This is an example from the north shore of the St Lawrence River of one of the earliest settlement patterns in what is now Canada. The seigneurial system was the original form of settlement for much of New France and had a whole set of prescriptions for land division through generations, creating the very thin parcels visible running away from the river in the above image.
On the coast of Nova Scotia, and in New Brunswick, the township system originated with British settlement and featured rectilinear blocks overlaid on the terrain. These settlements typically would have a fort on each side of the township and an agricultural commons just outside.
Ontario featured several township systems over time. This region shows an area using the "double-front" system of 100 acre lots with one face to a road, and backing onto another lot. This particular system was used in the early 1800s
Perhaps the most visually striking system is the Dominion Land Survey system spanning much of the central prairies of Canada. One can clearly see the hierarchy of square blocks the land was divided into and even the multitude of ways of subdividing those parcels.
With it's rugged terrain and limited areas of flat ground, BC had many different ways of arranging original settlement patterns, but here on the flat ground of the Lower Mainland where Vancouver is situated one can see a large area of regular lots created with the range section and block system. It has been further subdivided into smaller fields, or massively subdivided further into residential lots.
Across Canada, most urban areas now use a block and lot system, dividing blocks into lots which can be regular or irregular, both of which are seen in this image. This system is not so much an original settlement system, as it usually occurs with the subdivision of older parcels existing in one of the above systems.
With its very different land use activities, Newfoundland had an irregular system whereby parcels were simply created by occupying the land with no systematic reasoning or connection to a wider system. This has caused great difficulty in subsequent years.
This is the aboriginal community Lombadina/Djarindjin on the west coast of Western Australia's Dampier Peninsula. If one looks closely at the community it is settled in a block and lot system with streets winding through. It was established by the government in a systematic way to resettle aboriginal people into one centralized location. While the settlement itself is quite densely populated, it has a very small population and is in a very remote region with little access and very few other communities. One can see the airport which is the only commercial activity the community participates in, refueling helicopters flying from Broome to offshore LNG platforms. The rest of the community is involved in subsistence fishing and hunting, and limited tourism activities. In the context of our western thinking of land use and population density, this is an appropriate settlement pattern, however in the context of the aboriginal people of Australia, this is an extremely new phenomenon and does not fit their land use practices. The community was previously mobile in their large country surrounding the modern community.
