In this study Roland Fletcher argues that the built environment becomes a constraint on long-term settlement development. He reviews worldwide settlement growth over the past 15,000 years in the light of the limits imposed by buildings, layouts and forms of communication, and concludes with a major discussion of the great transformations of human settlements—from mobile to sedentary, sedentary to urban, and urban to industrial. This ambitious contribution to archaeological theory has implications for the future of urban settlement.