Rural Settlement and Land Use

Michael Chisholm, Marcus Felson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351492393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

To a remarkable extent, students of location problems have fastened attention upon industrial and urban matters rather than upon agricultural and rural affairs. The preponderance of the former studies undoubtedly reflects the relative importance of the manufacturing and commercial sectors of the technically more advanced countries where most students of location matters have in the past resided. Perhaps it has also seemed that the locational problems posed by city life and factory employment are more amenable than those of the countryside to rigorous analysis.

1
Introduction

Of recent years there has been a growing awareness of, and interest in, the problems presented by distances between places on the surface of the earth. Much of this interest has been stimulated by the issues involved in planning a reasonable distribution of employment opportunities in the different parts of this and other countries; more recently, there has been a spectacular expansion of interest in economic growth and the problem of getting the ‘under-developed’ countries to the point of ‘take-off’ into sustained growth. Such matters involve the relative advantages of locations, both in connection with their natural resources and their position relative to other parts of the world. Sociologists and town planners and others have become acutely aware of the social difficulties which arise from a long daily journey to work due to the separation of dwellings and workplaces. One of the objectives in planning is to reduce the amount of circulation necessary for the conduct of the normal business of living. Geographers have for long claimed an interest in the differences which exist between places and there is an increasing awareness among them that many observable variations of phenomena in space are attributable to relative locations rather than to the intrinsic qualities of the individual places. In many other fields of study and endeavour, such as economics and the organization of retail trade, the problems associated with distance and circulation are receiving increased attention; witness of this is given by studies of the influence of distance upon international trading patterns and the care taken in locating the large peri-urban shopping centres which are being built in the United States.

Distance, then, is the central theme around which this book is written, in an attempt to provide a systematic account of certain features of rural settlement and land use. By developing a systematic study, it has been possible to draw upon a wide range of seemingly unrelated materials to show how these have certain elements in common. In doing this, no claim is made to have elaborated a general theory of universal validity, because the problem of distance is only one among many factors affecting location patterns. However, it is a factor which has its influence everywhere in the world in all location matters, even if at times it is of negligible importance. To obtain a complete understanding of a location problem, the nature of the effects of distance must be appreciated. Though in some cases it may not be very important, it usually has a considerable influence and is often the dominating consideration.

The genesis of this book throws light on another aim which I had in mind when writing. For several years I was responsible for teaching Land Economics for a Diploma in Agricultural Economics¹ and this presented an interesting problem in the choice of material and approach. Many of the persons taking the Diploma came from abroad, the majority subsequently becoming engaged in various forms of administrative or advisory or research work in connection with agriculture under very diverse conditions. It was clear that an exposition of the economics of land use had to be couched in terms of principles with a universal application, backed with suitable examples, such that the students would subsequently be able to apply the concepts to their own particular problems. There was also the necessity of presenting the ideas in a manner which would enable their relevance to day-to-day problems to be seen readily; abstract theory would be a waste of time. I was further led to the conclusion that the central problems in the economics of land use can be stated quite simply as problems of location, of the competition between alternative users and uses to command each particular site.

This train of thought led to the issue of how best, in a limited amount of time, to introduce ideas on location to those unfamiliar with such studies. I chose to use a common situation which has an evident bearing on agricultural problems over the greater part of the globe: a particular farmer operates a holding which instead of being included within a single boundary is split up into several fragments which lie at various distances from the dwelling. On the one hand, there are all the problems arising from the general loss of time, cost of fencing and inability to use machinery properly. On the other, there is the effect of distance upon the way in which each plot of land is used. It is easy to show why it is rational to arrange the type of farming on each plot so that on the furthest ones the amount of labour which has to be bestowed is the least, with a consequential ordering of the crops and methods of cultivation in relation to distance from the farmstead.

The next step was to show that exactly the same sort of thing is manifest at larger scales, influencing the regional patterns of agriculture and indeed world distributions of crops and farming systems.

Hence, my concern has been to examine what really does happen in practice and to couch the exposition in terms designed to have relevance to practical matters. Though a certain amount of theoretical analysis is necessary to provide a framework for the body of the text, theory has been accorded the minimum of attention consonant with the general aim. Thus, no comprehensive account of the literature on location is offered, though it is hoped that what is given provides a coherent and intelligible outline. Those seeking a survey of the literature and of the development of location ideas are referred to such works as Ponsard’s Histoire des Théories Économiques Spatiales and Economie et Espace² and Isard’s text Location and Space Economy.³ On the other hand, there is nothing inherently complicated in the ideas expounded in this book and the techniques required to pursue their study are neither elaborate nor highly subtle. As has been already hinted, the exposition has relevance for persons engaged in a wide range of occupations; it is hoped that it will interest not only geographers and agricultural economists but also economic historians and engineers, sociologists and planners, and others besides.

