Settlements
City Design online course || Part 1
“Settlements” is the first part of City Design online course at Stepic.org.
How to define a city?
A city is a relatively large and permanent human settlement.
To simplify we will consider as a city any settlement with a population more than 1 000 people.
For more detailed definitions please read:
— City
— Human settlement
Settlement hierarchy
A classification by Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis suggests the following distinction:
— Dwelling: 1 or 2 buildings/families
— Hamlet: less that 100 people
— Village: 100 — 1 000 people
— Town: 1 000 — 20 000 people
— Large town: 20 000 — 100 000 people
— City: 100 000 — 300 000 people
— Large city: 300 000 — 1 000 000 people
— Metropolis: 1 000 000 — 3 000 000 people
— Conurbation: 3 000 000 — 10 000 000 people
— Megalopolis: more than 10 000 000 people
More on settlement hierarchies please read here:
— Example of a settlement hierarchy
— Idealized settlement hierarchy for the year 2100
It’s definitions’ time:
A settlement — is a permanent or temporary community in which people live or have lived, without being specific as to size, population or importance.
And one more worth minding before the video is:
Agriculture, also called farming, is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel, drugs and other products used to sustain and enhance human life.
For more details please have a look at:
— City: Origins
— Hunter-gatherer
— Agriculture
There are many benefits of forming a city.
In the video above 10 roles of the city are mentioned.
Brendan O’Flaherty in his book “City Economics” asserts:
“Cities could persist — as they have for thousands of years
— only if their advantages offset the disadvantages”
See City: Origins for more details.
O’Flaherty illustrates two similar attracting advantages known as increasing returns to scale and economies of scale, which are concepts normally associated with firms.
Increasing returns to scale occurs when
doubling all inputs more than doubles the output
and an activity has economies of scale
if doubling output less than doubles cost.
To offer an example of these concepts, O’Flaherty makes use of:
“one of the oldest reasons why cities were built:
military protection“
In this example:
— the inputs are anything that would be used for protection (e.g., a wall),
— the output is the area protected and everything of value contained in it.
O’Flaherty then asks that we suppose the protected area is square, and each hectare inside it has the same value of protection.
The next video step shortly reminds you a story of the house that Jack built.
Here’re also full lyrics “This Is the House That Jack Built” .
Workers seek to reduce their commuting costs by choosing a living place in the vicinity of their working place. However, because of the scarcity of land, everybody cannot live close to the city centre.
This implies that workers must commute between the workplace and their living place.
Competition for land among workers gives rise to a land rent that varies inversely with the distance to the city centre, thereby compensating workers living far from their workplace. (Fujita, 1989)
There is a trade-off between commuting and housing costs.
Imagine there’re two workers. The first one lives in A, which is further from the city center. The second one lives in B, which is closer to the city center. They have:
— Land rent (A) = 4
— Land rent (B) = (Land rent (A)) * 4
— Commuting costs (A) = 9
— Commuting costs (B) = (Commuting costs (A)) / 3
Compare A and B total costs (land rent + commuting costs).
