The Role of Rural Settlements as Service Centres

LUC completed major research for the Countryside Agency in early 2003 on the functionality of rural settlements.

We confirmed that prevailing policy assumptions about settlement hierarchies and the service and employment roles of market towns are too simplistic to pick up the considerable variation in rural areas, and how the settlements in them ‘work’. Rural residents display considerably more mobility than policy supposes, and in consequence neighbouring urban areas and major infrastructure routes exert significant structuring influences over many rural settlements. Without a proper understanding of this, rural settlement planning cannot be fully effective.

Market towns are not universal service centres as people use difference places for different services. Travel distance and the range of destinations are greatest of all for work.

For their own residents market towns can display strong sustainability characteristics. In some cases 35% of trips to work and services are made on foot. But village residents are generally highly mobile and car dependent. Attachment to ‘their’ market town is often much weaker than policy assumes.

On this basis we recommended far more careful and detailed planning for rural settlements, responding to the sorts of places they actually are, not that generalising policy might assume. Service use should not be assumed to be grouped, or coupled with employment. The notion of market town hinterlands needs careful examination. The impacts of transport policy fostering greater rural car use cannot be overlooked. We need to plan for rural realities to achieve better outcomes.

This work has set the tone for future rural settlement planning. It includes a guide to utilising the approaches used.