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Characteristics of Informal Housing - Coggle Diagram
Characteristics of Informal Housing
Where is informal housing usually located?
Informal housing is usually built on land which does not belong to the people building the housing. This is often land which is not suitable: river beds that could fill after rains, land close to industrial activity that could be damaging to health, or land on steep/unstable slopes.
What are the issues with this?
Leads to housing that is affected by landslides and flooding - causes injury/deaths and loss of property/belongings
No sanitation/no sewage network - leads to increased disease and health issues
Sewage output into water source - increased illness and death - cholera, diphtheria etc spreads very quickly
No electricity - people link up to other electrical sources - leads to fires which spread very quickly
Poor air quality - no vents for cooking etc
People who live here are unemployed and can't afford to pay rent. This leads to crime and drug dealing among the younger people
Children often collect rubbish from the huge rubbish piles that line the slum to try and find suitable rubbish for recycling which they can sell.
What is the housing like?
Made out of sheets of metal and rubbish - basically anything that can be found that is remotely suitable for building an informal house. They are also very cramped and a lot of people are crammed into small areas.
Problems linked to these types of housing
Diseases like cholera and diphtheria caused by drinking contaminated sewage water spread very quickly among the big population
There is no electricity, so people tend to try to build their own power sources or link up to other electricity sources close to the slum. This is very dangerous because it often causes fires which spread very quickly
There are no vents in any of the houses, so the air quality is very poor. For example, when they cook there food there is nowhere for the fumes to escape.
What is like like for people who live in these kind of settlements?
No solid income - no job opportunities
Very poor life expectancy - high infant mortality rates
Limited space - many people live in one house
All the excess rubbish attracts rats, which spread/cause disease