Modelling Community Preferences
for a Dispersed Rural Settlement Pattern:
Insights from the western shores of Lough Neagh
Michael Murray, David Houston, Brendan Murtagh and Sarah McCann
School of Planning, Architecture & Civil Engineering
Queen’s University Belfast
&
Gareth Harper
Rural Community Network
Introduction
Rural planning in Northern Ireland is a deeply contested sphere of public policy that on
the one hand is linked to environmental and landscape protection, and on the other hand to
broad based rural development. Over the past 40 years Government planners have sought
to reconcile this tension through a combination of policy responses that vary between very
strict controls over new development in the countryside and a more liberal development
control regime. In March 2006 Government announced new draft proposals to deal with
perceived over-development in the Northern Ireland countryside that have from publication
imposed a moratorium on planning permission for most new dwellings in the countryside.
The draft policy framework has been a number of years in the making and has generated
considerable reaction as denoted by the unwillingness of the Northern Ireland Assembly to
endorse its content, over 8,000 submissions to the Department for Regional Development,
and challenges in the High Court by way of Judicial Review.
Many of the current difficulties relate to how planning reads and responds to the rural in
Northern Ireland. Traditionally, town and country planning is comfortable in dealing with
nucleated settlement patterns and its toolkit of land zoning and development limits can more
easily be applied to towns and villages. On the other hand there is a professional planning
indifference to the existence of dispersed rural communities across Northern Ireland. These
express themselves spatially as locality-oriented living, social activities and sense of
belonging. Put more simply, planning tends to read the countryside as landscape rather than
society. It is blind to the reality that the rural settlement pattern functions on the basis of close
interaction between its various components: small towns, villages and countryside.
To date, there has been limited research on seeking to understand the dynamics
shaping rural settlement in Northern Ireland with a view to informing spatial planning policy.
Pilot action research being carried out under the SPAN project is addressing this deficit and,
in line with the broader objectives of SPAN, is developing a new methodology for engaging
with the rural that can have transferable relevance. There are three SPAN study areas in
rural Northern Ireland comprising different geographies of accessibility to the Belfast
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metropolitan area: (i) east Down (an accessible rural area), (ii) the western loughshore area
of Lough Neagh (an intermediate rural area) and (iii) the rural localities west of Castlederg,
County Tyrone (a peripheral rural area). Over the past two years the SPAN project, working
closely with local community stakeholders, has assembled a portfolio of secondary data and
engaged in primary data collection in the form of household questionnaires. Ordnance
Survey maps and air photographs have been used to examine aspects of the changing
morphology of the rural settlement pattern, and the investigative process has been designed
to conclude with community feedback and participatory planning workshops.
To date the entire process has been completed within the western loughshore area of
Lough Neagh, with work in the two additional territories due to be completed before the end
of 2006. A complete report of the methodology, and its application more broadly, is intended
for publication in 2007 by Queen’s University Belfast and Rural Community Network. This
paper presents the emergent findings from one of three territories in rural Northern Ireland
that have provided opportunity for rural people to debate community preference and
environmental responsibility with a view to building guiding principles for informing planning
policies which can be more responsive to local circumstances.
The Loughshore Study Area
Current Housing in the Loughshore Area
The Loughshore study area extends across some 250 square kilometres and is
situated within two District Council areas: Cookstown District and Dungannon and South
Tyrone Borough. The area comprises four wards (The Loup, Ardboe, Killycolpy and Washing
Bay) whose total population in 1991 was 9,065 persons, rising to 9,212 persons in 2001.
Notwithstanding this upward trend, one of the wards (Washing Bay) recorded a population
decrease from 2,545 persons to 2,382 persons over the inter-census period. The rural
settlement pattern comprises a series of village-style nucleations surrounded by a mosaic of
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dwellings, related community infrastructure and business enterprise within the open
countryside. Some of this countryside housing is recent in origin and is situated on more
stable building land adjacent to roads and on the top of small hills. Beyond the study area,
but inextricably linked to it in terms of services and employment, are the regional towns of
Cookstown and Dungannon.
