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The “Urban Functions in Rural Development”-UFRD, was introduced by Dennis Rondinelli as an approach to add the spatial and location dimensions to current regional planning practices. One
of the principles of the UFRD is to apply simple methods and techniques in the analysis part of this approach. In this article methods proposed for analyzing settlements system and also clustering the settlements are evaluated through a case study of rural settlements in the Golestan Province. The study shows that the manual scalogram , because of its serious limitations in considering the qualitative as well quantitative aspects of functions present in settlements and also the rich data available in the area is not an appropriate method to follow. The centrality index method was applied and yielded a very satisfactory result. For hierarchical clustering of the settlements, UFRD does not propose a specific method, but in several projects the clustering method proposed by John Marshall has been applied. The study used the techniques proposed by John Marshall, but only in one out of six Townships it yielded satisfactory result. The method proposed by Richard Preston was also tried. Although this method yielded satisfactory results, but has serious limitations. For hierarchical clustering of settlements, the study proposes a simple method, using column chart to cluster settlements based on their centrality index. The proposed method is much simpler to undertake and does not have the limitations of the Preston method.