Changing towns and cities

Cambridge IGCSE Geography 0460 · Paper 2 Human Geography Syllabus: 2027, 2028 and 2029 Official syllabus points: 7.1.1 to 7.3.2

Topic 7 is one of the five human topics examined on Paper 2. In every past paper session from 2020 to 2024 this topic carried a 7 mark levelled question, and every one of those mark schemes printed the same instruction: Max 5 if no named or inappropriate example. A correct, well written, placeless answer is capped at 5 out of 7 by rule, not by the examiner's judgement. Section 9 gives you the named example to learn.

What changed for 2027, and what to leave behind

This topic was rebuilt for the 2027 syllabus. Three things matter for revision.

Removed. The old syllabus point 1.5, Settlements (rural and urban) and service provision, is gone. Settlement patterns (dispersed, linear, nucleated), the settlement hierarchy, sphere of influence and threshold population are no longer examinable content in Topic 7. Do not revise them from older textbooks or older notes.

Removed from content, kept as a skill. Urban land use zones and the Central Business District were content in the old point 1.6. In the 2027 syllabus the only surviving reference to the CBD is in the Paper 4 fieldwork techniques list, as delimiting the sphere of influence/CBD, and as a sample hypothesis. So learn the CBD as something you might survey, not as a set of characteristics you might be asked to describe and explain. This is a real change: nine of the twenty nine 7 mark urban questions between 2020 and 2024 were about the CBD, and that style of question has no place left in the 2027 content.

New, and therefore unevidenced. Two things are new and no past paper tests them:

• 7.2.1, opportunities of urban living. Every urban question in the 2020 to 2024 papers asked about problems. There is no past paper mark scheme for the positive case. Section 4 is built from the syllabus wording alone.
• 7.3.1, an evaluation of the strategies and techniques used to manage urban growth, including sustainable. Past questions all said describe or explain. None said evaluate. Assume the command word will now be harder, and see section 8 for what an evaluation has to contain.

Terminology. The 2027 syllabus uses LIC, MIC and HIC (low, middle and high income countries). Past papers and their mark schemes use LEDC and MEDC. Write LIC, MIC and HIC. If you are practising an old paper, read LEDC as LIC or MIC and MEDC as HIC.

1. Urbanisation and global urban growth rates

Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of a country's population living in urban areas.

Three separate ideas are constantly confused, and syllabus point 7.1.1 is about the third one.

Exam trap: a country can have a very high level of urbanisation and a very low urban growth rate at the same time. The United Kingdom is about 84 per cent urban but its cities grow slowly. Ethiopia is only around a fifth urban but its cities are among the fastest growing on Earth. Do not use "urbanised" and "urbanising fast" as if they were the same word.

The global pattern

The United Nations World Urbanization Prospects is the standard source. Its 2018 revision reported that the world passed the point where more than half of all people lived in urban areas in 2007 to 2008, that about 55 per cent of the world was urban in 2018, and that this is projected to reach roughly 68 per cent by 2050. It also projected that around 90 per cent of the increase in urban population to 2050 will happen in Asia and Africa.

Approximate levels of urbanisation by region, 2018:

A 3 mark "describe the distribution" question on a world map wants the pattern first and the named regions second. A mark scheme for exactly this question credited uneven, widespread, and then any two named regions for one mark, which tells you that naming continents alone is worth very little without a pattern word.

Why the rates vary

1. HIC: urbanisation began with industrialisation in the 1800s
2. most people already live in towns
3. little rural population left to move
4. growth is now slow and comes mainly from natural increase and international migration.

1. LIC: farming still employs most people
2. cities offer far better paid work, health care and schooling
3. very large rural population available to move
4. high birth rates among a young urban population
5. urban growth rate is high.

