SETTLEMENTS

SETTLEMENTS

1. Definition: Place where people live from a single house to a mega city

2. FUNCTION: The reason a settlement was developed or built can be thought of as its function. For example, the settlement of Southampton is a port.

3. TEMPORARY OR PERMANENT e.g. gyspy camp is temporary but can become permannt.

4. SITE: The piece of land upon which a settlement is built is the settlement site/

   • Why some sites: e.g. flat land, near water, beautiful surroundings, employment opportunities

5. SITUATION: The situation of a settlement is its position in relation to the surrounding human and physical features, many of which will have an impact on the settlement's type, size and function

   • Wet point sites - these have a good water supply. Many settlements grew around wet point sites, eg villages in the South Downs.
   • Dry point sites - these are away from the risk of flooding, eg Ely in Cambridgeshire.
   • Defensive sites - often found on higher ground so that in the past enemies could be seen from a distance, eg Corfe Castle, Dorset, or in the loop of a meander, eg Durham
   • Aspect - settlements are often found on the sunny side of a deep valley. This is common in settlements in the Alps.
   • Shelter - from cold prevailing winds and rain.
   • Gap towns - Lincoln is found in a gap between two areas of higher ground.
   • Resources - important for industry, eg villages such as Aberfan in the Welsh valleys is close to coal reserves.
   • Bridging point - settlements with 'ford' in their name often grew around a fording point or bridging point, eg Watford is found on the River Colne.
   • Trading centres - often settlements grow where natural route ways and rivers meet, which helps the development of roads, railways and canals.

6. HIERARCHY: If we group and classify a number of settlements according to their size and shape, the result is settlement hierarchy.

   • As you move up the hierarchy, the size of the settlement and the distance between similar sized settlements increases. As you can see from the diagram above, there are more cities than conurbations, more towns than cities and more villages than towns.
   • The number of services that a settlement provides increases with settlement size. Small settlements will only provide low-order services such as a post offices, doctors and newsagents. Large towns, cities and conurbations will provide low and high-order services such as leisure centres, chain stores and hospitals.
   • Larger settlements and conurbations have a much larger sphere of influence than smaller ones. This means they attract people from a wider area because of the facilities they offer. Cities such as London have a global sphere of influence, whereas a small hamlet or village may only have a sphere of influence of a couple of kilometres.
   • Services such as department stores selling high order goods have a higher threshold than those selling low order goods such as newsagents. This means they need a higher number of people to support them and make them profitable, therefore they will only be found in larger settlements. It also means that there are fewer big department stores than small newsagents. The range of a service or product is the maximum distance people are prepared to travel to purchase it. The range of a newspaper is much lower than an item of furniture for example

Imagens e arquivos do mapa