'Villages' in the modern world

[The Vorpal Tribble]

I was reading a news story about India and something going on in a village. I'm like... wait, a 'village? Then thought, you hear of 'villages' like in Ireland, Middle East, Africa, etc.

Never thought about it before, but in this day and time are there really still the classic villages? Self sustained little area, everyone goes to the well and visits the local market?

I'm originally from the boonies, but it's not a village. Has America ever had 'villages'? I don't think even the reservations have 'villages'. Sounds odd without being from some medieval time.

[Maximum Zersk]

But aren't you forgetting the Amish?

[Sneak]

Yep. I lived in Diskit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubra_Valley#Places) (a Ladakhi village) for a week.

There wasn't not really a local market, but was a street with a bunch of shops, if that counts. There wasn't a well, either.

I also lived in a village near Udon Thani (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udon_Thani), Thailand, which was a bit more "classic village." There was a local market.

Still wasn't a well, though.

So from my experiences, yes, there are still villages—they're just not as tiny as the villages you're probably imagining. They're basically small towns.

[The Vorpal Tribble]

But aren't you forgetting the Amish?
Whoop, yes, I did. Geeze, and there is one only a few miles from my place.

[Serpentine]

Sure, there's lots of villages. I don't think there's many in "our parts" of the world that would be self-contained like you're after, but there's plenty of tiny towns. In fact, Wikipedia says that a village can be up to a population of several thousand, so I've lived in a couple (apparently a hamlet upgrades to village status when it gets a church, too).
Anyway, haven't you seen Little Britain? "Only gay in the village" and all that?

[Fri]

Yes. Where do you think all the rice in Asia came from?

[Fifty-Eyed Fred]

There are tons of villages all over Britain; many more than towns or cities. It seems odd that you'd ever think there weren't villages in the modern world. :smallconfused:

[Ravens_cry]

While not all medieval, I have lived in, or near, several towns that would qualify as villages. Like Vavenby (http://www.ntvalley.com/vavenby/). Now THAT'S a tiny town, though I am sure there is smaller.

[KuReshtin]

I grew up in a village in Sweden. Current population is about 1800.

It's got two grocery stores, two bank offices, two gas/petrol stations, two florists, a couple of hairdressers/barbers, a shoe store, two clothes stores (my dad owns one of them), a liquor store, a cinema, a pizza place, a baker, a pet store, a lumber yard, a computer store, a library, a church and a school.

That's about it.

Mandatory picture for reference:

http://webnews.textalk.com/upload/article/bild/1/253568/Spring_006_s.jpg
View down main street of Torsås from just outside the main bank office.

[Serpentine]

That's heaps bigger than my (high school) village... It has... lets see... One grocery store, two take-away stores (1 tripling as pizza place/movie hire), 2 pubs, a post office (though now I think about it I'm not sure where it was...), a petrol station, a couple of random shops, a library, a baker, a butcher (I think, can't remember where that was, either), a high school, 2 primary schools, a hospital and attached nursing home and hostel, a bank (I think), a chemist, a motel or two, a caravan park, a garage, a chemist, golf course, a hair dresser, a vet, about... (Jehova's Witnesses, Catholic, Anglican, Uniting, probably one I've forgotten) 5 churches, and an information centre with a fancy-pants touch screen.
Most of the town is in this picture:http://www.tallangattamotorinn.com.au/images/tallangatta.jpg

[kamikasei]

At least in Ireland, a village is just a small town, shading in to the level of low-density settlement where it's just a boundary drawn on a map that says all the scattered houses within it are technically part of the same village and there are a few shops and services near the middle.

This part, though?

Never thought about it before, but in this day and time are there really still the classic villages? Self sustained little area, everyone goes to the well and visits the local market?
No. Not around these parts, or at least certainly not for the majority of what people refer to as villages.

Incidentally, Wikipedia has an article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village) on this.

[Nerzi]

Those actually count as villages? That's a ridiculous amount of stuff going on for a village! A library! We just had a bus that came round every fortnight loaded with books.

The village I lived in as a child had a post office, a single church, one pub about a miles walk out, a local farm and a village green. Current population...roughly 350, probably less when I lived there.

So yeah...villages definitely still exist in the modern world, can't speak for America of course but they're not at all unusual here in Britain. They're hardly 'self-sustained' any more but they difinitely exist. And will for a long time, most of them are protected by planning guidelines to restrict building and development in the area.

[ArlEammon]

If Dungeons and Dragons matter in this real world discussion, I think it says that a village can have around 800 people.

[Jibar]

Those actually count as villages? That's a ridiculous amount of stuff going on for a village! A library! We just had a bus that came round every fortnight loaded with books.

The village I lived in as a child had a post office, a single church, one pub about a miles walk out, a local farm and a village green. Current population...roughly 350, probably less when I lived there.


