G Urban environments

The urban environments option studies cities as places of production, consumption, wealth and deprivation: how they are structured, how they change, the stresses that growth creates and how they might be run sustainably. More than half of the world’s people already live in towns and cities, and the UN projects about two-thirds by 2050, so decisions about how cities are planned and run affect most of the world’s population.

Questions that frame the option

Each subtopic answers one broad geographic question. The first asks how urban places, populations and economic activities are characterised and distributed. The second asks how economic and demographic processes change urban systems over time. The third asks how the power of different stakeholders shapes both the experience of urban stresses and their management. The fourth asks what possibilities exist for managing urban systems sustainably.

Behind these inquiries lie real questions about real places:

• Why are the most expensive districts of Lagos on islands at the mouth of its lagoon, while the stilt houses of Makoko stand on the water a few kilometres away?

• How did Shenzhen grow from about 30,000 people in 1980 to 17.56 million in 2020, and why did its first metro lines open only in 2004?

• Why did Detroit lose about two-thirds of its population between 1950 and 2020?

• Why does Delhi’s air stay at around 20 times the WHO guideline, and why do outdoor workers breathe the worst of it?

• Can a city redesign its streets and parks to hold a cloudburst, as Copenhagen has done since 2012?

What the option covers

How the subtopics connect

The four subtopics follow the life of a city, from the pattern of land uses and people inside an urban area to the designs proposed for cities in 2050. The structure described in the first subtopic is the product of past growth; the movements of the second (rural–urban migration, gentrification, suburbanisation and deindustrialisation) are constantly reshaping it; the stresses of the third arise where that change outpaces housing, transport and services; and the fourth asks how planning, technology and design can resolve the stresses without simply moving them elsewhere.

The concept map shows that the sequence is also a loop. Infrastructure is both a response to urban stress and a cause of further change: suburban railways and motorways created sprawl in the 20th century, and Shenzhen’s metro, built after the city already held millions of people, now shapes where new housing is built. Bid-rent theory links the first and third subtopics, because the contest for valuable central land explains why the redevelopment of Dharavi and the Heygate Estate is so disputed.

The dashed links show where the option meets the rest of the course. Megacity growth, rural–urban migration and informal settlements are studied at the national scale in changing population; the option looks inside the city. Gentrification has a tourist form in touristification, studied with leisure and tourism. The urban heat island makes heatwaves deadlier for the urban poor, and a city’s urban metabolism is the local version of the ecological footprint and the circular economy.

Key concepts in urban environments

All four key concepts run through the option, with three further concepts specific to it.

Scale runs through every subtopic: deprivation in Lagos and Manchester is concentrated in particular districts at the city scale, but the depth of absolute poverty differs greatly at the national scale. Perspectives matter in every evaluation, because a congestion charge or a redevelopment scheme brings gains to some groups, such as drivers who value faster journeys or new owners, and losses to others, such as low-income commuters or displaced tenants.

How SL and HL differ

Every Geography student studies options: SL students choose two of the seven and HL students choose three. Urban environments has the same content at both levels, its pages are identical for SL and HL readers, and both levels answer the same Paper 1 question on it. Nothing in the option is HL only.

Assessment

Urban environments is examined in Paper 1. Each option has one structured question built on a stimulus (10 marks) and one extended answer chosen from two (10 marks), marked with the same markband as Paper 2’s essays. Urban stimuli are often a land-use map or transect, a topographic map extract, a population graph, a choropleth of deprivation or crime, an isotherm map of a heat island or a pollution graph, so map and graph skills carry many of the short marks.

The structured question typically has four parts: (a)(i) and (a)(ii), one mark each, read a value or fact from the stimulus; (b), two marks, asks for an outline of one cause or effect; and (c), three marks plus three, asks for two developed explanations (for example, “Explain two reasons why informal settlements are often located on hazardous land”).

Extended questions often ask how well urban models explain real cities, who gains and loses from gentrification or redevelopment, or how effective strategies are for managing pollution, congestion or climatic risk. Urban environments is also a common setting for fieldwork for the internal assessment: land-use transects, environmental quality surveys, pedestrian counts and heat island temperature transects.