Rural settlements underlie today's cities and still hold over half the world's population. This text excavates the changing forms and functions of these settlements, exploring their origins, development and their future. Settlement is the physical reflection of the social organization of space. Starting with the human dwelling, settlement aggregates into farmsteads, hamlets, villages, towns and cities. Patterns of development can be traced, contours by which a history of a land and its people can be read.

Biographical Research reflects a rapid expansion of interest in the study of lives taking place within the social sciences. Life story, oral history, narrative, autobiography, biography and other approaches are being used more and more to explain how individuals interpret experiences and social relationships. The book examines the methodological and theoretical developments associated with research on lives in sociology, oral history, ethnography, biography, and narrative analysis. The author includes numerous examples of biographical research from his own work and other studies, and...

This major new text provides an introduction to the interaction of culture and society with the landscape and environment. It offers a broad-based view of this theme by drawing upon the varied traditions of landscape interpretation, from the traditional cultural geography of scholars such as Carl Sauer to the 'new' cultural geography which has emerged in the 1990s. The book comprises three major, interwoven strands. First, fundamental factors such as environmental change and population pressure are addressed in order to sketch the contextual variables of landscapes production. Second, the...