Anthony g champion Population trends of small and

medium-sized towns in non- metro regions

During the last three decades of the twentieth century, the population fortunes of small and medium sized towns have appeared to alter significantly and more than once, with the result that there is probably more uncertainty about their future prospects now than there has ever been. The situation seemed much more straightforward in the 1960s when urbanization processes continued to draw people out of rural areas and concentrate them into the main metropolitan regions and their larger urban centres. Things were perhaps also simpler in the 1970s and early 1980s when it was widely held that counterurbanization was reversing these tendencies and eliminating the previous problems of rural stagnation and small town decline.

The aims of this paper are to examine recent trends in the populations of small and medium sized towns in the Developed World, to explore the dynamics which lie behind these population changes and to discuss views on the way in which the patterns are thought likely to develop over the next few years. The focus is on the relatively freestanding settlements that lie outside the primary influence of the major metropolitan centres, though a central thrust of the argument is that the prospects of the former cannot be understood in isolation from events in the metropolitan areas. Rather than provide a comprehensive survey, the paper uses selected examples to highlight some of the more significant features, with particular attention being given to patterns and trends in population, migration and settlement patterns.

National settlement systems in flux

This section provides background to national trends in population distribution over the last three decades. There are two main reasons for doing this. The first is to emphasise that a great deal that has been happening to small and medium-sized non-metro towns is closely tied - by a mixture of cause and effect relationships - into events elsewhere, notably higher up the urban hierarchy and in the metropolitan regions but also in the surrounding rural hinterlands of these towns and - to a more limited extent in demographic as opposed to economic terms - beyond national boundaries. The second reason is to justify the assertion that the 1990s constitute a period of particular uncertainty for national settlement systems as a whole, following two switches in urban concentration trends since the 1960s and the possibility of a third switch underway at the present time. In addition, it will be seen that, despite the widespread sightings of counterurbanization tendencies across the Developed World in the 1970s, considerable variation has been observed in the onset, duration

and intensity of this phenomenon and in subsequent trends, with differences being found both between countries and, to some extent, within individual countries.

From urbanization to counterurbanization

Looking at the first and most thoroughly documented switch in trend, there would seem to be much evidence of a shift from urbanization to counterurbanization tendencies, measured principally in terms of the relationship between measures of population change and migration rates on the one hand and indicators of settlement size and urban status on the other. Whereas a positive relationship dominated national patterns in the 1960s, with the larger cities and more urbanized areas growing fastest, a negative relationship developed subsequently in many countries, signifying population dispersal down the urban hierarchy and into rural areas. It was in the early 1970s that the 'rural population turnaround' was identified in the USA, with the non-metropolitan rate moving above the national figure, while within metropolitan America the smaller métros were growing faster than the medium ones and much faster than the large ones (Frey, 1989). Vining and Kontuly (1978) demonstrated the widespread nature of the slowdown in metropolitan growth rates, showing that 11 out of 18 countries studied had by then experienced either a reversal in the direction of net population flow from their sparsely populated, peripheral regions to their densely populated core regions or, at least, had seen a dramatic reduction in the level of this inflow. Fielding's (1982) results on Western Europe revealed counterurbanization relationships in the 1970s for Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and West Germany.

On the other hand, other studies do not provide such a uniform picture and it would also appear that several countries were not experiencing counterurbanization at this time. Hall and Hay (1980) failed to detect any significant non- metropolitan population turnaround in Europe during the early 1970s, though they were impressed by the strong suburbanization taking place within the larger metropolitan areas and also by the accelerating déconcentration of population from the largest agglomerations to smaller metropolitan centres. Berg et al's (1982) work on Europe found that, while the proportion of urban regions in their 'disurbanization' stage (broadly equivalent to counterurbanization) rose steadily between the 1950s and the 1970s, this stage still comprised less than one-fifth of cases by then. According to Fielding (1982), Austria, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Portugal and Spain were still characterised by a positive or insignificant relationship between size and growth in the 1970s.