PROCESS OF SETTLEMENT TRANSFORMATION IN THE RURAL SETTLEMENTS OF BÁCS-KISKUN COUNTY With the Help of Village Typological Factor and Cluster Analysis P. BELUSZKY—T. T. SIKOS In our opinion, the development of Hungarian settlements took a new trend in the '70s. The major socio-economic changes in the '50s and the '60s, those in the social and properietary conditions, the repeated and basic transformation of land property conditions, the rapid decrease^n the number and ratio of agricultural wor- kers, the industrialization etc., spread only on the 'surface' of the settlement network and rearranged the 'microstructure' of the settlement stock. The basically new struc- ture of the settlement network was incipient; only the first results could be seen. Occupation restratification was also a surface feature of the settlement network; similarly, mass daily commuting had led to indisputable agglomeration only in some regions of the country. Only a smaller part of the labour force released by agriculture left the villages; there had even been a rise in rural population till 1970. (Its rate was 2% between 1960 and 1970; in the meantime, there was, as a matter of course, a strong decrease of 20 to 25% in certain peripheral areas with sir all villages, at scattered farmsteads, while in the neighbourhood of the capital and the larger country towns population was growing rapidly.) Except for the so-called socialist towns (i.e. towns with heavy and extractive industries founded after World War II), the population growth of towns lagged far behind the pace of increase in industrial and other employement numbers. But in the 1970s the adaptation of the settlement network to the new regio- nal distribution of the forces of production has accelerated. Apart from the transfor- mation of the settlement stock, alterations also affected the basic structure of the settlement network. These include changes in the number, the occupational, qualifi- cational and demographic structure of population, development in the dimensions and nature of the forces of production, town patterns reshaped by mass housing developments, the elimination of scattered farmsteads ('tanyas') in certain outskirts, transformed land use and man-made environment etc. We assume the dominance of the network elements, the hierarchic level of the settlements, the standard of supply, the network of institutions, the nature of rela- tionships with.the towns etc., in the present development of the settlement stock. It is by their changes that settlement-shaping process are most dynamically catalyzed and directed. The reaction of the population is keener and keener to the state of the network elements. (In commutation the role of the hierarchic level, supply and living condi- tions increasingly predominates over the possibility of employement and income perspectives.) Our attempt at the typology of rural settlements was urged by the recognition of this process. Previous general-purpose settlement classifications were made from few aspects and were based on selected factors presumably determining the nature