Urban and Rural Geography of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

This chapter deals with the basic characteristics of urban and rural settlements in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We also investigate the main factors of settlement development. We predominantly deal with spatial variations of the degree of urbanization, functional typology, and size categories of urban settlements. Bosnia and Herzegovina, considering the size of urban settlements, has a weakly developed urban system. However, the urban settlements of Bosnia and Herzegovina approximately fit into Zipf’s law on rank-size at the national level, and therefore Bosnia and Herzegovina differs significantly from the countries in Southeast Europe. Precisely because of that, the centuries-long continuous development of urban settlements within a mostly stable territorial coverage can be observed. By size, the urban system is dominated by urban settlements with less than 5000 inhabitants. More than half of the total population lives in nonurban settlements. Among nonurban settlements, there is domination of settlements by size up to 500 inhabitants (78.9%). During the war period, 1992–1995, a large number of settlements experienced a real urbicide. Thirty-five percent of housing units in Bosnia and Herzegovina were partially or completely destroyed.