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Most likely referring to a town, in geography, statistics and archaeology, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community of people living in a particular place. The complexity of a settlement can range from a minuscule number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. Settlements include hamlets, villages, towns and cities. A settlement may have known historical properties such as the date or era in which it was first settled, or first settled by particular people. The process of settlement involves human migration.
In the field of geospatial predictive modeling, settlements are "a city, town, village or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work". [1]
A settlement conventionally includes its constructed facilities such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woodlands, wind and water mills, manor houses, moats and churches. [2]
An unincorporated area is a related designation used in the United States.
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The earliest geographical evidence of a human settlement was Jebel Irhoud, where early modern human remains of eight individuals date back to the Middle Paleolithic around 300,000 years ago.
The oldest remains that have been found of constructed dwellings are remains of huts that were made of mud and branches around 17,000 BC at the Ohalo site (now underwater) near the edge of the Sea of Galilee. The Natufians built houses, also in the Levant, around 10,000 BC. Remains of settlements such as villages become much more common after the invention of agriculture, The oldest of them is Jarmo, located in Iraq.
Landscape history studies the form (morphology) of settlements – for example whether they are dispersed or nucleated. Urban morphology can thus be considered a special type of cultural-historical landscape studies. Settlements can be ordered by size, centrality or other factors to define a settlement hierarchy. A settlement hierarchy can be used for classifying settlement all over the world, although a settlement called a "town" in one country might be a "village" in other countries; or a "large town" in some countries might be a "city" in others.
Geoscience Australia defines a populated place as "a named settlement with a population of 200 or more persons". [3]
The Committee for Geographical Names in Australasia used the term localities for rural areas, while the Australian Bureau of Statistics uses the term "urban centres/localities" for urban areas.[ citation needed ]
The Agency for Statistics in Bosnia and Herzegovina uses the term "populated place" /"settled place" for rural (or urban as an administrative center of some Municipality/City), and "Municipality" and "City" for urban areas.
The Bulgarian Government publishes a National Register of Populated places (NRPP).
The Canadian government uses the term "populated place" in the Atlas of Canada , but does not define it. [4] Statistics Canada uses the term localities for historically named locations.
The Croatian Bureau of Statistics records population in units called settlements (naselja).
The Census Commission of India has a special definition of census towns.
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) of the Republic of Ireland has had a special definition of census towns. From the 2022 census of Ireland, the CSO introduced an urban geography unit called "Built Up Areas" (BUAs). [5]
The Pakistan Bureau of Statistics records population in units of settlements called Tehsil – an administrative unit derived from the Mughal era.
There are various types of inhabited localities in Russia.
Statistics Sweden uses the term localities (tätort) for various densely populated places. The common English-language translation is urban areas.
The UK Department for Communities and Local Government uses the term "urban settlement" to denote an urban area when analysing census information. [6] The Registrar General for Scotland defines settlements as groups of one or more contiguous localities, which are determined according to population density and postcode areas. The Scottish settlements are used as one of several factors defining urban areas. [7]
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has a Geographic Names Information System that defines three classes of human settlement:
Populated places may be specifically defined in the context of censuses and be different from general-purpose administrative entities, such as "place" as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau or census-designated places.
In the field of geospatial predictive modeling, a settlement is "a city, town, village, or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work". [1]
The Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) framework produces global spatial information about the human presence on the planet over time. This in the form of built up maps, population density maps and settlement maps. This information is generated with evidence-based analytics and knowledge using new spatial data mining technologies. The framework uses heterogeneous data including global archives of fine-scale satellite imagery, census data, and volunteered geographic information. The data is processed fully automatically and generates analytics and knowledge reporting objectively and systematically about the presence of population and built-up infrastructures. The GHSL operates in an open and free data and methods access policy (open input, open method, open output).
The term "Abandoned populated places" is a Feature Designation Name in databases sourced by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [10] and GeoNames. [11]
Sometimes the structures are still easily accessible, such as in a ghost town, and these may become tourist attractions. Some places that have the appearance of a ghost town, however, may still be defined as populated places by government entities.[ citation needed ]
A town may become a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it has failed, because of a government action, such as the building of a dam that floods the town, or because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods, uncontrolled lawlessness, or war. The term is sometimes used to refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods that are still populated, but significantly less so than in years past.[ citation needed ]
A town is a type of 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.
