The Rural-Urban Continuum: Real but Relatively Unimportant

The use of the terms "rural" and "urban" in current publications reveals a grosslack of agreement concerning their referents. This is interpreted as resulting from the failure to distinguish the influences upon man's actions of density and size of population, on the one hand, from the influences of culture, on the other. Although these two categories of influences cannot be severed in actuality, they must be distinguished if the nature of communities is to be perceived clearly.