Bringing Rurality Back to Planning Culture

The vast majority of the world’s land area is rural, yet rurality is routinely marginalized in planning. Urban bias is tacit and under-problematized, so the challenges facing rural areas and the importance of those challenges for society as a whole are not much reflected in planning scholarship or practice. We interrogate the urban bias and its implications for rural planning through the lens of planning cultures, using a content analysis of prominent and recent texts to shed light on the nature and implications of urban bias. Finally, we suggest ways to “bring the rural back” into twenty-first-century planning.