New Towns. A major change in the rural settlement pattern in Highland Bolivia.

TLDR: In this paper, the authors propose to refer to these new and growing settlement nuclei as towns and the use of this term needs some justification, and they use this term for what they represent to the rural population.

Abstract: During the period since the Revolution of 1952 and the later agrarian reform a new settlement type has been created in the northern Altiplano and the sub-tropical valleys of the Yungas of La Paz. New nucleated settlements have been built by the rural people, largely spontaneously, and they represent a break with the dispersed pattern of dwellings that was the characteristic form of rural settlement prior to I952. In this paper I propose to refer to these new and growing settlement nuclei as towns and the use of this term needs some justification. If one seeks to use Wolfe's typology of Latin American rural settlements 1 to categorize the Bolivian new towns, then many would appear to be scarcely worthy of the name hamlet (caserlo) when judged by their size. But their inhabitants as well as people from neighbouring communities consider them to be urban and many of the larger nuclei have a maximum population during a week of 500-800 people: they offer a range of services and have administrative functions greater than their size would suggest. Despite their small size and having regard more for what they represent to the rural population, the new settlements to be described are urban, although not in the sense in which the term is generally understood by social scientists. These new towns vary in size between clusters of five or ten houses-at an early stage of development-to towns with I50 or more houses, a school offering perhaps four or five grades of primary education, a church and a municipal building (alcaldia). Many of the new settlements have administrative functions such as being a canton centre, the local centre for a group of peasant unions, or even a provincial section with a series of dependent