Poverty & Deprivation in Urban Areas (DP IB Geography): Revision Note

Poverty in Urban Areas

• Poverty is defined as an individual not having the resources needed to meet a certain standard of living

• In urban areas, poverty often means that people do not have:

  • Basic services such as clean water, sanitation and electricity

  • Adequate housing

  • Access to healthcare and education

• There is wide variation in wealth across urban areas

  • In HICs, the poorest areas are usually found in the inner city areas around the CBD

  • In contrast, the poorest areas are the squatter settlements usually found at the rural urban fringe

• Poverty and deprivation lead to a variety of problems in urban areas

• All cities have levels of inequality, but LICs 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

• In other areas without a strong social network or cities with recently arrived large populations, high levels of crime, begging and petty theft are more common

• Overall, this creates urban poverty that degrades both the physical and social environment around that area

• This makes it difficult for people to escape from poverty and they fall victim to the vicious 'cycle of poverty’ and urban poverty becomes ingrained within the city

• 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

• 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

• They also tend to leave school early with few qualifications

• 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

• This feeds into a lower quality of life

Deprivation in Urban Areas

• Deprivation is connected with poverty and occurs when a person’s well-being falls below an acceptable minimum standard

• The minimum standard varies from country to country and applies to several different aspects of daily life

  • It is about more than just not having enough money

• There are several indicators of deprivation, including:

  • Economic: Access to employment and levels of income

  • Social: Crime rates, levels of health, access to health care and the proportion of lone-parent families

  • Environmental: Noise, air pollution and derelict land

  • Political: Opportunities to vote and participate in the community

  • Physical: Levels of pollution, vandalism, graffiti and quality of housing

  • Housing: Level of amenities, overcrowding, central heating

Informal Activity in Urban Areas

Informal housing

• Availability and affordability of housing cannot keep up with the rate at which the urban population is increasing in LICs and MICs

• This leads to people building their own homes on any vacant land using scrap materials like cardboard, corrugated iron and plastic

• The UN defines informal settlements as:

• They are unplanned and unregulated housing (informal settlements) with little sanitary facilities, fresh water or reliable energy supply

• The characteristics of the land include that it is:

  • Not usually owned by the residents

  • In areas of no economic value

  • On the urban edges or fringes

  • Along main roads or railways

  • Clinging onto the side of steep slopes

• Depending on the country, these informal settlements, or squatter settlements, are also called:

  • 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 developing countries, about a quarter of urban inhabitants (1.6 billion) live in these impoverished squatter settlements and by 2030, the UN estimates that 1 in 4 people on the planet will live in some form of informal settlement

• Some cities have 'mega-slums', which are extensive overcrowded areas usually within megacities

  • The largest are found:

    • Nairobi, Kenya, with a population of 1.5 million, is crowded into 3 sprawling slums of mud huts and tin shacks, - Kibera being the largest of the 3

    • Neza, Mexico City, Mexico, has a population of 1.1 million people 

    • Dharavi, Mumbai, India, has 1 million people in a warren of narrow lanes, interconnected shacks and single-room living spaces that double as factories

    • Orangi Town, Karachi, Pakistan, has an estimated population of 2.4 million people across 8000 acres of concrete block homes, with 8–10 people sharing two or three rooms

    • Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa, has a population of 400,000 in iron and wooden shacks

• These unregulated areas of housing present serious risks such as fire, flooding and landslides

• Informal settlements typically suffer from:

  • Poor, overcrowded, small housing, built very close together using inadequate material and with uncertain electricity supplies

  • They 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

  • There are inadequate health facilities, which, along with poor living conditions, increase sickness and death rates

  • The population in these areas have insecure living conditions as they may be forcibly removed by landowners or other authorities

Informal employment

• Urban areas, particularly in LICs have rapidly growing populations and job creation cannot match the pace of growth

• As a result, unemployment and underemployment are not unusual 

• People will often work on street corners doing informal work like shining shoes, giving haircuts, providing transport, 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 income to provide adequate services as workers pay no taxes

• It also makes wages and working conditions difficult to regulate