settlement

It is called settlement to the act and result of settling or settling. East verbOn the other hand, it can refer to placing a construction in a place or to making something firm or stable.

At a general level, it is known as settlement to the site where the establishment of a group of individuals. A village and a townIn this framework, they are human settlements. At present, the most common use of the concept is linked to the process that is developed to occupy and populate land.

In the past, when there were large areas of land without inhabitants, it was common for migrants to develop settlements. Thus arose the new towns that, little by little, began to grow in places that, until then, were uninhabited.

The idea of ​​settlement is also used to name the occupation that occurs by the force. It is often said that Europeans They "discovered" America and began to develop settlements on the continent after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus (1492). However, these settlements were created out of the forcible conquest of lands long inhabited by local Aboriginal people.

The degree of violence involved in this seizure of the lands goes far beyond the hand-to-hand clashes or the physical or material injuries caused by the Europeans, since they destroyed cultures and buried them without any kind of consideration or respect for the knowledge and beliefs that they crushed with their boots. Unfortunately, the contempt for aborigines it is a problem that lives on today.

Another frequent meaning of settlement is associated with the group of houses that, without legal authorization or planning, are established in a territory. These irregular settlements arise when people deprived and without economic resources do not have access to established housing, a situation that forces them to build their houses where they can and with the materials to which they have access. The calls shantytowns, shacks, favelas or cantegriles they are informal settlements.

In the field of civil Engineering there is the concept of settlements in soils, which can be defined as the mass compression or the vertical deformation of the ground. This phenomenon can take place both upwards and downwards, and is made up of the following three components:

* immediate settlement: occurs as a consequence of deformation elastic soil. This type of settlement can be carried out in dry, humid or saturated soils, without affecting the humidity of the final result. The most suitable soils for observing this change are granular, and it is supported by the fundamentals of elasticity theory, according to which linear elastic solids undergo deformations and also linear displacements if they are subjected to small deformations;

* settlement by consolidation: it is the change in volume that occurs in saturated cohesive soils as a result of expelling the water contained in their pores. The two types of I usually that includes this group are clayey and saturated clayey, with fine gravel, and one of its most important factors is permeability, which must be low. Consolidation settlement is a time-dependent deformation;

* secondary compression settlement: takes place as a result of adjusting the structure of the land, and then there is no pore compression or stress. In his name appears the word high school to refer to the fact that this compression occurs after a deformation, which implies a constant effective stress without modification in the amount of water in the pores. This kind of settlement is also time dependent.