6.3.+Rapid+urbanisation

6.3 What are the problems associated with rapid urbanisation?


Looking at the diagram, what do you think you are intended to think the ‘?’ should be replaced by? ‘Problems associated with rapid urbanisation’ perhaps? Absolutely. And if asked about the problems associated with rapid urbanisation, these are precisely the ideas you would need to explore. By implication, this means that as recent urbanisation has been most rapid in MICs and LICs, that it is only the cities in these countries that have these problems. But don’t be fooled – while the urbanisation in HICs was in general earlier and slower, many of the problems in the diagram applied equally to them in the early days. Think about the goings on in early Victorian times in London – it was all there! However there are differences between HICs in the past and current rapid urbanisation.

This is the Burgess Model of urban development, advanced in the 1920s. It worked well for towns and cities at the time. The town/city centre, known as the **Central Business District** (CBD) would be at the junction of the main roads and have the shops and offices there. The factories were built near the centre and the workers housing was close by – people needed to be able to walk to work from their small crowded terrace houses. The foremen and managers could afford to live in semi-detached houses with gardens, that were a bit further away – not so many nasty smells and much clearer air! The really wealthy lived in their detached residences on the outer part of the cities. So the problems we see in the diagram were concentrated in band 2 and 3 back in the Victorian era. But urban areas in LICs and MICs that have grown up in recent times have different pattern. The central business district is still at the centre but this time the nice housing in grouped around it, so

that they have access for all the shops and cinemas and banks and offices. Often, as in this case, the best housing takes over the best land spreading outwards along a hillside or close to a beautiful part of town. The industry needs good transport so tends to develop in wedges along the main routes to the city. People who moved to the town for work early on built houses for themselves or it was provided as social housing when the city growth was much slower. These areas tend to have most of the essential services such as clean water and sanitation and roads. But once urbanisation really took off, people arrived from the rural areas, made shacks wherever they could, often in areas prone to flooding for example or subject to other forms of pollution that no-one else wanted, using whatever materials were around. They lacked paved roads and fresh water or any of the other main services, like schools and health care.

It is in the outer shanty towns that you find most of problems shown in the diagram. The poor housing, lack of fresh water and sanitation, no electricity and unmade up roads are obvious problems. Why did they occur? The people arrived faster than the city could cope – and in the early days, many cities were unwilling to try too hard. Then there was employment issues. The migrants from rural areas thought that they would be much better off in the city, where there were lots of well-paid jobs – or so they believed. However, while there were jobs for the trained and educated, these rural people lacked the skills to make them employable in any of the available roles. So they are often left trying scratch a living from the **informal economy** (jobs that do not appear on government statistics and are often very hard and can be dangerous as there is no legal protection) as street vendors and cleaners or working in sweatshops down to picking up rubbish to recycle from the city tips. Some could not make enough feed their families and so turned to crime, pick-pocketing in the CBD or prostitution or dealing drugs. Hence crime was a big problem in some of the shanty towns. As we have mentioned there are few made-up roads in this area so public transport has to manage with narrow, muddy rutted roads. Once the buses are on their way into the city, the roads are crammed with every sort of vehicle wanting to get into the centre - congestions and polluted air are common place.

However, as cities and their countries have develope and with added pressure being exerted by the UN Millenium Goals (e.g. halve the number of people who live on less than 1$ a day, halve the number of people without clean drinking water,halve the infant mortality and maternal mortality, etc.etc.), it has become increasingly a matter of pride to try and make things better. They see it in their own interests to have a healthier, better educated, law abiding population, and while such an enormous problem cannot be solved overnight, by joining with the people in these areas, a lot has been achieved, in some areas at least. We will look at some examples of this in a later section.