7. impacts of urban growth

• Urban areas


  • Offer a variety of opportunities to people and businesses
  • Rapid and unplanned urbanisation creates a range of problems
• Problems created by rapid and unplanned urbanisation

  • Poor housing
  • Deprivation/inequality
  • Unemployment
  • Congestion
  • Transport issues
  • Crime
  • Poor environmental quality
• The speed of development is greatest in LEDCs, e.g. Sao Paulo in Brazil, which grew from 7 million people to over 20 million in 40 years and is now the second-largest urban area in the Americas
• Transport in urban areas

  • Provision of roads and public transport tends to be poor in quality, size, and reliability
  • Rapid development leads to transport systems becoming easily overloaded and overcrowded
  • Urban congestion varies over the week, time of day, the weather, and the season
  • High numbers of vehicles create high levels of atmospheric pollution such as smog
• Housing in urban areas

  • Availability and affordability of housing cannot keep up with the rate at which the urban population is increasing in LEDCs
  • People build their own homes on any vacant land using scrap materials
  • Unplanned and unregulated housing (informal settlements) with little sanitary facilities, freshwater or reliable energy supply
  • Found in areas of no economic value, on the urban edges or fringes, along main roads or railways, clinging onto the side of steep slopes
• Informal settlements


  • Favelas in Brazil
  • Shanty towns in the West Indies and Canada
  • Bustees on the Indian subcontinent
  • Skid row in the USA
  • Townships in South Africa
• In LEDCs, about a quarter of urban inhabitants (1.6 billion) live in these impoverished slums and squatter settlements and by 2030 the UN estimates that 1 in 4 people on the planet will live in some form of informal settlement
• Mega-slums


  • Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya with 1.5 million people
  • Neza in Mexico City, Mexico with 1.1 million people
  • Dharavi in Mumbai, India with 1 million people
  • Orangi Town in Karachi, Pakistan with 2.4 million people
  • Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa with 400,000 people
• Informal settlements


  • Present serious risks such as fire, flooding and landslides
  • Suffer from poor, overcrowded, small housing, built very close together using inadequate material and with uncertain electricity supplies
  • Have restricted access to water supplies
  • Little to no sanitation facilities and no solid waste disposal, which leads to a polluted and degraded local environment
  • Inadequate health facilities which, along with poor living conditions, increase sickness and death rates
  • Insecure living conditions as they may be forcibly removed by landowners or other authorities
• Informal economy in megacities

  • Rapidly growing populations and job creation cannot match the pace of growth
  • Unemployment and underemployment are not unusual
  • People work on street corners doing informal work like shining shoes, giving haircuts, taxing, selling water or food
  • These jobs are often unskilled and labour-intensive and require little money to set up
  • The informal economy leaves cities without revenue to provide adequate services as workers pay no taxes
  • Makes wages and working conditions difficult to regulate
• Deprivation

  Connected with poverty and occurs when a person's well-being falls below an acceptable minimum standard
• Cycle of poverty


  • All cities have levels of inequality, but LEDCs are amongst the worst affected
  • Many low-income families are 'pulled' to informal settlements around towns and cities looking for a sense of 'belonging' with others in the same situation
  • For others without a strong social network or cities with recently arrived large populations, high levels of crime, begging and petty theft are more common
  • Poverty and deprivation are passed on from one generation to the next
  • Children will tend to get less parental support and usually have to attend inadequate schools
  • Lack of qualifications means they cannot find well-paid employment and rely on social handouts
  • Children they have will be born into this cycle and so families remain 'trapped' and unable to improve their circumstances
• Combined with a lack of suitable work, housing, water supply, sewerage, solid waste disposal and pollution, the quality of life for people in cities is low
• Rise of the suburbanised village

  • Originally quiet, independent places with basic services and located near large urban areas
  • As people have moved out of the city - retirement, family or work reasons - these areas have changed
  • New, large, expensive housing estates with detached or semi-detached homes, some are gated communities
  • Urban style services increased - hence the change in name to 'suburbanised' village
  • The commuter belt means new roads and public transport links
  • New businesses such as pubs, restaurants, supermarkets and hotels have opened
  • Dilution of traditional country life