THE USE OF ANALYTICAL METHODS OF MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS FOR IDENTIFYING RURAL PLACES WITH GROWTH PROSPECTS: (with particular reference to Kaliningrad Oblast)

One of the key objectives in the rural development program for the Nonchernozem Zone of the RSFSR is the consolidation of rural settlement in larger places. An example of the dispersed settlement pattern is Kaliningrad Oblast, which has a total of 1,527 rural places ranging from fewer than 5 to more than 2,000 inhabitants, with a total rural population of 195,529 (1970 census). The author shows that growth prospects are dependent on a combination of five factors—geographical setting and level of development; population; fixed assets in agriculture; nonfarm fixed assets; availability of services—and, using correlation analysis, identifies 283 places with prospects of future growth, ranging from 32 in the 51–100 size class to one of more than 2,000 population. The preservation of some small rural places is termed inevitable because many serve as outlying settlements for livestock subdivisions of collective and state farms, and dairy and beef cattle represents a characteristic type of farming in Kaliningrad Oblast.     

GEOGRAPHICAL STUDY OF THE FIXED ASSETS OF RURAL PLACES

The use of fixed assets data as a geographical research tool is illustrated with reference to a rural rayon [minor civil division] of Kaluga Oblast, southwest of Moscow. The value of fixed assets by places is correlated with population size, the position of places within the system of settlement of particular state farms or collective farms, and distance from towns. The share of productive assets (farm buildings and equipment) is found to reach a maximum in places with populations of 100 to 200. In larger places, the share of productive assets declines because of the higher value of housing and the presence of most service facilities. The share of productive assets also tends to be low in suburban places where a substantial portion of the population commutes to nearby towns.     

An Approach to the Mapping of Changes in the Settling Process

A variety of mapping techniques are used to establish regional differences in the settling process in Irkutsk Oblast and to measure the process in general terms. The most dynamic area, with urban and rural population growth, is the Middle Angara valley, where industrialization has been combined with the development of rural nonfarm places based on resource development and construction. Both urban and rural decline is typical of old mining districts, such as the coal district of Cheremkhovo and the gold area of Bodaybo. In most of Irkutsk Oblast, urban growth has been associated with rural decline. An important factor in the rural settling process has been a reduction of the number of places and an increase of the mean size of places, with remarkable stability in the 200–300 population class of rural places. Analysis of the settling process yields a map that distinguishes population growth, decline or stability in combination with a predominance of particular population size classes among rural places. A previous paper by the author on the mapping of the settling process appeared in Soviet Geography, December 1969.     

PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS OF DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL NONFARM PLACES IN THE USSR

According to the 1970 census, the Soviet Union had 37,800 rural nonfarm places with a combined population of 6.1 million, or 5.8 percent of the rural population. The census data are believed to understate the number and population of nonfarm places because they assigned rural places to the nonfarm category purely on the basis of their generic designation. Many multifunctional nonfarm places and rural places that serve as administrative centers and have little relation to agriculture were not categorized as nonfarm in the census. Although many of the smaller nonfarm places are likely to be eliminated over time, others will continue to perform clearly defined functions in industry, construction, transportation, and services. The situation is illustrated with particular reference to Novosibirsk Oblast.     

THE PROBLEM OF DEVELOPING RURAL SERVICES IN NOVGOROD OBLAST

Novgorod Oblast, in northwestern Russia, has been distinguished by a high rate of rural outmigration and depletion of agricultural labor resources. One key factor in slowing the flight from the land is an improvement in the quality and range of rural services. The impact of adequate services is shown by available data on the distribution of rural population by distance from service centers. The rate of decline of rural population is generally found to be lower in places near service centers than in more remote places. Since most of the rural places are too small to support service establishments, it is recommended that services be expanded in about 200 central places that show promise of future growth.     