Factors behind the variation:

• Stage of economic development. Countries with a large share of workers in primary industry have a large rural population still to urbanise. A past mark scheme on a scatter graph of GNP per person against percentage urban credits both a positive relationship and the relationship is not perfect, there are many exceptions. Say both.
• Rate of population growth. A high national birth rate feeds the cities as well as the countryside.
• Speed of industrialisation. Rapid growth of manufacturing and service jobs in a few cities pulls people in fast.
• Government policy. Restrictions on internal movement, or investment deliberately spread across regions, slow urban growth. Investment concentrated in one capital city accelerates it.
• Physical and environmental conditions. Drought, desertification, soil exhaustion and flooding push people off the land in some regions and not others.
• Conflict. War and persecution empty rural districts very quickly.
• Counter urbanisation in HICs. In many HICs people and jobs have moved out of the largest cities to smaller towns and rural areas, which holds the growth rate of the big cities down.

Marks note: on the mark scheme for the GNP scatter graph, exceptions are worth credit. Some African countries with low GNP have a higher percentage urban than some European countries with high GNP. Naming an exception is the mark most candidates miss.

2. The causes of rapid urban growth in LICs

Syllabus point 7.1.2 names the causes explicitly: rural to urban migration, with social, economic, environmental and political factors, and natural increase. Answer both halves. A question worth 4 marks that gets four migration reasons and no natural increase has taken one route only.

Rural to urban migration: push and pull

A push factor drives people away from the rural area. A pull factor attracts them to the city.

The single most important mark scheme note in this topic: every mark scheme on this question prints Accept whether expressed as pulls or pushes but do not double credit. Writing "there are few jobs in the countryside" and "there are many jobs in the city" is one idea, not two. To score four separate marks you need four separate topics: jobs, health care, education, water supply. Not four ways of saying jobs.

Marks note on development. One mark scheme spells out how a bare idea becomes a Level 2 point: Employment + example = L2, e.g. jobs for unskilled workers, low skilled jobs in factories, earning money in the informal sector, while more jobs / better paid jobs are separate L1 ideas. The lesson is that naming the kind of job lifts the answer a level.

Natural increase

Migration is only half of it, and in most rapidly growing cities it is now the smaller half.

1. mainly young adults of childbearing age migrate to the city
2. the city's birth rate is high because its population is young
3. better urban health care and water supply cut the death rate
4. natural increase is large and positive
5. the city keeps growing even if migration stops.

That chain is worth memorising, because it answers the question "why does the city keep growing when migration slows?" which the old papers never asked but the new syllabus wording invites.

The impacts on the rural area left behind

Examined directly in November 2024. The mark scheme is unusually detailed and it credits positive impacts as well as negative, so do not write a one sided answer.

Marks note on scale. The same mark scheme states: Country name is unacceptable e.g. Brazil, but an appropriate named rural area could be Amazonia. If the question says "for a named area", the name has to be at the scale of the thing being described. A country is not a named rural area, and a country is not a named urban area either.

3. Unplanned settlements

The 2027 syllabus uses the term unplanned settlements at point 7.2.2. Past papers call them squatter settlements, and you will also meet informal settlement, slum, shanty town, favela, bustee and barrio. They mean broadly the same thing for exam purposes: housing built by residents themselves, usually on land they do not legally own, without planning permission and usually without mains services.

Why they form

1. rural to urban migration and natural increase outpace house building
2. there is not enough affordable formal housing
3. arriving families cannot pay rent in the formal market
4. they build on whatever land is unused, often steep, marshy, polluted or beside railways and rivers
5. an unplanned settlement grows, with no legal title and no mains services.

Characteristics and the problems for residents

Five mark questions on this appear repeatedly. The mark schemes list one mark per distinct idea, so a list of separate problems scores better than a paragraph about one problem. Recurring credited points:

• Housing built from scrap materials, corrugated iron, plastic sheet, cardboard and wood, easily destroyed by storms.
• No piped water, or water bought expensively from vendors, or taken from a polluted source.
• No sanitation and no sewer connection.
• No mains electricity, or dangerous illegal connections.
• Overcrowding, multi family homes, lack of privacy, little natural light, few windows.
• Rubbish and waste not collected, dumped beside homes.
• Rapid spread of disease because homes are close together. Cholera and typhoid from unclean water. Malaria and dengue from mosquitoes breeding in stagnant water. Respiratory disease from smoke.
• Vermin and insects, rats, cockroaches and flies.
• Fire hazard, because homes are flammable and packed together, and access for a fire engine is difficult.
• Flooding, because the settlement is often on land nobody else wanted.
• Lack of security, crime, and poor policing.
• Poor access to health care and schools, and no money to pay for treatment.
• Insecure employment, mostly in the informal sector, low paid and unprotected.

