Settlement geography
Settlement geography is a branch of geography that investigates the earth's surface's part settled by humans.
Classification
Traditionally, it belongs to human geography and is divided into urban geography and the geography of rural settlements. Apart from India, 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 in the 90s. [1] 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 periurbanisation or postsuburbanisation the existing dichotomy between the urban and the rural is losing importance, especially in industrialized countries and newly industrialized countries. 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.
Definitions
Referring to Stone (1965), settlement geography is
the description and analysis of the distribution of buildings by which people attach themselves to the land. Further, that the geography of settling designate the action of erecting buildings in order to occupy an area temporarily or permanently. It should be understood that buildings are one tangible expression of man-land relationships and that specification of this focus assumes study may be at any scale from quite general to most specific; there is no restriction to large-scale study of individual building plans or architectural details. Buildings are simply one representation of the process of people living in an area they are a mappable division of the landscape to which attention needs direction.[2]
With respect to the latter definition Jordan (1966) emphasizes, that settlement geography not exclusively investigates the distributions, but even more the structures, processes and interactions between settlements and its environment (such as soil, geomorphology, economy or society), which produce them. [3]
See also
References
- ^ Hornby W.F. and M. Jones 1991: An Introduction to Settlement Geography. Cambridge, 151 pp.
- ^ Stone, K.H. 1965: The Development of a Focus for the Geography of Settlement. In: Economic Geography, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 346-355
- ^ Jordan, T.G. 1966: On the nature of settlement geography. In: The Professional Geographer, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 26-28
Sub-fields of and approaches to human geography | ||
|---|---|---|
| Sub-fields |  | |
| Approaches | ||
