Human settlements are classified as rural or urban depending on the density of human-created structures and resident people in a particular area. Urban areas can include town and cities while rural areas include villages and hamlets.
While rural areas may develop randomly on the basis of natural vegetation and fauna available in a region, urban settlements are proper, planned settlements built up according to a process called urbanization. Many times, rural areas are focused upon by governments and development agencies and turned into urban areas.
Unlike rural areas, urban settlements are defined by their advanced civic amenities, opportunities for education, facilities for transport, business and social interaction and overall better standard of living. Socio-cultural statistics are usually based on an urban population.
While rural settlements are based more on natural resources and events, the urban population receives the benefits of man’s advancements in the areas of science and technology and is not nature-dependent for its day to day functions. Businesses stay open late into the evenings in urban areas while, sunset in rural areas means the day is virtually over.
The flip side of this is that rural areas do not have pollution or traffic problems that beset regular urban areas. Many governments, though focusing on the development of rural areas, have also tried to ‘protect’ these areas as preservation of their country’s basic culture and traditions.
Urban areas are also classified according to land use and density of population. But this can vary from developed countries to developing countries. For example, in Australia, urban cities must include at least a 1,000 residents with 200 or more people per square kilometer while in Canada, an urban area is defined with a density of 400 people per square kilometer In China, the density requirement for an urban area is about 1,500 people per square kilometer Statistically, two urban areas with less than two kilometers between them are considered one urban zone.
You May Also Find These Documents Helpful
-
The on-going debate of living in the city vs. country is very controversial in many people’s eyes but, the city has much more to offer economically, socially and in many other ways more convenient. Being able to meet your needs conveniently and to travel in a car less is what makes the city a lot easier to live in. Therefore, Living in the city is much more beneficial than living in the rural areas.…
- 367 Words
- 2 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
Urbanisation is the process in which people move from a rural area to an urban area. Levels of urbanisation are determined by looking at both the population of rural and urban areas. For the first time ever in history more people live in urban areas than in rural areas. This movement shows no sign of stopping with a predicted 1.84% increase in people living in urban areas expected between 2015 and 2020. And this disparity in rural-urban growth can be a really damaging element if the urban areas of a country aren’t prepared for the influx of people.…
- 681 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
The word Rural" is defined by population density which means how many people are there in a given square mile. Urban areas are defined by the "census blocks" that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile.…
- 573 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
There are many distinct characteristics that allow us to easily differentiate between rural and urban areas. Urban areas have a high (concentrated) density because it contains high amounts of people in small areas, and vice versa for rural areas. With this information, it can easily be inferred that urban areas create greater noise, but with greater job opportunities as well as using more resources. Therefore the prices rise and there is a greater chance that supply can’t compensate for demand, which then leads to things such as poverty. Urban areas also contain incredibly large amounts of human-created structures and there are a lot of different means of transportation to get around. These things help to develop problems such as health hazards, one example being smog which is a big problem in high-dense cities. With all the people, there are greater birth rates, death rates, and crime rates. Not everything is bad though, such as commercial areas being close to residential areas and easy access to needs such as healthcare and food. Driving or owning a car is not mandatory if everything around you is close, which is the case for some people. For myself, I can say that I am almost in this situation, because my parents don’t drive to work, but we need cars for other activities. On the other hand, rural areas are basically the exact opposite of urban areas and also have their ups and downs.…
- 515 Words
- 3 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
It is indisputable that there has always been a sharp distinction between urban and rural living. Therefore many people at some period of their life find themselves questioning the advantages of rural and urban life. Many villagers would like to abandon their godforsaken place and to move to a big city. All of us know a modern Russian fairytale about a girl or a guy who leaves his home country to conquer Moscow. The fact is that it seems to some people prestigious to live in the very centre of a big city or at least within the precincts of a town. Ironically enough but many townsmen would prefer a placid country to their bustling towns. There have been cases already when some successful well-to-do people moved to countryside to lead a regular life, to breed cattle and poultry, to grow vegetables and orchard trees. Of course there is a great gulf between a country and a city, and it is quite difficult to say at once with no reflections where it is better to live. Though both rural life and urban life offer great benefits, they both have a seemingly equal number of drawbacks. So, on this speech I would like to take a good look at positive and negative sides of living in a city and a country, and to understand where it is better to live.…
- 1388 Words
- 6 Pages
Better Essays -
‘Urbanisation’ is the process whereby the percentage of people living in towns and cities increases above those who live in rural areas. According to Duddin, 1996 ‘as the world’s population has grown the proportion of people living in towns and cities have also increased’.…
- 1386 Words
- 6 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
Dominant settlement patterns of most major cities in the world with high population densities are likely to result in clustering of buildings due to constraints of land resources.…
- 831 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
Why are the social relations between urban and rural areas so different and what causes these differences to occur? This question is what I am going to be arguing. I will be doing this not only through my opinions and ideas, but also through the works of Georg Simmel, Louis Wirth and Ernest Burgess. All three of these urban scholars add a slightly different view of urbanism as a way of life.…
- 1958 Words
- 8 Pages
Better Essays -
On the other hand, urban areas are the total opposite from rural areas. Urban areas, in contrast from rural areas, are not usually as private. Houses are usually right by each other in urban areas. There is usually a lot of activity going on in urban areas. Urban areas are usually loud and close to everything. Also, they are not laid back like rural areas.…
- 462 Words
- 2 Pages
Good Essays -
Urbanization is the concentration of people in towns and cities, this marks a fundamental step in mans social evolution. Cities first appeared some 5,500 years ago they were both small and overcrowded.…
- 685 Words
- 3 Pages
Good Essays -
Urban areas are defined on the basis of a number of criteria. In general, there appears to be three main criteria for determining the status of a settlement and these are;…
- 902 Words
- 4 Pages
Good Essays -
Therefore, when a settlement has met minimum population criteria then other criteria are also considered to meet the requirements definition. Malaysia has set when an area has reached a total population of 10,000 people, it can be recognized as the area of the city.…
- 3313 Words
- 14 Pages
Powerful Essays -
Urbanisation is the process by which the proportion of people living in cites and towns rises in comparison to rural areas. Urbanisation in London, England, as a developed which was at that time developing country and city, started around the 1760s continuing through to the 19th century, by which time 80% of the population was urban dwellers, sparked by the industrial revolution. So this is a time span of around 150 years, whereas in a developing country, Mumbai for example in India saw large increased of population from just under 3 million in 1951 to just over 20 million in 2010, a time period of only 60 years in comparison.…
- 1247 Words
- 4 Pages
Powerful Essays -
(Rural and Urban). It studies population growth, distribution, density, sex ratio, migration and occupational structureetc. Settlement geography studies the characteristics of rural and urban settlements.…
- 1260 Words
- 6 Pages
Satisfactory Essays -
Urbanization is defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency ‘as the concentration of human populations into discrete areas, leading to transformation of land for residential, commercial, industrial & transportation purposes. It can include densely populated centers, as well as their adjacent peri-urban or suburban fringes’ (EPA, 2012).…
- 1155 Words
- 5 Pages
Good Essays