Settlement Geography I: Rural Settlements and their Problems, the Origin of Towns (Childe, Pirenne, Mumford) and Urbanisation in Developed and Developing Countries
2. Contemporary problems of rural settlements
The document names three problems. Rural–urban migration is selective of young men, so origin villages become older and more female; agriculture is increasingly managed by women (the "feminisation of agriculture"), and in the hills whole villages empty out — Uttarakhand set up a Rural Development and Migration Commission (Palayan Aayog) in 2017 to study hundreds of depopulated "ghost villages". Land-use change converts farmland around growing cities to housing, industry and roads, fragments holdings and draws down groundwater, while the rural–urban fringe becomes a zone of speculation. Land acquisition and transactions became politically explosive in the 2000s, when acquisition for special economic zones and industry at Singur and Nandigram in West Bengal (2006–07) led to violent protest.
The colonial Land Acquisition Act, 1894 was replaced by the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013. It requires the consent of 80 per cent of affected landowners for private projects and 70 per cent for public–private partnership projects, a social impact assessment, compensation of up to four times the market value in rural areas (two times in urban areas), and rehabilitation and resettlement for livelihood losers as well as owners. On the transactions side, the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme computerises records, and the SVAMITVA scheme (2020) uses drone surveys to give villagers legal property cards for their house sites in the inhabited core (abadi) of the village, which had never been mapped.
3. Theories of the origin of towns: Childe, Pirenne and Mumford
V. Gordon Childe, the Marxist prehistorian, set out the urban revolution in a 1950 article in the Town Planning Review. The Neolithic revolution made an agricultural surplus possible; the urban revolution, in Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus valley, was the social reorganisation that concentrated that surplus. Childe listed ten criteria that distinguish the first cities from villages: large size and density; full-time specialists — craftsmen, merchants, officials and priests — fed from the surplus; the surplus paid as tax or tithe to a god or king; monumental public buildings; a ruling class; writing; exact and predictive sciences (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, the calendar); representational art; regular long-distance trade; and a state organised on residence rather than kinship. For Childe, cities arose from economic and technological change, with class and state as consequences.
Henri Pirenne, the Belgian historian, explained the medieval European town in Medieval Cities (1925). The ancient Mediterranean economy survived the fall of Rome but was cut off by the Muslim expansion of the seventh and eighth centuries — the famous Pirenne thesis ("without Muhammad, Charlemagne would be inconceivable") — leaving an inland, agrarian Europe in which towns were little more than fortresses (burgs) and bishops' seats. From the tenth and eleventh centuries the revival of long-distance trade brought colonies of merchants who settled outside the walls of these burgs in suburbs (faubourgs, portus); these merchant communities won charters of liberty and became the true medieval town, with its burghers and its market. Pirenne's is therefore a mercantile or trade theory of urban origins. Lewis Mumford — The Culture of Cities (1938) and The City in History (1961) — gave a cultural account: the city was first a magnet for ceremony and a container of social life; sacred sites and burial grounds came first ("the city of the dead antedates the city of the living"), then the citadel and kingship. Influenced by Patrick Geddes, he traced a six-stage cycle of urban growth and decay:
| Mumford's stage | Character |
|---|---|
| Eopolis | Village community of the agricultural age |
| Polis | An association of villages with a common centre — the market town |
| Metropolis | The "mother city" of a region, with a surplus of wealth and culture |
| Megalopolis | The beginning of decline: bigness, standardisation, bureaucracy |
| Tyrannopolis | Parasitism and display; economic exploitation, political militarism |
| Nekropolis | The city of the dead — war, famine, disease and abandonment |
4. Urbanisation in developed and developing countries
Urbanisation is the rise in the share of population living in urban places; urban growth is the rise in their absolute numbers. Urban growth has three sources — natural increase within cities, net in-migration, and the reclassification of rural places as urban. Ray Northam described the urbanisation curve as an S-shaped logistic: an initial stage with less than about a quarter of the population urban and slow growth, an acceleration stage between roughly 25 and 70 per cent as industrialisation and migration drive rapid growth, and a terminal stage above about 70 per cent where the curve flattens. About 55 per cent of the world was urban in 2018, and the UN projects 68 per cent by 2050, with almost all the increase in Asia and Africa.
| Characteristic | Developed countries | Developing countries |
|---|---|---|
| Timing and pace | Early (nineteenth century) and gradual | Late (after 1950) and rapid |
| Driver | Industrialisation drew labour from the countryside | High natural increase in cities plus migration, often ahead of industrial jobs |
| Present processes | Suburbanisation, counter-urbanisation (Brian Berry's term, 1976), re-urbanisation and gentrification | Continued concentration in the largest cities, peri-urban sprawl and the growth of census towns |
| Typical outcomes | Balanced urban hierarchies, high service employment | Primate cities, informal sector, slums; "over-urbanisation" and "pseudo-urbanisation" (T.G. McGee); desakota zones mixing rural and urban (McGee, 1991) |
In India, 31.2 per cent of the population (377 million people) was urban in 2011, in 7,935 towns — 4,041 statutory towns with a municipal body and 3,894 census towns, places without one that have at least 5,000 people, a density of at least 400 per km² and at least 75 per cent of male main workers outside agriculture. The size, structure and functions of urban areas are studied through functional classification: C.D. Harris (1943) classified American cities by the dominant share of employment, H.J. Nelson (1955) by how far a town's share in each activity exceeds the mean by multiples of the standard deviation, and Asok Mitra applied a comparable method to Indian towns from the 1961 census.
