When Europeans arrived in America, they created settlements by violently conquering the territory.
Settlement is the act and result of settling or settling . This verb , for its part, can refer to placing a construction in a place or to making something firm or stable.
At a general level, the place where the establishment of a group of individuals occurs is known as a settlement. A village and a city , in this framework, are human settlements. Currently, 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. This is how new towns emerged that, little by little, began to grow in places that, until then, were uninhabited.
Settlements created through violence
The idea of settlement is also used to name the occupation that occurs by force . It is often said that Europeans "discovered" America and began developing settlements on the continent after Christopher Columbus 's first voyage ( 1492 ). However, these settlements were created through the forcible conquest of lands long inhabited by local Aboriginal settlers.
The degree of violence that this seizure of land implied goes far beyond the hand-to-hand confrontations or the physical or material injuries that the Europeans have caused, since they destroyed cultures and buried them without any type of consideration or respect for the people. knowledge and beliefs that they crushed with their boots. Unfortunately, disdain for Aboriginal people is a problem that remains alive today.
A favela is an irregular settlement.
Irregular housing complex
Another frequent meaning of settlement is associated with the group of homes that, without legal authorization or planning, is established in a territory.
These irregular settlements arise when deprived people 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 so-called slums , shacks , favelas or cantegriles are informal settlements.
Soil settlement
In the field of civil engineering there is the concept of soil settlement , which can be defined as the compression of mass 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 the elastic deformation of the soil. This type of settlement can be carried out on dry, humid or saturated soils, without this affecting the humidity of the final result. The most suitable soils for observing this change are granular, and it is based on the foundations of the theory of elasticity , according to which linear elastic solids suffer linear deformations and displacements if they are subjected to small deformations.
- Settlement by consolidation : this is the change in volume that occurs in saturated cohesive soils as a result of the water contained in their pores being expelled. The two types of soil included in this group are clay and saturated clay, with fine gravel, and one of its most important factors is permeability, which must be low. Consolidation settlement is a time-dependent deformation.
- Settlement by secondary compression : occurs as a result of the adjustment of the ground structure, and there is no pore compression or stress afterwards. The word secondary appears in its name 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.