Exam trap flagged by a real mark scheme. On a "using evidence from the photographs" question, the examiner marked as worth nothing the bare statements no electricity, no water supply, no services and high population density, and marked as too vague the phrases poor quality housing, disease, smells and crowded homes. The same mark scheme credited flimsy materials so homes are easily destroyed in storms and stagnant water attracts mosquitoes, causing malaria. The difference is the consequence. Never stop at the noun.

The informal sector

Work that is not registered, not taxed, not regulated and not protected by employment law. Street vending, waste picking and recycling, small workshops, home working, domestic service, rickshaw driving, repair work.

A Paper 4 investigation on Kenyan squatter settlements measured this directly and its data is instructive: in a settlement that had grown rapidly over the previous three years, 73 per cent of residents worked in the informal sector, while in an older settlement established over twenty years, only 41 per cent did, with 59 per cent in formal work. Older, established unplanned settlements formalise. That is a fact you can use in an evaluation of upgrading policy.

4. The opportunities of urban living

Syllabus point 7.2.1, and new for 2027. There is no past paper mark scheme behind this section, so it is built from the syllabus wording, which names culture, housing, services, leisure, consumption, economic development. Treat it as the positive counterweight to everything in section 5.

Two further points worth making in an answer:

• Opportunity is unequally distributed. Every one of these opportunities exists in the same city as the conditions described in section 3. That is exactly what syllabus point 7.2.2 means by inequality, and saying so is the strongest single sentence you can write in this topic.
• Density can be an environmental opportunity. Apartments use less energy to heat and cool per person than detached houses, journeys are shorter, and public transport, water supply and waste collection are cheaper per person to provide. A compact city is more resource efficient than a sprawling one. This links directly to sustainable management in section 8.

5. The challenges of rapid urban growth

Syllabus point 7.2.2 names seven challenges, and the safest revision strategy is to prepare one paragraph on each, because the exam picks one and asks for seven marks on it.

5a. Inequality

Inequality means differences between groups within the same city in income, housing, services and opportunity.

Causes credited by mark schemes:

• Differences in employment, between formal, well paid, secure jobs and informal, low paid, insecure work, and outright unemployment.
• Differences in education and qualifications, which determine which of those jobs a person can get.
• Migrant status, with recent arrivals living in temporary settlements and lacking legal tenure.
• Racial and ethnic discrimination.
• Gender discrimination.
• Differences in access to basic services, water, sanitation, electricity, health care and welfare.
• Housing quality and land ownership, since owning land in a growing city creates wealth and those without title gain nothing.

Marks note: a mark scheme on a photograph of Mumbai stated answer needs to be comparative. Inequality is a comparison, so write it as one: "some people live in high rise luxury flats, while others in the same district live in self built shacks with no sanitation." One sentence, two groups, one mark.

1. rapid growth outpaces formal job creation
2. arrivals take informal, low paid work
3. they cannot afford formal housing or land title
4. they settle in unplanned areas without mains services
5. their children have poorer schooling and health
6. they enter the same low paid work
7. inequality is passed on to the next generation.

5b. Service provision

Water, sanitation, electricity, waste collection, health care, education and policing all have to be extended to a population growing faster than the budget. Consequences: unsafe drinking water, open sewers, overcrowded classrooms, clinics with long waits, power cuts and load shedding, and whole districts with no legal service connection at all because they are not officially recognised.

The recognition trap. An unplanned settlement often has no legal status, so the city has no obligation, and sometimes no legal power, to lay pipes and cables into it. Granting land tenure is therefore a service policy, not just a housing policy. This is why "site and services" schemes work, and it is the sort of link that reaches Level 3.

