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.[1] Although slums are usually located in urban areas, in some countries they can be located in suburban areas where housing quality is low and living conditions are poor.[2] 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. Slum residences vary from shanty houses to professionally built dwellings which, because of poor-quality construction or lack of basic maintenance, have deteriorated.[3]
Due to increasing urbanization of the general populace, slums became common in the 19th to late 20th centuries in the United States and Europe.[4][5] Slums are still predominantly found in urban regions of developing countries, but are also still found in developed economies.[6][7] The world's largest slum city is found in Orangi, Karachi, Pakistan.[8][9][10]
slum
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.[1][11][12] 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.[13][14]
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.[17]
Slums are often associated with Victorian Britain, particularly in industrial English towns, lowland Scottish towns and Dublin City in Ireland. Friedrich Engels described these British neighborhoods as "cattle-sheds for human beings".[20] These were generally still inhabited until the 1940s, when the British government started slum clearance and built new council houses.[21] 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.[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". 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.[24] In 1850 the Catholic Cardinal Wiseman described the area known as Devil's Acre in Westminster, London as follows:
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.[5][37] Five Points was named for a lake named Collect.[37][38] 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.[4][37]
Five Points was not the only slum in America.[39][40] 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 the Federal government of the United States.
Rio de Janeiro documented its first slum in 1920 census. By the 1960s, over 33% of population of Rio lived in slums, 45% of Mexico City and Ankara, 65% of Algiers, 35% of Caracas, 25% of Lima and Santiago, 15% of Singapore. By 1980, in various cities and towns of Latin America alone, there were about 25,000 slums.[46]
The formation of slums is closely linked to urbanization.[57] In 2008, more than 50% of the world's population lived in urban areas. In China, for example, it is estimated that the population living in urban areas will increase by 10% within a decade according to its current rates of urbanization.[58] The UN-Habitat reports that 43% of urban population in developing countries and 78% of those in the least developed countries are slum dwellers.[7]
Some scholars suggest that urbanization creates slums because local governments are unable to manage urbanization, and migrant workers without an affordable place to live in, dwell in slums.[59] Rapid urbanization drives economic growth and causes people to seek working and investment opportunities in urban areas.[60][61] However, as evidenced by poor urban infrastructure and insufficient housing, the local governments sometimes are unable to manage this transition.[62][63] This incapacity can be attributed to insufficient funds and inexperience to handle and organize problems brought by migration and urbanization.[61] In some cases, local governments ignore the flux of immigrants during the process of urbanization.[60] Such examples can be found in many African countries. In the early 1950s, many African governments believed that slums would finally disappear with economic growth in urban areas. They neglected rapidly spreading slums due to increased rural-urban migration caused by urbanization.[64] Some governments, moreover, mapped the land where slums occupied as undeveloped land.[65]
Another type of urbanization does not involve economic growth but economic stagnation or low growth, mainly contributing to slum growth in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia. This type of urbanization involves a high rate of unemployment, insufficient financial resources and inconsistent urban planning policy.[66] In these areas, an increase of 1% in urban population will result in an increase of 1.84% in slum prevalence.[67]
Urbanization might also force some people to live in slums when it influences land use by transforming agricultural land into urban areas and increases land value. During the process of urbanization, some agricultural land is used for additional urban activities. More investment will come into these areas, which increases the land value.[68] Before some land is completely urbanized, there is a period when the land can be used for neither urban activities nor agriculture. The income from the land will decline, which decreases the people's incomes in that area. The gap between people's low income and the high land price forces some people to look for and construct cheap informal settlements, which are known as slums in urban areas.[63] The transformation of agricultural land also provides surplus labour, as peasants have to seek jobs in urban areas as rural-urban migrant workers.[59]
Many slums are part of economies of agglomeration in which there is an emergence of economies of scale at the firm level, transport costs and the mobility of the industrial labour force.[69] The increase in returns of scale will mean that the production of each good will take place in a single location.[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. Alonso-Villar argues that the existence of transport costs implies that the best locations for a firm will be those with easy access to markets, and the best locations for workers, those with easy access to goods. The concentration is the result of a self-reinforcing process of agglomeration.[69] Concentration is a common trend of the distribution of population. 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.[69]
Lack of affordable low-cost housing and poor planning encourages the supply side of slums.[70] The Millennium Development Goals proposes that member nations should make a "significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers" by 2020.[71] If member nations succeed in achieving this goal, 90% of the world total slum dwellers may remain in the poorly housed settlements by 2020.[72] Choguill claims that the large number of slum dwellers indicates a deficiency of practical housing policy.[72] Whenever there is a significant gap in growing demand for housing and insufficient supply of affordable housing, this gap is typically met in part by slums.[70] The Economist has observed that "good housing is obviously better than a slum, but a slum is better than none".[73] 2ff7e9595c
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