Origin and Growth of Settlements (Evolution of Settlements)

• To understand any settlement, it helps to trace it from its origin, as Aristotle advised for any phenomenon. Its site, plan and functions often keep the imprint of the reasons it began.
• Permanent settlement began with the Neolithic Revolution (from about 10,000 BCE), when farming and herding replaced hunting and gathering. The first cities followed some five to six thousand years later in a few river-valley hearths.
• Growth since then has been uneven and non-linear. Settlements rise, specialise, decline and revive under the influence of environment, technology, economy and political power.

Origin of Settlements

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Archaeological Evidence and its Limits

• The exact beginning of settlement cannot be fixed. Early shelters were built of perishable materials (leaves, wood, thatch, hides) that leave few traces.
• Evidence therefore comes from durable remains: post-holes, hearths, stone foundations, burials and refuse.
• Ritual sites point to nearby habitation. Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain (England) had a large contemporary settlement at Durrington Walls, about 3 km away, around 2500 BCE.

Before Farming: Camps and Seasonal Bases

• Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers lived in caves, rock shelters and temporary camps, moving with game and seasons.
  • The Bhimbetka rock shelters (Madhya Pradesh) were occupied over a very long period and carry some of the oldest rock art in India.
• In the Mesolithic, some groups in resource-rich places began to stay longer.
  • The Natufians of the Levant (about 12,500–9,500 BCE) built round stone houses and collected wild cereals before farming.
  • In India, sites such as Bagor (Rajasthan) and Sarai Nahar Rai and Mahadaha (Ganga plain) show semi-permanent camps with burials.

The Neolithic Revolution and the First Villages

• V. Gordon Childe named the shift to farming and herding the Neolithic Revolution. It was the decisive step towards permanent settlement:
  • Domestication of wheat, barley, rice, millets, sheep, goats and cattle gave a reliable food supply.
  • Fields tied people to one place; storage of grain required fixed dwellings.
  • Population grew, and villages became the basic unit of habitation.
• Early villages:
  • Jericho (Jordan valley): a settlement with a stone wall and tower by about 8000 BCE.
  • Çatalhöyük (Anatolia, about 7400–6200 BCE): densely packed mud-brick houses entered through the roofs.
  • Mehrgarh (Balochistan, from about 7000 BCE): the earliest farming village in South Asia, growing barley and wheat and herding cattle.
  • Later Indian Neolithic sites include Burzahom (Kashmir) with pit dwellings, Chirand (Bihar) and the ash-mound sites of the southern Deccan.

Genesis: Social and Environmental Foundations

• Social roots: humans are gregarious. Cooperation, kinship, collective security and shared ritual favour living in groups. Settlements are thus social constructs as much as physical ones.
• Environmental roots: early people chose sites with water, fertile soil, a favourable climate and protection from floods and enemies, a clear case of man–environment interaction.
• Early settlements were rarely isolated. They formed clusters linked by exchange, marriage and conflict: the first, rudimentary settlement systems.

The First Cities

• Cities appeared where farming surpluses were large enough to support people who did not farm: priests, rulers, soldiers, craftsmen and traders.
• The primary urban hearths (where cities arose independently):

• Five of the six hearths lie in river valleys or coastal oases in dry or semi-dry lands, where irrigated alluvium gave high yields.
• Harappan cities were remarkably planned:
  • A citadel on a raised mound and a lower town.
  • Grid streets, standardised burnt bricks, covered drains and wells.
  • Dholavira (Gujarat), a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021, had elaborate water reservoirs in a dry setting.
• How and why the first cities arose is debated: surplus, irrigation, trade, religion and warfare all have their champions. These theories of the evolution of human settlements are treated separately.

Growth of Settlements

From Simple Habitations to Complex Systems

• At first, settlements served protection and subsistence. Over time they became centres of trade, administration, craft, worship and learning.
• The key change was from subsistence-based villages to functionally diverse towns, with non-farm occupations and wider spheres of influence.
• Long residence also produced topophilia, a term developed by Yi-Fu Tuan (1974): the attachment of people to their place, which gives settlements their identity.

