Typology of rural areas in the Śląskie province with respect to their infrastructure

The subject of the article is the structure of infrastructural facilities in the rural areas of the śląskie province. The infrastructure is composed of many elements which are facilities of the area technical infrastructure, however due to the confined space, the article focuses only on four selected elements of the infrastructure , i.e. on water supply system, sewer system, gas grid and road network. The paper aims at presenting the typology of infrastructure in rural areas of the śląskie province. The analysis was conducted on the scale of communes. The article comprises exclusively the ninety six rural communes in the province (ruralurban communes were not considered because of unavailability of data on their exclusively rural part). The level of the selected four elements of the infrastructure was assessed on the basis of the statistical data as of the end of 2004 and 2005. The studies were conducted using taxonomic method of structure analysis, i.e. Ward’s method and center of gravity method. These methods allow for grouping the analyzed objects by different means in order to confront the correctness of the realized typologization. Owing to the applied methods and basing on their similarities concerning the structure of infrastructural facilities, groups of ...