Keele Research Repository

The rural-urban fringe is a complex space, yet one increasingly being viewed as a unique, positive opportunity space (Scott et al., 2013). It is characterised by a flexible, contextspecific spatial form and is subject to governance pressures by both local and national public authorities (Gallent, 2006). Crucially, the rural-urban fringe is also often conceptualised as a ‘space of flows’ (Ros-Tonen et al., 2015) – characterised by the movement of people, goods, money and services – and thus has an inherently unique mobility potential to it. Yet, the ways in which this ‘mobility potential’ itself is governed remains a gap within the literature, which instead only focuses on the ‘rural’ vs. ‘urban’ dichotomy in such spaces and thus the flows therein (Scott, 2019a). This thesis argues that a more pluralistic ‘territorial’ and ‘relational’ perspective on how mobility is governed in the rural-urban fringe is conducive to transgressing this limited dichotomy. It aims to set the foundation for this by focusing on Warrington in the UK. Using a metagovernance approach, it explores how the state ‘metagoverns’ specific organisations and institutions across a variety of hierarchal scales and assesses how this creates inherent challenges and opportunities of governing mobility in the rural-urban fringe. In doing so, the thesis develops a foundation upon which to consider how the rural-urban fringe is not necessarily
just a product of the rural and urban, but holds particular, intrinsic and mobility-centred
properties, functions, challenges and opportunities - of which require an explicit
governance focus.