A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are primarily inhabited by impoverished people."What are slums and why do they exist?" UN-Habitat, Kenya (April 2007)
Although slums are usually located in urban areas, they can be located in suburban areas where housing quality is low and living conditions are poor. Slum residences vary from shanty houses to professionally built dwellings which, because of poor-quality construction or lack of basic maintenance, have deteriorated.UN-Habitat 2007 Press Release on its report, "The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003". While slums differ in size and other characteristics, most lack reliable sanitation services, supply of clean water, reliable electricity, law enforcement, and other basic services. The United Nations defines slums as ".... informal settlements lacking one or more of the following conditions: access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, sufficient living area, housing durability, and security of tenure."
Due to increasing urbanization of the general populace, slums became common in the 19th to late 20th centuries in the United States and Europe.Lawrence Vale (2007), From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors, Harvard University Press, Slums are still predominantly found in urban regions of developing countries, but are also still found in developed economies."Slums: Past, Present and Future" United Nations Habitat (2007)"The challenge of slums – Global report on Human Settlements", United Nations Habitat (2003) The world's largest slum city is found in Orangi in Karachi, Pakistan.Mike Davis, Planet of Slums [« Le pire des mondes possibles : de l'explosion urbaine au bidonville global »], La Découverte, Paris, 2006 ()Daniel Tovrov (December 9, 2011). "5 Biggest Slums in the World". , International Business Times.Craig Glenday, editor. Guinness World Records. 2013. Bantam. . Page 277.
Slums form and grow in different parts of the world for many different reasons. Causes include rapid rural-to-urban migration, economic stagnation and depression, high unemployment, poverty, informal economy, forced or manipulated ghettoization, poor planning, politics, natural disasters, and social conflicts.Patton, C. (1988). Spontaneous shelter: International perspectives and prospects. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Strategies tried to reduce and transform slums in different countries, with varying degrees of success, include a combination of slum removal, slum relocation, slum upgrading, urban planning with citywide infrastructure development, and public housing.Mona Serageldin, Elda Solloso, and Luis Valenzuela (March 2006). "Local Government Actions to Reduce Poverty and Achieve The Millennium Development Goals" . Global Urban Development Magazine, Vol 2, Issue 1.
Etymology and nomenclature
It is thoughtDouglas Harper (2001). "Slum" Etymology Dictionary. that slum is a British slang word from the East End of London meaning "room", which evolved to "back slum" around 1845 meaning 'back alley, street of poor people.'
Numerous other terms, some borrowed from or used in other languages, are or have been used more or less interchangeably with slum: shanty town, favela, rookery, gecekondu, skid row, barrio, ghetto, banlieue, bidonville, taudis, bandas de miseria, barrio marginal, morro, paragkoupoli, loteamento, barraca, musseque, iskuwater, inner city, tugurio, solares, mudun safi, kawasan kumuh, karyan, medina achouaia, brarek, ishash, galoos, tanake, baladi, trushchoby, chalis, katras, zopadpattis, ftohogeitonia, basti, estero, looban, dagatan, umjondolo, watta, udukku, and chereka bete.Slums of the World: The Face of Urban Poverty in the New Millennium? , UN-Habitat; page 30. Nonetheless, many of these words have their own distinct meaning.
The word slum has negative connotations, and using this label for an area can be seen as an attempt to delegitimize that land use when hoping to repurpose it.
History
Before the 19th century, rich and poor people lived in the same districts, with the wealthy living on the high streets, and the poor in the service streets behind them. But in the 19th century, wealthy and upper-middle-class people began to move out of the central parts of rapidly growing cities, leaving poorer residents behind.Flanders, Judith (May 15, 2014) "Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians: Slums" British Library
Slums were common in the United States and Europe before the early 20th century. London's East End is generally considered the locale where the term originated in the 19th century, where massive and rapid urbanization of the dockside and industrial areas led to intensive overcrowding in a warren of post-medieval streetscape. The suffering of the poor was described in popular fiction by moralist authors such as Charles Dickens – most famously Oliver Twist (1837–1839) and echoed the Christian Socialist values of the time, which soon found legal expression in the Public Health Act 1848. As the slum clearance movement gathered pace, deprived areas such as Old Nichol were fictionalised to raise awareness in the middle classes in the form of moralist novels such as A Child of the Jago (1896) resulting in slum clearance and reconstruction programmes such as the Boundary Estate (1893-1900) and the creation of charitable trusts such as the Peabody Trust founded in 1862 and Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1904) which still operate to provide decent housing today.
