Urbanisierung als sozialgeographischer Prozess-dargestellt am Beispiel südbayerischer Regionen Urbanization as a social-geographical process, described on the example of southern Bavarian regions
The study ries, from a social geographic point of view, to see the process of urbanization as part of the spatial development processes of human settlements, to explain it theoretically, and to show its regional differences empirically
. As a starting point, the attempt is made to define the geographic term town (urban settlement) in a new, social geographic way, namely as a human settlement, where the typical characteristics and development trends of the industrial society show themselves
in a relatively strong and distinct way and gain spatial relance. The totality of characteristics and ways of behaviour typical for urban settlements is called urbanity, their spreading in the sense of a diffusion process from this innovation centre
is urbanization. This diffusion process of urban ways of behaviour takes place in fields of different intensity, where we can find more or less urbanized settlements in a rural-urban continuum. The empiric studies proved the supposition that the urbanization
process does not take the same course in all settlements, but is composed of process components developing themselves with different degrees of intensity. In order to get types of urbanization, all possible combinations of eight components with three
degrees each were tested. After eliminating those types not existing in our area and reducing the nomber of types very similar to each other, eleven settlement types of urbanization were found. (HSC).