5.42 The countryside also performs an important role in providing a setting for the plan area's settlements. Maintaining the individual identities of communities is an important priority for the Council. The most obvious way of achieving this is keeping them physically separate from each other and areas outside of the plan area e.g. Emsworth to the west and the Coastal West Sussex Urban Belt to the east. Development over recent years has tended to cause some merging of settlements. The Council considers that designating areas between settlements as countryside gaps to be kept free of urbanising development may be an appropriate way of seeking to prevent further loss of local identity. A study of the potential for introduction of gaps between various settlements across the plan area is currently underway. Should the results of this study support the case for introducing such gaps, then this provision will be included within the next iteration of this Local Plan Review.