In Geography
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has a Geographic Names Information System that defines three classes of human settlement: "Populated Place", "Census" and "Civil". The populated place is defined as a place or area with clustered or scattered buildings and a permanent human population (city, settlement, town, village or hamlet) referenced with geographic coordinates, which is "usually not incorporated and by definition has no legal boundaries". The Populated Places may partially correspond to Civil records: "A political division formed for administrative purposes (borough, county, incorporated place, municipio, parish, town, township)."
Read more about this topic: Human Settlement
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. But here we are; and, if we tarry a little, we may come to learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here;—and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Supreme Being, shall not absent from the chamber where thou sittest.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)