5c. Housing

Not enough affordable homes, so: overcrowding, multiple families in one dwelling, high rents, homelessness, and the growth of unplanned settlements described in section 3. In HIC cities the same shortage shows up as unaffordable house prices, long commutes and young adults unable to leave the parental home rather than as shanty towns.

5d. Employment

Job creation lags behind population growth, so: unemployment, underemployment, where people work fewer hours or below their skill level, dominance of the informal sector, low pay, and no sick pay, pension or protection. Loss of manufacturing in older HIC cities produces long term unemployment concentrated in particular districts, which feeds inequality.

5e. Transport

Causes of traffic congestion, straight from the mark schemes:

• High population density, so many people making journeys in a small area.
• Rising car ownership as incomes rise.
• Many people travelling to work, school and the shops by car.
• Narrow roads and a road network built before mass car ownership.
• On street parking and too few car parks.
• Delivery vehicles and heavy lorries.
• No bypass or ring road, so through traffic uses city centre streets.
• Inadequate public transport and no cycle lanes.
• Rush hour peaks, when everyone travels at once.
• Accidents, roadworks and diversions.
• Traffic generators: tourism, industry, airports, stadiums, and travel into the central business district.

Consequences: wasted time, higher transport costs, air pollution and respiratory disease, noise, higher accident rates, delayed emergency vehicles, and firms discouraged from investing.

5f. Waste management

Named explicitly for the first time in 2027. Rapid growth generates more waste than collection systems can handle, and unplanned settlements are often not on a collection route at all.

• Uncollected refuse in streets and open drains.
• Vermin and insects, rats, flies and cockroaches, spreading disease.
• Drains blocked by rubbish, which causes and worsens flooding.
• Open dumping and open burning, producing smoke and toxic fumes.
• Leachate from unlined dumps polluting groundwater and rivers.
• Landfill sites running out of space and occupying land near the city.
• Waste pickers working on dumps in dangerous, unhealthy conditions.

Marks note: the syllabus for Paper 4 gives the CBD has better waste collection compared with the suburbs as a specimen hypothesis. Waste is now examinable as fieldwork as well as content.

5g. Pollution and health

Not in the list of seven, but it appears in every past mark scheme on urban problems, so learn it.

Marks note, and this one is strict. The air pollution mark scheme rejected outright the answers poisons people / die, global warming and mental health, and marked as too vague health problems, it is toxic, out migration and acid rain. Name the actual illness.

6. Urban sprawl and the rural to urban fringe

Urban sprawl is the unplanned, low density outward spread of a built up area onto the surrounding countryside.

The rural to urban fringe is the zone at the edge of a built up area where urban and rural land uses meet and compete.

Why the fringe attracts development

• Land is cheaper and available in large plots, so building is cheaper per house.
• Space for large footprint uses: retail parks, warehouses, business parks, hospitals, airports, golf courses, sports grounds, garden centres and car parks.
• Accessibility for cars and lorries, especially near ring roads and motorway junctions, and free parking.
• Less congestion and less pollution than the centre.
• Environment, so people want to live there: gardens, quiet, clean air, green space, lower crime.
• Room to expand later, which the city centre does not offer.

A mark scheme on the advantages of living in the fringe credits: lots of space for houses and gardens, low cost land, good air quality, quiet, close to green spaces, less crime, and an easy commute with less congestion.

Typical fringe land uses, worth three marks on sight: housing estates, retail parks and shopping malls, business parks and offices, industrial estates and warehouses, farmland, golf courses and playing fields, reservoirs, airports, hospitals, sewage works, landfill sites, park and ride car parks.

The impacts on the fringe and the surrounding area

Syllabus point 7.2.3. Past mark schemes on sprawl split cleanly into two lists, and a question that says "for people and the natural environment" needs both.

For the natural environment

• Loss of farmland, so reduced food production and food grown further away.
• Deforestation and loss of hedgerows and woodland.
• Loss of habitats, ecosystems destroyed, food chains disrupted, species killed and threatened.
• Increased flood risk, because fields are replaced by impermeable roofs, roads and car parks, so infiltration falls and surface runoff rises.
• Air pollution from the extra traffic at the edge of the urban area.
• Water pollution from runoff and drainage.
• Noise pollution.

