Settlement geography is a branch of

human geography Human geography or anthropogeography is the branch of geography that studies spatial relationships between human communities, cultures, economies, and their interactions with the environment. It analyzes spatial interdependencies between social i ...

that investigates the

earth's surface Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface ...

's part

settled A settler is a person who has migrated to an area and established a permanent residence there, often to colonize the area. A settler who migrates to an area previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited may be described as a pioneer. Settle ...

by humans. According to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and international security, security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be ...

' Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements (1976), "human settlements means the totality of the human community – whether

city A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...

town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an ori ...

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...

– with all the social, material, organizational, spiritual and cultural elements that sustain it."

Classification

Traditionally, it belongs to

cultural geography Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography. Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study first ...

and is divided into the geography of

urban settlement An Urban settlement is a concentrated settlement that is part of an urban area. It is an area with high density of human-created structures. *Municipal urban settlement, a type of subdivision such as Cape town in Western Cape *Urban settlement, ...

s (

cities A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be def ...

and

s) and

rural settlement The definition of a rural settlement depends on the country, in some countries, a rural settlement is any settlement in the areas defined as rural by a governmental office, e.g., by the national census bureau. This may include even rural towns. ...

s (e.g.

s and

hamlets A hamlet is a human settlement that is smaller than a town or village. Its size relative to a parish can depend on the administration and region. A hamlet may be considered to be a smaller settlement or subdivision or satellite entity to a lar ...

). Thereby, settlements are mostly seen as elements of the cultural landscape that developed over time. Apart from

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

, the term is actually rarely used in English-speaking geography. One of the last English books on settlement geography was published by

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII of England, King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press A university press is an academic publishing hou ...

in the 1990s. However, it is a traditional and actual branch in many other countries (e.g., German ''Siedlungsgeographie'', French ''Geographie de l'habitat'', Italian ''Geografia insediativa'', Polish ''Geografia osadnictwa '').

Actuality

Due to processes of

urban sprawl Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growt ...

such as

counter urbanization Counterurbanization, or deurbanization, is a demographic and social process whereby people move from urban areas to rural areas. It is, like suburbanization, inversely related to urbanization. It first occurred as a reaction to inner-city depriva ...

peri-urbanisation Peri-urbanisation relates to the processes of scattered and dispersive urban growth that create hybrid landscapes of fragmented and mixed urban and rural characteristics. Origin The expression originates from the French word ' ("peri-urban" m ...

or postsuburbanisation the existing

dichotomy A dichotomy is a partition of a whole (or a set) into two parts (subsets). In other words, this couple of parts must be * jointly exhaustive: everything must belong to one part or the other, and * mutually exclusive: nothing can belong simulta ...

between the urban and the rural is losing importance, especially in industrialized countries and

newly industrialized countries The category of newly industrialized country (NIC), newly industrialized economy (NIE) or middle income country is a socioeconomic classification applied to several countries around the world by political scientists and economists. They represent ...

. This point of view is already represented by many planning strategies such as the

unified settlement planning Unified settlement planning (USP) is the component of regional planning where a unified approach is applied for a region's overall development. The USP approach is most often associated with urban planning practices in India. Overview Regions us ...

. Hence, an integrative geography of settlements that considers the urban and the rural settlements as a

continuum Continuum may refer to: * Continuum (measurement), theories or models that explain gradual transitions from one condition to another without abrupt changes Mathematics * Continuum (set theory), the real line or the corresponding cardinal number ...

is regaining the importance lost during the 20th century. Further it is used in prehistoric, historic and present-focusing geographic research.

Definitions

Referring to Stone (1960), settlement geography is With respect to Stone's definition, Jordan (1966) emphasizes that settlement geography not exclusively investigates the distributions, but even more the

structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

es and

interaction Interaction is action that occurs between two or more objects, with broad use in philosophy and the sciences. It may refer to: Science * Interaction hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition * Interaction (statistics) * Interactions o ...

s between settlements and its environment (such as soil, geomorphology, economy or society), which produce them.Jordan, T.G. 1966: On the nature of settlement geography. In: ''The Professional Geographer'', Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 26-28 More recently, however, In sum, settlement geography describes and explains the settlements'

location In geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ...

, substance, form and

, as well as the functions and processes that produced them over time (

Genesis Genesis may refer to: Bible * Book of Genesis, the first book of the biblical scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity, describing the creation of the Earth and of mankind * Genesis creation narrative, the first several chapters of the Book of ...

, from

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

γέννησις, "origin, birth" or historical development). As an

applied science Applied science is the use of the scientific method and knowledge obtained via conclusions from the method to attain practical goals. It includes a broad range of disciplines such as engineering and medicine. Applied science is often contrasted ...

, it projects future settlement development and contributes to the sustainable development of human-environmental systems.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Settlement geography Human geography Urban planning

Classification

Actuality

Definitions

See also

References