Human Settlements and Settlement Patterns
What this domain tests
Human Settlements and Settlement Patterns asks you to classify settlements, read their layout, explain site and situation, and apply urban models. Map-based and photo-free questions often describe a layout in words.
Core rules
- A settlement is a cluster of dwellings where people live and work. Rural settlements are tied closely to primary activities; urban settlements have higher density and non-agricultural functions.
- Site is the local physical setting: water supply, relief, defence, fertile land, building material. Situation is the settlement's relation to the wider region: route junction, river crossing, coast, resource frontier.
- Rural patterns: compact or nucleated, dispersed, linear, rectangular, circular, radial, star and cross-shaped. Water scarcity, defence and kinship can produce compact villages; scattered farmland can produce dispersed settlement.
- Urban models: Burgess's concentric zones; Hoyt's sectors; Harris and Ullman's multiple nuclei. Christaller's central place theory uses hexagonal complementary areas, threshold and range.
- Urban hierarchy: rank-size rule and primate city. In India, a census town must have 5,000 population, density of 400 per sq km and 75% of male main workers in non-agricultural work.
Worked example
A village lies where a bridge crosses a river and two roads meet. Its site advantage is the crossing and water; its situation advantage is the route junction. Houses string along the road because the floodplain limits building, producing a linear pattern. The reasoning separates local physical factors from regional connectivity.
Traps
Do not use site and situation interchangeably. Pattern is not the same as shape or function. Urbanisation means a rising share of urban population; urban growth is an absolute increase. A census town is not a statutory town.