IB Geography • Section G3
Urban Environmental & Social Stresses
The varying power of different stakeholders in relation to the experience of, and management of, urban stresses
Restored from the original AdornGeo Weebly page • syllabus order preserved
Urban Microclimates and Air Pollution
Urban microclimate modification and management, including the urban heat island effect, and air-pollution patterns and their management. Case study of air pollution in one city and its varying impact on people.
Cities create their own local climates. Concrete, asphalt and dark roofs absorb solar energy; tall buildings alter wind and trap radiation; traffic, industry and air-conditioning release waste heat; and reduced vegetation limits cooling by evapotranspiration. The result is an urban heat island whose intensity changes by time, weather and land use. Pollutants are also unevenly produced and dispersed, so the same city contains sharply different levels of exposure.
- An urban heat island is a temperature difference between a built-up area and its rural surroundings, not simply a hot day.
- Low albedo, thermal mass, urban canyons, reduced evapotranspiration and anthropogenic heat combine to modify temperature, wind, humidity and precipitation.
- Air-pollution concentrations reflect emissions, atmospheric conditions, street-canyon form and distance from sources such as roads, power stations and industry.
- Management can act on sources, movement or exposure: cleaner energy and vehicles, emission zones, public transport, green and cool roofs, trees, warnings and protection for vulnerable groups.
- Risk is unequal. Income, age, health, occupation, housing quality and political influence affect both exposure and the ability to respond.
Read the heat island as a system
- Sketch a rural-to-CBD temperature transect. Label the temperature cliff, plateau, peak and park or river sink.
- Add process arrows for absorption, storage, anthropogenic heat, evapotranspiration and reduced wind speed.
- Use NASA's video and EO Browser to compare a dense central district with a park, water body and lower-density suburb.
- Design a short fieldwork route and identify the controls needed for a fair comparison of temperature and air quality.
Watch: NASA: Urban heat islands
Watch: Exploring your city from space: urban heat islands
Beijing: unequal exposure to air pollution
The original AdornGeo page used Beijing to connect emissions, weather, urban form and political decision-making. Rapid motorisation, coal combustion, construction dust and regional industry combined with winter inversions to produce severe particulate pollution. Strong regulation and cleaner energy have improved average air quality, but exposure and the ability to avoid it remain unequal.
- Pattern: pollution varies by season, wind direction, proximity to roads and industry, and the wider Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei airshed.
- Impacts: respiratory and cardiovascular illness, disrupted schooling and work, reduced visibility and economic loss.
- Inequality: outdoor workers, children, older people and lower-income households may face greater exposure and fewer protective choices.
- Management: coal controls, industrial relocation, vehicle standards, public transport, monitoring and public warnings demonstrate strong state power, while pollution can also be displaced beyond the municipality.
Watch: Surviving China's smog
Watch: Is China's airpocalypse gone for good?
Watch: Time-lapse: smog envelops Beijing
Traffic Congestion: Patterns, Trends and Impacts
Traffic congestion patterns, trends and impacts. Case study of one affected city and its management response.
Congestion is a spatial and temporal mismatch between road demand and network capacity. It is most visible on radial routes, bridges, bottlenecks and around major employment centres, and it varies with commuting peaks, school travel, incidents, road works and weather. More road space may briefly ease delay but can stimulate additional journeys through induced demand.
- Congestion imposes economic costs through lost time, unreliable deliveries and higher fuel use, but impacts are distributed unevenly.
- Environmental effects include particulate and nitrogen-oxide pollution, greenhouse emissions and noise; stop-start traffic intensifies exposure along busy corridors.
- Social effects include stress, reduced access, severance of communities and road danger, while car-oriented investment can disadvantage people without cars.
- Effective management combines supply, demand and land-use measures rather than relying on a single project.
From traffic count to management judgement
- Use a live traffic map to identify a radial route, ring road, bridge and bottleneck in Bangkok. Record how congestion changes across the day.
- Construct a consequence web with economic, social and environmental impacts, then show which stakeholders absorb each cost.
- Classify possible responses as supply-side, demand management, public transport, active travel or land-use planning.
- Evaluate whether building more road capacity is a sustainable response. Include induced demand and opportunity cost.
Curitiba: integrating transport and land use
Curitiba's bus rapid transit system began in 1974 and was developed along structural corridors where higher-density land uses were encouraged. Dedicated lanes, tube stations, pre-payment and feeder routes made the bus network operate more like a surface metro. Its international reputation is justified, but growing car ownership, overcrowding and declining ridership show that even celebrated strategies require renewal.
- Planning power: municipal government and IPPUC linked the transport network to a long-term land-use plan.
- Accessibility: trunk, express and feeder services widened access at lower capital cost than a metro.
- Environmental gains: public-transport priority reduced some car dependence, fuel use and central congestion.
- Evaluation: overcrowding, ageing infrastructure, peripheral growth and rising car ownership limit a simple success narrative.
Watch: How Curitiba revolutionised urban planning
Contested Land-Use Change
Contested land-use changes, including slum clearances, urban redevelopment and the depletion of green space. Detailed contrasting examples of two affected neighbourhoods and their populations.
