ABSTRACT
The dilemma about what is rural and what is urban is not easy to solve. We can always say that rural areas are those that are not urban. Wiefiner (1999, p. 300) presents different definitions of rural areas. The one given by the state government of Bavaria in 1976 is that rural areas are the areas without the so-called ‘ Verdichtungs-Raume ’ (areas of concentration, densely populated areas). Gatzweiler’s definition from 1979 cited in the same paper gives the following characteristics of rural areas:
These characteristics are not very easy to measure. Even if we accept the simplest definition, we cannot limit the rural areas without knowing which settlements are urban and what their boundaries are. The UN rec ommendations for Census 2,000 suggest that the settlements with less than 2.000 inhabitants can be part of rural areas while the settlements with 2.000 or more inhabitants can be treated as urban. Haggett (1983, p. 360) states that the size of the settlement considered as urban varies very much from country to country (from a few hundred in Iceland to 20,000 in Neth erlands). The notion of a city is multidimensional and complex. Cities have a certain physiognomy, important economic and social functions and they are also a kind of sophisticated technical system. They change through time and we can observe different kinds of cities in different parts of the
world. Slovenia, for example, has no big cities and no large urban agglom erations. The number of settlements is almost 6,000 and considering the population of around 2,000,000 living in the area of around 20,000 square kilometres we can easily jump to the conclusion that the majority of these settlements is very small and that they are densely scattered more or less all over Slovenia. The research made by Drozg (1999) for the Slovene gov ernment deals with the definition of settlements that meet certain standards necessary to define them as cities. He used physiognomic, economic, demographic and legal criteria. By applying the first three criteria, he could define 48 cities. Some settlements even twice the size of the smallest among those 48 did not match all the three mentioned criteria.
