Lesson video

Hello.

I'm Mr. Hutchinson and welcome to our lesson on geography.

And we're learning all about population.

We've been learning about population across the world and different locations and how population can change.

And in today's lesson, we're going to be looking at the population within settlements called slums. So in today's lesson, the first thing that we will do is we'll ask what is a slum and why do they appear? We'll then look at some specific example, examples of slum settlements.

For example, Rocinha.

And we'll look at some of the challenges faced by the people living there.

We'll look at another example of a slum settlement of Dharavi and the challenges faced by people there.

And some of the possible solutions that have been tried, and that are still being tried in those areas.

We'll finish with our end of lesson quiz.

So our first question.

What is a slum and why do they emerge? Well, there's a picture here of a slum settlement.

And a slum is usually defined, and there are different definitions, but it's usually defined as heavily populated and informal settlement.

So a formal settlement will be a settlement that has been planned usually by a government or some sort of authority in a region.

It's especially planned.

And then legally it will be built for people to move into.

And slums differ in that they're more informal.

So they get built up by people who don't necessarily own the land and can become very heavily populated.

So lots of people living very close together in these settlements.

Now, it's important to say right from the start that you might have heard some other names for slums, you might've heard them called Townships or Shanty towns or Favelas.

Some people find all of these names, including slums problematic.

They might find them offensive.

They think that there's lots of negative connotations, negative things associated with them.

And so can find these words to be a bit problematic and think that perhaps we should be using some different words instead.

I'm going to use slums for this lesson because in lots of the reports and things that have been written to help think about these settlements they're referred to as slums. That's the word that we use, but it's important to watch our language and think about how language can change.

And there are some people who say, maybe we shouldn't be using this word slums anymore.

It's an interesting debate it's an interesting argument.

So some of the characteristics of slums and very important again, often but not always, so great geographers, just generally, a good thing to do.

Don't generalise.

Don't say all things are like this.

So often within slums, we have quite poor conditions because they've been built so quickly and don't necessarily have that legal status.

Slums very often have little access to fresh water.

That's part of the definition.

And there might be limited services.

So limited access to police services, fire services, healthcare and education.

They might be quite difficult to come by.

Living in a slum may not be offered to the people living there.

So, first question for you.

We've looked at a few different definitions that are often used for slums, often used by people working with slums and finding out about them and communities living in these settlements.

What would be the best definition you use for slums here? Would it be a settlement that's built quickly, a heavily populated informal settlement, a group of houses on the edge of a city or a sparsely populated formal settlement? Choose now.

You could write down your answer if you'd like to, or you can just point at the screen once you think you've found the correct one.

Okay, let's see if you got it.

So, our correct answer here is B.

A heavily populated informal settlement.

So if you chose B well done, you've got the definition that we're using for a slum here.

It's a settlement that has lots of people living very often close together and it's informal.

What about this? I've got a statement here for you that I'd like you to read and see what you think about this.

The buildings, the people and the experiences inside slums are all the same.

So do you think that that statement is true, or do you think that that statement is false? Is it true that the buildings, the people, the experience inside slums are all the same or is that false? What did you choose? Well done if you said false.

Of course they're not the same.

People live in all sorts of different conditions, even within slums. In any settlement there's a big difference of how people live, the experiences that they have, the sorts of things that they do, the sorts of people that are there.

And so in slums like anywhere else, and slums are different across the world, but even within a particular slum that we might be looking at, the experiences will differ and they will vary.

We need to bear that in mind.

So where can we find slums? Well, this map here shows where some of the major slum settlements around world are.

And the UN, the United Nations estimate that, there's probably about one in eight people on earth, living in a slum settlement.

So around a billion people, living in some sort of an informal, heavily populated settlement on earth.

So, huge number of people, almost a billion.

And these settlements here show some of the largest ones.

So this map here, shows you some of the largest slum settlements around earth.

These circles here, these numbers refer to how many people.

So this is millions.

So 0.

6 is 0.

6 million.

So if you see a little yellow circle, it means that there's a slum settlement in this area with about 600,000 people living within it.

This larger dark circle.

And you can see that there's one over here in Mexico.

Means that there's 4 million people living in the slum settlement.

You can see how the slums are distributed.

Some of the major slums. But it's important again to say that we can find slum settlements all across the world.

In pretty much any location where you find people, there are slum settlements of varying sizes that are built up.

This is just showing some of the largest ones on this map here.

So I'll show you another map, which has got some.

