Who decides what’s remote – why the city isn’t always the centre
Kirsten Gow takes a critical look at how spatial classifications shape perceptions and policies around Scotland’s rural and island areas – and how new tools like the Scottish Islands Typology offer a way forward.
There is a joke doing the rounds in island circles that we will soon see a TV series in which a celebrity from a rural area makes a ‘spiritual journey’ to ‘the cities’.
There, said celebrity will marvel at the lives of the inhabitants, their innovative ways of navigating life in a complex urban system, and their culture of theatres and street art. This, of course, is a tongue-in-cheek prod at the seemingly endless churn of programmes where well-known faces ‘discover’ our rural and island places, claiming them as ‘hidden gems’ and destinations to ‘get away from it all’.
Yet the absurdity of this joke reflects frustrations at the fact that urban areas are often used as the baseline to indicate what is ‘normal’ in modern life, with rural and island areas billed as ‘other’, as regions which are ‘hard to reach’ or which require exceptions in national policy.
Where’s the centre anyway?
Such external perceptions are reflected in the way we officially classify our rural areas. Under the Scottish Government’s Urban Rural Classification large swathes of Scotland are deemed as ‘accessible’, ‘remote’ or even ‘very remote’, implying that somewhere else might be considered the centre. But who decides where the centre is?
While some will point to the Central Belt or cities such as Aberdeen and Inverness as obvious central points on the map, there is increasing resistance from others who highlight that, for many, our rural areas are the centre of daily life. If those living in Edinburgh consider the island of Fetlar to be remote, for example, we must accept that the opposite can be equally true: Edinburgh is remote to the people of Fetlar.
Disquiet about the use of the term ‘remote’ has not gone unnoticed. The Scottish Government recently stated that, with minor exceptions, it would no longer use ‘remote’ to refer to rural and island areas. This was seen as progress for those pushing for recognition that rural and island life can also be ‘the norm’. However, if spatial classifications are to be used as tools to help us understand the diversity of Scotland’s human geography, there is still work to be done in terms of how we classify our non-urban spaces.
Spatial classifications play an important role in policy development. Robust classifications can help us understand how policy might be implemented or experienced differently in different places. Poor classifications can mask impacts and opportunities and require us to rely on stereotypes. However, official classifications still routinely consider rural and urban as binary or as opposite points on a spectrum. By measuring ruralness against urban-ness they fail to reflect specific attributes of rurality, the diversity of rural spaces, or the realities of rural life.
While developments such as the mapping of Sparsely Populated Areas have added more nuance to the rural landscape there remains room for classifications which allow us to compare rural spaces to each other, rather than using urban as the yardstick, and which move beyond measurements of population and travel time to urban areas in order to more accurately capture the reality of life ‘on-the-ground’.
A new toolkit for understanding rural diversity
In response to this need, the Scottish Government Scottish Islands Typology was developed in 2024. The typology was intended to aid the understanding of the diversity Scotland’s islands, not least among policy makers who, under the Islands (Scotland) Act 2018, are duty-bound to consider differentiated impact of policy on the islands. While this specific typology focusses on Scotland’s islands, the underpinning methodology provides a model which may be adapted and applied to other rural and national contexts.
By using the dimensions of population, local amenities, and logistical connectivity, the typology creates a picture of the capacity each island has to operate on a daily basis and profiles their reliance on external actors. Data on these areas are used to compare islands to each other, creating non-hierarchical categories which reflect the differing needs and opportunities in different island types and avoiding the assumption that all islands are aiming to be the same ‘type’ of place.
This new typology and the methodology underpinning it is not the silver bullet. We still have work to do to improve our understanding of the diversity of rural places in Scotland if we are to create policy which avoids treating our island and rural places as exceptions to be managed and instead recognises them as normal contexts for modern Scottish life. What the Scottish Islands Typology does do is provide another resource in the toolkit to aid out understanding of islands and offers a model for how we might create alternative classifications which more accurately reflect the diversity our rural spaces, for the benefit of the whole nation.
Kirsten Gow, doctoral researcher at the James Hutton Institute and University of Aberdeen
This article originally appeared in ReSourcE spring/summer 2025.
The RSE’s blog series offers personal views on a variety of issues. These views are not those of the RSE and are intended to offer different perspectives on a range of current issues.
