Transcript A revision guide for GCSE Geography AEB 2007 To advance slide click here Settlement – the place where people live Settlement is closely linked with During this section you.

A revision guide for GCSE
Geography
AEB 2007
To advance
slide click
here
Settlement – the place where
people live
Settlement is closely linked with
During this section you will see where people live
population.
Often exam questions will
How the size and shape of a settlement can vary
combine elements of the two
How the site is chosen together.
to build a settlement
And how they can be classified in terms of size or
function
We will also look at how settlements
may change with time.
How to use this Settlement
Revision Lesson
• Click on the topic of your choice on the
following slide
• Read through the animated section to the
end
• Then choose either to return to the main
menu and choose another topic, or exit
and try a quiz.
• Finally look at the example GCSE
questions on Settlement and have a go at
being an examiner!
Settlement
site and
situation
Click on the
settlement topic
of your choice
Settlement
Hierarchy
and
Function
Growth
and decline
of cities
Settlement
Land Use
Settlement Site and Situation
• Key words and definitions
Settlement site – The place a settlement is located
Settlement situation – The settlements location in
relation to its surroundings
Rural – Countryside
Urban – Built up area
The location of settlements involves the study of both site
and situation of different settlement types.
There are two types of settlement:Rural (e.g. a village)
And Urban (e.g a town or city).
Rural settlements tend to be smaller in size with a smaller population.
Urban settlements tend to have higher population densities.
Historically settlement locations were
chosen because they offered either good
access to raw materials or were easy to
defend.
Let us look at some of these typical settlement sites.
There were those that were easier to defend:
A dry point site
(higher land in a marshy area)
Inside a river meander
(could act like a natural moat)
A hilltop site
(gave a good viewpoint to spot possible attackers)
Then there were those sites that were positioned to take
advantage of passing trade….
A crossroads site
A ford or bridging point
A gap site.
(This site might have also been chosen so
that the hills could provide shelter).
Another example of a settlement
site is the spring line settlement.
In limestone areas settlements were often located on the spring
line so they had easy access to a water supply.
Other settlements have grown up around local supplies of raw
materials such as coal or iron ore.
Today settlements in this country are not governed by these factors
but new settlements especially in LEDCs can still be found to
follow some of these patterns.
Original site factors can be grouped
as follows
•
•
•
•
To be near a water supply
To be safe from areas that flood
To be a good place to defend
To be near materials they could use for building,
food, or to make things
• To have good access to other places
• To have shelter from bad weather
• To have a supply of fuel for cooking and warmth.
An ideal site would have all these things, but very few do, so a
compromise would have to be made.
Good site for
wood for fuel,
weapons and
building
Warmer
south facing
aspect
Good soil
for farming
Wet sites – water
River /
Good defensive
site – good
views and hard
to attack
Spring
Stone and
trees for
building
Dry and
safe from
flooding
Good drier soils
Good grass for
animals
Bridging
point
Crossroads –
meeting point
The following table looks at factors that influence the location of
settlements
These may be social, historic, economic or political
Main factor
Description
UK example
Water supply
Streams, rivers, springs- used for washing
drinking cleaning and cooking
London
Defence
Easy to defend or giving a good view
Edinburgh
Route ways
Where 2 rivers valleys or road meet
Oxford
Distance
From other settlements. Commuter towns
Bedford
Resources
Nearby supplies of coal iron salt etc.
Wigan
Relief
Good shelter. Reduced risk of flooding.
Aspect (south facing)
Ely
Ports
Fishing grounds, sheltered inlets
Portsmouth
Market centres
Servicing the surrounding area
Dartford
Resorts
Holiday destinations
Blackpool
Educational centres
University towns
Cambridge
Religious centres
Cathedral cities
Canterbury
Railway towns
Major railways junctions
Crewe
Planned towns
New or expanded towns
Harlow
Manufacturing centres
Centres of industry
Coventry
• Although these site factors are less
important today you can often still find
evidence of what they might have been.
• A common type of GCSE question on this
topic is to use an OS map to look for likely
features that may have lead to the
development of a settlement at a certain
site. – The next page gives you some
possible points you could look for…
Bridging Point
(valley narrows
here)
Good water
supply from
river Eden
Valley
sides to
give
shelter
from
weather
Good defensive
site – on mound
with rivers on 2
sides
Meeting
place of
several
routes
Not built on
flood plain
(above 10m
contour)
Sketch map to show how the site of
Carlisle related to both physical and
human features in the area.
Settlement patterns over an area
Settlement patterns are usually classified as either
Dispersed
Buildings spread out –
common in sparsely
populated areas such as
pastoral farming
regions.
Nucleated
Here the buildings are
clustered together
around a central point.
Or, linear
The buildings are
arranged in a line.