For people

• Loss of rural amenity value, the countryside people valued becomes suburb.
• Traffic congestion around the edge of the urban area.
• Longer commuting distances, higher travel costs and more time lost.
• Loss of recreational and open space.
• Visual impact, the character of villages changes.
• Higher cost of extending water, sewerage, electricity and bus services over a larger area.
• Conflict over land use change, between developers, existing residents, farmers and conservation groups.

1. fields at the fringe are built on
2. roofs, roads and car parks are impermeable
3. infiltration falls almost to zero
4. surface runoff rises and reaches the stream in minutes rather than days
5. peak discharge is higher and sooner
6. the settlements downstream flood more often.

7. The management of urban growth: the strategies

Syllabus point 7.3.1 asks for an evaluation, including sustainable approaches. Section 8 tells you how to evaluate. This section is the raw material.

Housing and unplanned settlements

Marks note on command words, and it costs candidates marks every year. On the question describe the strategies used to improve living conditions in squatter settlements, the mark scheme states: DEV is on what they have done i.e. description not how it improves living conditions, and focus is on living conditions so reference to work = 0. On a similar question it states description of problems = 0 and explanation of how or why the solution is appropriate = 0. Describe means say what was built. Explain means say how it works. Answer the verb that is printed.

Transport

New road building, ring roads and bypasses, flyovers, extra lanes and dual carriageways, one way streets, roundabouts, traffic lights and traffic calming, traffic police, pedestrianisation, bus and taxi lanes, cycle lanes, park and ride, car sharing, congestion charging, investment in public transport including bus rapid transit, metro and tram, vehicle emissions testing and electric vehicles.

Services, waste and the environment

Building and staffing clinics, hospitals and schools; extending piped water and sewerage; regular refuse collection; recycling schemes and incentives; sanitary landfill and waste to energy plants; parks and green space; tree planting; air quality legislation and factory emission limits; brownfield redevelopment.

Managing sprawl

Green belts, a ring of land around a city where building is severely restricted; brownfield first policies, which require developers to use previously built land inside the city before greenfield land outside it; urban containment and density targets; planning permission and zoning; new towns to absorb growth in a planned place rather than at the edge.

8. Evaluating the strategies

New emphasis for 2027. No past paper asked for an evaluation of urban management, so this section tells you what one must contain rather than reporting a mark scheme. Read across from the rivers and coasts topics, where "evaluate" is long established: naming a method is Level 1, explaining how it works is Level 2, naming a place with figures is Level 3, and judging the method against its drawbacks is what evaluation means.

What makes urban management sustainable

Sustainable development meets present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own. In this topic that means a strategy is more sustainable when it:

• Involves residents in the decision, so the scheme fits how people actually live and is maintained afterwards;
• can be paid for and maintained locally, rather than depending on one grant that ends;
• reduces resource use, through recycling, public transport, walking, cycling and energy efficient buildings;
• protects the environment, keeping green space, trees and water quality;
• keeps livelihoods intact, so people can still earn where they live;
• and works at the density the city already has, rather than requiring the city to spread.

The evaluative sentence to aim for. No single strategy solves urban growth. Hard measures such as clearance, new roads and new flats produce fast, visible results but are expensive, treat symptoms, and often displace the poorest people they were meant to help. Community based measures such as self help, upgrading, tenure reform and recycling cost far less, keep livelihoods intact and last longer, but they act slowly and cannot deliver the scale of new housing a fast growing city needs. The cities judged most successful combine the two, and pair them with investment in the rural areas the migrants are leaving.

9. Detailed specific example: Mumbai, India

Syllabus point 7.3.2 requires one detailed specific example of a named urban area, covering causes of urban growth, the challenges and opportunities it brought, and the strategies and techniques used to manage it, including sustainable. Learn one city properly. Mumbai covers all three headings, and it is the city Cambridge itself has used as resource material.

Every 7 mark mark scheme describes place specific reference as locational details, named parts of the urban area, names of schemes, specific details, statistics. So learn the names of districts and schemes, not just the city.