Which tells us just how many people are living in slums in a particular region or area.

And as we go towards a darker blue here, more people are living in those slum settlements.

And you can see this is from the World Bank.

And they define a slum as any place where there's a group of individuals living under the same roof.

And they have limited access to improved water, so treated water, water that's safe to drink, limited access to improved sanitation.

So it's a way of getting water away.

For example, flushing toilets or waste water.

Sufficient living area.

So if they're too cramped and durability of housing, which refers to how robust the housing is.

So is the housing safe, will it stand up or will it easily get destroyed or damaged? And you can see here across this map, we've got the continent of South America here.

We've got here Central America and North America here.

We've got the Middle East here and then we've got Asia over here.

And this is where we find most of the people living in slum settlements and in the darker blue areas up to 200 million people living in slum areas across those different regions.

So why do they emerge? What are the factors, what are the things that cause slums to be created? Why do they emerge, why are they created and why did they develop? Why do they continue to grow? We have few different reasons.

One is migration.

So people might move from rural areas to more urban centres like cities.

And as they do, then these informal housing settlements like slums can start to appear.

They can start to develop as people move.

And this urbanisation is happening across the world, but especially in lots of developing countries and emerging economies.

So, in those areas where at the moment are lots and lots of big towns and lots of, lots of big cities, there are more of those places emerging becoming urbanised and so more people are beginning to migrate to those centres.

So those cities can grow very quickly.

And the slum settlements around them can also grow quickly around them.

Colonialism is another reason that slums have been created in the past and have also continued to develop.

So a colonial force is a group of people from one particular country who goes to another country and using force, very often using weapons, take over that country and take the things from that country and create worse living conditions for the people in those countries.

So, especially from Europe, lots of countries, including Great Britain, went to lots of other countries and took over those countries using force.

And in terms of slum settlements, they may well have gone to some of the major centres and sent those people out, excluded them.

So the people that were living there, they said you can't live here anymore, we want to live in the centre and they forced them out to live on the fringes.

That's another reason that those slum settlements then appear.

Because those people were left with nowhere to live because the colonial forces like Great Britain and the European forces sent them away.

It could also be down to poor house planning though.

So governments may not really be in a position or they may not really be able to have planned those housing, the NF housing.

Which means that people want to live near a city or inner city, but the housing just doesn't exist for them to do it because those governments, the leaders from those countries haven't planned the housing for them.

Slum settlements might appear because of work.

Lots of people, especially with physical labour, if things are being built, they want to go to those places where they know that they're going to be able to get work.

And if they are labourers, if they are working on building, then they become fantastic builders.

And so can then use those skills within the slum settlements, which makes those slum settlements bigger and more developed.

And the last factor is natural disasters.

So it may be that people are forced to leave where they live because of a natural disaster.

It could be drought, where there's no rain or flooding or earthquakes, or tsunamis which force large numbers of people somewhere else and they have to build quickly an informal settlement, like a slum.

So, I went through a lot of different factors there.

And I want to give you some time to think them through.

I want you to give, give you some time to really process them and think about some of the different factors that cause the creation of, and the expansion, the development of slum settlements around the world.

So I'll just give you a little bit of a list to jog your memory.

There was migration, there was urbanisation, there was colonialism, there was poor house planning, there was labour or work and there were natural disasters.

So I'd like you to now take a moment to have a think about all those different factors and how they affect slum settlements.

Get a pen, piece of paper or a notebook if you haven't already got one.

And just write out, choose at least one of those.

You could do all of them if you want to.

And you're feeling especially smart and just write out nice full sentences, how one or more of those factors can cause or expand slum settlements.

So pause the video and give that your best shot now.

And then you can restart the video once you've finished writing.

Super work.

So here's my example.

I had a go at this task and I wrote, one factor that's led to the creation of slums in some places is growing urbanisation.

This means that few people are living in rural areas and more towns and cities are emerging.

Around these urban centres, more informal settlements can emerge and develop.

Have a look at your answer.

Is there anything that you might like to improve having read mine? Or maybe you put something in yours which I haven't included in mine.

In which case, well done, awesome work.

So let's take a look now at a slum settlement.

Let's look at a slum settlement called Rocinha.

So let's locate it first of all.

So I've got my map here.

And you can see that this is where we live, in the United Kingdom.

Let's just zoom into that.

And we need to go across the Atlantic Ocean.

We're going to go to the continent.

What's this continent here called? South America.

