When Europeans began exploring and developing resources in what is now Canada, they found the land sparsely populated by many different First Nations in the south and the Inuit in the north. The Indigenous peoples were primarily hunters and gatherers and often were nomadic. Because they were few in number, the Indigenous peoples made little impact on the natural environment: they harvested only the resources needed for their own consumption, and there were no large settlements. Even though the Indigenous peoples had lived in the area for thousands of years, the Europeans perceived that they had found a pristine country with rich resources that awaited exploitation.

Different groups of Europeans came at different times to develop and export the abundant fish, furs, forests, and minerals. With the development of each new resource, new settlements were established. Most of the settlements based on these resources remained small, however, and some of them disappeared when their resources were depleted. A few port cities—including the eastern cities of St. John’s, Newfoundland; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Saint John, New Brunswick—continued to grow as they benefited from the export of successive resources. Montreal owed its early growth to the fur trade, but later it became an important entrepôt for exporting a succession of raw and processed materials and importing manufactured goods from Europe. Later Toronto and the west-coast city of Vancouver also grew quickly because of entrepôt activities. Winnipeg, Manitoba, owed its early growth to its gateway role in the agricultural development of the interior plains.

Except for the port cities, Canada’s most densely settled areas and largest cities developed in the areas with good agricultural land. Some nine-tenths of the population lives within a narrow strip of land along the U.S.-Canadian border—an area that constitutes only about one-tenth of Canada’s total land area. Intensive commercial agriculture in the Great Lakes–St. Lawrence lowlands gave rise to a dense network of villages, towns, and cities. Later, manufacturing and service industries reinforced population growth in this region, making it Canada’s urban, industrial, and financial heartland. Villages, towns, and cities also evolved from the agricultural pursuits in the western grasslands, but, because the manufacturing and service sectors did not grow, those areas were much less intensively urbanized. The development of the petroleum industry there, however, did stimulate the growth of two large cities, Edmonton and Calgary in Alberta.

At the beginning of the 20th century, about one-third of Canadians lived in urban areas, but by the end of the century four-fifths of the population lived in communities of more than 10,000 people and nearly three-fifths resided in metropolitan areas of 100,000 or more.

The growth of most of Canada’s large cities on good farmland, characterized by a low-density pattern of urban sprawl, has aroused considerable public concern about reducing Canada’s limited agricultural land resources. In the Niagara Peninsula of southwestern Ontario, the area with the best climate in Canada for producing soft fruits and grapes, urbanization has destroyed some one-third of the fruit land. To prevent further reduction, the Ontario Municipal Board in the 1980s delineated permanent urban boundaries and ordered that urban growth be directed away from fruit-growing areas.

Settlement did not proceed sequentially westward from an Atlantic beginning. Permanent settlement depended on agricultural land—which in Canada occurs in patches, separated by physical barriers. Different patches were settled by people from various European countries, so that a diversity of cultures and settlement patterns developed across the country.

In the Appalachian region, farms are spaced along the roads at irregular intervals wherever land can be cultivated. In Quebec the first settlers laid off long, narrow tillage strips from the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence or the St. Lawrence River into the interior. As settlement moved farther inland, roads were built parallel to the waterways, from which further narrow lots extended on either side. The same pattern occurred in the Red River valley of Manitoba and even parts of Ontario, where the early settlers were also French.

In most of Ontario and the eastern townships of Quebec, land subdivision was made according to British and American surveying practices. The townships were more or less square, but the grid became irregular because it was started from a number of different points, each of which used a differently oriented base. In the Prairies, on the interior plains, the grid is much more regular, partly as a result of the topography and partly because a plan for the subdivision of the whole region was laid out before it was settled, and based rigidly on lines of latitude and longitude.

Settlement patterns in mountainous British Columbia were greatly influenced by water access routes.