ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relative individual well-being and life satisfaction among rural and urban households are examined in terms of how they challenge the compact city policy agenda. The term counterurbanisation has been commonly used for more than three decades to generally describe the redistribution of population away from major cities and metropolitan areas and towards more rural areas. Three forms of counterurban movements have been identified by Mitchell: ex-urbanisation; displaced-urbanisation; and anti-urbanisation. Due to the difficulty of measuring utility, income was generally used as an indicator of individual and societal welfare, using personal income at an individual level, and national income Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at the macro level. Since the 1990's, spatial planning practice has increasingly focused on issues surrounding sustainable urban form and the role of planning within the context of sustainable development.
