Rural recovery or rural spatial justice? Responding to multiple crises for the British countryside

This commentary proposes the adoption of a spatial justice approach to under-standing the multiple crises facing rural Britain and developing policy responses. It introduces spatial justice as a concept rooted in urban studies but recently ex-tended by an emerging literature on rural spatial justice, and outlines a multidi-mensional framework in which spatial justice may be concerned with the actual and perceived distribution of resources and opportunities and the power dynam-ics behind these patterns, with the right of individuals to access, live in and shape spaces, or with normative models for a fair future. The remainder of the paper explores the potential for applying this framework to challenges for the British countryside, briefly considering three resulting statements: first, that there are in-ternal disparities and injustices in the geographical impact of contemporary chal-lenges within rural Britain that are obscured by political and media discourses of a ‘rural crisis’; second, that the capacity of rural communities to respond to challenges is uneven and has been eroded by recent socioeconomic pressures and policy decisions; and third, that we need an open discussion about what spatial justice looks like for the countryside of the future.