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A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting mostly of closely packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or incomplete infrastructure, inhabited primarily by impoverished persons. 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 provision of basic maintenance, have deteriorated.
Due to increasing urbanization of the general populace, slums became common in the 18th to late 20th centuries in the United States and Europe. Slums are still predominantly found in urban regions of developing countries, but are also still found in developed economies.
According to UN-Habitat, around 33% of the urban population in the developing world in 2012, or about 863 million people, lived in slums. The proportion of urban population living in slums in 2012 was highest in Sub-Saharan Africa (62%), followed by Southern Asia (35%), Southeastern Asia (31%), Eastern Asia (28%), Western Asia (25%), Oceania (24%), Latin America and the Caribbean (24%), and North Africa (13%). Among individual countries, the proportion of urban residents living in slum areas in 2009 was highest in the Central African Republic (95.9%). Between 1990 and 2010 the percentage of people living in slums dropped, even as the total urban population increased. The world's largest slum city is found in the Neza-Chalco-Ixtapaluca area, located in the State of Mexico.
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. 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.
Etymology and nomenclature
It is thought 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 non English terms are often used interchangeably with slum: shanty town, favela, rookery, gecekondu, skid row, barrio, ghetto,
bidonville, taudis, bandas de miseria, barrio marginal, morro,
loteamento, barraca, musseque, tugurio, solares, mudun safi, karyan,
medina achouaia, brarek, ishash, galoos, tanake, baladi, trushebi,
chalis, katras, zopadpattis, bustee, estero, looban, dagatan, umjondolo,
watta, udukku, and chereka bete.
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
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".
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
urbanisation 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.
Slums are often associated with Victorian Britain,
particularly in industrial English towns, lowland Scottish towns and
Dublin City in Ireland. Engels described these British neighborhoods as
"cattle-sheds for human beings". These were generally still inhabited until the 1940s, when the British government started slum clearance and built new council houses.
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.
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 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 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.
This passage was widely quoted in the national press, leading to the popularisation of the word slum to describe bad housing.
A slum dwelling in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, about 1936.
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 study of various arrondissements of Paris demonstrated the differences and connection between slums, poverty and poor health. 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 initiative to finance and build public housing and remove slums, managed by techniciens – urban technocrats, financed by Livret A – a tax free savings account for French public.
New York City is believed to have created United States first slum, named the Five Points in 1825, as it evolved into a large urban settlement. Five Points was named for a lake named Collect.
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. 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.
A type of slum housing, sometimes called poorhouses, crowded the Boston Commons, later at the fringes of the city.
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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. 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.
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.
Causes that create and expand slums
Slums
sprout and continue for a combination of demographic, social, economic,
and political reasons. 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.
Rural–urban migration
Rural–urban migration is one of the causes attributed to the formation and expansion of slums. Since 1950, world population has increased at a far greater rate than the total amount of arable land, even as agriculture
contributes a much smaller percentage of the total economy. For
example, in India, agriculture accounted for 52% of its GDP in 1954 and
only 19% in 2004; in Brazil, the 2050 GDP contribution of agriculture is one-fifth of its contribution in 1951.
Agriculture, meanwhile, has also become higher yielding, less disease
prone, less physically harsh and more efficient with tractors and other
equipment. The proportion of people working in agriculture has declined
by 30% over the last 50 years, while global population has increased by
250%.
Many people move to urban areas
primarily because cities promise more jobs, better schools for poor's
children, and diverse income opportunities than subsistence farming in rural areas. For example, in 1995, 95.8% of migrants to Surabaya, Indonesia reported that jobs were their primary motivation for moving to the city.
However, some rural migrants may not find jobs immediately because of
their lack of skills and the increasingly competitive job markets, which
leads to their financial shortage. Many cities, on the other hand, do not provide enough low-cost housing for a large number of rural-urban migrant workers. Some rural–urban migrant workers cannot afford housing in cities and eventually settle down in only affordable slums.
