Cities and Settlement 1

• Rural settlement: dispersed or clustered (nucleated)
• Dispersed 🡪 seen in areas that are largely agricultural in economic nature; individuals own land
• Canadian and American pioneer experience; land was organized into units and were sold or given away to European migrants coming to canada
• Dispersed rural settlement patterns -🡪 field patterns; geometric (Canadian farms) vs irregular (European; non geometric)
• Clustered settlement 🡪 nucleated; clustering together of residential units
• Very first forms of cities were nucleated settlements that have grown over the years
• Planned development vs organic development: strategic locations vs  natural points where people cluster e.g. living near your workplace

Issues:

• Depopulation 🡪 people leaving rural areas and moving to urban areas; linked to industrialization because less people needed on farms due to it
• Farm depopulation 🡪 people leaving farms because of technology
• Many small towns become ‘ghost towns’
• Repopulation or counter-urbanization: contradictory evidence about the existence of urban to rural migration (rural repopulation); cities might get smaller as people move back to smaller areas
• E.g. tele-commuting; you can live in rural areas and work from home instead of living near your workplace
• E.g. decentralized industrial activities and ageing population and retirement communities
• Retirees, wealthy, ‘hobby farmers’ etc;
• Rural-urban fringe: transition zone between urban (suburban) and rural areas; Not really rural, just on the end of the city
• Urban sprawl: the largely unpanned (and low density) expansion of urban land uses into surrounding rural areas
• Government legislation intended to slow urban sprawl: ‘green belts’ which are areas pf ‘no-go’ zone of urban or suburban development; planned area of open, rural (and sometimes natural) land surrounding an urban area; where urban expansion is restricted
• Differences between way of life in rural and urban areas 🡪 gemeinschaft: relationships between people are more communal and personal in rural areas
• Gesellschaft: depersonalized and anonymous in urban areas
• Size, density and heterogeneity in