Well done, well done if you got South America.

And we're going to look at Brazil, the country of Brazil in South America.

And you can see Brazil is a huge country.

You can see the Western boundary there, of Brazil.

The famous river running through it.

What's the river in Brazil? The Amazon river, well done.

But we're not going to look at the Amazon river.

We're going to go to the East coast over here.

And lots of major cities have appeared along the East coast of Brazil.

And we're going to zoom in here to one of the most famous, one of the largest and most important cities in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro.

You can see Rio de Janeiro here.

This is a normal map view, but we can just switch to satellite to have a look at what it really looks like.

And we can see now here how the settlement has developed, and you can see Rocinha here.

If we zoom in, we can see this slum settlement that's just emerged all along the outskirts and the sort of West side of Rio de Janeiro.

You can see the different buildings there that have been built and developed in Rocinha.

So here's another map which just shows Rio de Janeiro.

And we can see Rocinha is just over on the West hand side over here.

Now, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, is of course a wonderfully diverse city.

A modern city in lots of ways, a developed city in lots of ways.

And looking at the slum settlements, it can be easy, but it's important not to think, oh that's what it's like in Rio de Janeiro, But that's not true.

Rio de Janeiro is in many ways, you can see all of the sort of skyscrapers here in many ways, indistinguishable from any other city that you might have visited.

But it does have this huge, called a Favela.

Sorry, Favela the Portuguese word for slum along the outskirts.

And that causes some challenges.

So one of the challenges is that crime rates can be high.

Gangs can be present because there's not many police there.

So they can.

Gangs can, using violence can run those places.

The settlements that people live on might be illegal.

So people might not own the land, which means that they can be exploited and taken advantage of by people who perhaps own the land or say that they own the land.

The access to fresh water and sanitation can be variable.

It can be quite difficult for people to travel.

So if people want to travel into the city for a job for example, the transport links might not be very good.

The buildings can be unstable because of the building materials that are used and where they're located.

Especially with Rocinha there, located on a hill, on a slope.

So, looking at those different challenges now, I'd like you to think about the crime, the housing rights, the sanitation, that's water running away, especially through toilets and sewage, the building conditions and the mobility.

People being able to travel from one place to another.

Think about those different challenges that are faced by the people living in Rocinha.

And just write one sentence explaining, how that would present a challenge for the people living there.

So pause the video and you're going to write five sentences.

One for each of those challenges.

Great work.

You should have two paragraphs by now, you're already working really, really hard and understand a lot more about slum settlements across the world.

So well done.

Let's take a look at a different slum settlement now.

Let's go to Dharavi.

So again, let's take a look at our map.

We've just been in South America, looking at Rocinha in Brazil.

This time, however, we're going to go across to India.

So that's where we are, the United Kingdom and Europe.

And we're going to go across.

Instead of Brazil, we're going to go East.

We're going to have a look at India.

So let's just zoom in.

And this time we're looking at the West coast of India.

And a city called Mumbai.

Major city on the West coast, again on the coast here of India.

And if we zoom in, we can see a sort of peninsula, a bit of land sticking out into the ocean.

If we zoom into Mumbai, then this whole area in red here is known as Dharavi.

A huge slum settlement that is developed and built up over many years.

And you can see all of the informal buildings that have been built there.

So again, just like with Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai a beautiful, beautiful city, a varied city in a wonderful country which is hugely diverse and has in lots of ways, very very modern.

We can see some of the amazing structures there that have been built.

And there are challenges though faced by people living in Dharavi.

So, there are over a million people living in that very small area.

So it's very densely populated, lots of people living really closely together.

And the reason that Dharavi first emerged was because those colonial forces that we were talking about earlier, from Britain travelled across to India and using weapons, took over the land from the people that lived there already, sent them out of the major centres, sent them away into different places, which very sadly meant that they weren't able to have the same sort of access to rights and resources and jobs as the colonial forces who had taken over and said that they wanted to be in charge.

And they wanted to own the land that they'd taken from the people that lived there.

Again, there's very poor sanitation, very limited access to clean water within Dharavi.

And that can mean that there are disease epidemics that break out.

There have also been lots of major fires erupting, and they spread very easily in Dharavi.

However, we might get a little bit of a different picture.

So, one of the things that we've been talking about here is lots of the challenges that are faced by people in slums at times, and there are challenges facing people living in slum settlements.

But let's take a little bit of a different perspective.

It's important to get different perspectives when we're doing geographical work.

