LECTURE 6

Rural Settlement Patterns

Rural Settlements
Elements of Rural Settlements
Classification of Rural Settlements

Lecturer: Atif Bilal Aslam

Department of City & Regional Planning
University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore
February 19, 2011
 Importance of Rural Settlements
 Rural settlements dominate much of the
world’s occupied land.
 The majority of the world’s population lives
in rural areas.
 Great bulk of the world’s land is used for
rural activities.
 Most settlement units in the world are
rural.
 Rural Settlements
 C. A. Doxiadis in 1968 in his book Ekistics
had estimated that, if rural settlements are
defined as those with populations of less
than 2,000, there were 14 million such
settlements in the world.
 This included single dispersed
settlement units as well as nucleated or
composite settlements and represented
99 % of the total number of settlements in
the world.
 Rural Settlements
 Rural settlements can be identified by
mainly four criteria:
 Demographic (population size and density),
 Political or administrative,
 Economic (proportion of the population engaged
in agriculture etc.), and
 Socio-cultural.
 The Elements of Rural Settlements
 Rural settlement is composed of a complex
set of structural elements.
 These range from the intimate level of
personal structures to the agglomeration of
these structures into nucleated units.
 The fundamental ingredient, however is the
individual building because the variation in
the spatial arrangements of buildings
results in different settlement elements.
 The Elements of Rural Settlements
 Clustered forms of rural settlements are:
 Hamlets (16 – 149 population),
 Villages (150 – 999 population), and
 Small towns (1,000 – 2,499 population)
 Whereas, dispersed forms are such as:
 individual farmstead.
 The nature of the basic elements of
settlements are determined by t



function,
forms,
heir:
 The Elements of Rural Settlements
 architectural styles,
 construction materials, and
 their spatial arrangements.
 Other related elements of rural settlements
are:
 agricultural fields,
 roads/ tracks
 Classification of Rural Settlement
 Four criteria are used for classification of
rural settlements which are:
 forms, or morphology of settlements,
 location, particularly in relation to the physical
environment,
 genesis, and
 function, in the context of relationship between
the settlement and its associated field system.
 Classification based on Form or
Morphology
 Demangeon proposed three types of villages
in France i.e.
 Linear Villages (Villages Longs) aligned along
roads, rivers or in narrow valleys,
 Squared Villages (Villages Masses), and
 Star-Shaped Settlements (Villages En Etoiles)
because of convergence of route ways.
 Main concerns while classifying were:
 Spatial arrangements of elements,
 Compactness,
 Shape, and
 Regularity of settlements.
 Classification based on Location
 Christaller and other Germans categorized
villages on the basis of their location also
as:
 Forest Villages (Waldhufendorfer),
 Marsh Villages (Marschhufendorder),
 Mound Villages (Tarpen) etc.
 Classification based on Genesis
 According to Demangeon, villages can also
be categorized historically in terms of:
 Primary,
 Secondary, or
 Recent developments
 Classification based on Function
 Demangeon also proposed three types of
French villages based on their functioning
as follows:
 those associated with open fields,
 associated with contiguous fields,
 separated from their fields.
 References
 Michael Bunce, “Rural Settlement in an
Urban World,” by Croom Helm, London; 1982