AP Human Geography: Urbanization & Settlement - The Night Before 🌃

Hey! Let's get you prepped for the exam. We're going to make sure you're feeling confident and ready to ace this thing. This guide is designed to be super clear, engaging, and most importantly, helpful for your last-minute review. Let's dive in!

1. Urbanization & Settlement Patterns

Central Place Theory

Think of it like a hierarchy: big cities offer everything, while smaller towns have fewer options.

• Developed by: Walter Christaller (1930s, Germany)
• Goal: To understand why settlements are located where they are and why they're different sizes.
• Key Idea: Larger settlements (central places) provide a wider variety of goods and services to a larger surrounding area.

Core Concepts

• Range: How far people are willing to travel for a good or service.
• Threshold: The minimum number of people needed to support a business or service.
• Hierarchy: Settlements are organized in a hierarchy, from small villages to large cities.
• Hexagons: CPT uses hexagons to represent market areas because they minimize overlap and gaps, ensuring efficient service delivery.

Assumptions of Central Place Theory (and why they're not always true)

• No Topographic Barriers: ⛰️ In the real world, mountains, rivers, and other physical features can affect where people live and how they travel.
• Equal Farm Productivity: 🧑‍🌾 Not all land is equally fertile. Some areas are more productive for farming than others, which can influence settlement patterns.
• Even Dispersion of Rural Population: 🏘️ People aren't evenly spread out. Some areas have higher rural populations than others, impacting the demand for services.

Caption: Central Place Theory uses hexagons to illustrate the market areas around settlements.

Urban Settlement Theories

• Early Urban Hearths: Mesopotamia (Fertile Crescent), Egypt, China, and the Indus Valley were among the earliest places where cities developed independently.

• Why these locations? Fertile soil, water access, and a mild climate allowed for agricultural surpluses, which supported larger populations and the development of cities.
• Key Innovations: Writing, bronze and iron tools, and complex irrigation systems were all born in these early urban areas.

Rural vs. Urban Settlements

• Rural Settlements: Small, low-density, often agricultural, and socially homogeneous.
• Urban Settlements: Large, high-density, diverse economies, and socially heterogeneous.

• Louis Wirth's Definition: The difference between rural and urban depends on the density of human-created structures.

  • Rural: Fewer structures, more open space.
  • Urban: Many structures, less open space.

2. Describing Location

Site vs. Situation

| Site