Changes in the Distribution of Rural Settlement in Northern Kazakhstan from 1959 to 1963

After the first great population movement to northern Kazakhstan in the period 1953–1958 in conjunction with the start of the virgin-lands cultivation program, a period of reordering and restructuring of rural settlement within the region set in during 1959–1963. Three types of settlement areas are distinguished: (1) in areas of predominantly old settlement (preceding the virgin-lands program), the increase of rural population during this five-year period was below the average rate of natural increase for northern Kazakhstan as a whole; there was a net-outmigration from rural to urban areas and to other parts of northern Kazakhstan, (2) in areas of combined old and new settlement, population increase was more significant and there was a noticeable reduction of small populated places and increase in the number of larger places, (3) in areas of predominantly new settlement, where the density of population is lowest, the rate of population increase is highest, and settlement is mainly in widely spaced larger places.     

Some Demographic Problems in Belorussia's Urban Population Change in 1959–1971

The relative significance of the natural and migrational components of population change are analyzed for urban places of the Belorussian SSR using a graphic analytical technique proposed by J. W. Webb (Economic Geography, 1963, No. 2). A total of 59 out of 204 urban places in Belorussia are found to have a net out-migration, most of them being places of 5,000 population or less, with few employment opportunities. In 26 places, natural increase is inadequate to compensate for the outflow, resulting in a population loss, and three other places combine an excess of deaths over births with net out-migration. All 28 places of 20,000 population or more combine natural increase with net in-migration, with the natural component predominating in six places and the migrational in 22. In Minsk, the republic capital, and the five other oblast centers, the migrational component represents 70 to 75 percent of the population increment.     

Settlement in Lumber-Industry Regions of the USSR

About 80% of the population in Soviet logging and rafting areas is non-urban and lives in 6000 lumbering settlements assigned to the rural category. The majority of these places are small, crude settlements without adequate services that exist for periods of about 20 years until the surrounding timber stands have been depleted. It is suggested that area planning and diversification of forest utilization can improve the settling pattern, working and living conditions and the provision of services through the concentration of population in larger, modern central settlements supplemented by mobile dormitory camps in timber-felling areas situated beyond an optimal commuting distance. Existing and proposed settling patterns are illustrated with particular reference to a logging area in the western Urals.     

URBAN‐TO‐RURAL POPULATION GROWTH LINKAGES: EVIDENCE FROM OECD TL3 REGIONS*

The objective of this paper is to understand, from an international comparative perspective, how population growth in rural regions is affected by the relationship with their nearby urban centers. By means of a cross‐sectional analysis on OECD small regions (Territorial Level 3), the paper distinguishes spread effects—positive spillovers arising from urban growth—from the net effect of distance to nonrural places. The results show that spread effects outweigh backwash effects, so that rural regions benefit from growth in urban places. A rural region's distance from urban and intermediate regions has a negative effect on its population growth rate. Nevertheless, both the strength of this effect and the growth spillovers decline with distance, and this occurs relatively faster in Europe. The results further suggest that proximity to large urban areas has a higher positive influence than proximity to intermediate areas, but only outside Europe.     

Farmwomen's emotional geographies of care: a view from rural Ontario

This article contributes to geographies of rural women's health by investigating farmwomen's perceptions of their caring roles and responsibilities, which are crucial to the wellbeing and sustainability of rural people and their communities. Featuring a thematic analysis of interviews and a focus group with farmwomen from Ontario, Canada, the research examines farms and farming as unique places and spaces of care. Informed by the literature on emotional geographies, the article examines how care is situated and performed through farmwomen's negotiation of multiple, overlapping identities and how these are embodied and affective in emotional work. The findings not only confirm the paramount role of women in rural care, they demonstrate the interdependence of family, community and work as central to the challenges of rural women's health. The article argues that the link between health and productivity on the farm is crucial to understanding farmwomen's caring, and highlights the paradox that their emotional work is as much about opportunities for power and resistance as it is about obligation and subordination.     

PRINCIPAL TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN PLACES IN THE KARA KUM

The development of mineral resources in the Kara Kum desert and irrigation projects along the Kara Kum Canal have fostered the growth of urban population in Turkmenia at a more rapid rate than rural population. In general, established cities in the republic tend to grow more slowly than some of the new workers' settlements established on the basis of gas extraction and other mineral developments. The urban places of Turkmenia are classified by size classes, functional types and growth rates.     

