Geographic patterns of settlement vary dramatically across the United States, ranging from the intense concentrations of people and built structures in large metropolitan areas that serve as centers of decision making, production, and distribution, to regions that are nearly void of human habitation. In some areas, variations in these patterns are stark within short distances, even within miles, while in other areas they occur over hundreds of miles. These fundamental aspects of the geography of human settlement present the core challenge to designing geographic units of analysis that represent individual settlement ateas. That challenge is heightened by the need to treat the entire country in a single systematic fashion.

This working paper presents four investigations of new approaches to identifying and presenting elements of the U.S. settlement system. Authors of the reports are John S. Adams (University of Minnesota), Brian J.L. Berry (University of Texas at Dallas), William H. Frey (University of Michigan) and the late Alden Speare, Jr. (Brown University), and Richard L. Morrill (University of Washington) . The papers were prepared in conjunction with studies conducted for the Metropolitan Concepts and Statistics Project (MCSP) of the Bureau of the Census. Thei are part of an effort to establish areas for reporting statistics presented by Federal agencies that has its primary focus, in terms of geographical scale, at the level of metropolitan and complementary nonmetropolitan settlement areas. The studies, however, address issues and the delineation of geographic areas at other scales in support of this overall goal.