A comprehensive presentation of subchapter 6.4 The Management of Urban Settlements, from the third chapter of Human Geography, AS Cambridge, Settlements.

1. ASGEOGRAPHYREVISION
SETTLEMENTS
6.4 THEMANAGEMENTOF
URBANSETTLEMENTS

2. KEYTERMSANDDEFINITIONS
Slums are run-down areas of a city characterised by substandard
housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security.
Favelas is a Brazilian term for an informal, shanty-type settlement. It
generally involves the illegal occupation of land by squatters.
Corticos refers to decaying formal housing, mainly in the inner city.
Human development index is a composite index of development
devised by the United Nations in 1990 incorporating a life expectancy,
b educational attainment and c GDP per capita at purchasing power
parity.
Self-help housing initiatives are a partnership between communities
and local government whereby local government frequently supplies
building materials and the community supplies the labour.

3. KEYTERMSANDDEFINITIONS
Shanty town (squatter settlement) is an area of slum housing
constructed from makeshift materials and lacking in amenities such as
water supply, sewerage and electricity. Shanty towns often develop
spontaneously and illegally (as squatter settlements) in LEDC cities.
Soft infrastructure covers housing, education, health, leisure and
other associated facilities. These are the social aspects of urban
infrastructure.
Hard infrastructure refers to transportation, communication, sewage,
water and electric systems, etc.

4. KEYTERMSANDDEFINITIONS
Quality of life is a term that sums up all the factors that affect a
person’s general wellbeing and happiness.
Deprivation is defined by the Department of the Environment as
when ‘an individual’s wellbeing falls below a level generally regarded
as a reasonable minimum for Britain today’.
Social exclusion is the process whereby certain groups are pushed to
the margins of society and prevented from participating fully by virtue
of their poverty, low education or inadequate life skills. This distances
them from job, income and education opportunities as well as social
and community networks.
In situ urbanisation is a process that occurs when rural settlements
transform themselves into urban or quasi-urban entities with very
little movement of population.

5. TOPICSUMMARYSAOPAULO
About 32 per cent of the world’s urban population live in slums. São
Paulo has the largest slum population in South America.
Here, urban poverty is concentrated in two types of housing: favelas
(squatter settlements/shanty towns) and cortices (decaying formal
housing, mainly in the inner city). It is estimated that substandard
housing occupies 70 per cent of São Paulo’s area – approximately 1500
km2. Two million people, or 20 per cent of the population, live in
favelas, while over half a million people live in converted older homes
and even factories in São Paulo’s inner core, which are known as
corticos. The location of squatter settlements is strongly linked to the
city’s physical and environmental situation.

7. TOPICSUMMARYSAOPAULO
Initially favelas were densely packed informal settlements made of
wood, cardboard, corrugated iron and other makeshift materials. Later
they were replaced by concrete block constructions.
Over time, a range of attempts have been made to tackle the housing
crisis in São Paulo. Much emphasis has been on self-help housing
initiatives, known as ‘mutiroes’.
The Cingapura project was an ambitious urban renewal plan, based
on the experience of Singapore, and an example of south–south
technology and information transfer.

9. TOPICSUMMARYCAIRO
Cairo, the capital city of Egypt, is situated on the banks of the River
Nile (Figure 3.51) about 200 km south of the Mediterranean Sea.
Housing is overcrowded and in short supply. Other elements of the
urban infrastructure including transport, education, health, water and
sewerage are under extreme pressure from the rapidly rising
population. Planners generally recognise two types of infrastructure:
hard infrastructure and soft infrastructure. The former refers to
transportation, communication, sewage, water and electric systems,
while the term soft infrastructure covers housing, education, health,
leisure and other associated facilities.
Road transport has required a high level of investment as the city has
expanded in land area and population.

10. TOPICSUMMARYCAIRO
A 2007 survey of traffic congestion in Middle East cities placed Cairo as
the second most congested city after Dubai.
Cairo’s metro, currently the only one in Africa, ranks among the 15
busiest in the world, with over 700 million passenger rides annually.
Cairo International airport is the second busiest airport in Africa. It
has had to expand to keep pace with demand.
The Greater Cairo Waste Water project provided a new sewerage
system for Greater Cairo, covering an urban area of some 700 km2.
According to the government’s National Research Center, 40 per cent
of Cairo’s inhabitants do not get water for more than three hours per
day, and three large districts do not receive any piped water.