It has been assumed that the reader is not a trained economist and is therefore unfamiliar with the technical terminology of this subject. Accordingly, every attempt has been made to minimize the use of technical terms, and where their use cannot be avoided, to give some definition of the expressions employed. It is hoped that these measures have been radical enough to achieve their purpose, of rendering the following pages readily intelligible to the non-economist. The reader familiar with the economist’s vocabulary may feel impatient with occasionally cumbersome phrases, or ones which are not strictly precise; may he forbear, curbing his impatience in the interests of other readers, for I do not think that any great solecisms have been committed.

Types of location studies

Two major threads may be discerned regarding the methods and purposes of location studies, the one most unlike the other. Of these, the first to notice are studies in which one individual firm is the centre of study, or perhaps several such, and the object is to examine all the factors which have been important in determining the location thereof. This may be done by interviewing the managers, asking them for their opinions on what influenced the decision to locate at A rather than B or C, and by examining the cost structure to determine by how much profits at A are greater than they would be at B or C, and for what reasons. The result of such studies will be the listing of all the significant factors, with an attempt to assess the relative importance of each. This assessment must normally be a qualitative judgment, as very unlike factors are being compared, to which it may not be possible to put a money measure. The conclusions are specific to the particular firm and do not have any general value, unless: 1. the particular firm studied is representative of many similar ones, or 2. enough results can be collected for generalization to be possible. Such studies are invaluable as a means of testing hypotheses and building up a body of factual knowledge, but of their nature they do not provide a framework of concepts and methods of analysis applicable in a wide range of situations. Such concepts can be obtained only from a priori reasoning on evidence collected in this and other ways.⁴

Radically different is the school of thought elaborated by Lösch⁵ and Isard,⁶ in an attempt to develop a general theory embracing all the important factors and adequate to explain all the main features of spatial distributions. This approach tends to concentrate attention upon what patterns ought to be rather than what they are. Lösch in particular develops his theories regarding the nature of the ideal distributions and then seeks evidence that in fact reality does conform. To a large extent, it is the urban and industrial sectors of the economy which have been subjected to this form of scrutiny though recently agriculture has been served in the same manner by Rullière and Klatzman.⁷ They work out a number of formulae whereby it is intended to be possible to predict the rational type of agriculture which ought to be pursued in all areas if the characteristics of soil, climate, transport costs etc., are known. This type of work seeks to investigate the interrelationships between all the elements of the economy in a quantitative manner; from this study, a model can be constructed which will serve to predict what ought to happen in any given circumstances. Either the best location for a firm can be obtained, or the best use for a particular piece of land; all the adjustments which are required in the rest of the economy can be predicted, and the over-all spatial patterns can be derived. General theories of this kind, or theories of general equilibrium, suffer from several defects, of which three may be noted:

1. Necessarily, they are formulated in mathematical and algebraic terms, so that they require considerable expertise in these fields. Hence, they are accessible only to experts.

2. More important, because affecting the fundamental basis, is the necessity for a high level of abstraction from reality. In order to express the data in mathematical terms, assumptions have to be made which are often dubious.

3. Closely related to 2. above, factors to which suitable quantities cannot be assigned are perforce ignored. Consequently, it is not possible to take account of all phenomena, and ‘exceptions’ must in fact occur. The result is that any theory of general equilibrium must necessarily be unreal to some extent, pertaining to an assumed world which to a greater or lesser degree diverges from the actual one. Such a theory is not really designed to give guidance in particular cases, because the analytical process is so very complex; rather, it is designed to study the general pattern.

