What is a settlement?

A settlement is a place where people live. Settlements can be as small as a single house in a remote rural area or as a large as a city. Some settlements have so many people living in them that they are known as megacities. Besides the people that live there a settlement includes all the buildings, roads, shops places of entertainment, factories, places of worship etc.

Some settlements also have a special use. This is known as function. This describes what the settlement does. When settlements first started to grow, most had one very distinct function however today most have more than one. For example the original function of Southampton and Liverpool, which are both coastal towns was as a port. Others grew as university centres with a reputation for educational services such as Oxford or Cambridge. Other cities such as Blackpool are resort towns and holiday centres popular with tourists. Other cities such as Telford grew purely as residential towns where the majority of residents live but work elsewhere. The function of a town may also change over time. Defensive towns surrounded by walls built to keep invaders out of the city no longer have this defensive function and probably become tourist resorts.

Classification of Settlement according to size

We usually divide settlements into two main types according to size. A rural settlement refers to smaller settlements surrounded by the countryside such as a village. They are small in size and have low housing and population densities. On the other hand an urban settlement refers to a large built up area with houses built close together.

Rural settlements can again be divided into two types on the basis of size, namely hamlet and a village. A hamlet is a very small settlement with just a group of houses. In a hamlet is generally occupied by no more than a 100 people and perhaps just a few services, if any. People are usually engaged in primary activities such as farming. Villages are larger and the population may be up to several hundreds of people. Here we find a number of basic services and several shops. People are engaged mainly in primary industries but also in craft and cottage industries, in schools. Post offices, pubs and markets.

Urban settlements on the other hand are divided into four types according to size and include small towns, large towns, cities and conurbations. Towns are urban settlements with several thousand people living in them. A small towns usually has up to 20,000 people while in a large town live up to 100,000 people. Houses are build close together and people mostly work in secondary and tertiary industries. Usually a town has large commercial and social facilities including chain stores and shopping arcades, cinemas, railway stations, hotels, schools, and a hospital. Cities are the major towns of a country with up to a million people. Besides having all the facilities and services of a large town they usually have also a cathedral, university and a major airport. A conurbation grows when two or more cities or towns join together to form one large urban area with a population of over 1 million.

The diagram below shows a settlement hierarchy based on population size. As you move up the hierarchy, the size of the settlement and the distance between similar sized settlements increases. So as the settlement size increases, the number of settlements decreases so there are many hamlets and villages but few conurbations. As you can see from the diagram above, there are more cities than conurbations, more towns than cities and more villages than towns.

Watch this short video clip which explains clearly a settlement hierarchy based on population size.

Now work out the worksheet entitled Classification of Industry Worksheet available in the resources section.