Further, rural migrants, mainly lured by higher incomes, continue to
flood into cities. They thus expand the existing urban slums.
According to Ali and Toran, social networks
might also explain rural–urban migration and people's ultimate
settlement in slums. In addition to migration for jobs, a portion of
people migrate to cities because of their connection with relatives or
families. Once their family support in urban areas is in slums, those
rural migrants intend to live with them in slums
Urbanization
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.
The formation of slums is closely linked to urbanization.
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. The UN-Habitat reports that 43% of urban population in developing countries and 78% of those in the least developed countries are slum dwellers.
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. Rapid urbanization drives economic growth and causes people to seek working and investment opportunities in urban areas. However, as evidenced by poor urban infrastructure and insufficient housing, the local governments sometimes are unable to manage this transition.
This incapacity can be attributed to insufficient funds and
inexperience to handle and organize problems brought by migration and
urbanization. In some cases, local governments ignore the flux of immigrants during the process of urbanization. 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. Some governments, moreover, mapped the land where slums occupied as undeveloped land.
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. In these areas, an increase of 1% in urban population will result in an increase of 1.84% in slum prevalence.
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.
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. The transformation of agricultural land also provides surplus labor, as peasants have to seek jobs in urban areas as rural-urban migrant workers.
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. The increase in returns of scale will mean that the production of each good will take place in a single location.
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.
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.
Poor house planning
Lack of affordable low cost housing and poor planning encourages the supply side of slums.
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.
If member nations succeed in achieving this goal, 90% of the world
total slum dwellers may remain in the poorly housed settlements by 2020. Choguill claims that the large number of slum dwellers indicates a deficiency of practical housing policy.
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. The Economist summarizes this as, "good housing is obviously better than a slum, but a slum is better than none".
Insufficient financial resources and lack of coordination in government bureaucracy are two main causes of poor house planning. Financial deficiency in some governments may explain the lack of affordable public housing for the poor since any improvement of the tenant in slums and expansion of public housing programs involve a great increase in the government expenditure. The problem can also lie on the failure in coordination among different departments in charge of economic development, urban planning, and land allocation. In some cities, governments assume that the housing market
will adjust the supply of housing with a change in demand. However,
with little economic incentive, the housing market is more likely to
develop middle-income housing rather than low-cost housing. The urban
poor gradually become marginalized in the housing market where few
houses are built to sell to them.
Colonialism and segregation
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.
Some of the slums in today's world are a product of urbanization brought by colonialism. For instance, the Europeans arrived in Kenya in the nineteenth century and created urban centers such as Nairobi mainly to serve their financial interests. They regarded the Africans as temporary migrants and needed them only for supply of labor.
The housing policy aiming to accommodate these workers was not well
enforced and the government built settlements in the form of
single-occupancy bedspaces. Due to the cost of time and money in their
movement back and forth between rural and urban areas, their families
gradually migrated to the urban centre. As they could not afford to buy
houses, slums were thus formed.
Others were created because of segregation imposed by the colonialists. For example, Dharavi slum of Mumbai – now one of the largest slums in India,
used to be a village referred to as Koliwadas, and Mumbai used to be
referred as Bombay. In 1887, the British colonial government expelled
all tanneries, other noxious industry and poor natives who worked in the
peninsular part of the city and colonial housing area, to what was back
then the northern fringe of the city – a settlement now called Dharavi.
This settlement attracted no colonial supervision or investment in
terms of road infrastructure, sanitation,
public services or housing. The poor moved into Dharavi, found work as
servants in colonial offices and homes and in the foreign owned
tanneries and other polluting industries near Dharavi. To live, the poor
built shanty towns within easy commute to work. By 1947, the year India
became an independent nation of the commonwealth, Dharavi had blossomed
into Bombay's largest slum.