So this is from a researcher who visited Dharavi.

And he said, "From the main road leading through Dharavi, the place makes a desperate impression.

However, once having entered the narrow lanes Dharavi proves that the prejudice of slums as dirty, underdeveloped and criminal places does not fit real living conditions".

Oh, he's saying that some of these prejudices that people have against slums, that's not what he saw.

Instead, he actually went into the huts.

He said, "Inside the huts, it is however, very clean and some huts shared the elements of beauty.

Nice curtains at the windows and balconies covered by flowers and plants indicate that people try to arrange their homes as cosy and as comfortable as possible." So that was a German researcher called Denis Gruber writing about 15 years ago.

So, how does Denis Gruber's report there, what he said about what he saw in Dharavi when he actually visited, how does that contrast, how does that differ to how slums are very often presented? You might've seen slums in the media or in the news, or you might've seen them in a documentary or somewhere else.

So how does what he saw and what he wrote about and talked about, how is that different to how they are often presented? So pause the video and have a go at writing your answer to that now.

I've got a few sentence starters there to help you.

So you might start off your answer with, although slums are often presented mmh.

Gruber argues that mm.

Pause the video and have a go at writing another paragraph here.

You're going to do a great job.

Great work.

So, again I've written a little answer here.

You can compare yours to mine.

So I wrote, although slums are often presented as dirty, unhappy and hopeless places, Gruber argues that there is in fact lots of examples of clean and well looked after homes within Dharavi.

So Denis Gruber there giving us a different perspective.

Challenging, perhaps some of our preconceptions, some of the things that we thought we believed.

And it's always good to get lots of different perspectives, lots of different evidence when we're discussing and investigating these different things.

That's what great geographers do.

They take as much evidence in as possible to make their conclusions.

So we've looked at some different examples of slum settlements and some of the challenges that do face people that are living there.

What are some of the solutions? Well, there are eight here offered by the UN.

I'll let you read them first.

So there are lots of things that we can do to help meet some of those challenges that are faced.

And the first one the UN says, we have to recognise that there is a challenge here.

There is difficulty faced by people living in slum settlements.

And there are lots of people living in slum settlements.

A billion people, perhaps living in slum settlements.

And although some good work has been done in terms of making life better for people living in slum settlements, some of that good work has been lost in recent years.

And so the UN says it has to be people centred.

You have to think about the people living there.

There needs to be government leadership.

And there also needs to be.

The people living there need to be given land security.

One thing that can really help is that those slums can be upgraded.

So that would require a financial investment.

So that could be from businesses or it could be from charities or preferably it could be from the governments.

The governments of the countries that the slum settlements are in.

Another thing that's really important is job creation.

So if people have jobs, then they were able to get money and then they're able to create more wealth within those slum settlements.

So job creation is really important.

At the moment, we still don't have really good data.

Information about what's going on and the conditions of slums. How many people are living there? And so to make good decisions, we need to make sure that we get that better data.

And the UN says that these, all of these approaches should be community based.

It should be the people living within the communities that's driving this forward.

Not outsiders going in trying to change things or solve problems or take over.

But the communities within those slum settlements that are supported to be able to improve the conditions and meet the challenges that are faced.

So, lots of different solutions there.

As I say, lots have been tried in different places, lots of success in terms of meeting those challenges.

A bit up and down there in terms of how that's gone across different slum settlements across the world and across time.

So I'd like you now to choose one of the solutions that the UN suggests.

And have a go at writing down, why you think that it's important, why it might help.

So you can choose one or you can choose more than one if you want to.

If you're feeling like, you know, I really want to get my teeth into this.

I want to think about all the different ways that we can help to meet these challenges.

And that's fine.

But at least one, choose at least one to take some extra time to think about and present why you think it's an important solution to some of the challenges.

So I've got the eight that have been, that UN suggested here.

And you can choose which one you would like to write about.

Pause the video and write your sentences or your paragraph now.

Awesome work.

You've worked extremely hard, really, really impressive.

And lots and lots, thought really hard about a very difficult subject.

And we've gone around the world, we've talked about a big, big thing that is a very, very complex and diverse in lots of different ways, within settlements, between different settlements.

So well done for sticking with and thinking hard about this.

It's an important topic.

That's us finished for today's lesson.

Well done.

You've done it all, great work.

Phew, we'll be back for our next lesson on population to continue thinking about the people that are living around the world.

And I can't wait to see you there.