THE IMPACT OF THE 1971 NATIONAL CONCEPT FOR SETTLEMENT NETWORK DEVELOPMENT IN ZALA COUNTY
Abstract
This study is trying to show, to indicate the impact of the 1971 National Concept for Settlement Network Development on Zala County’s settlement system. The hierarchy created by the NCSND can be divided into two parts: one, determined from “above”, reaching to the middle level (cities and designated cities), and the other, determined by the county council, at the level of lower centers, e.g. villages or designated towns reaching the title in a long term process. This hierarchy is hard and frequently discussed, sentencing the concept as guilty in case of settlement blight for example, but there are much more factors which can be make responsible for this “crime” written on the concept’s account. Demographic trends, the shift in the economic structure of the county or even personal favor or revenge could have their impact on the settlement system as well.
The new shaped settlement system of Zala County shows only few changes: the backbone, two large cities and three (one existing, two planned) towns remained unchanged. For settlements seen as future towns in a long term development process were chosen villages with historical central functions, so this decision could be scored as correct, even though the four new towns are not identical with the planned ones.
The only remarkable change in the settlement system caused by the concept was the reduction of the number of lowest level centers from 101 to 81. Eleven centers were not classified (their classification, e.g. degradation were delayed), so the current number of settlements loosing their central function is only twenty. Some of them had less than 500 inhabitants, so their central function (seat of community council) were not based on their improvements, services and economic power but spatial, geographical situation, accessibility (A lot of Zala villages are in the present situated on narrow service roads, far from bus stops!).
Zala County’s settlement system shows the same shape (two eccentric cities, high settlement but low population density) as before inventing the NCSND, so the concept did not solved any spatial problems, but by the concentration of both social and financial resources into the higher level centers, its contribution to the decline of several rural settlements is remarkably. Usually NCSND were judged as guilty on damaging villages, devastating and depopulating them. One can see, that in Zala (and obviously in other countries too) the concept could act as an accelerator of fall or decline of villages, but many tiny villages would have lost their population on behalf of their scarce resources, on their geographical and demographic situation as well. Responsibility on the weakening of the settlement system, blight of tiny villages, and dramatic depopulation of former flourishing villages goes not only to NCSND. History (after world war II Zala became frontier region with hardly passable borders to the “enemy”), geography (lack of natural resources) and of course, politics (planning economy with always less resources as needed) paved the way toward down before and after the NCSND.
