The spaces where countryside meets town are often amongst society's most valued and pressured places which together form the rural–urban fringe (RUF). A ‘messy’ yet opportunistic space in policy and decision making processes, the RUF remains confused and ‘disintegrated’ lacking sufficient understanding and explicit attention for sustainable management as places in their own right. This paper exposes the scope, nature and reasons leading towards policy disintegration within the RUF with critical attention on the separate lenses of the Ecosystem Approach and Spatial Planning frameworks reflecting a marked natural and built environment divide. Using research funded by the Rural Economy and Land Use programme, three ‘bridging’ concepts were identified within which improved integration is explored: Time, Connections and Values. Using team member thoughtpieces and workshops, together with visioning exercises in two rural–urban fringes, a series of narratives are presented within which the RUF opportunity is re-discovered set within a hybridised theory of spatial and environmental planning. In so doing the paper challenges established economic and planning models of urban development and expansion with more holistic ideas and approaches. One size-fits-all solutions such as greenbelts, regionalism or localism are rejected within an approach that champions multi-scalar and sectoral perspectives set within a governance framework that achieves social and economic well-being through maintaining and enhancing ecosystem functions and services. We conclude by arguing that policy strands within environment and planning must be better connected allowing the RUF to be developed as an opportunity space for testing and experimentation

Assessing public perception of landscape continues to be both an academic and a policy challenge. The involvement of the public in landscape matters has been and continues to be both controversial and problematic. Constraints of time and resources, together with a reluctance to delegate responsibility to the public, have generally limited the scope and influence of much participation to conventional reactive strategies. The potential of a new methodology to identify public perception of landscape in Denbighshire is assessed. Forming part of a wider initiative known as LANDMAP, a technique adopted by the Countryside Council for Wales for identifying distinctive landscape areas, household questionnaires and focus groups have been used to evaluate public perception in response to carefully selected photographic media. The results afford important insights into public perception and allow particular landscape types to be evaluated in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Analysis of the results for two selected areas shows that the public has strong attachments to managed rural landscapes in general, and wishes to see more integrative and participative strategies for landscape protection and management. Such attitudes challenge planners and policy makers to rethink their approaches towards conventional landscape management strategies and planning.

This paper develops a multi-sensory and multiple-perspective framework for assessing public perception of landscapes. Proceeding from a viewpoint that landscape research and policy have been pre-occupied with expert-led and visual approaches, our method elevates the experiences and range of responses of different publics to centre stage. Set within phenomenological and experiential epistemologies, our piloted technique captured the real time responses of walkers, mountain bikers, planners, councillors and land managers on pre-planned trips in Aberdeenshire. Subsequent analysis of audio recordings and field notes elicited detailed data revealing a complex appreciation of landscape set within dynamic and multiple socio-economic identities and sensory experiences of individuals. The paper concludes with a plea for policy-makers and researchers to recognise the importance of different publics who may experience and respond to landscape in different ways and the significance of incorporating both visual and non-visual components into emergent landscape assessment and policy approaches.