URBAN GRAVITY, RURAL SETTLEMENTS AND LANDUSE GRADIENT A MICRO LEVEL SPATIAL ANALYSIS

Urban gravity is the function of urban hierarchy. The impact of city gravity reveals that there is often a linear relationship between the rural landuse intensity and the city size in urban hierarchy. The city size also influences the rural landuse pattern and the landuse diversity. Hence, the law of urban hierarchy can be complementary to the widely acknowledged spatial law of distance‐decay in geography. These together may further help the geographers in discovering generalizations in the distribution patterns, areal variations and spatial organization of phenomena in the regional context. This may further help the geographers that the regional canvass depicts both the uniqueness of space as well as the generalization of phenomena. The paper enquires the city size, function and gravity influence on the landuse structure, intensity and gradient in the command area of Aligarh city, India. It determines the demographic and social structure. It propels the vertical and horizontal mobility as well as the degree of migration in the fringe area. Urban gravity can help measure the dependency ratio as well as per capita resource availability in the rural‐urban fringe. Urban gravity acts as a rural stimulus in the fringe area. The paper raises a question, whether geographers can develop a working methodology to demarcate a functional and mathematically precise boundary of rural‐urban fringe or the gradient of the inner and the outer fringe.