IB Geography HL — Urban environmental and social stresses

Key Idea: Topic 13.3 is about the stresses a growing city puts on its environment and its people. It pulls together two strands: 13.3.1 — environmental stresses: crowding people, traffic and concrete into a small space creates the urban heat island, air pollution and loss of green space — human activity reshaping the city's microclimate. 13.3.2 — social stresses & deprivation: concentrated lack of work, income, housing, health, education and safety — measured with deprivation indicators, explained by the cycle of deprivation, and clustered on the least desirable land. Urban environments is an Option (G), examined on Paper 1: a short data-response / structured question off a figure, then a [10] extended-answer (Examine / Evaluate / Discuss) marked on markbands. SL answers two options, HL three — same questions at both levels.

🏙️ 13.3.1 — Environmental stresses & the microclimate

Fast urban growth packs traffic, industry and hard surfaces into a small area, stressing the local environment. The classic stimulus is a temperature transect running from the rural edge, across the dense centre, and out to the rural edge again — the warm dome over the centre is the urban heat island. The skill examiners test is reading a value off the figure (State / Estimate), then explaining how human activity warms and dirties the city, before weighing strategies that try to cut the stress.

Tip: For a transect/graph question, read the figure first — a centre value, a rural value, the gap between them (e.g. ~26 °C vs ~18 °C = an ~8 °C heat island). Then explain with a cause → effect chain: more concrete and traffic → warmer, dirtier air → harm to people and nature. Name the link, don't just name the problem.

🧱 13.3.2 — Social stresses & deprivation

Cities also face social stresses. Urban social deprivation is concentrated lack of work, income, housing, health, education and safety. It is multiple (the problems overlap) and clustered (it concentrates in particular neighbourhoods), so cities show sharp rich/poor contrasts. It is measured with deprivation indicators, its persistence explained by the cycle of deprivation, and its location set by physical, economic and political factors that push the poor onto the least desirable land.

If an Outline asks for a physical factor locating low-income housing, give a physical site feature — steep slope, marshy/flood-prone or contaminated land (e.g. hillside favelas in Rio, lagoon-edge settlement in Lagos). Distance from the CBD is an economic factor and scores nothing here. Name the feature, then develop why it pushes the poor there (cheap, hazardous, undesirable land).

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