Human settlement

In geography, statistics and archaeology, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community of people living in a particular place. The complexity of a settlement can range from a minuscule number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. Settlements include homesteads, hamlets, villages, towns and cities. A settlement may have known historical properties such as the date or era in which it was first settled or first settled by particular people. A number of factors like war, erosion, and the fall of great empires can result in the formation of abandoned settlements which provides relics for archaeological studies.

The process of settlement involves human migration.

In the field of geospatial predictive modeling, settlements are "a city, town, village or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work".^[1] A settlement conventionally includes its constructed facilities such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woodlands, wind and watermills, manor houses, moats and churches.^[2]

An unincorporated area is a related designation used in the United States.