{
  "id": "town.settlement",
  "term": "town",
  "sense": "settlement",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 8,
  "arena": "town",
  "domain": "settlement",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "A community where people live inside boundaries.",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "people.social",
      "boundary.limit",
      "community.social",
      "inside.spatial",
      "live.biological"
    ],
    "interaction": "People live inside boundaries and act as a community.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "bounded habitation",
      "persistent social cohesion",
      "shared spatial enclosure"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "In 2023, the town of Kiruna in northern Sweden relocated its entire urban center to avoid land collapse from underground mining.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The walled town of Carcassonne in France was continuously inhabited within its medieval fortifications from the 13th century until today.",
      "domain": "institutions"
    },
    {
      "text": "Over 200 people live year-round inside the boundary of Alert, Nunavut, the northernmost permanently inhabited settlement on Earth.",
      "domain": "everyday life"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "community.social",
      "note": "is-a",
      "type": "is-a"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [],
  "forms": [
    "town",
    "towns"
  ],
  "closed": true,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added missing constitutive concepts (inside.spatial, live.biological) to align record with definition."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-town.settlement"
}