These Geography A-Level notes on Global Interdependence delve into the management of shanty towns, covering strategies for improving living conditions, infrastructure, and access to services. The notes analyse various approaches to address the challenges of informal settlements, offering valuable i...
Suggest reasons why solving the problems of shanty towns can be difficult
A shanty town is a settlement of buildings which are made from mud and wood and usually lacks:
adequate infrastructure, proper sanitation, clean water supply and electricity. Squatter areas can
vary from small informal settlement to housing millions of people and can develop over time to
improve conditions.
Firstly, there is the issue of land rights, this is due to the people living in shanty towns not owning
the land that they live. This means that these squatter settlements are technically illegal but due to
the size of the area sit can be quite difficult to claim back land. One option is for the owner to give
the land to the squatter due to squatter right, ie they have lived there for long enough. Another is
for the local authorities to pay for the land, if they don’t own it, or it give it to the squatter. Finally,
the settlements could be bulldozed, and the land given back to the rightful owner. However, this
then creates the issue of where all these people will now go and if the problem has just been
diverted instead of resolved.
The biggest problem is cost and in all the examples above someone loses out either the landowners,
authorities, or the squatters. This is primarily due to these settlements being illegal however, due to
there being so many of them it is very difficult to just evict them. Also suddenly trying to provide
infrastructure and services for over a million people can become extremely expensive.
Another issue is scale if the shanty town is small then it poses a much smaller problem compared to
those such as Dharavi in Mumbai or Neza in Mexico which have a population over 1 million people.
In this case building infrastructure and providing facilities for these people will cost a lot more
money. Greater population also results in more pressure on services such as health and education.
Time can also be problematic such as if the people have been living in the shanty towns for several
years it can be much harder to evict them. It can also take long periods to setup things like waste
management and plumbing in sewage and clean water all of which are vital to increasing quality of
life. Due to it being so long after some of these shanties were built it may not be possible to install
some services due to the lack of space and forward planning.
In conclusion, shanty towns provide many challenges due to their lack of planning and illegal land
use. Many ways to solve these challenges also become very expensive and therefore make it even
more difficult to resolve.
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