Welcome to Rural Transformation Project

This site contains reference documents from The Rural Transformation project funded by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2005. The site is maintained by the principal investigator, Lex Chalmers, Department of Geography, Tourism and Resource Planning. The site includes project documentation from Lex Chalmers, John Smithers (University of Guelph) and John Paterson (Societies and Cultures).

The Rural Transformation project organized a public meeting (39 kb) in November. The meeting opened with a Powerpoint presentation by John Smithers that provided a contextual statement about one of the key studies undertaken in The Rural Transformation; the Farmers' Market (761 kb) project. The title of the paper was Linking agriculture and rural communities through local food systems (23.1 mb). John's paper described Farmers' Markets in Ontario, and the way that research in this area had informed the work undertaken in the Rural Transformation project in 2005.

John Paterson's presentation was entitled What is a lifestyle block and is it a form of rural gentrification? (298 kb)John noted that the term "lifestyle block" was introduced in the 1980s to describe a rural smallholding attractive to people who wished to live a rural lifestyle but whose income derived from non-farming activities. The last 10 years have witnessed a "lifestyle block boom", but definitional problems made it hard to be definitive about the impact on rural communities. John suggested that the "lifestyle" sought by "lifestylers" is both rural and urban in character. A continuum of rural smallholders is developed in the paper. It ranges from "rural residents" at one end through to "fulltime farmers/horticulturalists" at the other. John concluded that a rural smallholder can belong to one or more of these groups during the course of their smallholding "career" and that the same smallholding can change its designation depending on what group is living on it. This means that there is no such thing as a "lifestyle block" as a fixed identity for a rural smallholding.

During November and December of 2005 The Rural Transformation project initiated a survey of Farmers' Markets in New Zealand. Field survey work was carried out by John Smithers, Lex Chalmers, Nova Caie and Cass Courtney. Field surveys were carried out in seven locations; Matakana, Tauranga, Hawkes Bay, Wanganui, Blenheim, Nelson and Cromwell. The survey team used three forms of questionnaire (69 kb) adapted from work carried out in Southern Ontario. The questionnaire captured information from market managers (7), market vendors (35) and market customers (100).

Several outputs from the project will be produced before the end of the first phase of the project at the end of 2005. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise have been involved in the promotion of Farmers' Markets in New Zealand, and the project has produced a briefing paper (39 kb) to inform NZTE about the progress of work in The Rural Transformation. Lex Chalmers and John Smithers have offered a paper at the IGU conference (25 kb) in Brisbane in July, 2006. A draft paper mapping Farmers' Markets as a topic of media commentary will be available shortly (Courtney), and a paper on the migration patterns in rural areas is also in preparation (Caie).