The place

Mumbai is the capital of the state of Maharashtra on the west coast of India, built on a narrow peninsula, which is the single fact that explains most of its problems: the city cannot easily spread outwards, so it grows upwards and inwards. The 2011 Census recorded about 12.4 million people in Greater Mumbai. The wider metropolitan region is far larger, of the order of 20 million, and United Nations projections put it above 24 million by 2030.

Causes of its growth

• Economic pull. Mumbai is India's financial capital, home to the Reserve Bank of India, the Bombay Stock Exchange, the headquarters of many major Indian firms, the port, and the Hindi film industry based in the district of Bollywood. It generates a share of India's tax revenue and national output far above its share of population.
• Rural push from Maharashtra and beyond. Small farm sizes, unreliable monsoon rainfall, drought in the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions, farm debt, and mechanisation have all reduced rural incomes and rural jobs.
• Employment at every skill level. Textile mills historically, then construction, port work, domestic service, transport and a vast informal sector, alongside finance and technology jobs for the highly qualified.
• Services. Hospitals, universities and schools far better than those available in rural Maharashtra.
• Chain migration. Migrants join family and people from their own home district, who provide a first place to stay and a first job.
• Natural increase. The migrant population is young, so birth rates are high, and urban health care and water supply have cut death rates. Growth continues even where migration slows.

1. drought and farm debt in rural Maharashtra
2. families lose income and land
3. Mumbai offers construction and informal work paying more than farming
4. migrants arrive faster than housing is built
5. they settle in unplanned areas on marshland and beside railways
6. the migrant population is young, so births exceed deaths
7. the city keeps growing from within.

Opportunities

• Economic development. Mumbai's port, finance, media and technology sectors create work across the whole skill range, and its firms benefit from being near each other.
• Services and consumption. Specialist hospitals, universities, a very wide range of shops and goods, mains water and electricity in the formal city.
• Culture and leisure. The film industry, theatres, galleries, the Gateway of India and Marine Drive, beaches, cricket, festivals and a population drawn from across India.
• Opportunity inside the unplanned settlements themselves. Dharavi, the best known of them, is not only a housing problem. It contains thousands of small workshops in pottery, leather, textiles, food and above all plastics and waste recycling, employing tens of thousands of people. Published estimates of its annual economic turnover run into hundreds of millions of United States dollars, though the figures are estimates rather than measured accounts. Dharavi recycles a large share of Mumbai's plastic waste, which is a genuine environmental service performed by the informal sector.

Challenges

• Housing. The 2011 Census recorded that around 41 per cent of Greater Mumbai's population lived in slums. Dharavi occupies roughly 2 square kilometres between two major railway lines, and population estimates for it range from about 700,000 to around 1 million people, which is among the highest population densities recorded anywhere.
• Inequality. High rise luxury apartments look directly down onto self built shacks. Some residents have air conditioning and private cars; others share a communal tap and a public toilet block.
• Service provision. Communal toilets shared by hundreds of people; water supplied for only a few hours a day in some districts; illegal electricity connections; districts without a legal address and therefore without a legal service connection.
• Waste. Uncollected refuse, blocked drains, and large open dump sites such as Deonar, one of Asia's oldest and largest, which has suffered major fires releasing smoke across the eastern suburbs.
• Transport. The Mumbai suburban railway carries an extraordinary daily passenger load on a network built for far fewer, with severe overcrowding and a persistent record of passenger deaths on the tracks. Road congestion is severe because the peninsula funnels all north to south traffic onto a few routes.
• Flooding. Building over the Mithi river and the Mahim creek mangroves removed the city's natural drainage. In July 2005 Mumbai received extreme rainfall in a single day and suffered catastrophic flooding with heavy loss of life. Monsoon flooding remains an annual problem, and unplanned settlements on low ground are hit hardest.
• Air pollution and health. Respiratory disease from vehicle exhausts, construction dust, industry and waste burning; waterborne disease where sanitation is absent.

