A settlement is simply any place where people live and carry out activities — trading, farming, manufacturing, whatever. But settlements don't all look the same from above. Some are a single farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Some sprawl out along a road in a long line. Some cluster tightly around a village green. The shape a settlement takes is called its pattern, and it's controlled mostly by the physical geography of the area — rivers, hills, roads, and the reasons people first settled there.

Think of it like this: if you drop a group of people into a landscape and tell them to build homes, they won't scatter randomly. They'll cluster near water. They'll follow a valley. They'll line up along a trade route. The land itself nudges them into a shape — and geographers have named these shapes so we can describe and compare them.

This is when houses or farms are spread out individually across fields or along roads, rather than clumped together. You get dispersed settlement when the land can't easily support a dense cluster of people in one place.

• Where: rural areas with low population — the Sahel region of Africa, the Australian outback, mountainous parts of Scotland and Wales.
• Historical cause: in England in the 1600s–1700s, large rural estates were broken up into smaller individual farms, spreading settlement out.
• Climate cause: extreme weather (too hot, too wet, too cold, too dry) makes it harder for large settlements to grow, so people stay spread thin.

Houses line up in a row, tracing the path of something — usually a river, railway, or major road. This happens because that route brings trade and access, and people want to be as close to it as possible.

Linear settlement can also form for less obvious reasons: poor drainage elsewhere forces building along a narrow strip of usable land, or the base of a mountain only leaves a thin strip flat enough to build on.

This is the "clustered around a centre" pattern — homes group tightly around a shared feature like a church, village green, crossroads, or well. The further out from that centre you go, the fewer buildings there are (these outer, smaller places are hamlets or villages).

Why do people nucleate (cluster) instead of spreading out? Four big reasons:

• Defence — safety in numbers, easier to guard a tight cluster than scattered homes.
• Trade — being close together makes exchanging goods and services easier.
• Co-operative community — shared resources like farming land, water, and labour work better when people are close.
• Floodplain safety — grouping on a hilltop above a floodplain is safer than spreading across low, flood-prone land.

Once you understand nucleation, a whole family of shapes makes sense — they're all variations of "settlement forms around where roads meet":

These two terms sound similar but mean genuinely different things, and exams love testing whether you can tell them apart.

Quick way to remember it: Site = "what's under my feet?" Situation = "what's around me?"

• Water availability — needed for transport, drinking, irrigation, washing. But building to a river risks flooding, so there's a trade-off.
• Farming on a floodplain — actually good for agriculture because floodwater deposits alluvium (fertile silt), enriching the soil.
• Relief (flat vs. steep) — level ground is easier to build on, but harder to defend. Steep, elevated ground is the opposite: harder to build, easier to defend.
• Accessibility — steep relief can hurt transport and trade, especially near ports, bridges, or weirs where flat access matters.
• Proximity — how close is this site to other places people need for work or supplies?
• Aspect — the direction a slope faces. In the Northern Hemisphere, south-facing slopes get more sun and are warmer — better for growing crops. North-facing slopes are cooler and shadier.

Site explains where a settlement . But why do some tiny settlements stay tiny forever while others balloon into cities? Five main growth factors:

• Climate — settlements in overly extreme climates (too hot/cold/dry/wet) tend to stay small because life there is harder.
• Raw materials — triggers the multiplier effect: access to raw materials attracts investment → investment creates jobs and opportunities → opportunities attract more people → the settlement grows, which attracts even more investment. It snowballs.
• Fertile land — good soil means farmers produce a surplus (more food than they need) which can be sold. That frees up other people in the settlement to do non-farming jobs (shops, crafts, services) — which is exactly what lets a settlement grow beyond a small farming hamlet.
• Location — being central to other places and having good trade access naturally pulls in people and commerce.
• Historical importance — being the seat of government, home to a famous university, etc. gives a settlement a "head start" that compounds over centuries.

The function of a settlement is simply what it's — its main economic purpose. Crucially, function is not fixed. Settlements often start with one purpose and either add more functions as they grow, or completely swap their original function for a new one as the world changes around them.

Other common settlement functions you should recognise:

A hierarchy is a ranking system. Settlements are ranked using three linked measures: population size, number of services provided, and number of settlements at that level. Here's the key relationship to memorise — it's basically the whole topic in one sentence:

Picture it as an actual pyramid: a wide base of countless isolated homes and hamlets, narrowing all the way up to a tiny handful of megacities at the very top. This is why the model is drawn as a pyramid, not a straight ladder — there really are far more villages on Earth than there are megacities.

The full hierarchy sequence, memorise this order:

Rural covers dispersed settlements up through villages and small market towns. Urban covers large towns through to megacities. A common working definition used to draw this line: rural = under 10,000 people; urban = over 10,000 people.

Every settlement, no matter how small, offers basic functions and services — bread, milk, eggs, that kind of thing. But as settlements get bigger, they don't just add of the same services — they start offering entirely different, higher-level services too. This is because bigger settlements have bigger, denser populations, and certain services only become financially viable once enough people are around to use them.

The sphere of influence (also called a catchment area) is the area a settlement actually serves — how far its "pull" reaches. It's measured by the range: the maximum distance people are realistically willing to travel to get a particular good or service.

Two types of goods behave completely differently within a sphere of influence:

This is a real, examinable case study — learn the specific facts and figures, not just the general idea.

• Lozère is a landlocked department in southeast France.
• Its economy relies mostly on cattle rearing and tourism — a direct result of poor soil quality and mountainous relief, which rule out most other farming.
• Unemployment is low — but only because so many young people have out-migrated, leaving behind an ageing population.
• Improved communications, easier travel, and tourism have caused a slight population increase, bringing some new services with it.
• Tourism jobs, however, tend to be seasonal, low-skilled, low-paid, and part-time — not a stable long-term economic base.

How this plays out village by village: