How does the situation in England, Scotland and Wales compare with that found in other countries? In particular, how do different governments address their own rural housing questions; what are the prevailing attitudes to rural resources and rural development; and are approaches found elsewhere rationalised by a broad developmental or environmental perspective of ‘the countryside’? Throughout this book, we have implied that collectively (but not withstanding local differences) England, Scotland and Wales provide a unique or at least an ‘extreme’ case, with planning restriction creating a hostile environment for development generally and residential development more specifically. This, we have suggested, has been a bitter pill for some communities to swallow, denying some households access to homes, inhibiting the future development of rural communities and economies, and leading government to press continually for innovative circumventions of its own restrictions.

But is the rural planning and housing context in our case studies really so unique? Other developed countries have experienced rapid urban growth during the last hundred or so years; land-take for human use has increased and the boundaries of human habitation have expanded. Other countries have, invariably, created their own planning systems, establishing policy frameworks on the back of political processes that reflect prevailing social attitudes and cultural preferences. It seems almost inevitable that other countries face broadly comparable challenges, and that their populations share a concern with the use of land resources and the impact of change on open, green space and on natural and semi-natural environments. Surely, all countries have a concern to conserve something of their past and set restrictions on the sprawl of cities or the general spread of development over their open, more sparsely populated areas. These assertions are all broadly true: all countries share these concerns to a greater or lesser degree, but the critical difference between nations and between policy and planning frameworks is in the point of balance between an acceptance of development and the need to conserve, unchanged, areas of relative openness beyond cities and other built-up spaces.

Understanding the relative experiences of different countries is a hugely complex task with basic questions of understanding and perspective at its heart: what do different cultures understand by the word countryside? How is it made? And how will it be maintained in the future, if it is to remain recognisable as countryside?