Technology and Economic Change

• Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization (1934) and The City in History (1961), traced how technology shapes the built environment.
• Each major technical change reshaped settlement:
  • Agricultural improvement (plough, irrigation, iron tools) raised surpluses, which allowed specialists: traders, artisans, administrators.
  • Writing, money and the wheel extended trade and administration.
  • Industrial technology (steam power, factories, railways) concentrated people in industrial cities from the late 18th century.
  • Motor transport and telecommunication spread cities outward as suburbs and conurbations in the 20th century.
  • Digital technology now links cities into global networks and allows some work to disperse.

Historical Phases of Urban Growth in the World

• Ancient cities (c. 3500 BCE–500 CE): river-valley capitals, then Greek city-states and Roman cities. Rome is estimated to have held around a million people at its height.
• Medieval cities (500–1500 CE): in Europe, walled trading and market towns revived with commerce; in Asia and the Islamic world, large capitals such as Baghdad, Chang’an, Constantinople and Delhi.
• Mercantile and colonial cities (1500–1800): ports of the new oceanic trade (Lisbon, Amsterdam, London) and colonial gateways in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
• Industrial cities (1800–1950): explosive growth on coalfields and ports. Birmingham grew from about 74,000 in 1801 to over 520,000 in 1901.
• Post-industrial and global cities (after 1950): megacities in the developing world and global cities of finance and services. The UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2025 found 45% of the world’s people living in cities, against 20% in 1950.

Growth of Settlements in India

• Continuity and change:
  • Some sites show remarkable continuity: Varanasi and Ujjain have been inhabited for well over two millennia.
  • The Mughal network of qasbas (small administrative towns) and ganjs (grain markets) became the base of many district towns.
  • Colonial port cities reoriented India’s settlement system towards the coast and the export trade. Their hinterlands were opened by railways after 1853.
  • After 1947, planned new towns and industrial towns were built, and growth concentrated in metropolitan regions.
  • In Census 2011 the number of census towns rose from 1,362 to 3,892, showing urbanisation spreading through large villages.

Uneven and Non-linear Evolution

• Growth has never been uniform in time or space. Isolated settlements stagnated; well-placed ones grew fast under favourable economic or technical conditions.
  • The Industrial Revolution turned market towns such as Manchester and Birmingham into large industrial cities within a century.
  • Kolkata, founded as an East India Company settlement in 1690, became the largest city of British India on the strength of colonial trade and the Hooghly industrial belt.
• Evolution is reversible.
  • The decline of the Harappan cities after about 1900 BCE led back to a largely rural, village-based landscape for over a thousand years.
  • The historian D. D. Kosambi noted that the pastoral culture of the early Vedic period had a far simpler social organisation than the urban civilisation before it.
  • Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s capital from 1571, was largely abandoned within about fifteen years; Vijayanagara (Hampi) was sacked after 1565 and never recovered.
  • Troy (Hisarlik, Anatolia) shows nine main layers of building, destruction and rebuilding, a record of cyclical growth and decay.

Rural–Urban Differentiation

• The first clear distinction in settlement evolution is between rural and urban places, based on functional complexity:
  • Rural: dependence on primary activities, few occupations, simple morphology.
  • Urban: many functions, occupational specialisation, complex spatial organisation.
• Not every town grew out of a village. Many cities were founded for external reasons: colonial ports (Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai), planned capitals (Chandigarh, Naya Raipur) and company towns (Jamshedpur).

Sequential Growth: Stages and Models

• Settlement growth is often shown as a ladder: hamlet → village → town → city → metropolis → megalopolis.
  • A hamlet is small and homogeneous, dependent on primary activity.
  • A metropolis is the highest level of urban development, with advanced infrastructure, diverse functions and global links.
• Griffith Taylor borrowed the logic of the Davisian cycle to describe town growth in stages: infantile, juvenile, adolescent, mature (early, full and late) and senile, each with a typical plan and mix of land uses. An infantile town has shops and houses mixed along a few streets; a mature town has distinct commercial, industrial and residential zones; a senile town decays.
• Lewis Mumford (The Culture of Cities, 1938) proposed a six-stage cycle of rise and fall:
  • Eopolis (village community) → polis (association of villages with a market and shrine) → metropolis (dominant city of a region) → megalopolis (over-grown, money-centred) → tyrannopolis (parasitic, decaying) → nekropolis (city of the dead, in ruins).
• These are models, not laws. They describe tendencies, but real places skip, repeat or reverse stages.

