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Spec mapping (AQA 7037): Paper 2 (Human), §3.2.3 Contemporary Urban Environments — urbanisation in LICs and NEEs; the growth of megacities; the characteristics, causes and management of informal settlements (slums/squatter settlements) and the peri-urban fringe. Synoptic links run to §3.2.1 Global Systems (the global economy drives, and profits from, LIC/NEE urbanisation) and Population & the Environment (rural–urban migration). The lesson is weighted AO1 (the characteristics and causes of rapid urbanisation) and AO2 (evaluating management strategies and the contested redevelopment of informal settlements), with a worked AO3 exercise on megacity growth data.
Urbanisation in low-income countries (LICs) and newly emerging economies (NEEs) differs from the historical Northern experience in one decisive respect: speed. Where Britain urbanised over a century, allowing infrastructure to catch up (Lesson 2), cities such as Lagos, Mumbai and Dhaka are urbanising in decades, far faster than housing, water, sanitation or formal employment can be provided. The result is the proliferation of informal settlements and a vast informal economy. The cardinal A-Level error here is to view such settlements through a deficit lens only — as places of poverty and failure. The examiner rewards a more sophisticated reading: informal settlements are simultaneously sites of acute deprivation and dynamic, self-organising economic and social systems of remarkable resilience.
The informal sector comprises economic activity outside formal regulation, taxation and state oversight. In many LIC/NEE cities it employs the majority of the urban workforce.
AO2 analysis: The informal sector challenges Western development assumptions. Hernando de Soto (The Mystery of Capital, 2000) argues that the urban poor hold vast "dead capital" — assets (homes, businesses) they cannot leverage because they lack legal title — and that formalising property rights would let informal enterprise grow into the formal economy. Critics counter that formalisation can also expose the poor to taxation, eviction and market displacement, so the policy is contested rather than a panacea.
It is analytically important to grasp why the informal sector is so large in LIC/NEE cities rather than treating it as a temporary aberration that "development" will erase. Three structural explanations help. First, over-urbanisation: because cities are growing far faster than formal, salaried employment, the formal economy simply cannot absorb the labour arriving from the countryside, so the informal sector functions as the employer of last resort. Second, economic dualism (Arthur Lewis): LIC/NEE economies contain a high-productivity modern formal sector alongside a low-productivity traditional/informal sector, and labour shed from agriculture flows into the latter long before the former can soak it up. Third, deregulated globalisation: global supply chains frequently rely on informal labour — home-workers stitching garments, waste-pickers feeding recycling chains — so the informal sector is not separate from the global economy but woven into it, often supplying cheap, flexible labour to formal firms. This is the crucial synoptic insight (§3.2.1): the informal sector is not a sign that a city has been left out of globalisation but evidence of how it has been incorporated into it — on highly unequal terms. Seeing the informal economy as integral, exploited-but-resilient, rather than marginal, is exactly the nuanced reading examiners reward.
The UN-Habitat definition of a slum household is one lacking one or more of: durable permanent housing; sufficient living space (no more than three people per room); access to improved water; access to improved sanitation; and security of tenure (protection from forced eviction). The last — secure tenure — is repeatedly the most decisive, because without it residents have no incentive to invest in their homes and live under constant threat of clearance.
| Feature | Typical reality in an informal settlement |
|---|---|
| Housing | Self-built incrementally from improvised materials (corrugated iron, timber, reclaimed brick, plastic sheeting); consolidates and rises over time as tenure feels more secure |
| Infrastructure | Limited/absent piped water, sewerage and mains electricity (often illegally tapped); unpaved lanes; open drains |
| Population density | Extreme — tens of thousands, locally up to ~100,000+ people per km² |
| Health | Waterborne disease (cholera, typhoid, diarrhoeal illness); respiratory infection from indoor cooking smoke; limited healthcare access |
| Education | Low formal attendance; community and NGO-run schools |
| Social networks | Strong community bonds, mutual aid, neighbourhood and savings associations |
| Economy | Dominated by the informal sector; small-scale manufacture, recycling, services |
Terminology varies by country: favelas (Brazil), bustees (India/Kolkata), barriadas / pueblos jóvenes (Peru), townships (South Africa, with a distinct apartheid history), bidonvilles (Francophone Africa), gecekondu (Turkey, literally "built overnight"). The diversity of terms is itself a useful reminder against treating "the slum" as a single, uniform phenomenon.
A further analytical point concerns the dynamism of informal settlements over time. John Turner's influential work in 1960s–70s Lima reframed squatter settlements not as static problems but as housing-in-process: residents who feel secure invest incrementally, so a settlement that begins as a cluster of flimsy shacks consolidates over years and decades into solid, multi-storey, serviced neighbourhoods — provided tenure is secure and the state does not threaten clearance. This is why security of tenure is the single most important policy lever: it unlocks the residents' own enormous capacity for self-improvement. Turner's insight underpins the entire shift from clearance toward upgrading examined below, and it explains the apparent paradox that the best thing a government can often do for an informal settlement is simply to stop threatening to demolish it and instead grant legal title and basic trunk infrastructure, then let residents build.