Similarly, some of the slums of Lagos, Nigeria sprouted because of neglect and policies of the colonial era. During apartheid era of South Africa,
under the pretext of sanitation and plague epidemic prevention, racial
and ethnic group segregation was pursued, people of color were moved to
the fringes of the city, policies that created Soweto and other slums –
officially called townships. Large slums started at the fringes of segregation-conscious colonial city centers of Latin America. Marcuse suggests ghettoes in the United States, and elsewhere, have been created and maintained by the segregationist policies of the state and regionally dominant group.
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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 destroyed by the city government, amidst controversy,
to accommodate infrastructure for the city's growing population.
Poor infrastructure, social exclusion and economic stagnation
Social exclusion and poor infrastructure forces the poor to adapt to
conditions beyond his or her control. Poor families that cannot afford
transportation, or those who simply lack any form of affordable public
transportation, generally end up in squat settlements within walking
distance or close enough to the place of their formal or informal
employment. Ben Arimah cites this social exclusion and poor infrastructure as a cause for numerous slums in African cities.
Poor quality, unpaved streets encourage slums; a 1% increase in paved
all-season roads, claims Arimah, reduces slum incidence rate by about
0.35%. Affordable public transport and economic infrastructure empowers
poor people to move and consider housing options other than their
current slums.
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. Economic stagnation, in
contrast, creates uncertainties and risks for the poor, encouraging
people to stay in the slums. Economic stagnation in a nation with a
growing population reduces per capita disposal income in urban and rural
areas, increasing urban and rural poverty. Rising rural poverty also
encourages migration to urban areas. A poorly performing economy, in
other words, increases poverty and rural-to-urban migration, thereby
increasing slums.
Informal economy
Many
slums grow because of growing informal economy which creates demand
for workers. Informal economy is that part of an economy that is neither
registered as a business nor licensed, one that does not pay taxes and
is not monitored by local or state or federal government.
Informal economy grows faster than formal economy when government laws
and regulations are opaque and excessive, government bureaucracy is
corrupt and abusive of entrepreneurs, labor laws are inflexible, or when
law enforcement is poor.
Urban informal sector is between 20 and 60% of most developing
economies' GDP; in Kenya, 78 per cent of non-agricultural employment is
in the informal sector making up 42 per cent of GDP.
In many cities the informal sector accounts for as much as 60 per cent
of employment of the urban population. For example, in Benin, slum
dwellers comprise 75 per cent of informal sector workers, while in
Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad and Ethiopia, they make
up 90 per cent of the informal labour force.
Slums thus create an informal alternate economic ecosystem, that
demands low paid flexible workers, something impoverished residents of
slums deliver. In other words, countries where starting, registering and
running a formal business is difficult, tend to encourage informal
businesses and slums. Without a sustainable formal economy that raise incomes and create opportunities, squalid slums are likely to continue.
A slum near Ramos Arizpe in Mexico.
The World Bank and UN Habitat estimate, assuming no major economic
reforms are undertaken, more than 80% of additional jobs in urban areas
of developing world may be low-paying jobs in the informal sector.
Everything else remaining same, this explosive growth in the informal
sector is likely to be accompanied by a rapid growth of slums.
Poverty
Urban poverty encourages the formation and demand for slums.
With rapid shift from rural to urban life, poverty migrates to urban
areas. The urban poor arrives with hope, and very little of anything
else. He or she typically has no access to shelter, basic urban services
and social amenities. Slums are often the only option for the urban
poor.
A woman from a slum is taking a bath in a river.
Politics
Many
local and national governments have, for political interests, subverted
efforts to remove, reduce or upgrade slums into better housing options
for the poor.
Throughout the second half of the 19th century, for example, French
political parties relied on votes from slum population and had vested
interests in maintaining that voting block. Removal and replacement of
slum created a conflict of interest, and politics prevented efforts to
remove, relocate or upgrade the slums into housing projects that are
better than the slums. Similar dynamics are cited in favelas of Brazil, slums of India, and shanty towns of Kenya.
The
location of 30 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.
