The countryside in and around our towns and cities, the urban fringe, is the area of countryside closest to where most people live.  It is a place where rural and urban influences meet and mingle to create a distinctive and dynamic landscape.  This ...
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The Countryside in and around towns: A vision for connecting town and country in the pursuit of sustainable development More details
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Countryside Around Towns

The countryside in and around our towns and cities, the urban fringe, is the area of countryside closest to where most people live. It is a place where rural and urban influences meet and mingle to create a distinctive and dynamic landscape. This could be managed and used to improve the everyday lives and prospects of millions of people, and yet is too often neglected by policy makers, planners and others.

The Countryside Agency had a long record of involvement in these fringe areas – including establishing the Community Forest programme in the late 80s, and more recently the Doorstep Greens programme and REACT.

The Countryside Agency used that experience to develop - in conjunction with Groundwork UK, and with the support of English Nature, the Rural Development Service and the Forestry Commission - an holistic vision for the countryside in and around towns, capturing its full environmental, social and economic potential and promoting opportunities to deliver multifunctional landscapes.

Many regional teams linked implementation of the vision to local and regional ‘Green Infrastructure’ planning – an approach that establishes strategic networks of green spaces and other environmental assets that can work together to support sustainability and quality of life within and around urban areas and across whole regions.  Green infrastructure has subsequently emerged as an important theme for all of Natural England's work within and around towns and cities.

A national monitoring and evaluation framework supported the vision implementation programme and produced a formative monitoring and evaluation report. This has enabled us to capture and share all the lessons to be learnt from this work.

Natural England inherited a CIAT implementation programme, plus closely related work in the Growth Areas and a whole raft of work linked to the wider greenspace agenda. The Government also announced 26 new Growth Points in 2006, which overlapped with a number of CIAT vision implementation ‘exemplars’. Because of this an internal policy review in early 2006 acknowledged that Natural England’s work on Green Infrastructure (whether in the Growth Areas, new Growth Points or wider in the regions), should henceforth be closely aligned under the umbrella of Natural England’s Sustainable Communities Project. 

Natural England will continue to draw on what it has learnt from the CIAT programme in developing its policies for urban and urban fringe areas and particularly the delivery of green infrastructure. The CIAT programme has also produced a collection of research and other materials that can inform and support ongoing and future work by Natural England and others in this area.

Research:The CIAT programme commissioned wide-ranging research to provide a contemporary insight into the state and potential of the countryside in and around towns.

Guidance and good practice:The CIAT programme sought to assemble good practice guidance designed to inspire, inform and support those who want to unlock the potential of the countryside in and around their town or city. 

Image library:The CIAT programme commissioned a range of images to support the vision - re-imagining the urban fringe as a multifunctional landscape.