The concept of settlement has to do with the different movements that a society or population makes in search of being able to settle where it can feel safe, comfortable and with a future to develop. The settlement is the most essential act in the life of a community since it is at that moment or in that process in which its history begins to be written as a new entity, a group of people who decide to settle in a specific place to satisfy their needs. needs.
It is clear that throughout the history of Humanity, the population phenomenon has occurred in a thousand different ways and in many different situations. We can thus speak of cases of settlement as dissimilar to each other as the American settlement carried out by those first hominids who crossed the Bering Strait for the first time, as well as the settlement of America that thousands of years later would be carried out by the Spanish, English, Portuguese and French when they found this continent, or the settlement carried out by the different national states in the 19th century as is the case of the Argentine State, a settlement that meant the extension of the national border and the consequent annihilation of the indigenous peoples.
The population of a region can occur in a different combination in each case. Thus, some settlements have been the result of voluntary planning that States or individuals themselves have carried out to populate uninhabited areas and thus allow them to integrate into the world production market. In other cases, the settlement has been spontaneous due to the natural movement that various communities have carried out over a given space. Finally, there have also been forced settlements throughout history, which are those in which States or different social groups have forced other groups or sectors to move from their place of natural origin to another (such as when Jews they were expelled from Egypt in ancient times).
On the other hand, we can also speak of urban settlement as a relatively current phenomenon that has to do with the massive arrival of inhabitants to major cities in search of work and better living conditions, a situation that completely or partially changes the appearance of a city or city. previously existing urban center.