Scholars
claim politics also drives rural-urban migration and subsequent
settlement patterns. Pre-existing patronage networks, sometimes in the
form of gangs and other times in the form of political parties or social
activists, inside slums seek to maintain their economic, social and
political power. These social and political groups have vested interests
to encourage migration by ethnic groups that will help maintain the
slums, and reject alternate housing options even if the alternate
options are better in every aspect than the slums they seek to replace.
Social conflicts
Millions of Lebanese people formed slums during the civil war from 1975 to 1990. Similarly, in recent years, numerous slums have sprung around Kabul to accommodate rural Afghans escaping Taliban violence.
Natural disasters
Major
natural disasters in poor nations often lead to migration of
disaster-affected families from areas crippled by the disaster to
unaffected areas, the creation of temporary tent city and slums, or
expansion of existing slums.
These slums tend to become permanent because the residents do not want
to leave, as in the case of slums near Port-au-Prince after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and slums near Dhaka after 2007 Bangladesh Cyclone Sidr.
Characteristics of slums
Location and growth
Slums
typically begin at the outskirts of a city. Over time, the city may
expand past the original slums, enclosing the slums inside the urban
perimeter. New slums sprout at the new boundaries of the expanding city,
usually on publicly owned lands, thereby creating an urban sprawl mix
of formal settlements, industry, retail zones and slums. This makes the
original slums valuable property, densely populated with many
conveniences attractive to the poor.
At their start, slums are typically located in least desirable
lands near the town or city, that are state owned or philanthropic trust
owned or religious entity owned or have no clear land title. In cities
located over a mountainous terrain, slums begin on difficult to reach
slopes or start at the bottom of flood prone valleys, often hidden from
plain view of city center but close to some natural water source.
In cities located near lagoons, marshlands and rivers, they start at
banks or on stilts above water or the dry river bed; in flat terrain,
slums begin on lands unsuitable for agriculture, near city trash dumps,
next to railway tracks, and other shunned undesirable locations.
These strategies shield slums from the risk of being noticed and
removed when they are small and most vulnerable to local government
officials. Initial homes tend to be tents and shacks that are quick to
install, but as slum grows, becomes established and newcomers pay the
informal association or gang for the right to live in the slum, the
construction materials for the slums switches to more lasting materials
such as bricks and concrete, suitable for slum's topography.
The original slums, over time, get established next to centers of
economic activity, schools, hospitals, sources of employment, which the
poor rely on. Established old slums, surrounded by the formal city
infrastructure, cannot expand horizontally; therefore, they grow
vertically by stacking additional rooms, sometimes for a growing family
and sometimes as a source of rent from new arrivals in slums.
Some slums name themselves after founders of political parties, locally
respected historical figures, current politicians or politician's
spouse to garner political backing against eviction.
Insecure tenure
Informality of land tenure is a key characteristic of urban slums.
At their start, slums are typically located in least desirable lands
near the town or city, that are state owned or philanthropic trust owned
or religious entity owned or have no clear land title. Some immigrants regard unoccupied land as land without owners and therefore occupy it.
In some cases the local community or the government allots lands to
people, which will later develop into slums and over which the dwellers
don't have property rights. Informal land tenure also includes occupation of land belonging to someone else. According to Flood, 51 percent of slums are based on invasion to private land in sub-Saharan Africa, 39 percent in North Africa and West Asia, 10 percent in South Asia, 40 percent in East Asia, and 40 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean.
In some cases, once the slum has many residents, the early residents
form a social group, an informal association or a gang that controls
newcomers, charges a fee for the right to live in the slums, and
dictates where and how new homes get built within the slum. The
newcomers, having paid for the right, feel they have commercial right to
the home in that slum.
The slum dwellings, built earlier or in later period as the slum grows,
are constructed without checking land ownership rights or building
codes, are not registered with the city, and often not recognized by the
city or state governments.
Secure land tenure is important for slum dwellers as an authentic
recognition of their residential status in urban areas. It also
encourages them to upgrade their housing facilities, which will give
them protection against natural and unnatural hazards. Undocumented ownership with no legal title to the land also prevents slum settlers from applying for mortgage,
which might worsen their financial situations. In addition, without
registration of the land ownership, the government has difficulty in
upgrading basic facilities and improving the living environment.