The area lies adjacent to the largest inland
water area within the United Kingdom and Ireland
and carries a number of significant environmental
designations related to its wetland and wildlife
resources. There are Ramsar and Natura 2000
designations, statutory Areas of Special Scientific
Interest and National Nature Reserves, while the
edge of the loughshore is regarded as an area of
scenic
quality.
Planning
policy,
through
its
development plan framework, has designated a
series of Countryside Policy Areas to protect the
landscape from the perceived threat of future single
dwellings construction.
Quite clearly, therefore, there is a complex range of spatial planning issues relating to
the development and protection of land within this area. The SPAN project provided scope
for local reflection about what has been happening within the area and the ways by which
planning policy should respond to locally based cultural, social, economic and environmental
concerns.
In order to facilitate this process of enquiry a local platform of stakeholders was
convened in late 2004 to help guide the action research. Participation was secured from
Cookstown District Council and Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council, the Lough
Neagh Partnership, Cookstown and Western Shores Area Network and Future Ways,
working closely with staff from Rural Community Network and Queen’s University Belfast.
This participation culminated in a well attended one day community workshop in Washing
Bay Community Centre on 6th May 2006 to identify potential development trajectories for the
western shores of Lough Neagh. The remainder of this paper discusses the events of that
day and concludes with some preliminary observations on the wider value of the process.
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The Participatory Planning Workshop
The workshop comprised four stages:
Stage 1:
Reflection: participants were asked to take a retrospective look at their area
using maps and air photographs and to identify the nature and scale of
physical change;
The development of Ballyronan, 1832-2003
Changes in the development of Ardboe from 1982 to 2003
Stage 2:
Reality Checking: the main
findings from 300 household
questionnaires
were
presented and participants
were asked to discuss the
extent
to
which
they
recognised their community
from the data;
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Stage 3:
Revisioning: a small-group housing allocation modelling task was
undertaken to distribute a 10 year scenario of 500 new houses across the
study area as well neighbouring towns and villages outside the study area.
Environmental protection priorities were also to be identified. Participants
at five tables were each given a grid square map of the territory and ‘Lego’
bricks to make these choices. They were asked to take on-board the
background information and, having completed the distribution activity, to
agree the principles that had informed the spatial outcome for their table;
Stage 4:
Synthesis: GIS software was then used to capture the distribution of
housing and environment priorities for each table. A final plenary
Powerpoint session explored comparisons between the existing housing
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distribution
and
the
alternative
table
distributions,
including
the
environmental protection priorities.
GIS modelling of the housing allocation for the Loughshore area.
The overall conclusions were that local villages, and to a lesser extent neighbouring
towns, should accommodate a large proportion of future housing demand, but that there
should still be some capacity to build single dwellings in the countryside. Emphasis was
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placed on securing better design and addressing the issue of house size. Participants
supported the need to protect the edge of the loughshore, together with river valleys and
woodlands. They stated a need to invest in sewerage infrastructure and to protect and
develop existing local services. Finally participants expressed their appreciation of an
imaginative way for them to connect with a development process that placed weight on local
knowledge and dialogue.
Conclusion
The work of the SPAN project in the Western shores of Lough Neagh has provided an
opportunity for local people to discuss what has shaped their communities and settlement
pattern over the last 100 years, has invited critical reflection on the contemporary drivers of
change, and has allowed for the identification of community-based values that can inform
dialogue within the planning policy formulation process. The process demonstrates that it is
possible to have a serious conversation around community preference and environmental
responsibility at a local level. The clear lesson is that if rural planning policy is to be
acceptable locally, then there must be respect based on ownership of its aspirations.
Moreover, once that type of constructive dialogue has commenced, it would seem vital that
every effort is made to widen engagement, roll it forward and broadcast the outputs.
Accordingly, the mantra of “survey – analysis – plan” can find new meaning when a range of
community development and planning tools are brought together to model dispersed rural
settlement patterns.
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