Volumen 8 (2016): Heft 4 (December 2016)
Special Heft: Small towns as centres of rural areas, Editors: Annett Steinführer, Antonín Vaishar, Jana Zapletalová

Small towns play a key role in providing services for its wider hinterland. However, emerging economic importance of the largest agglomerations and increasing involvement of settlements in urban networks have transformed a relationship between the size of settlements and their expected urban function. In this context, the concepts of “borrowed size” and “agglomeration shadow” serve to explain the impact of network externalities on urban function but pay a little attention to service function of small towns. The paper aims at revealing the extent to which the provision of services is determined by location of small towns within a regional urban system strongly affected by a metropolitan area. The results show coexisting occurrence of the processes of borrowed size and agglomeration shadow and the importance of tourist and commercial attractiveness of particular places (towns) to final provision of services.

The paper analyses the position of small towns in the Czech settlement system. It deals with the definition of small towns, their geographical positions, demographic characteristics and functions in the national settlement system. A typology of small towns aimed at individual pillars of their sustainability is one of the results of the paper. The article discusses the position of small towns as part of the urban world and their position as a part of the countryside. It concludes that small towns are functionally important as rural centres. However, differences between urban and rural seem to be less important than differences among individual types of the Czech countryside (suburban, intermediate, inner periphery, borderland).

Small towns, compared to larger cities, are specific group of municipalities with weaker performance in many spheres of socio-economic development. The aim of the paper is to comprehensively evaluate development of twelve small towns in the region of East Slovakia over the centuries up to present. The paper deals with question how their demographic and economic developments have been reciprocally influenced under particular historical circumstances. Using various sources of statistical data and employing traditional historical, mathematical-statistical and cartographical methods, regularities and patterns were identified that enabled us to categorize small towns and evaluate their development trajectories and current roles in the settlement system. In the most cases, they are still valid nodes for their hinterlands even though their past situation has been unfavourable.

This article is based on a renewed, unified functional definition of France’s urban hierarchy. Our ranking defines small towns exclusively in terms of their commercial and service functions, not according to size (population or jobs). Accordingly small towns are characterized by their function both in terms of education (presence of a high school), healthcare (a hospital with an operating theatre) and trade (a supermarket with floorspace exceeding 2,500 square metres). The population of small French towns identified using these criteria ranges from 6,200 to 35,500, with 3,500 to 19,000 jobs, depending on their regional context. Large hub-bourgs, defined as places hosting a secondary school, supermarket and nursing home, emerge as the lower limit of the urban world, interfacing with the countryside. In several ways they might count as ‘very small towns’, with a population ranging from 2,400 to 13,500, and 1,000 to 4,700 jobs. The article then analyses the population dynamic of small towns in mainland France over the past 50 years. This period has witnessed far-reaching changes: an urban then metropolitan model has gradually taken shape and gathered strength. In recent years this process has gone hand-in-hand with the demographic renewal of rural areas.

The paper explores the role of small towns in the Mazovia region in Poland which is both characterized by rural areas and the suburban zone of Warsaw. The analysis of changes in the local labour markets reveals that microregions formed by small peripheral towns were more resistant to changes than those located in the suburban area of Warsaw. The latter were absorbed by the capital city whose zone of influence expanded in the detriment of adjacent small towns and their microregions. Using the concept of exogenous functions performed by small towns, we also shed light on their role with regard to the surrounding areas (with dominant agricultural function) in the past decade. The values of the service concentration index (SCI) and the level of population concentration showed that the majority of services to local and neighbouring inhabitants were delivered in small county towns located in the periphery. On the other hand, small county towns located in the vicinity of Warsaw mainly provided services to their inhabitants.

Self-promotion and reinterpretation of local identity is becoming increasingly important in rural communities. Local identity building is succeeded very differently by rural municipalities and regions. The paper analyses the role of small towns in local identity creation. There are varying interpretations of places in Hungary as ways of achieving meaningful territorialisation. Small towns based on their leading and central position within the micro regions can dominate the place-making processes. Using the example of six Hungarian rural micro-regions we analyse how rural small towns position themselves by local image building. The aim of this paper is to investigate interactions between territorial position and innovative capacity of rural towns through the analysis of symbolisation process and image building. We purpose to introduce a concept of a place oriented approach and demonstrate its usefulness for analysis of rural innovation and place-based development. The case-studies are based on qualitative methods: document-analysis, semi-structured interviews, transect walking and participatory observation. The paper analyses the process of local community and identity building in six rural micro-regions. We seek to understand how small towns position themselves in place-making, the aim of ‘placing’ themselves in the territorial hierarchy of the settlements of micro region. Our results suggest that small towns play very different roles in local image building. Characteristics and territorial scope of local cultural heritage significantly determine the innovative capacity of small towns in local image building where there is a wide range of meanings procedures and processes of place-making.

A study is made of the significance of small towns in the process of urbanisation of Wielkopolska, a region situated in the western part of Poland. The analysis is conducted in both, a dynamic and a static approach, and covers two aspects of urbanisation: demographic and spatial. The basic period examined embraces the years 2000-2015. What is visible in the set of Wielkopolska towns is the depopulation of its core city, Poznań, accompanied by an increase in the population of small units located in its suburban zone. There is an upward tendency in the population number also in selected size classes of small Wielkopolska towns, which demonstrates that in this case we cannot speak of a crisis of small towns since they play an important role in the process of urbanisation of the region. In the recent years, increasingly important in this process, especially at the local level, has been the appearance of new towns set up as a result of the restitution of municipal rights.

The study presented in this paper deals with the definition and role of small towns in the spatial development of the Republic of Serbia. An analysis of the profiles of small towns was performed and they were compared based on their spatial and population characteristics. The aim of this study is to determine the role of small towns in the development of settlement networks and the balanced population development of a country as a whole by identifying their specific features and establishing a ranking of their importance in local and regional contexts.