ABSTRACT

Models of global change sometimes take into account the population dimension, with various conjectures about demographic growth. More rarely they include hypotheses about the spatial distribution of the population, that is, the geography of settlement patterns. This neglect is regrettable because most of the relationships between societies and their environment depend on the nature and size of human settlements, at the microlevel of the individual as well as at the macro-level of regional planning. In particular, the general and powerful contemporary trend towards an increasing concentration of population within city systems in many countries of the world has to be considered seriously (Moriconi 1993). The grounds for such a process are not yet fully understood: for instance, many authors have interpreted the negative correlation between demographic growth and settlement size in the industrialized countries during the 1970s as initiating a new trend, called “counter-urbanization” (Berry 1976). The subject is still controversial (Champion 1989).