Key takeaways
- Compact, semi-compact, hamleted and dispersed types; linear, rectangular, circular, star, T/Y and double-village patterns; wet-point sites in dry lands and dry-point sites in flood plains.
- Nearest-neighbour index Rn = 2 d̄ √(n/A): 0 clustered, 1 random, 2.15 perfectly uniform.
- Rural problems: selective out-migration and ghost villages, peri-urban land conversion, and contested acquisition (Singur, Nandigram); the 2013 Act requires 80 per cent consent for private and 70 per cent for PPP projects plus a social impact assessment.
- Childe (1950): the urban revolution and ten criteria built on surplus; Pirenne (1925): medieval towns revived by long-distance trade and merchants; Mumford: the city as magnet and container, eopolis to nekropolis.
- Northam's S-curve (initial, acceleration, terminal); early, industry-led urbanisation in the developed world against late, rapid, often jobless urbanisation in the developing world; India 2011: 31.2 per cent urban, 7,935 towns.
Practice questions (10)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
A "dry-point" settlement is one located:
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Answer: A — On higher ground such as a levee or terrace in a flood-prone area
In flood plains and deltas people avoid inundation by building on the driest available ground — natural levees, terraces, mounds. A settlement clustered on a well or spring in a dry region is a wet-point settlement.Settlements split into several physically separate units sharing one village name, locally called para, palli or nagla, are termed:
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Answer: C — Hamleted settlements
Hamleted (fragmented) settlements consist of several hamlets, often divided along social lines, and are widespread in the middle and lower Ganga plain and Chhattisgarh. Compact villages have all houses in one cluster.In a region of 200 km² there are 50 villages, and the mean distance from each village to its nearest neighbour is 2 km. Using Rn = 2 d̄ √(n ÷ A), calculate the nearest-neighbour index. Type a number.
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 2
Rn = 2 × 2 × √(50 ÷ 200) = 4 × √0.25 = 4 × 0.5 = 2. A value of 2 is far above 1 (random) and close to the maximum of 2.15, so the villages are spaced almost uniformly.V. Gordon Childe's concept of the "urban revolution" rests primarily on:
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Answer: D — The concentration of an agricultural surplus that supported full-time specialists
Childe, a Marxist, saw the first cities as the outcome of surplus production, which allowed craft specialists, priests and rulers to live off the labour of farmers. Trade revival is Pirenne's explanation for medieval towns, and the magnet-container image is Mumford's.According to Henri Pirenne, the European towns of the Middle Ages grew chiefly because:
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Answer: C — Merchants reviving long-distance trade settled beside fortified burgs and episcopal centres
Pirenne's Medieval Cities (1925) is a trade theory: from the tenth and eleventh centuries merchant colonies outside the walls of burgs won liberties and became the towns. The surplus explanation is Childe's, and the burial-ground origin is part of Mumford's account.In Lewis Mumford's cycle of urban development — eopolis, polis, metropolis, megalopolis, tyrannopolis — the final stage is:
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Answer: A — Nekropolis
Mumford's sixth stage is nekropolis, the city of the dead, reached through war, famine and abandonment. Ecumenopolis, a single world city, is Doxiadis's idea; conurbation is Patrick Geddes's term for merged towns; edge city is Joel Garreau's.Which of the following are among V. Gordon Childe's ten criteria of the first cities? Select all that apply.
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Answer: A — Regular long-distance trade; C — Monumental public buildings; D — Writing
Childe's list includes monumental buildings, writing and long-distance trade, along with full-time specialists, a ruling class, science and art. The first cities of Mesopotamia and the Indus arose in the Bronze Age; iron smelting was not among his criteria.On Northam's S-shaped curve of urbanisation, the acceleration stage corresponds roughly to an urban share of:
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Answer: D — 25 to 70 per cent
Northam's initial stage lies below about 25 per cent urban, the acceleration stage — rapid, industrialisation- and migration-driven growth — between about 25 and 70 per cent, and the terminal stage above about 70 per cent, where the curve levels off.Assertion (A): Many developing countries have been described as "over-urbanised". Reason (R): Their urban populations have grown faster than the industrial employment available in their cities. Choose the correct option.
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Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
Both are true and R explains A: over-urbanisation means urban growth running ahead of the productive urban economy, so migrants and the natural increase of cities end up in the informal sector and slums.Under India's land acquisition law of 2013, acquisition for a private company's project requires the prior consent of:
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Answer: B — At least 80 per cent of affected families
The Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013 requires 80 per cent consent for private projects and 70 per cent for public–private partnership projects, together with a social impact assessment.