(a) Explain the problems and prospects of urban expansion in the context of urban fringe in developed and developing nations. (20…

(a) Urban expansion in the urban fringe: problems and prospects

The urban fringe is the zone of transition between the built-up city and the rural area, where land use, occupations and population change rapidly as the city expands.

(i) Problems in developed nations. Car-based suburbanisation produces low-density sprawl, leapfrog development and edge cities. The result is car dependence, high costs of servicing a dispersed population, loss of farmland and open space, traffic, and the decline of the inner city. Fringe villages lose their character and are priced out by commuters.

(ii) Problems in developing nations. Rural-to-urban migration and land speculation drive unplanned growth. Weak local governance produces unserviced informal settlements, shortage of water, sewerage and roads, conversion of fertile agricultural land, groundwater depletion and pollution, and conflict over land acquisition. The peri-urban belts of Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Kolkata illustrate this, as do Lagos and Jakarta.

(iii) Prospects in developed nations. Green belts, smart growth, compact development and transit-oriented development contain sprawl, protect open space and shift growth to brownfield sites.

(iv) Prospects in developing nations. The fringe has cheap land for housing, industry, logistics and planned townships, and supplies vegetables and milk to the city. Peri-urban agriculture, decentralised industrial corridors, affordable housing, and extension of municipal services before settlement, together with joint planning between the city and adjoining villages, can turn it into a productive zone.

(b) Gender equity and human development

Gender equity is both an end of human development and a means to it. Sen's capability approach treats the freedom of women to be educated, healthy and to take part in decisions as central to development.

(i) Links. Female education lowers fertility and child mortality, delays marriage and improves the health and schooling of the next generation. Women's employment raises household income and national productivity, and women's representation improves spending on health, education and sanitation. Discrimination does the reverse and wastes half the human potential.

(ii) Indices. The UNDP publishes the Gender Development Index (GDI), the ratio of female to male HDI; the Gender Inequality Index (GII), which measures loss from disparity in reproductive health, empowerment and labour force participation; and the older Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), replaced by the GII in 2010. The World Economic Forum issues the Global Gender Gap Index, and the OECD the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI).

(c) Limits to Growth model: nexus and criticism

Meadows and others, for the Club of Rome, published Limits to Growth in 1972 using the World3 system dynamics model, with five variables: population, industrial output, food production, non-renewable resources and pollution.

(i) Nexus. Population and industrial output grow exponentially and use more resources. As resources deplete, more capital must go to extraction, leaving less for industry and farming. Pollution rises, food per head falls and, after a delay, population and output collapse, in the standard run within the twenty-first century. Only early policy and a stable, sustainable steady state avoid the overshoot.

(ii) Criticism. Economists such as Solow and Simon argued that it ignored prices, substitution, recycling and technological progress. Others called it neo-Malthusian, saying poverty and over-consumption by the rich, not numbers, are the cause, and the world model hid regional differences. Its fixed reserve estimates proved wrong, and it assumed that human adaptation and policy could not change the trends.