8. Urban Settlements

In contrast to rural people, people in urban areas engage mostly in secondary and tertiary activities. Settlements in these areas are termed urban settlements. Depending on the available services, the size of the population functions rendered, and administration, urban centres are assigned as a town, city, megacity, conurbation, and megalopolis.

The town is a general name for an urban place that satisfies a prescribed minimum population threshold. Based on the function a city serves, they can be classified into the following types:

Usually, a large urban place is termed a city. But, there are no strict definitions to separate it from a smaller town. It is a nucleated settlement with multifunctional character, established central business district.

A megacity is a very large city, and it can be a single metropolitan area.

Urban areas like cities, large towns, and other urban regions expand through physical expansion, population growth, or urbanisation. On expansion, they merge to form one continuous urban or industrially developed area called conurbation.
Conurbation consists of a number of cities, large towns, and other urban areas.

A satellite town is designed to address the overpopulation problem in important metro cities. These cities house the excess population of the adjacent big city. But, they are situated well beyond the limits of the city, i.e. outside the rural-urban fringe. Most of the satellite cities in India are purely residential in character.  Satellite towns occasionally present a look of twin towns such as Dehri and Dalmianager in Rohtas district of Bihar. They may be connected with roads. 

A smart city is an urban region, which is very much advanced in terms of infrastructure, real estate, communication, and market availability. India's first ten smart cities are Bhubaneshwar, Pune, Jaipur, Surat, Ludhiana, Kochi, Ahmedabad, Solapur, New Delhi and Udaipur. Tamil Nadu has 12 major cities to be transformed into smart cities. They are Tiruchirapalli, Tirunelveli, Dindigul, Thanjavur, Tiruppur, Salem, Vellore, Coimbatore, Madurai, Erode, Thoothukudi and Chennai.