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 ...

that investigates the 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 security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoni ...

' 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 o ...

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 ...

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

Classification

Traditionally, it belongs to cultural geography and is divided into the geography of urban settlements ( cities 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). 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 country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...

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 List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...

, 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 King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pr ...

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 such as counter urbanization, peri-urbanisation or postsuburbanisation the existing dichotomy between the urban and the rural is losing importance, especially in industrialized countries and newly industrialized countries. This point of view is already represented by many planning strategies such as the unified settlement planning. Hence, an integrative geography of settlements that considers the urban and the rural settlements as a continuum 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 a ...

s, processes 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) * Interaction ...

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