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Ekistics |
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A settlement hierarchy is a way of arranging settlements into a hierarchy based upon their size. The term is used by landscape historians and in the National Curriculum [1] for England. The term is also used in the planning system for the UK and for some other countries such as Ireland, India, and Switzerland. The term was used without comment by the geographer Brian Roberts in 1972. [2]
In Europe, centuries-old settlements were surrounded by farmland and tended not to be wider than 30 minutes' walk from one end to the other, with wealthier people monopolising the "town centre", and poorer people living on the town's outskirts or nearby countryside (the "sphere of influence"). With the advent of decentralization technologies (e.g., bicycles, trains, cars, etc.), American settlements reversed this trend before reaching their saturation point, with vast farmlands managed by homesteads located dozens of miles away from the nearest settlement; lower-income communities occupied the "centre" as the middle-income and upper-income migrated into suburbia. This created a phenomenon known as urban decay.
A settlement's population size, its geographic area, its status,[ clarification needed ] and the availability of services can all affect this hierarchy. Position in a settlement hierarchy can also depend on the sphere of influence. This is how far people will travel to use the services in the settlement: if people travel further the town becomes more important and ranks higher in the settlement hierarchy.
A collection of the most widely accepted units of measuring a settlement's size is as follows: [3] [4]
Isolated Dwelling < Hamlet < Village < Small Town < Large Town < City < Conurbation [5]
Using the title of a settlement can be misleading in the absence of any widely accepted definition. For example, city status in the United Kingdom historically arose from its place in the ecclesiastic hierarchy. (In modern times, city status is awarded for secular reasons but without reference to size.) Thus, some cathedral cities in England (e.g., Ely, Cambridgeshire) have a much smaller populations than some towns (e.g., Luton). In some parts of the United States, the distinction between town and city is a matter of a decision by local government to incorporate. In addition, there is no agreement as to the number of levels in the hierarchy or what they should be called. Many terms used to describe settlements (e.g., village) have no legal definition, or may have contradictory legal definitions in different jurisdictions.
Position in an accepted settlement hierarchy can imply status, [6] which in turn reinforces the position of the settlement in the hierarchy. Status can derive from being the residence of a King or high-ranking member of the nobility or from being the location of a major religious establishment. A formal hierarchy of settlements, known as a multiple estate, appears to have been common in 10th-century England. [7] The centre of an estate (often called a "caput") could be supported by subsidiary settlements, which were sometimes given specialised roles. For example, a Saxon royal estate might be supported by settlements specialising in the production of cheese or barley or maintaining flocks of sheep. [8]
The following settlement hierarchy is adapted from the work of Konstantinos Apostolos Doxiadis for the actual current world situation as of 2010, as opposed to Doxiadis' idealized settlement hierarchy for the year 2100 that he outlined in his 1968 book Ekistics . As an example population criteria for each category of settlement might be different depending on context.
In this example, a roadhouse is at the lowest level while the ecumenopolis is at the top with the greatest number of residents: [9]
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2022) |
At this density, the settlement's population, spheres of influence, and gross domestic product tends to exceed that of most countries with lesser density. The need for administrative divisions, public transportation, public infrastructure and other government public services is critically essential for the sustainable growth and continued prosperity of its citizens. High income jobs and non-essential luxury services are abundant (e.g. car dealerships, brain surgery centers, airports, financing, computer stores, coffee shops, etc.) as these cannot be sustained by lesser density. Medium income exceeds national average. The first city in recorded history to reach a population of one million residents was Ancient Rome in 133 B.C. During the Second Industrial Revolution, London, England reached the mark in 1810 and New York City, United States made it in 1875.
The main type at this level is the
Larger types at this level would be:
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2022) |
At this density, there is ready access to more specialized advanced services (e.g. doctors, mechanics, colleges, etc.) due to economies of scale and economies of agglomeration.
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2022) |
At this density, there is ready access to less specialized services but residents may need to travel to a larger city in some circumstances.
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2022) |
Less than one hundred thousand residents. Common "city features" and third place services such as clinics, pharmacy, bank, supermarket, police station, fire station, schools, residential neighborhoods, restaurant, etc. become less available as size reduces. Density may be sufficient to support local commercial areas which may include a "Main Street" or a shopping mall.
This section possibly contains original research .(May 2022) |
Less than one thousand residents. At this number, settlements are too small or scattered to be considered "urban", and services within these settlements (if any) are generally limited to bare essentials: e.g., church, grocery store, post office, etc. Throughout most of human history, very few settlements could support a population greater than 150 people.[ citation needed ]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (June 2019) |
The position of a settlement in the hierarchy is intended to inform decisions about new developments, such as housing. Rather than define the hierarchy by population, an alternative way to construct the hierarchy is based on the services that are available within each settlement. Settlements are described as "level 1", "level 2", etc. rather than using terms such as village or town. [12] The Government planning statement (PPS3) does not specifically mention "settlement hierarchies", but talks about the availability of services to small rural settlements. The term is used a number of times in the guidance for preparing evidence for planning decisions; a settlement hierarchy starts with an isolated dwelling, then hamlet, then village, town, city then a conurbation.