For their particular purposes, the above two approaches are useful and necessary, but they leave between them a large middle ground for which neither is suitable. This book is at once more ambitious and more modest; more ambitious than cataloguing factors, more modest than attempting a general equilibrium analysis which seeks to explain all phenomena. It is, in fact, a reversion to the method from which Lösch and Isard built up their systems, the method of partial equilibrium. With this method of analysis, certain data are assumed to be given, being fixed points of reference. Other phenomena are then allowed to vary, the consequential location patterns being observed for each particular set of circumstances. By this form of reasoning, only incomplete answers are vouchsafed because no attempt is made to account for the data which are assumed to be given. For example, we may assume that the location of London is fixed and hence the location of a very big consuming centre. We may then proceed to examine the influence which this city has upon the disposition of agricultural production, having regard to the cost of transport and the physical conditions of the land and climate. This would be an analysis in partial equilibrium, with physical conditions and the location of London as fixed and known quantities. An altogether more complicated problem would be involved if it were allowed that the disposition of conditions for plant growth in this country and elsewhere, influencing the cost of feeding our capital, could, even to an infinitesimal degree, alter the location of London. We would then be involved in calculations of the mutual repercussions of a series of small adjustments in location, such that any slight shift in one necessarily influences the other which in turn reacts upon the first, and so on. One must either be content with an answer derived from successive approximations, which can never be completely accurate, or devise a series of equations suitable for simultaneous solution. The more variables which are introduced, the more complex becomes the solution of such a problem.

Religious belief provides a parallel sort of issue. Believers are content to accept the existence of a god or deity as a ‘fact’ and to base their attitudes and actions upon this foundation. They have a point of reference in their lives about which everything else can be arranged. The sceptic may want to know how it is possible to conceive of a First Cause—how was it itself caused? He may insist that there is no such thing as a First Cause, only an endless chain of interacting causes, each having some influence on all others. A disturbance in any one cause must have its repercussions on all others, until some new equilibrium is attained, if indeed that is possible. For the believer, the First Cause is not subject to influences from elsewhere in the chain of causation. By this analogy, analysis by partial equilibrium corresponds to the situation of the believer, by general equilibrium to the position of the sceptic.

The use of the simpler approach of partial equilibrium may be justified on several grounds. There are the problems associated with more general theories which have already been mentioned. Second, it is purposed to frame this account with respect to what does actually occur, or is likely to happen in the future, and not with respect to what ought to arise in some locationally ideal world. In doing this, the concern is necessarily with the decisions which people take in the light of the knowledge which is available to them. Hence, third, it is entirely reasonable when considering agricultural matters to assume that certain things are given and immutable, at any rate in the short run. The most obvious example is that the conditions of the physical environment can only be altered to a very small extent by human agency, whether deliberate or not. Recent experiments with the ‘seeding’ of clouds to induce rain have had only a limited success and it seems quite apparent that no fundamental climatic change can be brought about. Geological and topographical conditions also are not subject to alteration, except marginally. Admittedly, there are slow changes taking place in the physical environment independently of human interference, such as the isostatic readjustment of the level of several land masses following the diminution of the ice caps at the end of the Ice Age. On the human time scale, such changes are usually too slow to be noticed by any one generation. For most practical purposes, it can be taken that natural conditions are unchanging: this eliminates the problem of variation in one set of factors, and so much simplifies the whole problem of location analysis.

It is also generally possible to regard the location of the major urban areas as fixed. In most cases, the situation of urban centres is based very largely on industrial and commercial opportunities, though some regard must be had for the ease or otherwise of obtaining foodstuffs. Even when agricultural raw materials are included with foods, it remains true that in the majority of cases location with respect to agricultural supplies has very little influence on the location of the major urban areas, except in the broadest regional sense that fertile areas can support dense populations and vice versa. Normally, differences in locational advantages with respect to agricultural supplies are reflected in variations in the prices which have to be paid for the produce: a good location means low prices, a poor one high prices. Hence, for many purposes it is entirely reasonable to assume that the major urban areas have developed in their present situations for reasons which need not be considered, their existence being accepted as a fact.

As will become apparent in subsequent chapters, it is quite reasonable to assume the fixity of certain phenomena at all scales of consideration. It may be the farmstead which is taken as given, an urban centre or a major industrial region such as the Ruhr. The same is true of other factors, such as the quality of the soil, which varies from field to field, region to region and between different parts of the world.

The method of presentation which has been adopted is to take a situation at a moment in time, when it may be assumed that techniques are unchanging, and to analyse the location patterns which occur. In the body of the book, the idea of technical change is only conveyed incidentally, by discussing a sequence of situations succeeding each other in time (see Chapter 5 in particular). A systematic discussion of changes in techniques is reserved to the end. Notice also the segregation of material according to the scale of phenomena, large or small, rather than according to the ‘subject’ as conceived along orthodox lines of distinction, e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copy Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Johann Heinrich Von Thünen
• 3 More Principles of Location
• 4 The Farm and The Village
• 5 The Region and The World: I
• 6 The Analysis Inverted
• 7 The Farmstead and The Village
• 8 The Region and The World: II
• 9 Technical Change
• Selected Bibilograpy
• Index