Places
When one employer is the whole town
Settlements built around a single mine, mill or plant have a recognisable life cycle, and the ending is the part that has been studied least and experienced most.
Places
Towns, valleys and islands worth knowing about.
Places
What a heritage listing does to a place
International recognition brings visitors, funding and constraints, and the effect on the people living inside the designated area is not consistently positive.
Places
Mountains that are not for climbing
A number of prominent peaks around the world are treated by the people who live beneath them as places where you do not go, and the resulting disputes with visitors have been long-running.
Places
Moving with the season: transhumance and the routes it wore into the land
Seasonal movement of livestock between lowland and upland pasture shaped landscapes, legal systems and settlement patterns across an enormous area, and it is disappearing quickly.
Places
Passes: the few places you can get through a mountain range
A mountain range is a wall with a small number of doors, and everything — trade, armies, languages, disease — has had to go through them.
Places
Border towns: places that exist because of a line
A frontier creates its own economy, its own vocabulary and its own kind of settlement, and moving the line rarely removes what grew along it.
Places
Delta cities: built on ground that is still arriving
A large share of the world’s biggest cities sit on river deltas, which are the most fertile, most connected and least stable ground available.
Places
Where water decides everything: settlement in dry country
Desert towns exist where the water is, and the engineering that brought water to them is among the most sophisticated infrastructure any pre-industrial society built.
Places
Islands make different rules
Isolation does specific things to language, biology and social organisation, and island communities across the world have arrived at similar solutions to similar constraints.
Places
The weekly market and the town it built
A great many towns exist because someone was granted the right to hold a market there, and the physical shape of those places still shows it.
Places
Why old towns are built high, and what happens when the reason goes
Hilltop settlements across the Mediterranean, the Andes and the Himalaya share a logic that stopped applying about two centuries ago. The buildings did not move.