Slums are often associated with the British Isles during the Victorian era, particularly in industrial towns. Friedrich Engels described these neighborhoods as "cattle-sheds for human beings".Mike Pitts (August 27, 2009). "Unearthing Manchester's Victorian slums" The Guardian. These were generally still inhabited until the 1940s, when the British government started slum clearance and built new council houses."The History of Council Housing" University of the West of England, Bristol (2008) There are still examples left of slum housing in the UK, but many have been removed by government initiative, redesigned and replaced with better public housing. In Europe, slums were common.Eckstein, Susan. 1990. "Urbanization Revisited: Inner-City Slum of Hope and Squatter Settlement of Despair". World Development 18: 165–181Roger W. Caves, editor (2005). Encyclopedia of the City. . page 410; also see "Slum", Encyclopædia Britannica (2001). By the 1920s it had become a common slang expression in England, meaning either various taverns and eating houses, "loose talk" or gypsy language, or a room with "low going-ons". In Life in London (1821) Pierce Egan used the word in the context of the "back slums" of Holy Lane or St Giles. A footnote defined slum to mean "low, unfrequent parts of the town". Charles Dickens used the word slum in a similar way in 1840, writing "I mean to take a great, London, back-slum kind walk tonight". Slum began to be used to describe bad housing soon after and was used as alternative expression for rookeries. In 1850 the Catholic Cardinal Wiseman described the area known as Devil's Acre in Westminster, London as follows:
Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and cottages and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms a huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach – dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten.
This passage was widely quoted in the national press, leading to the popularization of the word slum to describe bad housing.
In France as in most industrialised European capitals, slums were widespread in Paris and other urban areas in the 19th century, many of which continued through first half of the 20th century. The first cholera epidemic of 1832 triggered a political debate, and Louis René Villermé studyNancy Krieger (2001). "Historical roots of social epidemiology". International Journal of Epidemiology. 30 (4): 899–900 of various arrondissements of Paris demonstrated the differences and connection between slums, poverty and poor health.Ann-Louise Shapiro (1985), Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–1902, Melun Law first passed in 1849 and revised in 1851, followed by establishment of Paris Commission on Unhealthful Dwellings in 1852 began the social process of identifying the worst housing inside slums, but did not remove or replace slums.
After World War II, French people started mass migration from rural to urban areas of France. This demographic and economic trend rapidly raised rents of existing housing as well as expanded slums. French government passed laws to block increase in the rent of housing, which inadvertently made many housing projects unprofitable and increased slums. In 1950, France launched its Habitation à Loyer Modéré"10 idées reçues sur les HLM" , Union sociale pour l'habitat, February 2012France – public housing European Union initiative to finance and build public housing and remove slums, managed by techniciens – urban technocrats.,"Ordering the Disorderly Slum – Standardizing Quality of Life in Marseille Tenements and Bidonvilles" Minayo Nasiali, Journal of Urban History November 2012 vol. 38 no. 6, 1021–1035 and financed by Livret A"Livret A rate falls to 1.25%" The Connexion (July 18, 2013) – a tax free savings account for French public. Some slums remain in the early 21st century in France, most of which are dismantled after a few months, the largest being the "Petite Ceinture" slum on the northern Paris decommissioned train tracks.
New York City is believed to have created the United States' first slum, named the Five Points in 1825, as it evolved into a large urban settlement.Kevin Baker (September 30, 2001). "The First Slum in America" . The New York Times. Five Points was named for a lake named Collect.Solis, Julia. New York Underground: The Anatomy of a City. p. 76 which, by the late 1700s, was surrounded by slaughterhouses and tanneries which emptied their waste directly into its waters. Trash piled up as well and by the early 1800s the lake was filled up and dry. On this foundation was built Five Points, the United States' first slum. Five Points was occupied by successive waves of freed slaves, Irish, then Italian, then Chinese, immigrants. It housed the poor, rural people leaving farms for opportunity, and the persecuted people from Europe pouring into New York City. Bars, bordellos, squalid and lightless tenements lined its streets. Violence and crime were commonplace. Politicians and social elite discussed it with derision. Slums like Five Points triggered discussions of affordable housing and slum removal. As of the start of the 21st century, Five Points slum had been transformed into the Little Italy and Chinatown neighborhoods of New York City, through that city's campaign of massive urban renewal.
Five Points was not the only slum in America.Suttles, Gerald D. 1968. The Social Order of the Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago PressGans, Herbert J. 1962. The Urban Villagers. New York: The Free Press. Jacob Riis, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine and others photographed many before World War II. Slums were found in every major urban region of the United States throughout most of the 20th century, long after the Great Depression. Most of these slums had been ignored by the cities and states which encompassed them until the 1960s' War on Poverty was undertaken by U.S. president Lyndon Johnson and the Federal government of the United States.