The German planning system is based on the Central Place Theory developed by Walter Christaller in the 1930s and first applied in the Nazi Era, especially in Poland. Every settlement is categorized by function: highly central cities Oberzentrum (e.g. Hamburg, with speciality clinics for tropical diseases), middle central cities Mittelzentrum (for periodic functions[ clarification needed ] e.g. Homburg (Saar) with major schools (starting at 5th grade)) and basic central towns Grundzentrum /Unterzentrum (e.g. Illingen with basic doctors[ clarification needed ] and Supermarket). The number of inhabitants is less important: thus a city such as Kaiserslautern (100,000 people) can be a highly specialized city, because it is a centre for the surrounding rural area.
It[ clarification needed ] is used at the federal level for the regional planning system of states and planning regions for the "State Development Programmes" (Landesentwicklungsprogramm [de]) and the "Regional Spatial Structure Plans" (Regionaler Raumordnungsplan [de]). These are political plans to achieve goals such as equivalent living standards (Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse [de]) in rural and urban areas in all of Germany, east and west.
A suburb is an area within a metropolitan area which is predominantly residential and within commuting distance of a large city. Suburbs can have their own political or legal jurisdiction, especially in the United States, but this is not always the case, especially in the United Kingdom, where most suburbs are located within the administrative boundaries of cities. In most English-speaking countries, suburban areas are defined in contrast to central city or inner city areas, but in Australian English and South African English, suburb has become largely synonymous with what is called a "neighborhood" in the U.S. Due in part to historical trends such as white flight, some suburbs in the United States have a higher population and higher incomes than their nearby inner cities.
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.
The municipalities represent the local level of administration in Finland and act as the fundamental, self-governing administrative units of the country. The entire country is incorporated into municipalities and legally, all municipalities are equal, although certain municipalities are called cities or towns. Municipalities have the right to levy a flat percentual income tax, which is between 16 and 22 percent, and they provide two thirds of public services. Municipalities control many community services, such as schools, health care and the water supply, and local streets. They do not maintain highways, set laws or keep police forces, which are responsibilities of the central government.
A conurbation is a region comprising a number of metropolises, cities, large towns, and other urban areas which, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area. In most cases, a conurbation is a polycentric urbanised area in which transportation has developed to link areas. They create a single urban labour market or travel to work area.
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.
Constantinos A. Doxiadis, often cited as C. A. Doxiadis, was a Greek architect and urban planner. During the 1960s, he was the lead architect and planner of Islamabad, which was to serve as the new capital city of Pakistan. He was later known as the father of ekistics, which concerns the multi-aspect science of human settlements.
An urban area, built-up area or urban agglomeration 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.
Central place theory is an urban geographical theory that seeks to explain the number, size and range of market services in a commercial system or human settlements in a residential system. It was introduced in 1933 to explain the spatial distribution of cities across the landscape. The theory was first analyzed by German geographer Walter Christaller, who asserted that settlements simply functioned as 'central places' providing economic services to surrounding areas. Christaller explained that a large number of small settlements will be situated relatively close to one another for efficiency, and because people don't want to travel far for everyday needs, like getting bread from a bakery. But people would travel further for more expensive and infrequent purchases or specialized goods and services which would be located in larger settlements that are farther apart.
Ecumenopolis is the hypothetical concept of a planetwide city.
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.
Ekistics is the science of human settlements including regional, city, community planning and dwelling design. Its major incentive was the emergence of increasingly large and complex conurbations, tending even to a worldwide city. The study involves every kind of human settlement, with particular attention to geography, ecology, human psychology, anthropology, culture, politics, and occasionally aesthetics.
The street hierarchy is an urban planning technique for laying out road networks that exclude automobile through-traffic from developed areas. It is conceived as a hierarchy of roads that embeds the link importance of each road type in the network topology. Street hierarchy restricts or eliminates direct connections between certain types of links, for example residential streets and arterial roads, and allows connections between similar order streets or between street types that are separated by one level in the hierarchy. By contrast, in many regular, traditional grid plans, as laid out, higher order roads are connected by through streets of both lower order levels. An ordering of roads and their classification can include several levels and finer distinctions as, for example, major and minor arterials or collectors.
The Greater London Built-up Area, or Greater London Urban Area, is a conurbation in south-east England that constitutes the continuous urban sprawl of London, and includes surrounding adjacent urban towns as defined by the Office for National Statistics. It is the largest urban area in the United Kingdom with a population of 9,787,426 in 2011.
A megalopolis or a supercity, also called a megaregion, is a group of metropolitan areas which are perceived as a continuous urban area through common systems of transport, economy, resources, ecology, and so on. They are integrated enough that coordinating policy is valuable, although the constituent metropolises keep their individual identities. The megalopolis concept has become highly influential as it introduced a new, larger scale thinking about urban patterns and growth.
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.