The new dimension of settlement inequality: the agricultural land use structure

Abstract

The aim of our study is to analyze the groups of land use by structure in Hungarian settlements and to examine whether there is this correlation between the development indicators of settlements and the structure of land use. Despite extensive research on land use as well as the structure of land ownership and a number of research aimed at examining the social characteristics of land users, we find few analyzes based on settlement-level data. The added value of our research is given by the fact that, deviating from the use of data in the literature, it considers the settlement as an observation unit. In the first step of our analysis, we developed a database of land-using farms based on the EU Single Area Payment Scheme (SAPS) data, and then we created a settlement-level database based on this, which was linked to settlement-row indicators. Using latent profile analysis, we identified six characteristic groups of settlements according to the structure of land use, which can be well identified according to previous qualitative works. The geographical location of each land use type is rather mixed, however, some clear spatial distributions can be described. The dominance of large estates is typical in Transdanubia and in a part of small and medium-sized towns in the Great Plain. The segmented land use structure, in which large estates also play a major role, is most present in the smaller and medium-sized towns of the Great Plain. The mixed structure is dominant in the north-eastern part of the area between the Danube and the Tisza. The dominance of small, medium and dwarf farms is the predominant land use of the small villages of Transdanubia and the Northern Central Mountains. Case studies using qualitative methods warn that elements of local economic traditions that survive in both the socialist and post-socialist eras may have influenced the current land use structure in some settlements. The characteristics of the settlement clusters were examined according to the socio-demographic, social, housing and living conditions, economic and labor market, infrastructural and environmental indicators. The combination of the development indicators of the settlements with the land use structure showed that the mixed, segmented and large land dominance structure is characteristic of settlements whose development indicators exceed the indicators of the settlements with a fragmented land use structure. The dominant presence of larger holdings is mostly associated with higher values of development indicators. The structure of land use in settlements requires further research, but it can already be stated that an important dimension of inequalities between settlements has been presented, which has received little attention in research so far.