IB MYP Individuals and Societies – Settlement and urban morphology Study Guide

This study guide teaches settlement and urban morphology for IB MYP Individuals and Societies. It is aligned to the International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014, which lists settlement and urban morphology among the topics explored in the on-screen examinations. The page suits MYP years 4 and 5. MYP has no SL/HL split, so everything here applies to every student.

One point first. MYP has no prescribed content list: schools design their own units. This page covers a topic the IB’s brief lists, using the geography that is standard at this level. Your teacher will share the task-specific clarifications for your own school’s units. For the course as a whole, see the IB MYP Individuals and Societies course hub and the printable checklist. When you finish, use the settlement and urban morphology revision notes and the practice questions.

“Urban morphology” means the shape and layout of a town or city: where its land uses sit, how its streets are arranged, and how that pattern changes over time.

What this unit covers

Area	What you must be able to do	Criteria it feeds
Site and situation	Tell the two apart; explain why a settlement grew where it did	A
Settlement hierarchy	Rank settlements; use threshold, range and sphere of influence	A, B
Urban land-use models	Describe and critique Burgess, Hoyt, multiple nuclei and a model for cities in lower-income countries	A, D
Urbanisation	Define it; calculate percentage urban; explain push and pull factors	A, B
Informal settlements	Explain why they form; compare responses	A, D
Sustainable cities	Judge how far a city meets the needs of people now and later	C, D

The brief names four equally weighted criteria: A Knowing and understanding, B Investigating, C Communicating and D Thinking critically. Each has eight achievement levels (1–8) in four bands. Among the related concepts the brief gives as examples are causality, globalization, culture and sustainability; all four fit this topic. The key concept “time, place and space” fits it most closely.

Site and situation

Site is the physical land a settlement is built on. Classic site factors:

• a reliable water supply (a spring or river)
• a dry point above a flood plain, or a wet point in a dry area
• a defensive hill or a river meander
• flat land for building and farming
• a bridging point where a river is narrow or shallow

Situation is where a settlement sits in relation to the things around it: other settlements, routes, resources and the wider region. A town at the meeting of two valleys, or at a natural harbour on a trade route, has a good situation.

The difference matters because site explains why a settlement started, while situation often explains why it kept growing. Many river-crossing towns in Europe began at a bridging point (site). The largest of them grew because roads and later railways met there (situation).

Settlement hierarchy

A settlement hierarchy ranks settlements by size and by the services they offer. From smallest to largest: isolated dwelling, hamlet, village, town, city, conurbation (towns and cities that have merged), and megacity (usually taken as 10 million people or more).

Three terms explain the hierarchy:

• Threshold – the minimum number of people needed to keep a service running. A post office needs a small threshold; a department store or a university hospital needs a large one.
• Range – the greatest distance people will travel to use a service. People travel further for high-order goods (furniture, specialist doctors) than for low-order goods (bread, newspapers).
• Sphere of influence – the area a settlement serves. The higher a settlement sits in the hierarchy, the larger its sphere.

These ideas come from central place theory, set out by Walter Christaller in 1933. As you go up the hierarchy there are fewer settlements, they are further apart, and each offers more high-order services.

The rank-size rule

The rank-size rule predicts that the n-th largest city has a population of P₁ / n, where P₁ is the largest city’s population. A country where the largest city is far bigger than the rule predicts has a primate city. A simple primacy index is P₁ / P₂.

Worked example 1: rank-size in Norland

Norland is a fictional country. Its five largest cities (millions): 3.6, 1.2, 1.0, 0.6, 0.5.

Rank  Actual  Predicted (3.6 / n)
1     3.6     3.6
2     1.2     1.8
3     1.0     1.2
4     0.6     0.9
5     0.5     0.72

Every lower-ranked city is smaller than predicted. The primacy index is 3.6 / 1.2 = 3.0; under the rule it would be 2.0. So Norland has a primate city. A likely cause is that its capital holds the government, the port and most foreign investment, which pulls in migrants from every region.

Urban land-use models

A model simplifies reality so you can compare real cities with it. Each model below comes from a particular city and period, which is also its main limitation.

Burgess concentric zone model (1925)

Ernest Burgess based it on Chicago. Rings spread out from the centre:

1. Central business district (CBD) – shops, offices, highest land values
2. Zone in transition – older industry and poor-quality housing, changing use
3. Zone of working-class homes – older terraced housing near work
4. Residential zone – newer, larger homes
5. Commuter zone – suburbs and villages beyond the built-up edge

The pattern is explained by bid rent: land is most accessible and most expensive at the centre, so uses that gain most from accessibility (shops, offices) outbid others there. In the idea’s simplest form, rent falls steadily with distance.

Hoyt sector model (1939)

Homer Hoyt argued that land uses grow outwards in wedges along transport routes. Industry follows railways and rivers; high-status housing grows away from industry, often towards higher ground or attractive views. The model adds direction to Burgess’s distance.

