Abstract: Researchs on automatic generalization of urban settlements in the past, mostly concentrated on polygon simplification, neglecting the connection with road networks and blocks. This paper pre-sents a method for automatic generalization of urban settlements considering road networks. The ge-neralization is split into two components:road selection and generalization of features within blocks. Selective omission of road features is based on mesh density and evaluated on the function of road sections. An improved method based on rectangle differential model is applied to polygon simplification. Experimental results with data at the 1:10 000 scale achieved good effect.