What is rural settlement and what is urban settlement?

This is a good example of how social and economic changes can “blur” what appears to be a simple question revealing the complex changing geography of modern settlements.

Perception of Place

What feeling/emotions/thoughts do different places create in your minds?

What is your perception of a rural area?

What is your perception of an urban area?

Positive Negative

Rural

Urban

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds?

Ebenezer Howard’s

Three Magnets 1898

Contrasting rural and urban life. The possibility that the best of urban and rural could be incorporated in a “Garden City”

eg Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn Garden City (1920). He actually planted a tree in every garden in WGC.

Ebenezer Howard ‘Garden Cities of Tomorrow’ in 1902.Influenced the later strategy of building new towns in the UK, US, Canada, Argentina, Israel and Germany.As with most instances of social engineering, the garden city movement didn’t quite achieve what it set out to do. Its laudable motives and egalitarian vision contrast with the often depressing artificiality of ‘garden cities’, and the fact that they merely function as dormitories to the larger cities they so often adjoin.

How can we define a rural area and an urban area?

Try to develop a robust definition to classify rural and urban for each of these terms.

Site and Situation – Where is it?

Population size – How many people live in the settlement?

Population density – Are people clustered together or spread out?

Land use – What is the land used for?

Function – What is the purpose of the settlement? What can people do there?

Employment – What jobs do people have?

Social structure – Who lives there?

Other ideas??????????????

Urban thresholds in different countries (Iceland 200, Canada 500, India 5000, Japan 50,000)

Suburbanised commuter villages

Tourism replacing agriculture

Cities as centres of production or centres of consumption?

Urban villages

Rural urban continuum Landmark page 228

Urban built environment

Urban-rural fringe

Farming and commuter zone

Deep countryside

Remote rural environments

Urban Rural