Rapid LIC/NEE urbanisation is propelled by powerful push and pull factors, reinforced by natural increase.
graph LR
subgraph RURAL [Rural push]
P1[Land fragmentation]
P2[Environmental degradation /<br/>drought, soil erosion]
P3[Mechanisation cuts farm jobs]
P4[Conflict & insecurity]
P5[Lack of services]
end
subgraph URBAN [Urban pull]
U1[Jobs: formal + informal]
U2[Higher wages]
U3[Education & healthcare]
U4[Bright-lights perception]
end
RURAL ==> M[Rural-urban migrant]
M ==> URBAN
URBAN ==> N[Natural increase:<br/>young migrant age structure]
Push factors include land fragmentation through inheritance, environmental degradation (soil erosion, desertification, water scarcity, intensifying with climate change), hazard losses (drought, flood), mechanisation reducing farm labour demand, conflict, and the absence of rural services. Pull factors include real and perceived employment (urban wages are typically 2–3× rural), concentrated education and healthcare, and the aspirational "bright lights" image of the city (often inflated by media — a representation issue, Lesson 8). Because migrants are predominantly young adults, their arrival also raises the urban birth rate, so cities grow by natural increase as well as migration — which is why slowing migration alone cannot halt megacity growth.
It is worth drawing the contrast with the historical Northern path explicitly, because it explains why informal settlements are so prevalent today.
| Dimension | Global North (historic, e.g. 19th-c. Britain) | Global South (contemporary, e.g. Lagos, Dhaka) |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Gradual, over ~a century | Compressed, over a few decades |
| Driver | Industrialisation pulling labour into factory jobs | Migration + natural increase, often ahead of industrial jobs |
| Jobs | Formal factory employment broadly kept pace | Formal jobs scarce → vast informal sector |
| State capacity | Sanitation/housing reform eventually caught up | Weak fiscal/administrative capacity; provision lags badly |
| Outcome | Slums eventually cleared/improved as wealth rose | Persistent, growing informal settlements |
The decisive variable is the mismatch between the pace of urbanisation and the pace of economic and infrastructural development. In the historic North, industrial employment grew alongside urban population, and rising national wealth eventually funded sanitation, public health and housing reform that cleared the worst slums. In much of the contemporary South, urban population races ahead of formal employment and of the state's fiscal capacity to provide infrastructure — the condition of over-urbanisation — so informal settlements are not a transitional stage that growth will automatically erase but a structural, expanding feature of the city. This comparison is a high-value AO2 move: it shows you understand urbanisation as a process whose consequences depend on context and pace, not as a single universal script.
The table gives the population (millions) of three rapidly urbanising cities at two dates. AO3 requires you to quantify and interpret such change, not merely read it.
| City | Population 2000 (m) | Population 2020 (m) | Absolute change (m) | % change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lagos (Nigeria) | 7.2 | 14.4 | +7.2 | +100% |
| Mumbai (India) | 16.1 | 20.4 | +4.3 | +27% |
| Dhaka (Bangladesh) | 10.3 | 21.0 | +10.7 | +104% |
Describe: All three grew substantially, but at very different rates. Dhaka and Lagos roughly doubled (+104% and +100%), whereas Mumbai grew far more modestly (+27%) despite adding 4.3 million people.
Manipulate: Lagos's percentage change is:
%change=7.214.4−7.2×100=7.27.2×100=100%
The compound annual growth rate for Lagos over the 20 years is:
CAGR=(7.214.4)201−1=20.05−1≈0.035=3.5%per year
Explain: Lagos and Dhaka are at an earlier, steeper stage of the urbanisation S-curve, with high rural–urban migration and high natural increase, so they double in twenty years. Mumbai, already very large and at a later stage, is growing more slowly in percentage terms (a base effect) and is partly constrained by its physical site (a peninsula with limited room), with growth spilling into satellite Navi Mumbai. The slower percentage growth disguises a still-large absolute increase of 4.3 million — the same percentage-versus-absolute distinction stressed in Lesson 2.
Evaluate: Megacity figures are notoriously uncertain: definitions of the urban boundary differ (city proper vs agglomeration vs metropolitan region), censuses in fast-growing LICs are often dated or incomplete, and informal populations are routinely under-counted. The Lagos figure in particular is contested, with state and federal estimates differing by millions. The data robustly establish rapid growth and a clear rank order of pace, but precise totals should be treated as best estimates, not exact counts — a critical-awareness point that lifts an AO3 answer.
Approaches range along a spectrum from top-down redevelopment (demolish and rebuild) to bottom-up upgrading (improve in situ with residents). The evidence increasingly favours the latter.
Governments or NGOs provide enabling support — secure tenure, materials, technical advice, basic services — and residents build incrementally themselves. Advantages: low public cost; community empowerment; housing tailored to need; local construction employment. Disadvantages: slow; variable quality; depends on secure tenure (the usual stumbling block); may not deliver area-wide infrastructure. The classic success is the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan, where residents, supported by the OPP's technical guidance, financed and built their own underground sewerage lane by lane — over 100,000 households connected at a small fraction of conventional government cost, by sharing labour and using a simplified "component-sharing" model.
The state provides serviced plots (water, sewerage, electricity, road access) and residents build their own homes. Advantages: ensures minimum standards; secure tenure from the outset; planned infrastructure. Disadvantages: costlier than self-help; often on peripheral sites far from work; and prone to "downward raiding" — capture by middle-income groups who buy out the original poor residents. Dandora, Nairobi (a 1970s World Bank scheme) illustrates the trap: initially successful, but over time many original beneficiaries sold their plots to wealthier buyers, blunting the poverty-reduction aim.
Dharavi is one of Asia's largest and most-studied informal settlements, occupying roughly 2.1 km² of central Mumbai (a prime location, wedged between two main railway lines) and housing an estimated 700,000–1,000,000 people — a population density of around 300,000 per km², among the highest on Earth.
The Maharashtra state government has long pursued a comprehensive redevelopment: demolish the existing fabric, rehouse eligible residents in high-rise flats, and free the remaining (highly valuable, central) land for commercial development, financed by private developers who receive development rights in exchange for building the rehousing. The scheme has been repeatedly relaunched (most recently as a major public-private venture in the 2020s).
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