11. TOPICSUMMARYCAIRO
Three of the world’s 30 largest slums are in Cairo. In total there are
about 8 million slum dwellers in Greater Cairo.
New urban initiatives such as the ten new cities on the periphery of
Cairo were designed to decentralise population and relieve the burden
of in-migration, but the scheme has had only limited success.
Cairo suffers from high levels of air, noise and land-based pollution.
The city is attempting to set up infrastructural facilities in an attempt
to reduce the impact of the pollution problem.

12. TOPICSUMMARYINNERLONDON
Although small parts of inner London have always been affluent and
the process of gentrification has significantly upgraded many other
areas, there remains a considerable gap in the quality of life between
inner and outer London (Figure 3.58) with high levels of deprivation in
the former.
Recently the population of inner London has increased (reurbanisation)
after a long period of decline. The change in population in inner
London in recent decades has had a significant impact on population
structure, with a considerable increase in the young adult age groups.
In the 2004 Index of Multiple Deprivation for England, Inner London
boroughs appear 41 times in the 50 most deprived districts list. This
contrasts with 13 times for the Outer London boroughs. The nature of
and linkage between London’s inner city problems are reasonably
illustrated by the web of decline, deprivation and despair.

14. TOPICSUMMARYINNERLONDON
Over the years a number of different explanations of the inner city
problem in London and the UK in general have appeared.
Local authority housing estates are increasingly becoming the focal
points of deprivation with very high levels of unemployment.
Government responses since the late 1990s have focused on trying to
tackle the ‘social exclusion’ of the poor by targeting health, education,
employment and child poverty in particular.
In spite of a concerted effort to tackle child poverty, the level in Inner
London remains particularly high – 48 per cent in 2007 after housing
costs were taken into account.

16. TOPICSUMMARYINNERLONDON
London has experienced a number of significant regeneration projects,
the largest of which have been the redevelopment of London
Docklands and the regeneration of the Lower Lea Valley in association
with the 2012 Olympic Games. London’s air quality remains the worst
in the UK. Particularly high pollution levels are recorded in large parts
of central and inner London.
Many people complain about the inadequacy and relatively high cost
of public transport, but there have been substantial additions to the
public transport infrastructure in recent decades. People on low
incomes are much less likely to drive in London than elsewhere.
Among the poorest 10 per cent of Britain’s households car ownership
is just 18 per cent in Greater London compared to 25 per cent
nationally.

18. TOPICSUMMARYCHINA
For many years the Chinese government followed a relatively
restrictive policy towards urbanisation, in part by means of policies
that sought to limit rural–urban migration.
In more recent years, restrictions on migration to urban areas have
been gradually eased to satisfy the growing demand for labour in
China’s rapidly expanding industries.
Since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, regulating
and controlling migration has been one of China’s most consistent
development policies.
From the 1950s the main instrument used to control rural–urban
migration has been the population register system (the Hukou
system), which identified people as either ‘urban’ or ‘rural’.

19. TOPICSUMMARYCHINA
Alongside these measures, the authorities since the 1950s have
periodically encouraged large numbers of people to leave the cities;
some voluntarily, others very reluctantly.
Although considerable changes in migration restrictions were
introduced in the early 1980s, the household registration system was
not dismantled and it continues to provide the framework within
which migration takes place.
China’s urbanisation strategy focuses on promoting the development
of small and medium-sized cities, ensuring multi-faceted development
of regional economies.

20. TOPICSUMMARYCHINA
The emergence and development of in situ urbanisation has been one
of the major characteristics of urbanisation in China since the 1980s.
This process occurs when rural settlements transform themselves into
urban or quasi-urban entities with very little movement of population.
In situ urbanisation is well developed in Quanzhou in Fujian Province.

21. ADDITIONALWORK
1. Use the internet to research conditions in one favela in São Paulo.
Try to find out about the condition of a housing, b water supply and
sanitation, c access in terms of roads and public transport, d access to
health and education facilities and e any other relevant information.
2. Find out more about one aspect of Cairo’s infrastructure.
3. Select one borough in Inner London and use 2001 census data to
produce a factfile on this borough.

22. SUGGESTEDWEBSITES
www.irinnews.org
www.statistics.gov.uk
www.econ.worldbank.org
www.idol.union.edu