Management, and how sustainable it is

How to write the evaluation. Mumbai shows that the schemes which deliver most housing fastest are the ones most likely to break the informal economy that the residents live on, and that the cheapest and most durable improvements have been the ones residents helped design and now maintain themselves. The city's most sustainable achievements, its recycling economy and its community sanitation, were not built by clearing anything.

10. Supporting examples

You need only one detailed example for point 7.3.2, but a second and third city give you place specific detail for questions on sprawl and on sustainable management. Keep these shorter.

Curitiba, Brazil: managing growth sustainably

A city of roughly 1.8 million people in southern Brazil, widely used as the standard example of planned, sustainable urban growth.

• Bus rapid transit. From the 1970s Curitiba built dedicated express bus lanes along five main routes radiating from the centre, with tube shaped stations where passengers pay before boarding and step on at floor level, and bi articulated buses carrying several times a normal bus load. It moves metro numbers of passengers at a fraction of metro cost, and it was copied worldwide, including in Bogotá and Lagos. Published figures for the share of commuters using it are high but date from the 1990s and should be treated with care.
• Land use tied to transport. High density building is permitted along the bus corridors and restricted away from them, so the city grows in the shape its transport system can serve. This is the single most transferable idea in the case study.
• Green Exchange. Residents of districts too narrow for refuse lorries exchange bags of sorted rubbish for food or bus tokens. It cleans the settlements, feeds families and raises recycling, all at once, and it is the clearest example in the syllabus of a scheme that is social, economic and environmental at the same time.
• Green space and flooding. Rather than canalising its rivers, Curitiba turned floodplains into parks which flood harmlessly, and used sheep to graze them. Green space per person rose dramatically after 1970, though the widely quoted figures vary between sources.

Evaluation: Curitiba shows that good outcomes came from cheap, well designed choices sustained over decades, not from large capital projects. The limits are that it is a medium sized city with unusual continuity of planning leadership, and it still has unplanned settlements on its own periphery.

London and the Metropolitan Green Belt: managing sprawl in an HIC

• The Metropolitan Green Belt around London covers roughly 5,000 square kilometres, and green belts in total cover something in the region of an eighth of England's land area.
• The policy dates from a 1938 Act for London and was extended nationally by a government circular in 1955, with five purposes: check unrestricted sprawl, prevent neighbouring towns merging, safeguard the countryside, preserve the setting of historic towns, and encourage the recycling of derelict land inside cities.
• It works, on its own terms. London's built up edge has been held broadly in place for seventy years, farmland and habitat around the city survive, and pressure to redevelop brownfield land inside London is high.
• The costs are real. Restricting land supply pushes house prices and rents up sharply inside the belt. Development leapfrogs the belt into towns beyond it, so commuting distances and rail crowding increase rather than fall, and the carbon saved by preventing sprawl is partly given back in longer journeys.

This is the example to use when a question asks you to evaluate a management strategy, because it is one where the strategy plainly succeeded at its stated aim and plainly created a second problem.

11. Fieldwork links for Paper 4

Urban fieldwork appears constantly on Paper 4, and the syllabus lists the techniques by name.

Suitable hypotheses

• Land use changes with distance from the city centre.
• The percentage of commercial land use decreases with distance from the centre.
• Environmental quality improves with distance from the city centre.
• Pedestrian counts are highest in the central shopping street.
• Residents of unplanned settlements mainly work in the informal sector.
• The central business district has better waste collection than the suburbs. (This is the syllabus's own specimen hypothesis.)

Methods to be able to describe

• Land use survey along a transect. Walk a line outward from the centre, use a recording sheet with agreed land use categories, and record the use of each ground floor frontage at set intervals.
• Environmental quality survey and bi polar survey. Score each site against paired opposites, for example "no litter" to "heavy litter", on a scale from plus 3 to minus 3, at the same time of day at every site.
• Pedestrian and traffic counts. Count everyone passing a fixed point for a fixed period, for example five minutes, using a tally sheet, and repeat at each site.
• Questionnaires. Design the layout, wording, number and format of questions, run a pilot survey first, and choose the sampling method and the location of the survey deliberately.
• Field sketches and annotated photographs to record housing quality where a questionnaire is not allowed.
• Building material tallies, counting brick built against sheet metal homes, as a measure of housing quality.

