Beyond ‘slums’: rethinking urban informal settlements in the Global South

The pejorative word “slums” has made a reappearance in the mainstream Western media following the death of Pope Francis as mourners recalled his visits by bus to reach the poor shanty town areas of Buenos Aires where he was archbishop — giving him the nickname of the “slum pope”.

The word dates back to the 18th century and, while its origin is unknown, some speculate it might come from slime meaning a waste product from mining or German word for mud, schlamm — implying dirtiness — while others point to the stem for “slumber” i.e., somewhere to lay one’s head.

Its meaning as a description of squalid housing conditions became associated with the rapid urbanisation of western cities such as London and New York as the Industrial Revolution drew thousands of people into the expanding cities for work. As the influx outstripped the available housing, the new migrant workers had to make do with what they could find.

This led to the creation of slums whose common features can be summarised as heavily populated places that lacked public services and whose residents had inadequate housing and little if anything in the way of security of tenure.

Programmes of social house building such as council estates and housing projects as well as commercial developments led to slums being razed and the residents often displaced rather than rehoused. In London and  Britain’s first council estate, Boundary Green Estate that replaced the Old Nicol slum, saw only 11 of the original residents rehoused there.

Map of Old Nichol slum from Charles Booth's mapping Source psychogeographicreview

Redeveloped-Boundary-Estate-Housing_for_the_Working_Classes-Report-1912-1913-William-Edward-Riley

St Giles Rookery near the British Museum — immortalised by Patrick Hamilton in his book Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky — was bulldozed to make way for New Oxford Street as was The Devil’s Acre in Westminster that is now Victoria Street. Agar Town in Camden was demolished to make way for the railways to Scotland and the North of England.

No universal solution

In the 21st century, the focus of the debate has move to Latin America, Asia and Africa. Thanks to hit movies and media coverage there are many significant places that are known by name in terms of their slums —Kibera in Nairobi, Dharavi in Mumbai and huge areas of Mexico City.

Informal semi-legal housing is thus widespread across the world and is likely to become even more important over the coming years if forecasts of population growth are met. The United Nations says the global population will hit 9 billion by 2025, a rise of more than a third since 2020. But the urban population will grow faster, doubling to more than 7 billion and, of that, the number living in informal urban settlements will treble to 3 billion.

Kibera in Nairobi. Schreibkraft, CC BY-SA 3.0 httpscreativecommons.orglicensesby-sa3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

These forecasts have led to mounting concern about the potential impacts on slum dwellers and societies without some sort of intervention. This was crystallised by the American urban theorist Mike Davis in his best-selling book, Planet of Slums, in which he sets out an apocalyptic vision of cities expanding beyond their limits and growing beyond what might be deemed as acceptable.

To give an example, writing in 2006, he warned that cities had “absorbed nearly two thirds of the global population explosion since 1950 and are currently growing by a million babies and migrants each week”.

UN-Habitat the United Nations’ sustainable urban development agency, in 2003 issued a report called Challenges of the Slums, which warned that the number of slum dwellers was “growing and will continue to increase unless there is serious and concerted action by all relevant stakeholders”. It was motivated by the growing concern over urban poverty and identified slums as physical and spatial manifestation of that and of inequality within cities.

This has encountered criticism from academics particularly those based in the Global South who argue that the word slums, which rose out of a specifically British and European experience of the Industrial Revolution, has connotations that are not appropriate for the informal settlements of the cities of the Global South.

These urban areas that are often peripheral to the more established city are not homogenous: there are many types of settlements varying by country. While they may look cramped and overcrowded to western eyes, that is a relative concept. Often the individual slum residents will build their own homes and will improve their housing as they get hold of the funding. These communities will often work together to gain political power, giving them a voice within the city government.

Another unwelcome echo is that the historic word slum is used as a justification to repeat European and American practice of evictions, removals and displacements, often to make way for real estate developers working alongside the government to build high-end buildings that will attract wealthier residents. Even if they are well intentioned, such programmes often have the opposite impact to that intended: driving the urban poor to the further fringes of cities where they are usually cut off from opportunities of work.

Policies based on lessons learned from urban developments in the Global North are unlikely to translate well to cities in the Global South. A whole new mindset is needed, that is based on the lived experiences of the people who live in communities in peripheral and informal settlements. Rather than take planning policies and theories developed 100 years ago, the focus should be on learning from the experiences of the multitude of different types of settlements. Instead of one universal truth there should be hundreds of lessons for building better cities.