Dimensions of Transformation

• Morphological: the built-up area expands; land use becomes differentiated into residential, commercial, industrial and administrative zones; architecture grows more complex.
• Demographic: population and density rise; socially homogeneous communities become heterogeneous and multicultural.
• Occupational: the workforce shifts from primary to secondary and tertiary activities.
• Services: higher-order services appear, such as hospitals, colleges, courts and banks, lifting the settlement in the hierarchy.

Settlement Systems and Regional Interdependence

• Settlements grow as parts of a regional system: the growth of one affects others. This is the logic of Walter Christaller’s central place theory, in which settlements form an interdependent hierarchy.
• Kolkata’s rise drew trade and population away from older Bengal towns such as Murshidabad and Hooghly-Chinsurah, producing a primate-city pattern in eastern India.
• Evolution must therefore be studied within the wider network, not settlement by settlement.

Factors in the Site and Growth of Towns

• The original site decides where a town begins; its situation decides how far it grows.
• Physical and morphological factors:
  • Water supply: rivers, springs, tanks and wells; wet-point towns in dry regions (Jaisalmer, with its Gadisar tank).
  • Flood-free ground: dry-point sites on levees, terraces and mounds (Patna on the high south bank of the Ganga).
  • Defence: hilltops, rocky outcrops, river loops and islands (Gwalior, Chittorgarh, Golconda; Srirangapatna on a Kaveri island).
  • Confluences: water, routes and sanctity together (Prayagraj, Devprayag, Rudraprayag).
  • Bridging and ferry points: where a river could be crossed (Rajahmundry, a historic crossing at the head of the Godavari delta).
  • Gaps and passes: towns guarding routes through mountains (Palakkad in the Palghat Gap; Lonavala–Khandala on the Bhor Ghat).
  • Heads of navigation and natural harbours: where ships must stop or find shelter (Kolkata on the Hooghly; Mumbai, Visakhapatnam and Kochi on natural harbours).
  • Climate and scenery: hill stations built as summer retreats (Shimla, Darjeeling, Ooty).
• Economic and cultural factors:
  • Route centres and junctions: Nagpur, Itarsi, Mughalsarai.
  • Resources: coal, iron and oil towns (Dhanbad, Jamshedpur, Digboi).
  • Religion: pilgrimage towns (Varanasi, Puri, Tirupati, Ajmer).
  • Administration and planning: capitals and planned towns (Chandigarh, Gandhinagar, Amaravati).

Critique of Evolutionary Models

• Traditional models assume a linear progression from rural to urban. Harold Carter (1983) argued that urban origins cannot be explained as a simple sequence.
• Cities often arise from external forces: colonialism, long-distance trade, strategic location or a ruler’s decision, not organic growth from a village.
• Evolution depends on human decisions, political intervention and technology, making it multi-causal.
• The stage models also carry a Eurocentric bias: they generalise from Mesopotamian and European cases and fit poorly the temple towns, ceremonial centres and colonial cities of other regions.

Sources and Methods for Studying Settlement Evolution

• Urban evolution is easier to study, thanks to historical records, maps, administrative documents and archaeology.
• Rural evolution has fewer records. Geographers combine:
  • Revenue records, though these follow administrative units, not social settlements.
  • Toponymy (place names): suffixes record origin and function. -pur and -nagar (town), -abad (founded settlement), -patnam and -pattinam (port town), -halli and -palli (village), -garh (fort), -ganj (market).
  • Oral traditions, genealogies, folklore and local legends.
  • Studies by S. Sen and J. Sen show how combining such sources can reconstruct the history of rural settlements.
  • Archaeology, old maps, satellite images and aerial photographs, which reveal abandoned sites and former field patterns.
• Settlement evolution is thus a dynamic, multi-dimensional process. London and Paris have kept their dominance for centuries, while others have declined, shifted or been reborn. No single linear path explains them all.