A Method For Calculating The Requirements For Mobile Public Services Under Various Geographical Conditions

A formula is developed for computing the requirements for mobile service units, such as traveling stores, repair shops, and clubs, in various types of rural settlement patterns. The formula takes into account the character of the service rendered, the number and density of the places to be served, the state of the roads, climatic conditions, and other factors. Mobile-unit requirements are found to increase with a decline in the average population, in places to be served, and in density of places. The requirements are highest in remote range-grazing lands in the southern Soviet Union.     

The Index of Economic Disparity: Measuring trends in economic disparity across Canadian Census Subdivisions and rural and urban communities

Territorial inequalities have long been a subject of study and concern in Canada. In the face of large structural changes such as industrial shifts and the decarbonization of our economies, there is an urgency to understand such inequalities and design effective policy interventions for those places facing persistent economic decline. This paper shares a novel composite index that measures economic disparity across Canadian Census Subdivisions (CSDs) using Census data from 2001 through 2016 and the 2011 National Household Survey. Named the “Index of Economic Disparity,” it is comprised of an equally weighted average of four sub-indices that assign percentile rankings for all CSDs based on whether they experience persistent and substantial decline in key economic areas: population, labour force outcomes, working-age share of population, and industrial diversity. The variation of outcomes across geographies—urban and rural—highlights the importance of place-based policies.     

Indicators Characterizing Systems of Rural Settlement

Several measures of variation are applied to an analysis of the local systems of rural settlement of the Estonian SSR. The measures used in the analysis are the range between the largest and smallest populations of places within a system; the mean population; the mean distance between places; the relative variability, defined as the ratio of the mean deviation to the mean; and the coefficient of variation, defined as the ratio of the standard deviation to the mean. These indicators are used to break down the systems of rural settlement in Estonia into five basic types and 12 subtypes.     

Socialist architecture as today’s dissonant heritage: administrative buildings of collective farms in Estonia

The heritage studies of the socialist built legacy of the former Soviet Socialist Republics have mainly concentrated on the buildings and monuments representing the political ideology of the socialist era due to their evidently controversial character, while the more mundane and ordinary legacy has seldom been the focus. The administrative buildings of collective farms represent a particular socialist architecture of the 1960s–1980s in Estonian rural areas and small towns. These prosaic buildings, which used to play important role in the Soviet-time rural life, have become a dissonant heritage today, although their controversial nature lies in the complicated contemporary environment they fell into after the collapse of the socialist regime, rather than in the fact that they were constructed for ideological purposes. This paper examines the dissonant processes and the present contexts that affect the re-use and preservation of the administrative buildings of collective farms, as well as the acceptance of them as a meaningful part of Estonian history that should not be ignored or forgotten.     

The Rural Labour Market in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT Wage labour in Zimbabwe is most often associated with large commercial farms. The use of wage labour within ‘peasant’ agriculture has been rarely investigated and remains largely undocumented. In 1986/7, the author conducted research in Zimbabwe which was explicitly concerned with issues of rural economic differentiation and the wage labour supplied and hired by ‘peasant’ households. The data suggest that a dynamic labour market exists in rural Zimbabwe. Further, it was found that in addition to the many part-time rural wage workers, there is a group of people who depend upon wages for all or the bulk of their income. These people, who have been largely ignored by policymakers, cannot be defined as farmers at all.     

Conditional Belonging: Farm Workers and the Cultural Politics of Recognition in Zimbabwe

This article examines Zimbabwean land politics and the study of rural interventions, including agrarian reform, more broadly, using the analytical framework of territorialized ‘modes of belonging’ and their ‘cultural politics of recognition’. Modes of belonging are the routinized discourses, social practices and institutional arrangements through which people make claims for resources and rights, the ways through which they become ‘incorporated’ in particular places. In these spatialized forms of power and authority, particular cultural politics of recognition operate; these are the cultural styles of interaction that become privileged as proper forms of decorum and morality informing dependencies and interdependencies. The author traces a hegemonic mode of belonging identified as ‘domestic government’, put in place on European farms in Zimbabwe's colonial period, and shows how it was shaped by particular political and economic conjunctures in the first twenty years of Independence after 1980. Domestic government provided a conditional belonging for farm workers in terms of claims to limited resources on commercial farms while positioning them in a way that made them marginal citizens in the nation at large. This is the context for the behaviour of land‐giving authorities which have actively discriminated against farm workers during the politicized and violent land redistribution processes that began in 2000. Most former farm workers are now seeking other forms of dependencies, typically more precarious and generating fewer resources and services than they had accessed on commercial farms, with their own particular cultural politics of recognition, often tied to demonstrating support to the ruling political party.     