Sampling and reliability points that earn marks

• Systematic sampling along a transect gives even coverage, is easy to carry out, and removes the bias of a student choosing what to record. Its weaknesses are that it requires a lot of recording, and it can miss an untypical land use or land your interval on an anomaly.
• Land use on the upper floors may differ from the ground floor, and one side of the road may differ from the other. Say which you recorded.
• Repeat counts on different days and at different times, and take an average, because a single count catches one rush hour or one wet afternoon.
• Pilot the questionnaire to find questions people misread.
• Choose survey locations so that one busy junction does not dominate the results.

12. Common exam mistakes

• Giving no named urban area on a 7 mark question. Every mark scheme in this topic caps you at 5 out of 7.
• Naming a country where the question asks for a named urban area or a named rural area. The mark scheme states that a country name is unacceptable.
• Naming a city but giving no detail inside it. Level 3 needs districts, scheme names, figures and dates.
• Double crediting a push and its matching pull. "Few jobs in the countryside" and "more jobs in the city" is one idea. The mark schemes say so explicitly, in every session.
• Answering "causes of urban growth" with migration only, and forgetting natural increase.
• Stopping at the noun. "No sanitation" and "disease" were marked as worth nothing or too vague. "No sanitation, so sewage contaminates the water supply and cholera spreads" earns the mark.
• Writing "health problems" or "it is toxic" for air pollution. Name the illness: asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer.
• Confusing the level of urbanisation with the rate of urban growth.
• Answering describe with an explanation, or explain with a description. On a "describe what has been done" question the mark scheme awards zero for explaining why the solution is appropriate, and zero for describing the problem.
• Writing only about the problems of cities. Syllabus point 7.2.1 requires the opportunities, and 7.2.2 asks for the opportunities of rapid growth as well as the challenges.
• Writing only about the negative effects of rural to urban migration on the countryside. The mark scheme credits remittances, returning skills, less pressure on services and jobs freed up.
• Listing management strategies without a drawback on a question that says evaluate.
• Revising settlement patterns, the settlement hierarchy, sphere of influence, threshold population or the characteristics of the CBD as content. They are not in the 2027 syllabus for this topic.
• Using LEDC and MEDC. The 2027 syllabus uses LIC, MIC and HIC.

13. Quick revision

• Urbanisation is the rising percentage of people living in urban areas. Urban growth rate is how fast that population grows. They are different.
• The world passed 50 per cent urban around 2007 to 2008; roughly 55 per cent in 2018; projected near 68 per cent by 2050, with about 90 per cent of the increase in Asia and Africa.
• Africa has the fastest urban growth rates. North America and Latin America are the most urbanised. Europe grows slowly.
• Causes of rapid urban growth in LICs: rural to urban migration (economic, social, environmental, political push and pull) plus natural increase.
• Do not double credit a push and its matching pull.
• Impacts on the rural area: ageing and imbalanced structure, loss of workforce, falling food production, closures. But also remittances, returning skills and less pressure on services.
• Opportunities of urban living: culture, housing, services, leisure, consumption, economic development. New for 2027.
• Challenges of rapid growth: inequality, service provision, housing, employment, transport, waste management, unplanned settlements.
• Unplanned settlements: self built, no legal tenure, no mains services. Problems are flimsy materials, no water, no sanitation, overcrowding, disease, fire, flood, insecurity, informal work.
• Inequality answers must be comparative: some people have X, others have Y.
• Urban sprawl harms the natural environment (farmland, habitat, flooding, pollution) and people (congestion, commuting, loss of amenity, land use conflict).
• Managing growth: self help, site and services, upgrading, tenure, low cost housing, new towns, rural investment, public transport, congestion charging, green belts, recycling.
• Sustainable means locally affordable, locally maintained, resident involved, resource saving and livelihood preserving.
• Evaluation means strengths and drawbacks, then a judgement.
• One detailed specific example of a named urban area: causes of growth, challenges and opportunities, management including sustainable.
• A named example is worth two marks. Place specific detail is worth the top mark.

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