What’s in a Name?

Abstract

Abstract Is “slum” a useful term to describe the poorest districts of an increasingly urbanized modern world? Notwithstanding the word’s widespread use by commentators, urban planners and developers, the judgmental and paternalistic assumptions that have been historically embedded in the term continually compromise efforts to redevelop disadvantaged urban neighborhoods on more functional and equitable lines. This chapter reviews the early nineteenth-century origins of the word “slum” and its subsequent spread across the world as a result of colonialism and urbanization. It overviews the ways in which the word conditions our understanding of urban disadvantage and of the policy options that are available to overcome it. The chapter contends that more-effective social inclusion and urban renewal programs need to be grounded in what “slum”-based thinking has always ignored: the commonsense viewpoints and self-help strategies of the poor themselves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.