Urbanisation is the term given to the process of people establishing themselves in locations as a large urban community, building the characteristics of bigger towns and cities for example the cities of; London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. From this we can deduce that Counter-urbanisation is the process of people migrating away from the big crowded cities into less densely packed areas in the countryside or smaller settlements than the environments they came from.
One of the main causes of counter - urbanisation is the perception of a better quality of life, they want to be able to live in a clean and quiet area without air and noise pollution, busy traffic, dirt and the crime of urban environments. Another attraction of moving to a rural environment is that employers have also started to move to rural areas, adding to the cause of counter- Between 1981 and 1996 rural areas gained more than 1 million jobs. The use of high speed internet connections has allowed people to work at home, even establishing their own internet businesses this has allowed them to move away from the towns and cities.
One of the major effects of counter- urbanisation is that the majority of the services in the area are forced to close. This is because the majority of people moving into the areas commute to work every day so instead of using the small village shops for their goods they use the large supermarkets in the urban areas in which they work. Businesses in rural areas then have to close because they aren’t getting enough trade. Other services that have disappeared in many rural areas are schools, post offices, churches and bus services because the new majority of residents in rural areas still use ones from urban areas as they tend to move to rural areas that are close to their previous urban area so that they can possibly commute to their old place of work another