Slum

A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty.

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.

Numerous other non-English terms are often used 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.

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 (1837-9) and echoed the Christian Socialist values of the time, which soon found legal expression in the Public Health Act of 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.

[22][23] 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".

[24][page needed] 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 potty 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 of 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.

The first cholera epidemic of 1832 triggered a political debate, and Louis René Villermé study[30] of various arrondissements of Paris demonstrated the differences and connection between slums, poverty and poor health.

Common causes include rapid rural-to-urban migration, poor planning, economic stagnation and depression, poverty, high unemployment, informal economy, colonialism and segregation, politics, natural disasters and social conflicts.

[69] And even though an agglomerated economy benefits these cities by bringing in specialization and multiple competing suppliers, the conditions of slums continue to lag behind in terms of quality and adequate housing.

Urban growth is dramatically intense in the less developed countries, where a large number of huge cities have started to appear; which means high poverty rates, crime, pollution and congestion.

[80] During apartheid era of South Africa, under the pretext of sanitation and plague epidemic prevention, racial and ethnic group segregation was pursued, people of colour were moved to the fringes of the city, policies that created Soweto and other slums – officially called townships.

[86][87] A growing economy that creates jobs at rate faster than population growth, offers people opportunities and incentive to relocate from poor slum to more developed neighborhoods.

[1] Research in the latest years based on ethnographic studies, conducted since 2008 about slums, published initially in 2017, has found out the primary importance of labour as the main cause of emergence, rural-urban migration, consolidation and growth of informal settlements.

[99][page needed] Many local and national governments have, for political interests, subverted efforts to remove, reduce or upgrade slums into better housing options for the poor.

In cities located in mountainous terrain, slums begin on difficult to reach slopes or start at the bottom of flood prone valleys, often hidden from the plain view of downtown but close to some natural water source.

Paper, plastic, earthen floors, mud-and-wattle walls, wood held together by ropes, straw or torn metal pieces as roofs are some of the materials of construction.

[113] However, the ad hoc construction, lack of quality control on building materials used, poor maintenance, and uncoordinated spatial design make them prone to extensive damage during earthquakes as well from decay.

[153][page needed][156] Due to lack of skills and education as well as competitive job markets,[157] many slum dwellers face high rates of unemployment.

[161] Examples of illicit informal economy include illegal substance and weapons trafficking, drug or moonshine/changaa production, prostitution and gambling – all sources of risks to the individual, families and society.

[213][214] Slums are considered a major public health concern and potential breeding grounds of drug resistant diseases for the entire city, the nation, as well as the global community.

Factors like poor sanitation, low literacy rates, and limited awareness make diarrhea and other dangerous diseases extremely prevalent and burdensome on the community.

A significant portion of city populations face challenges with access to health care but do not live in locations that are described as within the "slum" area.

[244][245] Policymakers, urban planners, and politicians need to take the factors that cause people to live in informal housing into consideration while tackling the issue of slums.

[254] In Mexico City for example, the government attempted to upgrade and urbanize settled slums in the periphery during the 1970s and 1980s by including basic amenities such as concrete roads, parks, illumination and sewage.

Krueckeberg and Paulsen note[263] conflicting politics, government corruption and street violence in slum regularization process is part of the reality.

[264][page needed] Urban infrastructure such as reliable high speed mass transit system, motorways/interstates, and public housing projects have been cited[265][266] as responsible for the disappearance of major slums in the United States and Europe from the 1960s through 1970s.

City governments used infrastructure investments and urban planning to distribute work, housing, green areas, retail, schools and population densities.

[278]: 127  Among individual countries, the proportion of urban residents living in slum areas in 2009 was highest in the Central African Republic (95.9%), Chad (89.3%), Niger (81.7%), and Mozambique (80.5%).

Share of urban population living in slums (2018)
19th century slum, London
One of the many New York City slum photographs of Jacob Riis (ca 1890). Squalor can be seen in the streets, wash clothes hanging between buildings.
Inside of a slum house, from Jacob Riis photo collection of New York City (ca 1890).
Part of Charles Booth 's poverty map showing the Old Nichol , a slum in the East End of London . Published 1889 in Life and Labour of the People in London . The red areas are "middle class, well-to-do", light blue areas are "poor, 18s to 21s a week for a moderate family", dark blue areas are "very poor, casual, chronic want", and black areas are the "lowest class...occasional labourers, street sellers, loafers, criminals and semi-criminals".
A slum dwelling in Toronto, Ontario , Canada, about 1936. [ 28 ] [ 29 ]
A 1913 slum dwelling midst squalor in Ivry-sur-Seine , a French commune about 5 kilometers from center of Paris . Slums were scattered around Paris through the 1950s. [ 42 ] [ 43 ] After Loi Vivien was passed in July 1970, France demolished some of its last major bidonvilles (slums) and resettled resident Algerian, Portuguese and other migrant workers by the mid-1970s. [ 44 ] [ 45 ]
Kibera slum in Nairobi , Kenya, the second-largest slum in Africa [ 47 ] [ 48 ] [ 49 ] and third-largest in the world. [ 47 ]
A slum in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil. Rocinha favela is next to skyscrapers and wealthier parts of the city, a location that provides jobs and easy commute to those who live in the slums.
A large slum pictured behind skyscrapers in a more developed area in La Paz , Bolivia.
An integrated slum dwelling and informal economy inside Dharavi of Mumbai . Dharavi slum started in 1887 with industrial and segregationist policies of the British colonial era. The slum housing, tanneries, pottery and other economy established inside and around Dharavi during the British rule of India. [ 76 ] [ 77 ] [ 78 ]
Makoko – One of the oldest slums in Nigeria, was originally a fishing village settlement, built on stilts on a lagoon. It developed into a slum and became home to about a hundred thousand people in Lagos . In 2012, it was partially destroyed by the city government, amidst controversy, to accommodate infrastructure for the city's growing population. [ 85 ]
A slum near Ramos Arizpe in Mexico .
A woman from a slum is taking a bath in a river.
The location of 100 largest "contiguous" mega-slums in the world. Numerous other regions have slums, but those slums are scattered. The numbers show population in millions per mega-slum, the initials are derived from city name. Some of the largest slums of the world are in areas of political or social conflicts.
Slum in Tai Hang , Hong Kong, in the 1990s
Substandard housing in a slum in Manila , Philippines in the 2000s.
Slum with tiled roofs and railway, Jakarta railway slum resettlement 1975, Indonesia.
Slums in the city of Chau Doc , Vietnam over river Hậu (Mekong branch). These slums are on stilts to withstand routine floods which last 3 to 4 months every year.
A slum in Haiti damaged by 2010 earthquake. Slums are vulnerable to extensive damage and human fatalities from landslides, floods, earthquakes, fire, high winds and other severe weather. [ 153 ] [ page needed ]
A propaganda poster linking slum to violence, used by US Housing Authority in the 1940s. City governments in the US created many such [ page needed ] propaganda posters and launched a media campaign to gain citizen support for slum clearance and planned public housing. [ 162 ]
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was controlled by local triads .
A young boy sits over an open sewer in the Kibera slum, Nairobi .
Villa 31, one of the largest slums of Argentina , located near the center of Buenos Aires
A slum dwelling in Borgergade in central Copenhagen Denmark , about 1940. The Danish government passed The Slum Clearance Act in 1939, demolished many slums including Borgergade, replacing it with modern buildings by the early 1950s. [ 238 ] [ 239 ]
Housing projects in Chalco , Mexico
Housing projects in Bahia , Brazil
Percent urban population of a country living in slums ( UN Habitat , 2005)
Urban population living in slums, 2014. [ 275 ]