Often following the
line of a road or
river along a
valley.
When describing a settlement you need to
remember these key points..
• A settlement can be permanent or temporary
• The site of the settlement would have been
chosen by the settlers who would have been
looking for one or more important features
• The piece of land the settlement is built on is the
settlement site
• The situation of a settlement is its position in
relation to the human and physical features
around it.
• Try to refer to the relief of the land, the
vegetation and any important physical features
eg. a river as these may give you clues as to
what the original site factors might have been.
That completes this section on
Settlement site and situation
Click this box to return to the main
menu to choose another topic
Click here to try a short test
on what you have just learnt
Click here to exit the program. Then why not
have a look at the sample GCSE questions on
Settlement.
Settlement Hierarchy and Function
Here are some useful definitions
• Sphere of influence – The region that a
settlement can attract people from
• Function – The type of services offered by a
settlement
• High order – Expensive and less frequently
used goods and services
• Low order – Less expensive but more
frequently used goods and services
• Threshold population – The number of people
needed to support a particular function
Settlements can be ranked in order of their
size and number. This is called a settlement
hierarchy.
City
Town
Village
Hamlet
These different settlements will differ in
terms of size population and function.
Listing these in order of size:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Capital city
Major city
City
Town
Village
Hamlet
These
settlements
increase in size,
population,
range of
functions and
sphere of
influence
However they will decrease in number
•
•
•
•
•
•
Capital city
Major city
City
Town
Village
Hamlet
There are
fewer cities
than towns.
There are
fewer towns
than villages
and so on.
Any urban region will have a city surrounded by
several smaller towns and many smaller villages
Settlement Function
• The term function describes what a
settlement originally did or still does. It
can be the purpose that the settlement
was built for, but also relates to any later
development and refers to its main activity.
• Look at the following diagram to see
examples of this.
Centres of
Religious
centres
administration
Defensive
Residential
or commuter
towns
Tourist
resort
Route centre
Market
towns
Educational
Port
Commercial
centres
Mining
Industrial
Higher up the hierarchy , the greater the range and number of services they have to
offer. See the table below to illustrate this:
Village
Town
City
Primary school
YES
YES
YES
Chemist
YES
YES
YES
Newsagent
YES
YES
YES
Bus service
YES
YES
YES
Pub
YES
YES
YES
Post office
YES
YES
YES
Baker
YES
YES
YES
Grocer
YES
YES
YES
Bank
YES
YES
Florist
YES
YES
Small supermarket
YES
YES
Secondary School
YES
YES
Butcher
YES
YES
Clothes shop
YES
YES
Building society
YES
Hospital
YES
Superstores
YES
Dry cleaners
YES
Jewellers
YES
Railway
YES
College
YES
Sports centre
YES
Services
Hamlets often have no services except a
phone box or post box.
A village has a limited range of essential
low order services
Large towns and cities have a wide range
of high order services.
People usually have to travel further to
use high order services.
Central Place Theory
The central Place theory sees settlements as places to which people
travel to buy something. They travel to a central place from a market
area or sphere of influence.
People will only travel a short distance for low order goods that they
uses regularly e.g. bread and milk. So that sphere of influence is small.
However for high order goods (comparison expensive goods like
furniture, clothes etc) they will travel further from a larger sphere of
influence.
Not all settlements will fit into these
models and patterns. However they
are a good generalisation and will
hold for most countries. However, as
always there will be exceptions e.g.
there will be villages that are larger
and offer more services than some
towns but their population size would
still suggest that they are a village.
As settlements do grow and develop
over time they may move up the
hierarchy e.g. a village becomes a
town.
That completes this section on
settlement hierarchy and function
Click this box to return to the main
menu to choose another topic
Click here to try a short test
on what you have just learnt
Click here to exit the program. Then why not
have a look at the sample GCSE questions on
Settlement.
Growth and Decline of cities
Important terms
• Urbanisation – process of increasing
proportion of the population becoming
town or city dwellers
• Deurbanisation – The movement of
people out of cities to rural areas
• Reurbanisation – Regrowth of cities often
due to urban renewal
• Greenbelt – area around cities designed
to stop urban sprawl
Urbanisation
• This is the increase in the proportion of
people living in towns or cities compared
to rural areas.
• As a country becomes more industrial
people move to towns and cities to look for
work.
• MEDCs tend to have high levels of
urbanisation.
Urbanisation is taking place on a
global scale
100 years ago only
about 10% of the
world’s population
lived in urban areas.
Today this has risen
to about 47% and is
still rising.
Millionaire cities
A millionaire city is one with a population of over
one million people.
There are over 280 millionaire cities in the world,
most of these are in LEDCs.
