Shaping the Rural–Urban Symbiosis: Density, Dispersal, Remoteness, and Town Size in South‐East Australia

Abstract

Within the context of economic and social change in rural Australia, this paper identifies four structural dimensions of non‐metropolitan communities that are shown to influence a range of areal and socio‐demographic characteristics. The analysis shows that such influence is essentially maintained whether the social catchments forming the database are subdivided by State or by an equivalent number of landscape types. Also, although the dimensions influence both the urban and dispersed elements of the communities, the strength of the relationships is substantially greater if those elements are considered as a symbiotic whole. Throughout, net rural local density (as opposed to gross density) is shown to be a consistently important dimension of rural communities in relatively sparsely settled lands such as those of south‐eastern Australia, supported by the important subsidiary influence of relative settlement dispersal and town size. The paper concludes with a discussion of the processes involved in the impact of those structural dimensions upon rural society.

The Future of Australian Rural Communities: How Powerful are the Forces of Change?

“…Likewise remoteness, stressed as a driver variable by so many writers, remains in the final model (used for Figures 5 and 6) only as a minor contributor. While this reinforces earlier findings on the importance of local density and relative dispersal as fundamental qualities of settlement systems (Griffin et al 2012), it does not of course mean that amenity, remoteness and towns size are unimportant: rather, the search for parsimony in the construction of the model may place perhaps too much emphasis on some of the driver variables, while excessively downplaying the influence of the rest. A likely explanation is that both remoteness and amenity are very strongly correlated with rural population density (Table 2), so that part of their influence is expressed indirectly through density, a very strong and dominant variable.…”

“…Fourthly, as to density, the strong and consistent relationship between this variable (measured as net local density) and community population change, as well as a series of important spatial and socio-economic characteristics 1 of rural communities across south-eastern Australia has been demonstrated (Smailes et al 2002;Griffin et al 2012). High densities bespeak habitable and desirable rural areas with relatively small holdings, many opportunities for social interaction, and short travel distances..…”

“…In the same strain, Hugo (2005, p. 61, updated in Swan (2010) has shown the very close links between remoteness, population density and the rate of population change. Distilling these views and combining with related research on fundamental factors that shape the nature of rural communities (Coombes and Raybould 2001;Smailes et al 2002bSmailes et al , 2005Griffin et al 2012), we examine the five key independent variables listed in the Introduction, and hypothesised to influence demographic change at the local community level. All of these have frequently been cited as explanatory variables for differential population growth rates within a nation or region, and/or as the most fundamental qualities of settlements.…”