I was gonna say, those are freaking massive for villages. Most my friends live in villages and they're tiny. One of them has... a church, a newsagents, a pub, a butcher and a chemist and that's it. And it's probably the biggest village for a long time around.

I live in a small town that acts like a hub for all the villages nearby, and we're probably the same size as one of the villages you lot described.

[Hazkali]

I think in Britain, certainly, villages are no longer entirely self-sustaining. They may have a farm shop, but most of the food needs will be serviced by shops and supermarkets getting food in.

Village houses are certainly very desirable here as second-homes, which causes all sorts of problems- it pushes the price of houses up, so young local people can't afford to live there, and move away, so the average age of people in villages skyrockets, and the community spirit begins to die out. The worst thing is that if the house is being used as a second home it stands empty most of the time, so the village becomes very empty.

[Eldan]

At least legally, we count as a village. About 2500 inhabitants in the village itself, and with the neighbouring villages included about 4000 in the community.
We have a school (years 1-6 only), a kindergarten, a small supermarket, a small shop, a dentist, two doctors, a computer store, two or three factories (mostly packaging meat), a butcher, a baker, a gas station, a post office, probably a few more things I'm forgetting.
Still. The next town (with about 18000 inhabitants) is about ten minutes by bus or 20 by bicycle, the next City (St. Gallen, about 70000 inhabitants, I think, with about twice that if you count the entire agglomeration) is about half an hour by train or car away, and it takes an hour to Zurich (about 1 million inhabitants with all the suburbs and mostly absorbed smaller towns).

So, depends on your definition of village. While the swiss mostly live in the lowlands, where the population density is very high, there are still mountain villages around, those with a dozen houses (half of them usually empty because no one wants to live there anymore), one street, no shops, a chapel and a school three villages over.

[Thursday]

I live in one of these villages in Rural England.. Population at the last census 193. We have a Pub, thats it. Nearest shop is five miles away since the post office closed. Now, it has never been self sustaining in my lifetime, but it is very much a working farming village. In fact it was doing quite well with most people here employed in dairy farming until foot and mouth disease closed half the farms a few years ago. Now we have a few commuters starting to creep in.

Do you mean the same thing as we do by the word village?

[GolemsVoice]

Here in Germany, you still have a lot of villages or hamlets that consist only of two streets, a few hundred people, a butcher's, a bakery, and maybe a bank that opens at hours that no sane mortal can visit it at. Small-scale farming is still an option here, and most of the life and the jobs are in the local area.

Of course, Germany is a first-world country, so everyone has access to cars, the internet, etc. Nothing is really self-sustained anymore, the goods for the shops are brought from far awy etc, but the community is still very much local.

[Anuan]

I'm officially moving to Germany. These places sound amazing.

[taltamir]

self sustained?
a villiage is not an outpost in a hostile land.
A villiage is a really small farming community. They have them everywhere in the world.

I lived in a village once. 60% of the residents were non farmers (my immediate family wasn't, my grandparents were and we came to live near them). And thanks to cars we could reach a major city in under an hour.
And every available modern amnety was there...

even the amish interact with the outside world (although they try to minimize it). And those goat herders in the himalias have heard of modern society... although they have limited access there is typically one TV and radio and phone PER VILLAGE.

Even feudal villages were not entirely self contained and had some trading going on though.

[The_Admiral]

There are quite a few villages in malaysia too.
I have visited an Orang Asli village before.
BTW They still hunt with a blowdart.

[Mercenary Pen]

Britain has- as many other posters have said- plenty of villages still. However, I'd be hard-pressed to describe most British villages as self-sustaining (at least in terms of food), since the norm as I understand it is that these tend to be the out of the way locations at vastly inflated house-prices for people with fairly large budgets and their own private transportation. From here you drive in to work (at least as far as the nearest railway station if not all the way) because there's little or no public transport provision, drive to reach anything but the most local of shops (which likely provide only the most limited range of services- and have to rely on deliveries from outside apart from what may be grown or reared locally- which probably doesn't provide much variety)...

As a matter of fact, Milton keynes (where I live) was built as a new town out of a fairly large number of smaller towns and villages over the last forty years, and you can see where the architecture changes and you switch from the surrounding suburbs to the original villages and vice versa... We even have more villages dotted around the outskirts.

So, to sum up, yes the village still exists- but not necessarily in its traditional form- having instead taken on a rather different form, designed to serve best those who can afford to live in a village rather than closer to their source of income.

[Eldan]

Heh. We have, let me think, four farmers in our village (see description above, 2500 inhabitants). One has a few apple trees and and not much else, he's probably somewhere between seventy and eighty judging by his appearance and only walking on crutches. One of the other three mostly buys and sells cattle, a few dozen at a time. He has large stables, but doesn't do much farming himself. The others are more classical swiss farmers: a dozen cows, a dog, a few chicken, apple trees. There's also a maize field somewhere, but I have no idea who that belongs to.

