Identification of spatial-settling status of rural areas of southern Poland a case study

Abstract

A spatial range of urbanisation is visible in the size of geographic space used “in an urban way”. In rural areas, spatial changes are mainly related to modifications to land use. The area of lands used agriculturally decreases in favour of built-up and urbanised areas including tourist and recreational lands, storage areas as well as commercial and service areas. Visible changes include the visual aspect and morphology of buildings due to the decreasing number of farm buildings and to the changing way of arrangement and density of buildings in rural areas. Modernisation of technical infrastructure takes place, including the development of transport network and its accompanying buildings as well as progress of the network of technical utility infrastructure (water distribution and sewage systems). An increase in the density of buildings and the floor area ratio, both vertical and horizontal, occurs in rural areas. There are some research questions, which factors most of all affect those urbanisation modifications? The aim of the paper is to assess the spatial-settling status of selected rural settlement units of southern Poland. Above all, the dependence between the density of buildings and the degree of coverage of the built-up and urbanised areas with housing developments in relation to the distance from an urban settlement was considered. Classification of the analysed objects by the spatial taxonomy method was performed to determine the similarity of settlement units in the spatial-settling aspect in the analysed area, which is important from the scientific point of view. The research was conducted in selected rural settlements in an area of Małopolskie Voivodeship in southern Poland.