Poverty & Deprivation in Urban Areas (SL IB Geography)

• Poverty is defined as an individual not having the resources needed to meet a certain standard of living
• In urban areas, poverty often means that people do not have:
  • Basic services such as clean water, sanitation and electricity
  • Adequate housing
  • Access to healthcare and education
• There is wide variation in wealth across urban areas
  • In HICs, the poorest areas are usually found in the inner city areas around the CBD
  • In contrast, the poorest areas are the squatter settlements usually found at the rural urban fringe
• Poverty and deprivation lead to a variety of problems in urban areas
• All cities have levels of inequality, but LICs are amongst the worst affected
• Many low-income families are 'pulled' to informal settlements around towns and cities, looking for a sense of 'belonging' with others in the same situation
• In other areas without a strong social network or cities with recently arrived large populations, high levels of crime, begging and petty theft are more common
• Overall, this creates urban poverty that degrades both the physical and social environment around that area
• This makes it difficult for people to escape from poverty and they fall victim to the vicious 'cycle of poverty’ and urban poverty becomes ingrained within the city
• Combined with a lack of suitable work, housing, water supply, sewerage, solid waste disposal and pollution, the quality of life for people in cities is low

Cycle of poverty

• Poverty and deprivation are passed on from one generation to the next
• Children will tend to get less parental support and usually have to attend inadequate schools
• They also tend to leave school early with few qualifications
• Lack of qualifications means they cannot find well-paid employment and rely on social handouts
• Children they have will be born into this cycle and so families remain ‘trapped’ and unable to improve their circumstances
• This feeds into a lower quality of life

• Deprivation is connected with poverty and occurs when a person’s well-being falls below an acceptable minimum standard
• The minimum standard varies from country to country and applies to several different aspects of daily life
  • It is about more than just not having enough money
• There are several indicators of deprivation, including:
  • Economic: Access to employment and levels of income
  • Social: Crime rates, levels of health, access to health care and the proportion of lone-parent families
  • Environmental: Noise, air pollution and derelict land
  • Political: Opportunities to vote and participate in the community
  • Physical: Levels of pollution, vandalism, graffiti and quality of housing
  • Housing: Level of amenities, overcrowding, central heating

Informal housing

• Availability and affordability of housing cannot keep up with the rate at which the urban population is increasing in LICs and MICs
• This leads to people building their own homes on any vacant land using scrap materials like cardboard, corrugated iron and plastic
• The UN defines informal settlements as:

Contiguous settlement where the inhabitants are characterised as having inadequate housing and basic services

• They are unplanned and unregulated housing (informal settlements) with little sanitary facilities, fresh water or reliable energy supply
• The characteristics of the land include that it is:
  • Not usually owned by the residents
  • In areas of no economic value
  • On the urban edges or fringes
  • Along main roads or railways
  • Clinging onto the side of steep slopes
• Depending on the country, these informal settlements, or squatter settlements, are also called:
  • • 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 developing countries, about a quarter of urban inhabitants (1.6 billion) live in these impoverished squatter settlements and 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 extensive overcrowded areas usually within megacities
  • The largest are found:
    • Nairobi, Kenya, with a population of 1.5 million, is crowded into 3 sprawling slums of mud huts and tin shacks, - Kibera being the largest of the 3
    • Neza, Mexico City, Mexico, has a population of 1.1 million people 
    • Dharavi, Mumbai, India, has 1 million people in a warren of narrow lanes, interconnected shacks and single-room living spaces that double as factories
    • Orangi Town, Karachi, Pakistan, has 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, has a population of 400,000 in iron and wooden shacks
• These unregulated areas of housing present serious risks such as fire, flooding and landslides
• Informal settlements typically suffer from:
  • Poor, overcrowded, small housing, built very close together using inadequate material and with uncertain electricity supplies
  • They have restricted access to water supplies
  • Little to no sanitation facilities and no solid waste disposal, which leads to a polluted and degraded local environment
  • There are inadequate health facilities, which, along with poor living conditions, increase sickness and death rates
  • The population in these areas have insecure living conditions as they may be forcibly removed by landowners or other authorities

Informal employment

• Urban areas, particularly in LICs have rapidly growing populations and job creation cannot match the pace of growth
• As a result, unemployment and underemployment are not unusual 
• People will often work on street corners doing informal work like shining shoes, giving haircuts, providing transport, selling water or food 
• These jobs are often unskilled and labour-intensive and require little money to set up 
• The informal economy leaves cities without income to provide adequate services as workers pay no taxes
• It also makes wages and working conditions difficult to regulate