Housing (Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE Geography): Revision Note

Housing in urban areas

• All urban areas have recurring features:

  • A central core or central business district (CBD)

  • Industrial areas—inner-city zone

  • Different residential districts—suburban zone

  • Outer zones of suburban expansion—urban fringe

• All towns and cities tend to grow outward from a historic centre or core to an urban fringe

• Availability and affordability of housing varies within all urban areas

Central core

• This is the oldest part of a city with features such as:

  • The central business district (CBD) includes banks, retail shops, and commercial offices

  • Multi-storey development focuses on vertical growth instead of horizontal growth because of limited space

  • High-value land

  • Concentrated retail and office space

  • Low residential population

Inner-city zone

• A 'frame' to the inner core, which developed as the core developed, with features such as:

  • Older, compact, terraced 'worker' housing to support a growing population density 

  • Surrounded by older industrial areas

  • Available land increases with distance, so costs are reduced

Suburban zone

• The main residential area that grew based on wealth, ethnicity, choice or government policy (e.g. social housing) with features such as:

  • Segregated residential zones

  • Semi- and detached housing with gardens

  • Tree-lined avenues and cul-de-sac

  • Smaller retail premises

  • Decreasing land costs but the size of the property increases with the distance

Urban fringe

• These are the outer edges of the city, where:

  • Housing is grouped into estates, which increases 'spot' density

  • Some industrial land uses

  • Accessibility is best

• In HICs housing is expensive in relation to general wages

  • Many families share one house or just a room

  • This creates opportunities for landlords to set high rents and no building maintenance (slum landlord)

• With the development and regeneration programmes in cities, inequalities have increased between the wealthier and poor residents of the city

  • In HICs poorer residents tend to live in inner-city areas, edge-of-town estates and high-rise flats

    • Poor-quality housing is one of the many causes of poor health due to coldness, overcrowding and mould

Unplanned settlements

• Housing cannot keep up with the rate of population increase, particularly in MICs and LICs

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

• These homes are unplanned and unregulated housing (informal settlements) with little sanitary facilities, freshwater or reliable energy supply

• Usually, the people building the settlements do not own the land and are located

  • in areas of no economic value

  • on the urban edges or fringes

  • along main roads or railways

  • clinging onto the side of steep slopes

• These informal settlements, also known as squatter settlements, go by various names depending on the country

  • 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 LICs, about a quarter of urban inhabitants (1.6 billion) live in these impoverished squatter settlements

• 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 very large, overcrowded informal settlements, usually within megacities

  • The largest examples are found in:

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

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

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

    • Orangi Town, Karachi, Pakistan, with 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, with a population of 400,000 in iron and wooden shacks

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

• Squatter settlements typically suffer from housing, which is:

  • made from poor-quality materials

  • overcrowded

  • small

  • built very close together

• The settlements have restricted access to water and electricity supplies

• There are little to no sanitation facilities and no solid waste disposal

  • This leads to a polluted and degraded local environment

• There are inadequate health facilities

  • Together with poor living conditions, this increases sickness and death rates

• Most people in these areas have insecure living conditions, as they may be forcibly removed by landowners or other authorities

• Whereas other governments accept that informal housing is a self-help way of dealing with a housing shortage