyone propose that all those towns and villages should be left to rot, and that the entire population should be forced through economic hardship to migrate to Berlin.

blanch152

oscarBravo wrote: »

Better yet, cancel all investment in Ireland and focus on Frankfurt. But I guess not: it's always amazing how people think the perfect place to invest is wherever they happen to be.

There is no rural broadband scheme. There's a National Broadband Plan, which aims to bring a world-class broadband infrastructure to the entire country. If you want to cancel that, you might as well propose that we stop upgrading and repairing the national grid outside of the greater Dublin area.

This idea that everyone in the country should live in a maximum of one or two cities is beyond bizarre to me. Have you ever flown into a German airport at night? The entire countryside is a dense patchwork of towns and villages. I haven't seen anyone propose that all those towns and villages should be left to rot, and that the entire population should be forced through economic hardship to migrate to Berlin.

The big problem in Ireland is one-off housing, we don't have a rural countryside like Germany or France, where you can travel twenty miles without seeing a house. There is nowhere left in Ireland where that is the case.

We have one of the least urbanised populations in Europe leaving us with inefficiencies in broadband provision, housing, education, health and public transport. We have to manage a change to eliminate one-off housing and small settlements and encourage growth in towns and cities, otherwise we will never have decent public services.

oscarBravo

blanch152 wrote: »

The big problem in Ireland is one-off housing, we don't have a rural countryside like Germany or France, where you can travel twenty miles without seeing a house. There is nowhere left in Ireland where that is the case.

You can't travel twenty miles in Denmark without seeing a house either, but I don't hear anyone talking about how it's necessary to uproot everyone from Jutland and move them en masse to Copenhagen.

We have to manage a change to eliminate one-off housing and small settlements...

We do? Why? Because you have decided that there is literally nothing more important than the single metric of efficient delivery of public services?

I'm not going to claim that our widespread one-off housing problem isn't a disaster that shouldn't have been allowed to happen, but you can't just turn around and tell a substantial percentage of the population that sorry, they're going to have to move to a city because it has been decreed that they must be punished for how poorly we planned things in the past.

By way of example, more than a thousand people work in Allergan in Westport. Assuming that Westport doesn't measure up to your lofty standards of a sustainable-sized city, what do you propose they do? Abandon their world-class pharmaceutical facility that they've built up over forty years? Insist that their staff leave their relatively comfortable agrarian lifestyle for vastly more expensive high-density urban housing?

What do you propose to do with the existing stock of one-off housing? Bulldoze it all and let nature take over?

ancapailldorcha

What exactly is the problem with one-off housing?

Jim2007

blanch152 wrote: »

We have one of the least urbanised populations in Europe leaving us with inefficiencies in broadband provision, housing, education, health and public transport. We have to manage a change to eliminate one-off housing and small settlements and encourage growth in towns and cities, otherwise we will never have decent public services.

I tend to agree with you on the need to encourage growth in other towns and cities as a means of solving the housing and congestion issues. But I don't agree that you need to target one off housing and small communities to do.

oppenheimer1

oscarBravo wrote: »

You can't travel twenty miles in Denmark without seeing a house either, but I don't hear anyone talking about how it's necessary to uproot everyone from Jutland and move them en masse to Copenhagen. We do? Why? Because you have decided that there is literally nothing more important than the single metric of efficient delivery of public services?

I'm not going to claim that our widespread one-off housing problem isn't a disaster that shouldn't have been allowed to happen, but you can't just turn around and tell a substantial percentage of the population that sorry, they're going to have to move to a city because it has been decreed that they must be punished for how poorly we planned things in the past.

By way of example, more than a thousand people work in Allergan in Westport. Assuming that Westport doesn't measure up to your lofty standards of a sustainable-sized city, what do you propose they do? Abandon their world-class pharmaceutical facility that they've built up over forty years? Insist that their staff leave their relatively comfortable agrarian lifestyle for vastly more expensive high-density urban housing?

What do you propose to do with the existing stock of one-off housing? Bulldoze it all and let nature take over?

You have to ask though why allergan are in Westport. The answer is simple - Government support has allowed them to turn what would be a naturally less profitable location into one that is. Take away Government support and you see industry moving to urban areas. So the question really is is it sustainable for government to keep providing these incentives to locate FDI in rural areas? Could we get better value if those incentives were spent elsewhere? What is the point or overall goal in keeping rural towns alive?

oppenheimer1

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

What exactly is the problem with one-off housing?

The allowance of one off housing is probably the single greatest policy mistake of this country. It's not hyperbole to state that you can trace almost all of the big issues effecting the state back to it.

Effectively one off housing forces the state to spread it's resources thin in order to achieve wide geographic coverage. This this spread mean that services are often low quality. In practice for example it means it can take an hour for an ambulance to reach a heart attack victim.