Urban land is contested because place value is not only financial. Governments may seek infrastructure, investment and tax revenue; developers seek profit; residents need homes, livelihoods and identity; and environmental groups defend ecosystem services. Formal ownership and political access determine whose definition of improvement is most likely to shape the city.
- Redevelopment can remove unsafe housing and add infrastructure while simultaneously displacing tenants, informal workers and community networks.
- Slum clearance is not the same as poverty reduction if residents lose access to jobs, transport, schools or secure tenure.
- Green space provides cooling, drainage, biodiversity, recreation, food and cultural value, yet many of these benefits have no simple market price.
- A stakeholder analysis should compare interests, power, costs, benefits and the scale at which each is experienced.
Who decides the future of Bang Krachao?
- Locate Bang Krachao within the Chao Phraya bend and annotate its relationship to central Bangkok, port and industrial land.
- Read the three surviving AdornGeo articles. Build stakeholder profiles for residents, landowners, developers, conservation groups, tourists, local government and national agencies.
- Map economic, social and environmental values. Distinguish private benefits from public costs and short-term gains from long-term effects.
- Hold a planning hearing and agree conditions for a land-use plan that protects green space without treating residents as scenery.
Bang Krachao, Thailand
The original AdornGeo enquiry focuses on a 16 km² green area inside a bend of the Chao Phraya. Development pressure, rising land values and changing livelihoods threaten vegetation, waterways and a distinctive community landscape, while conservation can also restrict what local landowners are able to do with valuable property.
- Ecosystem services include local cooling, flood storage, drainage, habitat, recreation and cultural landscape.
- Landowners may need income or prefer to sell; developers benefit from proximity to central Bangkok; visitors and the wider city gain from preservation.
- Planning agencies, the forestry department, universities, firms and community networks possess different types of legal, financial and knowledge power.
- Sustainable options include land-use controls, conservation incentives, organic agriculture, community enterprise and low-impact tourism.
Dharavi, Mumbai
Dharavi provides a deliberate contrast: an extremely dense, centrally located settlement where homes, workshops, recycling and social networks overlap. Redevelopment promises sanitation, safer housing and valuable new floorspace, but eligibility rules, temporary relocation and standard apartment designs may undermine livelihoods that depend on street access and mixed use.
- Government and developers frame redevelopment around infrastructure, formal housing and land value.
- Residents are not a single interest group: tenants, structure owners, recent arrivals, workers and business owners face different risks.
- In-situ, community-led upgrading may preserve location and networks better than clearance, but financing and infrastructure remain difficult.
- A fair comparison evaluates housing quality, tenure, livelihood access, participation, displacement and who captures the increase in land value.
Watch: Dharavi: life and work in an informal settlement
Managing Urban Social Deprivation
Managing the impacts of urban social deprivation, including the cycle of deprivation and geographic patterns of crime.
Social deprivation is a multidimensional shortage of income, employment, education, health, housing quality, safety, mobility and access to services. These disadvantages can reinforce one another through a cycle of deprivation and cluster spatially, but neighbourhood statistics describe places rather than predetermine the lives of everyone who lives there.
- A multiple-deprivation index combines indicators because income alone cannot represent access, security, health or opportunity.
- Area averages can conceal differences within a neighbourhood and may stigmatise residents if treated as labels rather than evidence.
- Crime patterns reflect opportunity, guardianship, reporting, policing and the location of activity; a crime map is not a simple map of criminal people.
- Management may be people-based, place-based or both: welfare and education, housing and health services, environmental improvement, community safety, transport and local economic development.
- Regeneration can improve services and public space but may trigger rising rents and displacement unless residents have meaningful power and protection.
London deprivation and crime enquiry
- Use the English indices of deprivation map to locate contrasting London neighbourhoods. Record evidence for at least four domains.
- Compare this pattern with Metropolitan Police data. Identify clusters, corridors and anomalies without claiming that correlation proves causation.
- Construct a cycle of deprivation linking low income, poor housing, health, education, employment and reduced political influence. Add two intervention points.
- Evaluate a regeneration proposal from the perspectives of a tenant, young person, local business, police service, council and developer.
IB synthesis and exam practice
- Create a four-row table for Beijing, Curitiba, Bang Krachao and London: stress, spatial pattern, most affected group, most powerful stakeholder and management outcome.
- Use the table to answer: Examine why people experience urban environmental and social stresses differently.
- Finish with a judgement about whether stakeholder power or physical location is the stronger explanation.
London: deprivation, crime and regeneration
London contains some of the UK's highest incomes and most expensive property alongside neighbourhoods experiencing persistent deprivation. The original AdornGeo lesson paired a social-deprivation reading with London crime visuals, inviting students to map patterns and interrogate the relationships between disadvantage, housing, opportunity and safety.
- Map several deprivation domains separately before combining them; their geography is related but not identical.
- Consider housing costs and insecure tenure alongside conventional income and employment measures.
- Explain why recorded crime is influenced by footfall, land use, reporting and policing as well as deprivation.
- Judge management by outcomes for existing residents, not only investment, new buildings or a changed image.