[paddyfool]

I'm originally from the boonies, but it's not a village. Has America ever had 'villages'? I don't think even the reservations have 'villages'. Sounds odd without being from some medieval time.

As roughly stated by prior posters, the definitions are very different in the USA compared to the UK, just as they are for "towns" and "cities". The old fashioned definitions in the UK went roughly as follows:

- Hamlet: Cluster of dwellings too small for a church
- Village: Diocesian centre
- Town: Local trading hub
- City: Local administrative centre, had cathedral

Latterly, as religion has fallen out of public life and other factors have come into it, things have got a fair bit more complicated... especially given what commuters have done. However, a village today in the UK would have a population anything between a couple hundred people and 5,000, and would generally have at least one pub, be bounded by green spaces, etc.

I grew up in a village of about 2000 people myself. Its population comprised lots of commuters, quite a few pensioners and a handful of farmers and local shopkeepers. It had a single row of shops, a couple churches (one inactive), a couple of golf courses (sadly), a village hall, a local nursery, a local primary school, a girl's boarding school for 11-18 year olds and a pub just outside the bounds (there was an old covenant on the land which forbade any within the village limits).

[Fifty-Eyed Fred]

I think VT's impression of a village is based on fantasy worlds and medieval history... but at no point in our history have they been entirely self-sufficient. Villages are an entirely normal part of life in Europe, or certainly in Britain. As I said earlier, I find it odd that anyone would expect villages not to exist.

[KuReshtin]

These are pretty much the definitions that I go by when using the term 'Village'.


A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousands (sometimes tens of thousands),

Also:


Swedish definitions
Terms used for statistical purposes
Tätort (= urban area or locality) is the central concept used in statistics. The definition is agreed upon in the Nordic countries: A tätort is any village, town or city with a population of at least 200 for which the contiguous built-up area meet the criterion that houses are not more than 200 meters apart when discounting rivers, parks, roads, etc.
Småort (= minor locality) is a rural locality with 50–199 inhabitants in a contiguous built-up area with no more than 150 meters between houses. The concept is rarely used outside the field of statistics, where it is used for settlements just below the limit defined for tätort.


So, according to the latest census (2005) the population of Torsås (where I grew up) was 1.829, which falls uder the definition of a Village.


@Serp: That is a pretty village.

[Eldan]

As far as I know, at least in the middle ages of the german empire, the definition of city was a legal one: a settlement was made into a town by the emperor, which granted them a series of rights. What kind of rights changed over time and where it was, but generally, it included things like the right of limited self-government, governing the surrounding land, nominating judges, building city walls, holding an official market, taking taxes and so on. Therefore, a big deal, but not entirely dependent on size.

[Amiel]

The town of Boort in northwestern Victoria (from whence a friend comes) has a population of 773 (according to the 2006 census).

The town of Serpentine, also in northwestern Victoria, only has a population of 380 (according to the 2006 census).

Buckrabanyule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckrabanyule,_Victoria) apparently only has 8 people, and "only qualifies as a township because several farmhouses are within a few kilometre's radius."

I suppose all of the above and more are villages; they're very much self-contained and self-sustaining. They have to be, considering Australia's immense size.

[Serpentine]

By the way, that town is what originally brought the word "serpentine" to my attention.

[Sleverin]

I think in Britain, certainly, villages are no longer entirely self-sustaining. They may have a farm shop, but most of the food needs will be serviced by shops and supermarkets getting food in.

Village houses are certainly very desirable here as second-homes, which causes all sorts of problems- it pushes the price of houses up, so young local people can't afford to live there, and move away, so the average age of people in villages skyrockets, and the community spirit begins to die out. The worst thing is that if the house is being used as a second home it stands empty most of the time, so the village becomes very empty.

Funny, The Kinks have a whole album about the quaintness and pleasantness of village life and how modern Britain has caused the modern village to fall and how old ways are dying out, which is a tragedy. The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is what it's called.

I dunno though I mean I've heard of towns in America with populations of only a few hundred pretty often, I've only lived in or near urban centers so i don't know what it's like to live in low populated areas.

[The Vorpal Tribble]

I dunno though I mean I've heard of towns in America with populations of only a few hundred pretty often, I've only lived in or near urban centers so i don't know what it's like to live in low populated areas.
Yeah, but even they usually have a Wal*Mart. Just can't put the word 'Village' on that :smallwink:

I think what it is is that in America the less people the more spread out. Village means everyone clumps together, just not much in the clump. Just a toned down town/city. Up where I'm from it may be miles between each house. That's more of the norm for rural area here.

[John Cribati]

Most of the Jamaican countryside is village. Some places have no running water, even.