Harris and Ullman multiple nuclei model (1945)

Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman showed that large cities have several centres, not one: an old CBD, an out-of-town retail park, a university district, an industrial estate by a motorway junction. Car ownership makes this more common.

A model for cities in lower-income countries

The Griffin and Ford model (1980) describes Latin American cities. A modern CBD sits beside a commercial spine with an elite residential sector along it. Rings of housing decline in quality outwards, and peripheral squatter settlements form the outer ring. A disamenity sector of the poorest housing may follow a river, railway or rubbish tip into the centre. The key contrast with Burgess: the richest people live near the centre, and the poorest at the edge.

Worked example 2: testing a model with a transect

A class records land use on 40 plots at five points along a road leading out from a city centre (fictional data).

Distance from centre (km)	Commercial plots (of 40)	% commercial
0	34	85.0
0.5	22	55.0
1	12	30.0
2	6	15.0
3	2	5.0

Commercial land use falls steadily with distance from the centre, from 85% to 5%. This supports the Burgess idea of a CBD with bid rent falling outwards. But one transect cannot test Hoyt’s sectors: you would need transects in several directions to see whether land uses form wedges.

Urbanisation

Urbanisation is the increase in the proportion of a population living in urban areas. It is not the same as urban growth, which is an increase in the number of urban dwellers. A city can grow while the country’s level of urbanisation stays the same, if rural areas grow just as fast.

Causes:

• Rural–urban migration, driven by push factors (few jobs, low farm incomes, drought, poor services) and pull factors (jobs, schools, hospitals, perceived better life).
• Natural increase – more births than deaths among the young adults who make up much of the migrant population.

In many higher-income countries the pattern later shifts: suburbanisation (moving to the edge of the city), counter-urbanisation (moving out to smaller towns and the countryside) and re-urbanisation (moving back into regenerated inner areas). Since around 2007, more than half of the world’s people have lived in urban areas. Countries define “urban” differently, so compare figures with care.

Worked example 3: calculating urbanisation

In Norland in 2000, 4.2 million of 12.0 million people lived in urban areas. In 2020, 9.1 million of 15.6 million did.

2000: 4.2 / 12.0 × 100 = 35.0% urban
2020: 9.1 / 15.6 × 100 = 58.3% urban
Change: 58.3 − 35.0 = 23.3 percentage points
Urban population growth: (9.1 − 4.2) / 4.2 × 100 = 116.7%
Rural population: 7.8 million → 6.5 million

The rural population fell while the total rose, so migration from rural areas is a likely cause, not just natural increase. Note the difference between a change in percentage points (23.3) and a percentage increase (116.7%).

Informal settlements

An informal settlement is housing built without legal title to the land or without planning permission. Homes are often self-built. Services such as piped water, sewers and rubbish collection may be missing. Such settlements form when cities grow faster than jobs, housing and infrastructure. They often occupy land nobody else wants: steep slopes, flood plains, land beside railways.

They are not only places of problems. Many have busy workshops and markets, strong community networks, and homes improved step by step over years. Dharavi in Mumbai is a well-known example with a large informal economy, including recycling.

Responses include:

• Clearance and relocation – removing housing and moving residents, often to the city edge, far from their work.
• Upgrading in place – adding water, drains, paved lanes and legal title while residents stay. Rio de Janeiro’s Favela-Bairro programme, begun in the 1990s, is an example.
• Self-help schemes – residents build with technical support. The Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, begun in 1980, helped residents lay their own lane sewers at low cost.
• Site-and-service schemes – the authority provides plots with basic services, and families build their own homes.

Sustainable cities

A sustainable city meets the needs of its people today without harming the ability of future residents to meet theirs. It balances three things: the environment, the economy and social fairness. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 (2015) is about sustainable cities and communities.

Features to look for: efficient public transport, cycling and walking routes, green space, waste reduction and recycling, energy-efficient buildings, affordable housing and building on brownfield (previously used) rather than greenfield land.

Curitiba in Brazil is a common case study. From the 1970s it built a bus rapid transit system on dedicated lanes, created parks on flood-prone land, and ran a scheme in which residents could exchange recyclable waste for food. When you judge any city, ask who benefits, who pays and whether the gains last.

Common errors

• Swapping site and situation. Site is the land itself; situation is the surrounding area.
• Treating urbanisation as the same as urban growth.
• Writing “the urban population rose by 23.3%” when you mean 23.3 percentage points.
• Describing a model without saying which city and period it came from.
• Applying Burgess to a Latin American city without noting that the rich live near the centre there.
• Presenting informal settlements only as problems, with no mention of their economy or community.
• Calling a city “sustainable” because of one green feature, with no social or economic evidence.

For source work in this topic, see source evaluation exam preparation; for how each criterion is judged, see criteria in practice. Now move on to the revision notes and the practice questions.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Middle Years Programme Subject Brief – Individuals and societies, from 2014. The brief lists settlement and urban morphology among the topics explored in the on-screen examinations, and names the four criteria and the related concepts used on this page.