Defining the rurban settlement: Planning models and functional realities in Israel

The growth in the number of rurban communities has been a major feature of the changing settlement space in western societies. Attempts to define these communities according to traditional criteria is problematic, owing to the mixture of "rural" and "urban" features. This problem is all the more difficult in Israel, where rigid institutional and organizational criteria provide an added dimension to settlement definition. A study of 75 new rurban communities in Israel shows that while the public agencies responsible for the development of the rurban settlements have attempted to predefine idealized models according to traditional rural-based criteria, their models prove to be incompatible with the functional categories which best describe the operational norms of these communities.