Geography (9696) | The management of urban settlements

The Management of Urban Settlements: Study Notes (9696 Geography)

Welcome to the final topic in Core Human Geography: Settlement Dynamics! Cities are growing faster than ever before, especially in LICs and MICs. This rapid growth creates huge challenges—think traffic jams, slums, and managing waste. These notes will help you understand the specific problems cities face and, crucially, how geographers evaluate the attempts to solve them.

You need to focus on two major areas of management: managing informal housing (shanty towns) and managing essential services (infrastructure).

1. The Core Challenges of Urban Growth

As cities expand rapidly (a process called urbanisation), local governments often struggle to keep up. This leads to issues that require careful management:

• Service Provision: Ensuring clean water, sanitation, and electricity for everyone.
• Housing: Dealing with the huge demand for affordable homes, often leading to the growth of informal settlements.
• Transport: Managing overwhelming traffic congestion and ensuring efficient movement of goods and people.
• Environmental Issues: Dealing with air and water pollution, and inadequate waste disposal.

2. Managing Squatter Settlements (Shanty Towns)

Definition and Nature of Squatter Settlements

A squatter settlement (or shanty town/favela/barrio) is an area of housing built illegally on land not owned by the occupants. They are a common feature in many LICs and MICs due to rapid rural-to-urban migration and the high cost of formal housing.

2.1 Challenges Faced in Squatter Settlements

These settlements concentrate multiple problems, making them extremely difficult to manage:

1. Lack of Tenure Security: Residents do not legally own the land or homes, meaning they could be evicted at any time. This discourages residents from investing in improvements.
2. Poor Infrastructure: There is often no formal provision of electricity, piped water, or sewage systems. Residents rely on informal (and often unsafe) connections.
3. Health Risks: Lack of sanitation (open sewers) and clean water leads to the spread of waterborne diseases (like cholera).
4. Environmental Hazards: Shanty towns are often built on marginal land, such as steep slopes (prone to landslides, *e.g., in Venezuela*) or floodplains (prone to flooding).
5. Social Issues: High crime rates, lack of formal employment opportunities, and poor access to schools and healthcare.

Quick Tip: Think of the 5 S's of shanty town problems: Squatter status, Services absent, Sanitation poor, Safety risks, Social deprivation.

2.2 Attempted Solutions and Evaluation

Governments and NGOs use different strategies, often needing to balance immediate relief with long-term, sustainable development.

A. Site and Service Schemes (Government/Top-Down)

The government buys the land, develops the basic infrastructure (streets, water pipes, electricity hookups), and then divides the area into individual plots. These serviced plots are sold or rented to residents, who then build their own homes.

• Pros: It provides legal tenure security and essential services immediately. It is cheaper for the government than building houses.
• Cons: Can be expensive to implement; plots may be too small; the scheme may only reach those who can afford the rent or basic building materials (missing the very poorest).

Example: Sites and Service schemes were implemented in countries like Zambia and India in the late 20th century.

B. Self-Help Housing/Aided Self-Help (Bottom-Up)

This approach recognises that squatters are already resourceful. The government or NGO provides loans, technical advice, or basic building materials (like cement and roofing sheets). Residents use their own labour (sweat equity) to improve their homes and community areas.

• Pros: It is highly sustainable, empowers the community, ensures improvements meet local needs, and improves housing quality gradually.
• Cons: Very slow process; relies heavily on resident involvement and cooperation; may not solve deeper environmental hazards (like unstable slopes).

C. Clearance and Rehousing (Radical/Top-Down)

The settlement is completely demolished, and residents are moved to formal, often high-rise, apartment blocks elsewhere in the city.

• Pros: Rapidly removes visible slums, provides formal, safe housing structures.
• Cons: Often destroys the community network (social capital); new housing may be far from job opportunities; rehousing blocks are often poorly maintained and can turn into new slums.

3. Managing Urban Infrastructure (Transport Focus)

Infrastructure refers to the basic physical systems that support a country or city, such as roads, sewers, power lines, and public transport systems. Effective management of this backbone is vital for a city's economic health and quality of life.

3.1 Challenges in Providing Urban Transport Infrastructure

The main challenge is that demand often outstrips capacity, leading to severe traffic congestion.

1. Economic Costs: Congestion causes delays, wasted fuel, and lost productivity. (*A major economic drag on cities like Jakarta or Mexico City.*)
2. Environmental Costs: Idle cars produce excessive greenhouse gases and particulate pollution, worsening the urban heat island effect and respiratory illness.
3. Social Inequality: Poor public transport systems disproportionately affect low-income residents who cannot afford private vehicles and may face long commutes.
4. Urban Sprawl: A reliance on cars necessitates the building of more roads, encouraging urban sprawl and further fragmenting the city.

3.2 Attempted Solutions for Transport Infrastructure

Urban transport management typically involves a mix of two strategies: increasing road supply (Hard Engineering) and managing demand (Soft Engineering).

A. Hard Engineering Solutions (Increasing Supply)

These focus on physical construction and large-scale projects.

• Construction of Mass Transit Systems: Building underground railways (metros/subways, e.g., London Underground) or elevated rail systems.
  Pros: High capacity, low pollution. Cons: Extremely high initial cost, takes many years to build.
• Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Systems: Dedicated bus lanes and specialized stations, allowing buses to move quickly and reliably.
  Pros: Cheaper and faster to implement than rail, highly flexible. Cons: Still uses road space and is not emission-free unless electric. (Example: Curitiba, Brazil or Bogotá, Colombia).
• Road Construction: Building new ring roads, expressways, or flyovers.
  Common Mistake Alert: While this temporarily relieves congestion, it often encourages more people to drive, leading to congestion returning quickly (the concept of induced demand).

B. Soft Engineering Solutions (Managing Demand)

These aim to reduce the need to drive or make driving less appealing.

• Congestion Charging: A fee is charged to vehicles entering specific, high-congestion areas (like the Central Business District, CBD) during peak hours.
  Example: The London Congestion Charge successfully reduced traffic volumes in the zone.
• Park and Ride Schemes: Peripheral car parks are linked to efficient public transport, allowing commuters to leave their cars outside the city centre.
• Integrated Ticketing and Timetables: Making public transport seamless and easy to use (e.g., one ticket for bus, tram, and train) encourages use.
• Non-motorized Transport: Investing in dedicated cycle lanes and pedestrian walkways.

3.3 Evaluation of Infrastructure Solutions

When evaluating these solutions, consider the following trade-offs:

• Cost vs. Benefit: Are high-cost solutions (like subways) justified by the number of people they serve and the economic benefits?
• Equity: Do the solutions benefit all citizens? Congestion charges, for instance, can disproportionately affect essential workers who must drive.
• Sustainability: Does the solution prioritize long-term environmental health (mass transit) or short-term relief (new highways)?
• Integration: The most successful cities (e.g., Singapore) use an integrated transport policy, combining hard and soft solutions to offer genuine alternatives to driving.

Quick Review: Management Key Concepts

Shanty Town Management:

• Challenge: Lack of services and legal tenure.
• Successful Solution Trend: Aided self-help and upgrading (bottom-up).
• Avoid: Forced clearance (destroys social capital).

Infrastructure Management (Transport):

• Challenge: Congestion, pollution, and high cost of expansion.
• Successful Solution Trend: Integrated planning combining mass transit (BRT/Rail) and demand management (Congestion Charging).
• Avoid: Relying purely on building new roads (induced demand).