The ‘Open-Closed’ Settlement Model and the Interdisciplinary Formulations of Dennis Mills: Conceptualising Local Rural Change

Abstract

This article is an examination of the value of the 'open-closed' settlement model. The model has endured as a helpful point of reference in historical investigations of local rural change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in particular in the study of property and class relations and their influence on the evolution of settlement form. The article is also a consideration of the significance of the work of a chief architect of the model, the historical geographer and local historian Dennis Mills. The model and the contribution of Mills are discussed in relation to initiatives seeking to develop local history of the twentieth century, including the promotion of engagement with interdisciplinary historiographies.

Local Civil Society

“…In such circumstances development was relatively more prescribed and contained, life more regulated and the social economy more narrowly agrarian in its focus. This is in contrast to 'open' settlements -like Rhos -where property holding was more dispersed, development less restricted, life less controlled and the social economy more dynamic, more diverse and expansive (Jackson 2012). The open/ closed distinction used by rural historians such as Mills (1973) has a bearing not only on how villages developed, but on the civil relations found therein.…”