Settlement, sphere of influence & urbanisation

From the tiniest hamlet to the thirty-million-person megacity, taken one careful step at a time. In this AS lesson we learn what a settlement is — its site, situation and function — and how settlements form a hierarchy, each with a sphere of influence set by range and threshold. We examine rural depopulation: why the countryside empties and how we might keep people there. Then we contrast urbanisation in a low-income country like Namibia — fast, driven by rural push, and often informal — with the slow, managed urbanisation of a high-income country. Windhoek and Katutura are our living case study. We finish on the great global shift: the world's cities growing ever larger, with the mightiest new megacities rising in the Global South.