ABSTRACT
The relationship between rural and urban areas has been an important part of underlying assumptions of development theory and practice. The nature of the relationship is interpreted differently according to different theoretical perspectives. This can be illustrated by contrasting two frameworks used for analysing colonial and post-colonial development. The first is put forward by Gould (1969) who saw development as a process of modernisation. At the time, he was writing on applied quantitative methods which were the focus of an emergent approach in geographical research. Gould, being in the vanguard of this approach, applied these methods to the analysis of modernisation diffusion in Tanzania. He divided the country into a series of cells of equal area and recorded indicators of modernisation, such as miles of metalled road, number of government offices, and number of hospital beds. He did this for a selection of time periods throughout the first half of the twentieth century and mapped the changes through time and space. Not surprisingly, he found a strong bias towards the cities, in particular Dar es Salaam, then the capital. As the century progressed only the most remote areas beyond the main feeder roads remained untouched by modernisation. There was evidence, according to Gould, of a diffusion of modernisation from the urban core of Dar es Salaam down the urban hierarchy and then out into the rural areas. Arguably this is evidence of what has been described elsewhere as the ‘trickle-down’ effect.
