🚗 Congestion
As more people arrive, more of them own or use vehicles. Roads built for a smaller city fill up. Traffic crawls, journeys take hours and people lose time and money. Delivery vehicles and workers are late, which slows the whole economy.
Growing Cities » Problems of Rapid Urbanisation
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Edexcel spec: 6.1 A growing percentage of the world's population lives in urban areas (c)
- The problems of rapid urbanisation: congestion, transport, employment, crime and the environment
- How these problems link together
- How to use photographs and maps to investigate the impacts
Urban Environments is an optional topic. Check with your teacher that it is one of the two topics you are studying in Paper 2 Section A.
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Unlock This CourseCities that grow too fast
You know that cities grow through rural-urban migration and natural increase, and that the fastest growth is in developing and emerging countries. Growth brings jobs and services, but when a city grows faster than it can build roads, homes and workplaces, problems appear.
Key terms:
- Rapid urbanisation: a fast increase in the proportion of people living in towns and cities.
- Congestion: too many vehicles or people on roads and public transport, so movement slows down.
- Unemployment: when people want a job but cannot find one.
- Crime: actions that break the law, such as theft and violence.
The specification names five problems. Learn them as a list: congestion, transport, employment, crime and environmental issues.
Congestion and transport
These two problems are close partners, so make sure you can explain both.
🚌 Transport
Public transport such as buses and trains is often too small, crowded or too expensive to build quickly. Many roads are in poor condition. Cities spread outwards, so people live far from where they work and need long journeys.
There is also a knock-on effect. Slow, packed traffic uses more fuel and gives off more exhaust fumes, which links congestion to the environmental problems later in this lesson.
Employment
People move to the city to find work, but the number of new migrants can be bigger than the number of new jobs. This causes two problems:
- Unemployment: there are too few formal jobs for everyone who wants one.
- Underemployment: people work only a few hours or in low-paid jobs because they cannot find better ones.
With low or no income, families struggle to pay for housing, food and transport. How people earn money without a formal job is taught in the lesson called Squatter Settlements and the Informal Economy, so do not go into that here.
Crime
Crime can rise when many people live close together with little money. Reasons include:
- Unemployment and poverty, which may push some people towards theft.
- Overcrowded areas with poor street lighting, where crimes are harder to prevent.
- Too few police and services for such a fast-growing population.
Crime then causes further problems. Residents feel unsafe, businesses may avoid an area, and visitors and investors can be put off.
Environmental issues
Large, fast-growing cities put heavy pressure on the environment.
💨 Air pollution
Traffic, factories and power stations release fumes and smoke. This can harm people's breathing.
💧 Water pollution
If sewage and waste are not treated properly, they can flow into rivers and pollute the water people use.
🗑 Waste
Cities make huge amounts of rubbish. If it is not collected, it piles up in streets and attracts pests.
As the city spreads, it also covers farmland and natural land with buildings and roads, so the countryside around it shrinks.
Learn this
The problems link together. Fast growth means more people, so more traffic (congestion), more people than jobs (unemployment), more poverty and crime, and more pollution and waste.
Skill: using photographs and maps
The exam often gives you a photograph or a map and asks you to investigate the impacts of rapid urbanisation. Use a simple method each time.
- Look. Read the title, key and scale first. Then name what you can see.
- Pick out evidence. On a photograph, look at the foreground, middle and background. On a map, look at roads, buildings and land use.
- Link evidence to a problem. Say which of the five problems it shows, and why.
📷 Reading a photograph
Imagine a photo of a main road in a fast-growing city. Every lane is full of cars, buses and motorbikes, with barely any gaps. Thick haze hangs over the buildings. This shows congestion and air pollution.
🗺 Reading a map
On a map of a city, many roads meeting at a few crossing points suggest traffic will build up there. Buildings creeping outwards into green space show the city is spreading onto farmland and natural land.
Worked example
Question: A photograph shows a crowded bus station. People are queueing in long lines and every bus is packed. What problem does it show and why? [2 marks]
Answer: It shows a transport problem. (1) There are too few buses for the number of passengers, so the system cannot cope with the growing population. (1)
Common mistakes
- Writing "traffic" and nothing else. Explain why: too many vehicles for roads built for a smaller city.
- Treating the problems as separate. Good answers link them, such as unemployment leading to poverty and crime.
- Describing a photo without saying which problem it shows. Always name the problem.
- Saying cities are only bad. Growth also brings jobs and services. The problems come when growth is too fast.
Exam-style question
(a) Name two problems associated with rapid urbanisation. [2 marks]
(b) Explain why rapid urbanisation can lead to congestion. [3 marks]
(c) A photograph shows an overcrowded road in a fast-growing city, with thick smoke over the traffic. Describe two impacts of rapid urbanisation that the photograph shows. [4 marks]
Model answer
(a) Any two from: congestion, transport problems, unemployment, crime, environmental problems such as pollution. (1) (1)
(b) Many people move to the city, so there are more vehicles. (1) The roads were built for a smaller population and cannot carry so many vehicles. (1) Traffic therefore moves slowly and queues build up. (1)
(c) The photograph shows congestion, because the road is full of vehicles with no space to move. (1) This slows journeys and wastes time. (1) It also shows air pollution, because there is smoke over the traffic. (1) This can harm people's health. (1)
Exam tip
When a question gives you a photograph, name the problem, point to the evidence you can see, and then add a reason or effect. Each step usually earns a mark.