ABSTRACT
The concept of a settlement system is important to understanding the urbanization process. The dichotomy between 'rural' and 'urban' was meaningful at some stage of the development of settlement systems, when they could differentiate settlement types whose characteristics were opposite on several dimensions. More detailed typologies of settlements are needed for analyzing new urbanization trends. The rural-urban continuum in settlement sizes and the generality of the hierarchical models of size distribution, whatever the historical or regional political circumstances, have suggested many tentative explanations. Several European countries have defined classifications of settlements including intermediate categories between urban and rural. The conception of urban settlements as urban fields where spatial interaction can occur in a given time favors a definition based upon frequency and length of daily movements around an urban center. The Pareto law describes the distribution of urban settlements, while the lognormal distribution is appropriate to the whole settlement systems.