Insecure tenure of the slum, as well as lack of socially and
politically acceptable alternatives to slums, also creates difficulty in
citywide infrastructure development such as rapid mass transit, electrical line and sewer pipe layout, highways and roads.
Substandard housing and overcrowding
Slum areas are characterized by substandard housing structures.
Shanty homes are often built hurriedly, on ad hoc basis, with materials
unsuitable for housing. Often the construction quality is inadequate to
withstand heavy rains, high winds, or other local climate and location.
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. In some cases, brick and cement is used, but
without attention to proper design and structural engineering
requirements. Various space, dwelling placement bylaws and local building codes may also be extensively violated.
Overcrowding is another characteristic of slums. Many dwellings
are single room units, with high occupancy rates. Each dwelling may be
cohabited by multiple families. Five and more persons may share a
one-room unit; the room is used for cooking, sleeping and living.
Overcrowding is also seen near sources of drinking water, cleaning, and
sanitation where one toilet may serve dozens of families. In a slum of Kolkata, India, over 10 people sometimes share a 45 m2 room.
In Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, population density is estimated at
2,000 people per hectare — or about 500,000 people in one square mile.
However, the density and neighbourhood effects of slum populations may also offer an opportunity to target health interventions.
Inadequate or no infrastructure
Slum with tiled roofs and railway, Jakarta railway slum resettlement 1975, Indonesia.
One of the identifying characteristics of slums is the lack of or inadequate public infrastructure.
From safe drinking water to electricity, from basic health care to
police services, from affordable public transport to fire/ambulance
services, from sanitation sewer to paved roads, new slums usually lack
all of these. Established, old slums sometimes garner official support
and get some of these infrastructure such as paved roads and unreliable
electricity or water supply.
Slums often have very narrow alleys that do not allow vehicles (including emergency vehicles) to pass. The lack of services such as routine garbage collection allows rubbish to accumulate in huge quantities.
The lack of infrastructure is caused by the informal nature of
settlement and no planning for the poor by government officials. Fires
are often a serious problem.
In many countries, local and national government often refuse to
recognize slums, because the slum are on disputed land, or because of
the fear that quick official recognition will encourage more slum
formation and seizure of land illegally. Recognizing and notifying slums
often triggers a creation of property rights, and requires that the
government provide public services and infrastructure to the slum
residents.
With poverty and informal economy, slums do not generate tax revenues
for the government and therefore tend to get minimal or slow attention.
In other cases, the narrow and haphazard layout of slum streets, houses
and substandard shacks, along with persistent threat of crime and
violence against infrastructure workers, makes it difficult to layout
reliable, safe, cost effective and efficient infrastructure. In yet
others, the demand far exceeds the government bureaucracy's ability to
deliver.
Low socioeconomic status of its residents is another common characteristic attributed to slum residents.
Problems
Vulnerability to natural and unnatural hazards
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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.
Slums are often placed among the places vulnerable to natural disasters such as landslides and floods.
In cities located over a mountainous terrain, slums begin on slopes
difficult to reach or start at the bottom of flood prone valleys, often
hidden from plain view of city center but close to some natural water
source. In cities located near lagoons, marshlands
and rivers, they start at banks or on stilts above water or the dry
river bed; in flat terrain, slums begin on lands unsuitable for
agriculture, near city trash dumps, next to railway tracks,
and other shunned, undesirable locations. These strategies shield slums
from the risk of being noticed and removed when they are small and most
vulnerable to local government officials.
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. These risks will be intensified by climate change.
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.
Some slums risk man-made hazards such as toxic industries, traffic congestion and collapsing infrastructure. Fires are another major risk to slums and its inhabitants, with streets too narrow to allow proper and quick access to fire control trucks.
