Boundaries and bordering: the city and national parks

This article explores the interrelationship between urban and rural spaces using the New Forest as a case study. The New Forest exists cheek by jowl with surrounding major cities and inevitably each is influenced by the other. We argue that that national parks and protected landscapes are becoming overwhelmed and overburdened because of their proximity to large cities. They have become a space of service, called upon to play multiple policy and environmental roles at local and national levels as well as providing a significant part of the population with access to green space. We explore how the New Forest has become an environmental dumping ground, carrying the weight of a profusion of ambitions and demands that are, inevitably, in tension. In holding all these ambitions, the New Forest has become a site of permission allowing urban areas that surround it to develop and grow in ways that lack concern with sustainability, recreation or social health. We argue that this can be addressed by utilising a theoretical contrast between the ideas of ‘boundaries’ and ‘bordering’ – which, we argue, demands a regulatory approach that is relational, recognising the mutually constitutive relationship between the rural and the urban.