estonia-2030_en

Apart from increasing the density of cities and towns, new construction areas – primarily other largersettlements with their social infrastructure in the immediate hinterland of cities and towns – need tobe identified. Utilisation may also exploit areas immediately outside cities and towns, where linkingup to technical infrastructure is easier. The creeping of dense settlement into areas (conservationareas, core areas and corridors of networks of green areas, valuable agricultural land and the like)valuable in any other sense should be avoided.In terms of the availability of services, jobs, educational institutions and so on, an important role isplayed also by the network for light vehicles, which links larger urban communities with their immediatevicinity and provides better access.In general, settlement should not be shaped through one-off decisions. If individual detailed plans failto be linked, their implementation will result in urban sprawl in the vicinity of the larger cities andtowns. Because of that, the quantity of planned residential or commercial areas may, in some regions,markedly exceed the actual need, with the development of both technical and social infrastructurespossibly being overlooked. In the vicinity of the larger cities and towns, this manifests itself in,amongst other things, a dearth of places at schools and kindergartens; the building-up of green areas,leisure areas and fertile agricultural land; and in the lack of public transport facilities Local governmentsneed to take responsibility for shaping the local spatial development through comprehensiveplans, more than they have to date, and, if necessary, void any detailed plans whose implementationwill not provide sustainable development or the quality of the living environment. The objectiveshould be set of shaping settlement more consistently, which may be done by means of up-to-datecomprehensive plans.The planning of the living environment in rural settlements needs to consider the fact that ever fewerpeople there are involved in conventional agriculture or forestry. Many other types of jobs have comeabout, such as accommodation, hospitality and tourism services, remote work and various greenfarms; an increasing proportion of the workforce engage in daily work-related commuting betweentown and country. A number of people have settled in the countryside; they value privacy and a naturalenvironment and may also promote local life, but their lifestyle and activities are often urban. Thenumber of country homes of mostly city-dwelling people keeps growing, with the period of time theyare lived in becoming longer too. In a word, people living in the countryside are increasingly urbanised– in terms of their thinking, behaviour, employment and so on. Therefore, the planning of rural areasneeds to consider new types of communities.Over recent decades, the availability of services in rural areas has clearly decreased. The situation hasbeen exacerbated both by companies’ decisions to close locations of their operations (post offices22