A metropolitan area or metro is a region consisting of a densely populated urban agglomeration and its surrounding territories which share industries, commercial areas, transport network, infrastructures and housing. A metropolitan area usually comprises multiple principal cities, jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, boroughs, cities, towns, exurbs, suburbs, counties, districts and even states and nations in areas like the eurodistricts. As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions.
A census tract, census area, census district or meshblock is a geographic region defined for the purpose of taking a census. Sometimes these coincide with the limits of cities, towns or other administrative areas and several tracts commonly exist within a county. In unincorporated areas of the United States these are often arbitrary, except for coinciding with political lines.
A census-designated place (CDP) is a concentration of population defined by the United States Census Bureau for statistical purposes only.
A hamlet is a human settlement that is smaller than a town or village. This is often simply an informal description of a smaller settlement or possibly a subdivision or satellite entity to a larger settlement. Sometimes a hamlet is defined for official or administrative purposes.
A geocode is a code that represents a geographic entity. It is a unique identifier of the entity, to distinguish it from others in a finite set of geographic entities. In general the geocode is a human-readable and short identifier.
An urban area is a human settlement with a high population density and an infrastructure of built environment. This is the core of a metropolitan statistical area in the United States, if it contains a population of more than 50,000.
An urban area or tätort in Sweden has a minimum of 200 inhabitants and may be a city, town or larger village. It is a purely statistical concept, not defined by any municipal or county boundaries. Larger urban areas synonymous with cities or towns for statistical purposes have a minimum of 10,000 inhabitants. The same statistical definition is also used for urban areas in the other Nordic countries.
Greater Glasgow is an urban settlement in Scotland consisting of all localities which are physically attached to the city of Glasgow, forming with it a single contiguous urban area. It does not relate to municipal government boundaries, and its territorial extent is defined by National Records of Scotland, which determines settlements in Scotland for census and statistical purposes. Greater Glasgow had a population of 1,199,629 at the time of the 2001 UK Census making it the largest urban area in Scotland and the fifth-largest in the United Kingdom. However, the population estimate for the Greater Glasgow 'settlement' in mid-2016 was 985,290—the reduced figure explained by the removal of the Motherwell & Wishaw (124,790), Coatbridge & Airdrie (91,020), and Hamilton (83,730) settlement areas east of the city due to small gaps between the populated postcodes. The 'new towns' of Cumbernauld and East Kilbride (75,120) were never included in these figures despite their close ties to Glasgow due to having a clear geographical separation from the city. In the 2020 figures, the Greater Glasgow population had risen to just over 1 million.
Spatial analysis is any of the formal techniques which studies entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques using different analytic approaches, especially spatial statistics. It may be applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, or to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is geospatial analysis, the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data. It may also be applied to genomics, as in transcriptomics data.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is an Australian Government agency that collects and analyses statistics on economic, population, environmental, and social issues to advise the Australian Government.
The United States Census Bureau defines a place as a concentration of population which has a name, is locally recognized, and is not part of any other place. A place typically has a residential nucleus and a closely spaced street pattern, and it frequently includes commercial property and other urban land uses. A place may be an incorporated place or it may be a census-designated place (CDP). Incorporated places are defined by the laws of the states in which they are contained. The Census Bureau delineates CDPs. A small settlement in the open countryside or the densely settled fringe of a large city may not be a place as defined by the Census Bureau. As of the 1990 census, 26% of the people in the United States lived outside of places.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to geography:
In Ukraine, the term "populated place" refers to a structured component of the human settlement system, representing a stationary community within a territorially cohesive and compact area characterized by a significant concentration of population. Its defining attribute is the continuous presence of human inhabitants. Populated places in Ukraine are classified into two primary categories: urban and rural. Urban populated places are cities, whereas rural areas include villages and rural settlements. According to data from the 2001 Ukrainian Census, there are 1,344 urban and 28,621 rural populated places in Ukraine.
In urban planning, a historic core city or central city is the municipality with the largest 1940 population in the present metropolitan area. This term was retired by the US census bureau and replaced by the term principal city, which can include historic core cities and post-WWII cities. Metropolitan areas were no longer considered monocentric, but polycentric due to suburbanization of employment. A historic core city is not to be confused with the core of a metropolitan area which is defined as an urban area with a population of over 50,000 by the US census bureau.