Approaches to Locating Urban Functions in Developing Rural Areas

This article compares two approaches to planning the locations of urban functions in developing rural regions. The prevailing functional integration approach gives more weight to integrating and articulating an urban hierarchy than to increasing the access of rural populations to urban-based services. It relies on supply-side descriptions of functional urban hierarchies and linkages and fails to consider effective demand when assessing the provision of services. A demand-based location-allocation approach can be used instead to develop rigorous plans that provide the rural population access to urban facilities, and contain the costs of providing services.