Urban issues and challenges
Geography · GCSE · The School
Why cities grow
Two things at once. RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION, driven by push factors (mechanised farming, drought, few services) and pull factors (jobs, healthcare, schools, electricity). And NATURAL INCREASE, because migrants are mostly young adults, so birth rates in the city stay high. Answers that give only migration miss half the growth.
Opportunities, not only problems
Rapid urban growth brings social and economic opportunity: access to services a village cannot support, formal and informal work, education for girls, and the concentration that makes water, power and transport affordable to provide at all. A balanced answer names these alongside congestion, pollution, housing shortage and waste — and the balance is usually what separates a good answer from a list of complaints.
Improving informal settlements
SITE AND SERVICE: the authority provides land with water, sanitation and power, and residents build. SELF-HELP: residents are given materials, training and legal tenure, and improve their own homes — tenure matters most, because nobody invests in a house they may be evicted from. Both keep the community and its economy intact; clearance does not.
A hillside settlement of 40,000 people has no mains sewerage, irregular electricity, and no legal land title. POLICY A, CLEARANCE: bulldoze it and rehouse residents in blocks on the edge of the city. The housing is better. But the journey to work is now two hours and two fares, the informal businesses that supported half the households are gone, and within a few years a new settlement has appeared somewhere else — because the reason people were there has not changed. POLICY B, SELF-HELP WITH TENURE: give legal title, run in water and power, and supply materials. Residents extend and improve their own homes because the investment is now theirs to keep, the businesses stay, and the journey to work is unchanged. Same money, and only one of them addresses why the settlement exists.