Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)

3. The settlement structure of Slovakia

The settlement structure of Slovakia

two processes that have the same trend. One of them is the increase of the population from 2,998,239 people at the time of the 1921 census to 5,379,455 people according to the 2001 census. At 179.4% this increase is considerable. The other process is that an increasing proportion of the population lives in ever bigger settlements. It is an obvious sign of urbanization that the number of inhabitants of settlements with fewer than

1.000 people decreased from more than one million (1,155,022 people) to much fewer than one million (878,377) between 1950 and 2001. This is a decrease of 76.0%. According to the 1950 census, 33.6% of the more than 3,400,000 people lived in settlements with populations of fewer than

1.000 people, whereas this was only 16.3% of the population of 5,000,000 in 2001. The statement can also be justified by the fact that while in 1921 87.2% of the population lived in settlements with fewer than

10.000 inhabitants, in 2001 it was only 51.3%.

Table 12. Changes in the population in the three most typical settlement groups, 1921-2001

1921

1930

1950

1961

1970

1980

1991

2001-1,999

1,802,204

1,942,408

1,923,680

2,001,880

1,933,213

1,657,235

1,620,941

1,645,938

2,000-9,999

812,996

903,153

898,872

1,313,723

1,318,077

1,204,994

1,042,102

1,111,930

10,000-383,039

485,324

619,760

858,447

1,285,995

2,135,939

2,611,292

2,621,587

Total population

2,998,239

3,330,885

3,442,312

4,174,050

4,537,285

4,998,168

5,274,335

5,379,455

Rate of change, %

111.1

103.3

121.3

108.7

110.2

105.5

102.0

Source: Štatisticky űrad SR, Bratislava

The distribution of the population in both Table 12 and Figure 3 is based on the result of another settlement categorisation. From the detailed data we can see that the population movement of three settlement groups shows the most typical values. According to the table, the population of settlements with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants had been around two million until the 1970s, and then it started to decrease dramatically. The population of settlements with more than 2,000 but fewer than

10.000 inhabitants increased slowly till their total population became more than one million. Meanwhile, in the settlements with more than

10.000 people (all of them towns) there was steady and later accelerating growth.

The changes are even more emphasized by proportional changes, because they also demonstrate the effect of the increase in the total population (Table 13, Figure 4).

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