Poverty & Deprivation in Urban Areas (DP IB Geography)

Revision Note

Poverty in Urban Areas

  • 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

Infographic illustrating the cycle of poverty: child grows up in poverty, disadvantaged in education and skills, struggles to get a formal job, remains in poverty.
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 in Urban Areas

  • 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 Activity in Urban Areas

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

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