Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
The settlement structure of Slovakia indented terrain is favourable for the emergence of a high number of small villages. (Table 8) Besides villages with a low number of inhabitants, there are also sporadic settlements. According to researchers of the settlement geography of Slovakia, a settlement can be defined as a dwelling community which consists of a group of houses, is at least 200 meters from the neighbouring dwelling community, and where there is open space dividing it from the next community. Lukniš, a Slovak researcher, has been engaged in the issue of sporadic settlements. This is the settlement form that most often breaks the rule involved in the definition. According to his calculations, there are about 7,000 sporadic settlements in the country. If they are also taken into account, there are altogether 10,100 settlements in Slovakia (Očovský- Bezák- Podolák 1996) The following discussion focuses on the settlements reflected by official Slovak statistics. Compared to the figures of 1950, the number of settlements decreased for the next 40 years. In the 1950 census 3,344 independent settlements were registered. This number had dropped to 2,725 by 1980. The proportions show that the population became concentrated in settlements with an increasing number of inhabitants. While the number and proportion of the settlements with low populations was decreasing decade by decade, the number of larger settlements was increasing. According to the figures in Table 8, settlements with a population between 5,000 and 10,000 (mostly towns) tend to remain around 50 in number. This stagnation is due to the fact that the number of settlements is in turn growing in the next-higher-population settlement groups of the table. Simultaneously, since small villages had become independent again their number began to rise from the 1980s. During the decades of socialism the number of settlements with fewer than 1,000 inhabitants decreased at an extremely quick pace, which was first of all due to the fact that settlements merged and small settlements were attached to larger ones. Their proportion decreased from 74.9% in 1950 to 64.6% in 1980, and their number from 2,506 to 1,759. The forced unification of settlements took place after 1950, when 346 settlements with fewer than 500 inhabitants were attached to larger settlements. This was the reason why the number of settlements with more than 500 inhabitants increased by 239. In the 1960s there were only half as many settlement mergers, and these did not result in such a large increase in the population of the central settlement, therefore the number of large settlements hardly increased. It was in the 40
