Which of the following is not the pattern of Urban settlement ?

Question

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Correct — option (3), Dispersed. The stem prints 'not' in bold: the question asks which of the four is NOT a pattern of urban settlement. Three of the options — checker-board, circular and linear — are descriptions of the shape a built-up town takes on the ground, and each has a well-understood cause. A checker-board or grid-iron layout, streets crossing at right angles to make rectangular blocks, is the signature of a planned or deliberately laid-out town, from the walled city of Jaipur to the sectors of Chandigarh, and it also arises naturally where a settlement grows at a crossroads. A circular or radial pattern develops where a town has grown around a central feature — a fort, a temple, a lake, a major junction — with roads running outward from it and building following the roads. A linear pattern develops where growth is confined to a line: along a road or highway, a railway, a river bank, a canal, a coastline or the floor of a valley, and ribbon development along highways is its modern form. 'Dispersed', by contrast, is not a shape at all; it belongs to the other classification of settlements, the one that measures how far the dwellings are agglomerated. On that scale settlements run from compact or nucleated, through semi-compact and hamleted, to dispersed or scattered, where individual houses and farmsteads stand apart from one another over a wide area. Dispersed settlement is characteristic of hills, forests, plateaus and thinly peopled regions where terrain, water sources or extensive farming keep households apart — and it is by definition rural, because an urban settlement is one in which population and buildings are concentrated. A dispersed town is a contradiction in terms, and that is exactly why option (3) is the odd one out.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The checker-board or grid-iron pattern, in which streets cross at right angles to produce rectangular blocks, is one of the most common urban forms in the world and the standard product of deliberate town planning; it also appears where a settlement grows outward from a crossroads. Since the question asks which option is not an urban pattern, naming a genuine and very widespread urban pattern cannot be right. Candidates sometimes choose it because the printed hyphenated form looks unfamiliar, but unfamiliar wording is not evidence that a term is wrong.  (b) The circular or radial pattern is a recognised urban form, produced where a town has grown around a central feature such as a fort, a temple, a lake or a major junction, with routes radiating out from the centre and settlement thickening along them. Many historic Indian towns show it around their fort or temple core, and planned nodes such as the concentric circles of Connaught Place in New Delhi show it in a designed form. It is a shape of concentration, which is precisely what an urban settlement is, so it cannot be the odd one out here.  (d) The linear pattern is urban settlement stretched along a line of communication or a physical constraint — a highway, a railway, a river bank, a canal, a coast or a valley floor. It is one of the commonest patterns in hilly and coastal districts, where level ground is available only in a strip, and ribbon development along the approaches to a city is the same pattern in its unplanned modern form. Like the checker-board and the circular pattern, it describes the arrangement of a concentrated settlement, whereas 'dispersed' describes the absence of concentration altogether.

Concept: Settlements are described along two different axes and confusing them is what this question punishes. The first axis is the degree of concentration: compact or nucleated settlements, in which dwellings stand close together in a single cluster; semi-compact settlements; hamleted settlements, in which a village is split into several physically separate units; and dispersed or scattered settlements, in which individual farmsteads stand alone across the landscape. This axis explains why settlements agglomerate — availability of water, defensibility, fertile soil and social cohesion favour compactness, while broken terrain, forest, thin soils and extensive farming favour dispersion. The second axis is the geometric pattern or shape of a settlement on the ground: linear, rectangular or grid-iron, circular or radial, star-shaped, T-, Y- or cross-shaped, and so on, each traceable to the routes, water bodies or relief around which building took place. Urban settlements, being agglomerations by definition, are described on the second axis, while 'dispersed' belongs to the first and describes a rural condition.

State PCS 2024 Q17 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q17 — Geography PYQ with Answer