Study guide: Rural and Urban Settlements

📋 Course Outline

1. Rural Settlement Characteristics
2. Types of Rural Settlements
3. Subsistence and Commercial Farming
4. Urban Functions and Land Use
5. Aerial Photograph Types
6. Urbanization and Housing
7. Health and Education Challenges

📖 1. Rural Settlement Characteristics

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Primary activities: Work in which people work on or with the land or sea to extract natural resources, such as farming, forestry, mining, hunting, and fishing.
• Migration: Leaving one's home to look for work.

★ Must-know

• Rural settlements are far from urban areas and from one another, and they may be isolated and spread out or clustered together.

Further detail

• Basic necessities are not always available in rural settlements.

💡 Memory Hook

Rural settlements are far from urban areas; their homes may be isolated or clustered.

📖 2. Types of Rural Settlements

★ Must-know

• Farm settlements provide a base for people whose livelihoods depend on farming, and some families have lived this way for generations.

• Mining and quarrying settlements develop where minerals occur beneath the Earth's surface; miners work underground, and some settlements grow into small towns.

• Rural fishing settlements occur along coasts where fish are caught, provide work for residents, and support subsistence and commercial fishing.

Further detail

• Kimberley and Johannesburg began as rural mining settlements.

• Forestry settlements occur in Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Eastern Cape, where people work in natural indigenous forests and plantations.

• People who work in forests and sawmills live in forestry stations, where they must watch for forest fires.

📖 3. Subsistence and Commercial Farming

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Subsistence farming: Produces food for farmers' own needs and their families, sometimes with several families forming one rural settlement.
• Commercial farming: Grows cash crops to sell for money as a business.
• Monoculture: The large-scale growing of one crop to sell at a profit.

📝 Essential Points

• Subsistence farmers use traditional methods, little modern technology, and labor-intensive work in which people do the farm work themselves.

• Subsistence farms have small fields, grow different crops such as maize, and keep livestock and other farm animals such as cattle.

• Commercial farms generally use modern technology throughout farming, need few workers because machinery replaces farm laborers, and may be very large.

💡 Memory Hook

Subsistence farming feeds families; commercial farming sells crops for profit.

📖 4. Urban Functions and Land Use

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Central business district: The central business district (CBD) is the city center, with tall buildings, heavy pedestrian and vehicle traffic, high land and rental costs, and offices of large companies.
• Transition zone: The transition zone surrounds the CBD and contains both old, deteriorated areas and restored or renovated areas as the CBD expands into old warehouses, empty buildings, and poorly maintained houses.

★ Must-know

• Urban settlements provide:

  • employment
  • housing
  • entertainment and recreation
  • services
  • transport
  • places of worship

• Residential areas may be near or far from the CBD and include high-, middle-, and low-income housing as well as informal settlements such as shacks or squatter camps.

Further detail

📌 Low-income housing is cheaper, middle-income housing is affordable, and high-income housing is expensive; densely populated areas have apartments or small houses close together, while suburban houses have large gardens.

• Services and recreation may be in a rural or urban transition zone, around an urban settlement, or in town centers and shopping centers; examples include nurseries, golf courses, and sports grounds.

📖 5. Aerial Photograph Types

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Aerial photograph: A photograph of part of the Earth's surface taken from an aircraft.
• Oblique aerial photograph: An oblique aerial photograph is taken from an aircraft with the camera aimed at the Earth's surface at an angle of less than 90°, showing the sides of landscape features.
• Vertical aerial photograph: A vertical aerial photograph is taken with the camera lens aimed directly at the Earth's surface at a 90° angle and has a uniform scale that shows the shape and size of landscape features.

📝 Essential Points

• In an oblique aerial photograph, scale changes, so features in the foreground appear larger than those in the background.

💡 Memory Hook

Oblique photographs show the sides of features; vertical photographs look straight down.

📖 6. Urbanization and Housing

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Urbanization: An increase in the proportion of the total population living in urban settlements.
• Infrastructure: A country's services and facilities, such as transport, electricity supply, and water supply.

★ Must-know

• Migrants place additional pressure on already overcrowded schools, hospitals, and other services in urban areas.

• Housing types include: formal houses made of brick and cement with proper roofs, informal homes made from wood, corrugated iron, and plastic, traditional African homes made from natural materials such as mud, clay, thatch, and wood, rooms, caravans, tents, and boats

Further detail

📌 If urban areas do not have enough jobs for everyone, unemployment can increase, potentially contributing to more crime and rural poverty.

💡 Memory Hook

More urban migrants can strain services and contribute to unemployment, crime, and rural poverty.

📖 7. Health and Education Challenges

★ Must-know

• Health care and education face shortages of clinics, hospitals, and schools, while existing services are overcrowded.

Further detail

• Health care and education services may lack staff, supplies, equipment, and funding, and people may be unable to afford services or have difficulty traveling to them.