GCSE Geography: Urbanisation and Megacities

More than half of humanity now lives in cities, and GCSE Geography's urban unit starts by asking why — and what happens when urban growth outruns everything meant to support it. This quiz covers the global side of that story.

The foundational questions pin down the vocabulary: urbanisation as the rising proportion of people living in urban areas, the megacity threshold of ten million people, and natural increase — births exceeding deaths — as one of the two engines of urban growth. The other engine, rural-urban migration, is tested through the push-pull framework: push factors like agricultural mechanisation destroying rural jobs, and pull factors like employment prospects and better services drawing people in. A trends question locates today's fastest urban growth where it actually is — Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia — not in the already-urbanised higher-income world.

The consequences questions balance opportunity against challenge, as the specification requires. Opportunities: diverse urban labour markets and access to services and education. Challenges: squatter settlements built without legal title from makeshift materials, sanitation and clean water shortfalls, waste management, and pollution. Two deeper questions probe the informal economy — why unregulated work becomes the safety net for migrants shut out of formal employment — and what squatter settlements are and are not (a question that rejects the comfortable assumption of government provision).

Examples like Lagos and Rio appear broadly, without contested statistics, keeping every question board-neutral. Paired with the UK Urban Change quiz, this completes the urban issues unit from the global scale down to the local one.

• Define urbanisation, megacities and natural increase
• Apply the push-pull framework to rural-urban migration
• Locate where urban growth is fastest today and explain why
• Balance the opportunities of city growth against challenges like squatter settlements and sanitation
• Explain the role of the informal economy in rapidly growing cities

Topic scope follows the urban issues core of the DfE GCSE geography subject content, common across UK exam boards: global patterns of urban change, the factors driving urbanisation and megacity growth, and the opportunities and challenges of rapid urban growth in lower-income countries and newly emerging economies.