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

Availability and affordability of housing varies within all urban areas

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

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