Some cities are ‘mega-cities’ – have over ten
million inhabitants e.g. Mexico City, Tokyo
Causes of urbanisation
• Large scale rural to urban migration – often in
search of a better life (however this is often not
the case)
• Population increase – tends to be faster in
urban areas
Problems of urbanisation
• Spontaneous settlements
(shanty towns) – found in
many LEDC cities. Badly built
without basic amenities.
• Overcrowding  pressure on
services, health care, water,
waste disposal etc.
• Some LEDCs are trying to
solve these problems with self
help schemes.
Other problems
• Too much traffic
• Unemployment
• Pollution – land, water
and noise
Urbanisation can lead to Urban
Sprawl
• If a city is allowed to grow it takes up more
and more of the surrounding area.
• Green belts are put in place to stop this.
• A conurbation is formed if a city grows so
much it swallows up towns into one large
urban area.
Deurbanisation (or counter
urbanisation)
• Caused when people decide to move back out
from the urban to the rural environment
because of these problems.
Deurbanisation is possible
because:
• Growth and better transport and
communications (don’t have to live where
you work)
• Government policies – encourage such a
move
• People with more money to own a second
home
Counter urbanisation can have an effect on
the villages people move to…
Re-urbanisation
• Cities can be regenerated to encourage people to
move back.
• Often encourage the renewal of brownfield sites
(old derelict land).
Example of Regeneration - London
Docklands
• Regeneration of derelict land in London
• Built new roads, the Dockland Light
railway and London City airport
• New offices e.g. Canary Wharf
• Created many new jobs
• Built new homes and shops
• Planted over 100,000 trees.
That completes this section on the
growth and decline of cities
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menu to choose another topic
Click here to try a short test
on what you have just learnt
Click here to exit the program. Then why not
have a look at the sample GCSE questions on
Settlement.
Settlement Land Use
Land Use is exactly what it says – what land is used
for, like housing or factories.
We tend to use models to help explain the complex
patterns of land use in settlements.
There are two main models of land use that apply to MEDCs.
Urban Land Use in MEDCs –
Burgess Model – concentric zone
model
This is the best known land use model.
Let’s see how it is built up…..
Industrial area grown up
around the original centre
of the town (inner city
zone)
Outer suburbs –
largest housing
often detached.
Cheap housing built to
provide homes for the
workers in the inner city
factories. Often terraced
housing.
Central zone – oldest
part, now contains
main shops, banks
and offices. Called
the central Business
District or CBD for
short.
So the oldest part of
the city is the centre
and the newest
parts are on the
edge
Inner suburbs – built
as people move out
from the inner city –
larger houses often
semi-detached.
Urban Land Use in MEDCs Hoyt Model – sector model
Similar to the Burgess models but with obvious
differences. Let’s see why…..
This expands the concentric zone
model to take into account industrial
development along a main routeway
into and out of a city.
The inner city housing (yellow) will still
surround this (red) zone.
The medium quality housing – inner
suburbs (pink) will fill in the gap with
the high quality housing stretching
across these zones.
It is important to remember that these models are
generalisations and real places are all different. In recent years
out- of-town shopping centres have begun to change land use
patterns. New housing is now often built on brownfield sites
(cleared derelict land) instead of the settlement’s edges.
Land use in the Central Business
District
Competition for land makes land prices high in the
CBD. The CBD contains the main retail and
commercial premises, major public buildings and
administrative headquarters. Shops selling high
order goods and high rise buildings are here, but
few people live here. As competition for land is
highest here land prices are high. This leads to
many high-rise buildings where each piece of
land can be used several times.
Urban Land Use in LEDC cities
This looks similar to the MEDC models in shape.
However the positioning of the various zones is very
different.
Let us compare the LEDC and MEDC models
CBD
Industrial zone
Low quality housing
Improved housing
LEDC
Highest quality
housing
Note the highest quality housing in an MEDC is on the
outside of the city whereas it is next to the CBD in an
LEDC.
The poorest housing in an LEDC is on the outside
(Often shanty towns), but is near the centre in MEDCs
MEDC
The Doughnut effect
The doughnut effect occurs when the
commercial activity of a city becomes
concentrated around the outskirts.
Out-of-town shopping centres have
become more common, so shops in
the CBD have had problems attracting
customers. Chain stores have
increasingly located in new shopping
malls leading to the high street stores
closing down.
This leaves a ‘hollow’ or empty area in
the middle of the city. This effect was
first seen in the USA but is becoming
more common in British cities.
Hollow
centre
Movement of
economic activity
That completes this section on
Settlement Land Use
Click this box to return to the main
menu to choose another topic
Click here to try a short test
on what you have just learnt
Click here to exit the program. Then why not
have a look at the sample GCSE questions on
Settlement.
Thank you for using this revision
tool to help with your studies of
Settlement.
Goodbye
I hope you have found it useful.