Settlement scholarship has increasingly addressed sustainability, resilience, governance, and socio-ecological change, yet it still tends to treat settlement primarily as a spatial or functional system. Citizenship research, by contrast, examines participation, belonging, responsibility, institutions, and public life, but rarely theorizes permanent settlement as the enduring socio-spatial setting in which these civic relations are produced. This article develops Civic Settlement as an integrative conceptual framework linking these literatures. Using a Narrative Literature Review, the study compares and synthesizes interdisciplinary scholarship on human settlements, citizenship, civic culture, governance, sustainability, community development, and civilization. The synthesis identifies five interrelated dimensions: human; cultural and spiritual; governance and political; spatial-ecological; and economic and knowledge. Together, these dimensions explain how permanent communities organize belonging, shared values, institutions, environmental relations, productive activity, learning, and intergenerational continuity. Civic Settlement is therefore conceptualized as a permanent human living system in which people collectively transform inhabited space into an organized civic environment. The framework contributes a relational account of settlement that connects everyday community life with sustainable human habitat and longer-term processes of civilizational continuity, while remaining a conceptual proposition that requires empirical validation across diverse contexts.
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