Recent differential population growth in Sumatra: 1961–71

Sumatran population growth and influences

Sumatra, Indonesia's large western Outer Island region, had general, urban and rural rates of population growth during 1961–71 as much as 50% or higher than those for the remainder of Indonesia. The rapid population growth in Sumatra, continuing into the later 1970s, has been associated with a variety of influences. Among these were:

1. New or improved economic activities encompassing large‐scale extraction of crude oil, natural gas, tin, bauxite, and forest products; some coal mining; continued fisheries, commercial small‐holder and estate types of agriculture; and new or expanded manufacturing.

2. Large‐scale transmigration, in‐migration from elsewhere in Indonesia other than Java and Bali, and intramigration within Sumatra have led to increased populations and densities in at least five major areas. The southern area of Lampung Province and to a lesser extent eastern South Sumatra have had notable growth from transmigration flows; several coastal plains areas in Aceh, North Sumatra, West Sumatra, Riau, and Jambi provinces, from upland to lowland or other in‐ and intra‐migration flows.

3. Traditional ethnic, religious, and regional linkages within a predominantly rural village system have remained strong. These cultural conditions provide a background for understanding the continuing overwhelming rural character of Sumatra's people.

4. Although urban growth was more rapid than rural growth in Sumatra during 1961–71, most of this urban growth was concentrated in and around a few relatively large urban centres; the remainder of the urban growth was in the many other urban places, most having the aspect of overgrown villages.

5. Differential growth rates for total, rural, and urban populations were associated with differing perceptions at local, provincial, Sumatra‐wide, or national levels — of the areas having the best opportunities for improved living. With a few exceptions, Sumatra's upland areas have lost large numbers of people to near‐by and only recently highly accessible lowlands. Small, but crucially important, numbers of ambitious and more highly educated people have left Sumatra for Jakarta or other areas of actual and perceived greater economic opportunity.

6. In 1971 the sharply contrasting and increasing population densities of Sumatra emphasized several areas of greater economic development on the one hand; areas of continued limited accessibility or economic activities oil the other. If trends of the 1961–71 decade persist, the 1981 Indonesian census results for Sumatra should indicate increased populations and densities, particularly in the southern Lampung area of agricultural inflow and in the lowlands around Sumatra's large cities which also should continue to have sizeable population increases.

     

The Impact of the Territorial and Sectoral Structure of Production on the Renewal of Population and Labor Resources

Significant indirect relationships are found to exist between the territorial-sectoral structure of the economy, the demographic structure and employment and the process of population renewal. A key element in these correlations is the male-female ratio in employment, which tends to vary with regional wage levels, the availability of services, and the age-sex structure of the population. In rural areas, the relationship between the structure of the economy and population reproduction is associated with three factors: (1) the settlement pattern, (2) the type of farming, and (3) the territorial organization of farming (for example, the functional type of rural places).     

COMMUTING LINKS AT LOWER LEVELS OF RURAL SETTLEMENT

The study of commuting links in rural areas of the Non-Chernozem Zone offers a useful approach to the redesign of settlement patterns. Commuting to work is analyzed in 80 primary settlement systems (farm systems) in five rayons of Vologda Oblast. Most of the commuting streams are found to occur toward the central farm settlements within systems and also between adjacent systems, with rural nonfarm places (both industry-based and transport based) offering the principal opportunities for employment. Commuting is analyzed in terms of two indices: a labor-balance index (relating resident population and employment opportunities) and a commuting intensity index (relating the number of commuters to resident population).