Rural and urban settlements notes

Towns do not all play the same role. An urban hierarchy ranks urban places from many small low-order centres to a few large high-order centres. Central place theory, developed by Walter Christaller…

A settlement is a place where people live, from a single farmhouse to a huge city. Settlement geography studies where people live and why they live there. This section covers site and situation, the…

The structure of a city is the way its land uses and buildings are arranged. A land use is an activity on a piece of land, such as a park or a shop. A land-use zone is an area of the city where one…

Rural settlements are the smallest settlements: farmsteads, hamlets and villages. They are unifunctional, and the people who live there do primary activities such as farming, forestry, fishing or…

Many rural areas in South Africa are losing people, services are thin, and the question of who owns the land is still being addressed. This section covers rural–urban migration, rural depopulation…

South African cities are still growing quickly. People arrive faster than houses, jobs, water pipes and power lines can be provided, and this causes a range of urban issues. This section covers…

Urban settlements are towns and cities where secondary and tertiary activities take place. They are multifunctional: they have shops, industry, services and government offices, not just one primary…