The term settlement is a current term that is used to refer to all those forms of informal or not entirely suitable human habitat. In general terms, a settlement is any type of human settlement since the action is always being designated by which a small or large group of people establish as their habitat and permanence space that place they have chosen and that slowly and with time time can be transformed more and more according to the needs. However, in the areas of sociology and anthropology, as well as other human sciences, the term is commonly used to indicate those unstable, insecure and informal forms of settlement that arise in certain spaces as a consequence of the scarce housing possibilities as well as of phenomena such as poverty and misery.
Human settlements have a lot to do with unstable forms of housing. While when we talk about large cities we refer to urban settlements, the term "settlement" has been much more relegated to a social issue that has to do with poverty, misery, insecurity, abandonment and even deportation of a much of society. These affected groups do not have access to a stable or safe quality of life and must therefore resort to much more unstable forms of habitat. Thus, the settlements can be understood as one of the clearest examples of social inequality since, in the face of the well-being of some, an abundant sector of an urban center can live in very poor living conditions without this reality changing.
In some cases, the settlements are generated by socio-economic issues. These are the most common examples in impoverished and underdeveloped regions such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, some countries in Africa. However, we can find different types of settlements near almost any large city in the world. In most of these cases, the settlements are located in the surroundings of the urban area since this population carries out their tasks and work activities within the city, for which they must maintain a relatively short distance from it. Sometimes they can even be located next to the most exclusive sectors of a city because they perform service jobs in those neighborhoods. The settlements of this type receive different names depending on the place: shantytowns, favelas, slums, conventillos, marginal neighborhood, camp, ghetto, etc.
Finally, we must also talk about settlements generated by political causes, as is often the case in countries in Africa and the Middle East. In this case we are facing a phenomenon generated by disputes and internal conflicts within a country or between opposing regions. These types of settlements are unstably armed with thousands and hundreds of thousands of refugees who, in addition to living in very poor living conditions, have been forced to leave their homeland or their original place.
