Penaah Island, Lingga Regency, Riau Islands Province - Indonesia

Stilt houses or pile dwellings or palafitte are houses raised on piles over the surface of the soil or a body of water. Stilt houses are built primarily as a protection against flooding, but also serve to keep out vermin. The shady space under the house can be used for work or storage.

Riau Islands Province (acronym: Kepri) is the fastest growing province of Indonesia by population, consisting of the principal group of the Riau Archipelago, together with other island groups to the south, east and northeast. In Indonesian, Riau Islands and Riau Archipelago are synonymous and can only be distinguished by the word for province, "Provinsi".

Originally part of the Riau province, the Riau Islands were split off as a separate province in July 2004.

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand (sometimes tens of thousands). Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the East Village in Manhattan, New York City and the Saifi Village in Beirut, Lebanon, as well as Hampstead Village in the London conurbation. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.

In the past, villages were a usual form of community for societies that practise subsistence agriculture, and also for some non-agricultural societies. In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. In many cultures, towns and cities were few, with only a small proportion of the population living in them. The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories; the concentration of people caused many villages to grow into towns and cities. This also enabled specialization of labor and crafts, and development of many trades. The trend of urbanization continues, though not always in connection with industrialisation. Villages have been eclipsed in importance as units of human society and settlement.

Settlement, locality or populated place are general terms used in statistics, archaeology, geography, landscape history and other subjects for a permanent or temporary community in which people live or have lived, without being specific as to size, population or importance. A settlement can therefore range in size from a small number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of cities with surrounding urbanized areas. The term may include hamlets, villages, towns and cities.

The term is used internationally in the field of geospatial modeling, and in that context is defined as "a city, town, village, or other agglomeration of buildings where people live and work".

A settlement conventionally includes its constructed facilities such as roads, enclosures, field systems, boundary banks and ditches, ponds, parks and woods, wind and water mills, manor houses, moats and churches.

The tropics is a region of the Earth surrounding the Equator. It is limited in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the northern hemisphere at approximately 23° 26′ 16″ (or 23.4378°) N and the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere at 23° 26′ 16″ (or 23.4378°) S; these latitudes correspond to the axial tilt of the Earth. The tropics are also referred to as the tropical zone and the torrid zone (see geographical zone). The tropics include all the areas on the Earth where the Sun reaches a point directly overhead at least once during the solar year.

The tropics are distinguished from the other climatic and biomatic regions of Earth, the middle latitudes and the polar regions on either side of the equatorial zone.

This is a list of stationary and mobile types of human habitation.

Maritime Southeast Asia refers to the maritime region of Southeast Asia as opposed to mainland Southeast Asia. Six states make up the region, namely, Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, East Timor, Singapore,^{[citation needed]} and Indonesia. Maritime Southeast Asia is sometimes also referred to as "Island Southeast Asia" or Insular Southeast Asia. The nineteenth century term, "Malay Archipelago", refers to a largely similar area.

Cultural diversity is the quality of diverse or different cultures, as opposed to monoculture, as in the global monoculture, or a homogenization of cultures, akin to cultural decay. For example, before Hawaii was conquered, the culturally diverse Hawaiian culture existed in the world, and contributed to the world's cultural diversity. Now Hawaii has been Americanized; the vast majority of its culture has been replaced with American culture. The phrase cultural diversity can also refer to having different cultures respect each other's differences. The phrase cultural diversity is also sometimes used to mean the variety of human societies or cultures in a specific region, or in the world as a whole. The culturally destructive action of globalization is often said to have a negative effect on the world's cultural diversity.

An island country is a country whose primary territory consists of one or more islands or parts of islands. As of 2011, 47 (approximately 25%) of the 193 UN member states are island countries.

Dwelling, in addition to being a term for a house or home for a given period of time, is a philosophical concept which was developed by Martin Heidegger. Dwelling is about making oneself at home where the home itself is any place for habitation. In the US, the legal definition of dwelling varies from state to state but most include language that defines characteristics for the purposes of habitation. In the UK, a dwelling is defined (in line with the 2001 Census definition) as a self-contained unit of accommodation.

Houses can be built in a large variety of configurations. A basic division is between free-standing or Single-family houses and various types of attached or multi-user dwellings. Both sorts may vary greatly in scale and amount of accommodation provided. Although there appear to be many different types, many of the variations listed below are purely matters of style rather than spatial arrangement or scale. Some of the terms listed are only used in some parts of the English speaking world.

Specific terms under various American federal, state, or local laws dealing with fair housing, truth in advertising, and so forth, have been prescribed and engender specific legal meanings. For example, in American housing codes, all "apartments" must contain a kitchen, bathing facilities, and a sleeping area, or else that term may not be used. This generates various differences within the English-speaking world, and the terms such as "single-family", "two-family", or "three-family" building, residence, house, home, or property can be generic and thus convey little or no building plan (style of building) information. Such terminology is most common in advertising and real-estate markets that offer leasing of such units, or sales of such buildings.