How Successful have Policies for managing Urban Settlement been?

Authors Avatar

Essay Question:

How Successful have Policies for managing Urban Settlement been?

Areas may need to be controlled as they may become over populated or under populated. This can arise from many factors including high Birth Rates (or low birth rates), immigration (or emigration) or low death rate (or a high death rate) etc.

When there are too many people for the resources or technology within an area, the area is said to be overpopulation (e.g. Bangladesh). The opposite of this is underpopulation, and this occurs when there are too many resources than can be used by the number of people living there (e.g. Canada).

When an area becomes overpopulated or underpopulated it may need to be controlled, this is usually done by the government.

I am going to first of all compare two different places which had to be managed, Cairo (in Egypt) and London (in England). Both these places are in urban areas. The word urban relates to an area that is in a city or a densely populated area.

I have chosen to use Cairo as one of my case studies and I will show factors such as the need for management here, what was done to fix the problems, what it is like now etc.

I will then do the same for the London Docklands case study which I will use.

I have chosen to compare the two because Cairo is in a LEDC (i.e. a Less Economically Developed Country) whereas London is in a MEDC (i.e. a More Economically Developed country).

I will look at how successful these schemes have been, however, it is important to note that just because something is a success for one individual (or party) it does not mean that it will be successful for others.

To begin with, I will look at Cairo which is one of the world's most densely populated cities.

Cairo, which is the capital of Egypt, had, in 1996, an estimated population of between 12 and 16 million.

Cairo has relatively few squatter settlements. Instead, newcomers live in overcrowded, two-roomed apartments within tall blocks of flats where there are few public services, and washing hangs everywhere making the streets look very dirty and unattractive.

Many migrants live in the ‘City of the Dead’, a huge Muslim cemetery.

People actually live within the tombs, which are often cleaner than apartments, however they are situated over a kilometer from the nearest water supply.

To try and accommodate people, new flats were built but these were built in the suburbs, so not only is the rent too expensive for many locals, but the cost of the journey to work in the city centre is too high for most people.

These problems of poor, inadequate housing led to more problems amongst the local people.

Join now!

In Cairo, there are 1.5 million cars and many buses, and Cairo’s streets were not built for this amount of traffic, which is known for its noise and pollution.

Like in many other LEDC’s, Cairo’s drinking water is often contaminated with sewerage which and cause diseases (such as cholera, typhoid etc).

Cairo’s government are the ones who order the change as they are the ones with the authority. Finance and resources to be able to make these changes possible.

Pollution, in Cairo comes from the breakdown of the sewerage systems, or the lack of them. Local factories ...

This is a preview of the whole essay