Modelling Population Changes in Small English Urban Areas

Research on urbanisation has been hampered by discrepancies between the administrative boundaries of towns and a meaningful spatial framework of urbanism that recognises both the true extent of the built-up areas of towns and the functional linkages between urban centres and their surrounding hinterland. An ‘urban area’ definition has been recently developed for British census statistics to represent the physical reality of urban boundaries in terms of land that is urban in use, whereas the functional approach to urban definition has been implemented in terms of a set of urban-centred labour-market areas. In this paper the spatial frameworks of physical and functional definitions are combined in order to investigate processes of population growth in small- and medium-sized towns in England between 1971 and 1981. As in other studies, a general tendency to counterurbanisation— higher growth rates for smaller urban areas (physically defined)—is demonstrated. However, a variety of types of ‘counterurbanisation’ also become apparent. In addition to growth of smaller towns in rural areas beyond metropolitan influence, there has been growth of towns in the labour-market areas of newer freestanding urban centres, and also in the decentralised commuter hinterlands of large metropolitan cores. In this paper a number of causal processes which may underlie different types of growth are investigated, setting this investigation within the standard and labour-market regional context of physical urban areas. There is evidence of ‘people-led’ growth in environmentally attractive locations (for example, through retirement migration). However, growth of small- and medium-sized towns also reflects employment decentralisation and deconcentration to freestanding or satellite towns, and the extension of commuter hinterlands linked both to a growth of car commuting and to availability of land for private-sector housing. Government policies encouraging growth are also demonstrated to be significant. Conversely, decline in a minority of small towns often indicates a diminishing employment base or policy restrictions on growth. The impact on modelling growth in urban areas of a diversity of causal processes and locational contexts for growth is considered.