Towns & Cities Unit
7 modules covering why is everyone moving to the city, and will it ever stop? where urban growth is fastest and why, what the city promises and what rapid growth does, and how cities can be managed. built for the 2027 cambridge igcse syllabus with kuala lumpur woven throughout
Your route through the unit.
Start anywhere — M1 is the gentlest way in.Module 1
Where People Live
More than half of humanity now lives in a town or city, but the fastest growth is happening in the poorest places. Where urban growth varies, why cities in LICs are growing so rapidly, and how Kuala Lumpur became a city of eight million.
Module 2
The Promise of the City
The city makes six promises: culture, housing, services, leisure, consumption and economic development. Why cities pull people in, how one new job becomes many, and what Kuala Lumpur offers those who hear the call.
Module 3a
M3a: The City Under Strain
Growth strains a city in ways you can measure — unequal incomes, stretched services, hours lost in traffic, tonnes of waste a day and floods that arrive within hours. How rapid growth stretches Kuala Lumpur and cities worldwide, and why the money keeps arriving anyway.
Module 3b
M3b: The Informal City
When a city cannot house or employ everyone formally, people build and earn outside the system. Housing that costs more than people earn, the 1.1 billion who live in slums or informal settlements, the two billion who work without a contract, and Mumbai's Dharavi — a place of hard living and of 15,000 workshops at the same time.
Module 4
Sprawl and the Fringe
A growing city needs land as well as buildings. This module follows the edge of Greater Kuala Lumpur outwards: why building happens there, what gets built on former estates and fields, the largest mall in Malaysia on the fringe, and what sprawl costs and gives, from farmland and flood risk to gardens, jobs and space.
Module 5
Managing Urban Growth
Kuala Lumpur has spent tens of billions trying to fix itself: two MRT lines, a river clean-up, rent-controlled flats, a flood tunnel, two new cities and a policy ladder of targets. This module teaches how to judge a strategy with six questions, then judges all six, with the evidence on both sides, and lands the unit's first 7-mark evaluate question.
Module 6
KL, The Case Study
The last module assembles the whole unit into one exam answer. Why Kuala Lumpur grew, the challenges and opportunities that growth brought, and how well the city is managing it, organised onto one revision sheet, checked against a dashboard of real figures, and deployed on the 7-mark questions.