The development history of human settlements

The formation of human settlement environment is the result of the continuous changes in human survival style caused by the development of social productive forces. In this process, humans have gone from passively relying on nature to gradually utilizing nature, and then actively transforming nature.

In the long primitive society, human beings initially relied on simple labor such as gathering, fishing and hunting as a means of livelihood. In order to continuously obtain natural food, human beings can only "live according to water and grass", and their living locations are neither fixed nor concentrated. In order to facilitate migration, human beings either lived in natural caves that could be abandoned at any time, or lived in shabby houses on the ground or nests in trees. These very simple dwellings were scattered together to form the most primitive settlements.

With the development of productivity, the production method of obtaining the means of living on relatively fixed land - farming and raising - has emerged, and groups of people engaged in different specialized labor have formed: farmers, herdsmen, hunters and fishermen. . The emergence of agriculture and the first division of labor in human history put forward the requirement for human beings to settle down, thus forming a variety of rural residential environments.

This kind of real human settlement environment first appeared in the middle Neolithic period, such as the village ruins of the Yangshao Culture in my country. With the continuous improvement of production tools and labor skills, labor products became surplus, private ownership emerged, and promoted another large-scale division of labor—the separation of handicrafts, commerce, and agriculture and animal husbandry. Craftsmen and merchants sought suitable places to live together in order to specialize in handicraft production and commodity exchange. As a result, about 5,500 years ago, towns mainly responsible for non-agricultural economic activities came into being. Thebes and Memphis in the lower reaches of the Nile River, Ili and Babylon in the two river basins, Harappa and Mohenjodaro in the Indus River basin, and Bo, Yin, and Haojing in the Yellow River basin are the earliest cities and towns in the world. . As a human habitat, the human settlement environment has experienced a development and evolution process from the natural environment to the artificial environment, and from the secondary artificial environment to the higher-level artificial environment, and will continue to do so. In terms of the hierarchical structure of the human settlement environment system, this process is manifested as: scattered settlements, villages, towns, cities, urban belts and urban agglomerations, etc.

Changes in population size show the basic characteristics of the evolution of the scale of human settlements. This evolutionary process has roughly gone through three stages. In the long period before the Industrial Revolution, agricultural and handicraft production developed slowly and did not require large-scale population gathering. The scale of various human settlements was basically in a state of slow growth. After the Industrial Revolution until the 1960s, countries around the world entered a period of urbanization. The scale of cities and towns expanded rapidly, while the scale of rural areas remained relatively stable (even shrinking in some areas), forming a population transition from rural areas to small towns to medium-sized cities. ®Centripetal movement patterns in large cities. In addition, the subsequent rise of the tertiary industry supports urbanization in many aspects with production services, scientific and technological services, cultural services and life service functions, and further expands employment opportunities, giving cities and towns new attractions. After the 1960s, the evolution of the scale of human settlements entered the third stage. In developing countries, the process of industrialization-led urbanization is on the rise, and the urban population, especially in large cities, has been growing continuously. In 1952, there were 19 large cities in my country, which increased to 52 in 1985, an increase of 1.74 times. The population of large cities increased from 32.31 million to 69.41 million, an increase of 114.8%. In developed countries, new trends have emerged at this stage. Due to the high density of population, the deterioration of urban environmental quality and the intensification of land shortages, the pace of urbanization has been greatly slowed down, and there has even been a reverse trend of a decrease in the population in big cities, an increase in the population in small towns, a decrease in the population in the city center, and an increase in the population in the suburbs. urbanization phenomenon.

As the human settlement environment evolves, its regional form is also constantly developing and changing. The evolution of rural regional morphology is relatively simple. From scattered farmhouses to various types of land arranged with central buildings or main streets as clues, the evolution process of regional morphology has basically been completed. The evolution of urban regional morphology is relatively complex. Ancient Chinese towns were basically in the form of a symmetrical checkerboard with the authority as the center, which is the same original town as the European towns with churches, palaces or squares as the center. With the development of productivity, cities have continued to grow and expand. Eastern and Western cities have reached the same goal by different routes, and they have all tended to be single-core concentric cities that resemble tree rings. In the early days of capitalism, the rapid development of industry caused cities to expand viciously, but the city still clung to its original center. The geographical expansion changed from a spread-like overflow development to a spread along transportation lines, and the urban regional form gradually evolved into a single-core and multi-core city. Radiating ring. In modern times, in order to overcome urban diseases, people envisioned using "enclaves" on the outskirts of large cities as new growth nuclei to disperse the pressure from central cities, resulting in the emergence of multi-core cities and constellation town agglomerations. In the practice of urban planning and construction, people gradually realized that the polar axis expansion of cities along a given direction has great advantages, so directional satellite cities, strip cities, chain-shaped town clusters, etc. were created. Urbanization (or urbanization) is an important social phenomenon in world development. To put it simply, contemporary world urbanization has the following four characteristics:

The urbanization process has greatly accelerated. In 1950, the world urbanization level was 29.2%, which rose to 39.6% in 1980, an increase of 10.4 percentage points.

It is expected to reach 51.8% in 2010, that is, the number of people living in cities exceeds the number of people living in rural areas worldwide. At the same time, since the 1970s, the urban population of developing countries has begun to exceed that of developed countries, and by 2020 the ratio will be 3.5:1. This shows that urbanization in developing countries has constituted the main body of urbanization in the world today.

The trend of urbanization is obvious and the emergence of large cities is an important feature of contemporary urbanization. The consequences of this are not only the further concentration of population and wealth in large cities, but also the rapid increase in the number of large cities. Moreover, new forms of urban spatial organization have emerged, such as Supercity, Megacity, City Agglomeration and Megalopolis.

Suburban urbanization, counter-urbanization and re-urbanization. After the war, the population migration from rural to urban areas in several developed countries gradually took a back seat to a new and large-scale reverse process of urban-rural population mobility. What's starting to happen is what's called suburban urbanization. After the 1950s, due to the surge in population in megacities, rising urban land prices, improved living standards, people's pursuit of low-density independent residences, the widespread use of cars, and the modernization of transportation network facilities, the urbanization process in suburbs accelerated. At the same time, taking the suburbanization of residential areas as the forerunner, it triggered a chain reaction of suburbanization of various urban functional departments.

Since the 1970s, new trends have emerged in the out-migration of some metropolitan areas. Not only the population in central urban areas continues to move out, but also the population in suburban areas. People move to rural areas and villages further away from the city. Small towns and entire metropolitan areas have experienced negative population growth. Foreign scholars call this process counter-urbanization. Counter-urbanization first appeared in the United Kingdom, and later in the United States.

Facing an aging economic structure and declining population, some cities in the northeastern United States actively adjusted their industrial structure in the 1980s, developed high-tech industries and tertiary industries, and actively developed declining areas in the city center to attract young professionals. With people returning to live in cities, coupled with the influence of domestic and foreign immigration, from 1980 to 1984, seven cities including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago achieved population growth within their urban areas, and the so-called re-urbanization occurred.