Unemployment and informal economy
Due to lack of skills and education as well as competitive job markets, many slum dwellers face high rates of unemployment. The limit of job opportunities causes many of them to employ themselves in the informal economy,
inside the slum or in developed urban areas near the slum. This can
sometimes be licit informal economy or illicit informal economy without
working contract or any social security. Some of them are seeking jobs
at the same time and some of those will eventually find jobs in formal
economies after gaining some professional skills in informal sectors.
Examples of licit informal economy include street vending,
household enterprises, product assembly and packaging, making garlands
and embroideries, domestic work, shoe polishing or repair, driving tuk-tuk or manual rickshaws, construction workers or manually driven logistics, and handicrafts production.
In some slums, people sort and recycle trash of different kinds (from
household garbage to electronics) for a living – selling either the odd
usable goods or stripping broken goods for parts or raw materials.
Typically these licit informal economies require the poor to regularly
pay a bribe to local police and government officials.
A
propaganda poster linking slum to violence, used by US Housing
Authority in the 1940s. City governments in the USA created many such
propaganda posters and launched a media campaign to gain citizen support
for slum clearance and planned public housing.
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. Recent reports reflecting illicit informal economies include drug trade and distribution in Brazil's favelas, production of fake goods in the colonías of Tijuana, smuggling in katchi abadis and slums of Karachi, or production of synthetic drugs in the townships of Johannesburg.
The slum-dwellers in informal economies run many risks. The
informal sector, by its very nature, means income insecurity and lack of
social mobility. There is also absence of legal contracts, protection
of labor rights, regulations and bargaining power in informal
employments.
Violence
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was controlled by local triads.
Some scholars suggest that crime is one of the main concerns in slums.
Empirical data suggest crime rates are higher in some slums than in
non-slums, with slum homicides alone reducing life expectancy of a
resident in a Brazil slum by 7 years than for a resident in nearby
non-slum. In some countries like Venezuela, officials have sent in the military to control slum criminal violence involved with drugs and weapons. Rape
is another serious issue related to crime in slums. In Nairobi slums,
for example, one fourth of all teenage girls are raped each year.
On the other hand, while UN-Habitat reports some slums are more exposed to crimes
with higher crime rates (for instance, the traditional inner-city
slums), crime is not the direct resultant of block layout in many slums.
Rather crime is one of the symptoms of slum dwelling; thus slums
consist of more victims than criminals.
Consequently, slums in all do not have consistently high crime rates;
slums have the worst crime rates in sectors maintaining influence of
illicit economy – such as drug trafficking, brewing, prostitution and gambling –. Often in such circumstance, multiple gangs fight for control over revenue.
Slum crime rate correlates with insufficient law enforcement and inadequate public policing.
In main cities of developing countries, law enforcement lags behind
urban growth and slum expansion. Often police can not reduce crime
because, due to ineffective city planning and governance, slums set
inefficient crime prevention system. Such problems is not primarily due
to community indifference. Leads and information intelligence from slums
are rare, streets are narrow and a potential death traps to patrol, and
many in the slum community have an inherent distrust of authorities
from fear ranging from eviction to collection on unpaid utility bills to
general law and order. Lack of formal recognition by the governments also leads to few formal policing and public justice institutions in slums.
Women in slums are at greater risk of physical and sexual violence.
Factors such as unemployment that lead to insufficient resources in the
household can increase marital stress and therefore exacerbate domestic
violence.
Slums are often non-secured areas and women often risk sexual violence when they walk alone in slums late at night. Violence against women and women's security in slums emerge as recurrent issues.
Another prevalent form of violence in slums is armed violence (gun violence), mostly existing in African and Latin American slums. It leads to homicide and the emergence of criminal gangs. Typical victims are male slum residents. Violence often leads to retaliatory and vigilante violence within the slum. Gang and drug wars are endemic in some slums, predominantly between male residents of slums.
The police sometimes participate in gender-based violence against men
as well by picking up some men, beating them and putting them in jail. Domestic violence against men also exists in slums, including verbal abuses and even physical violence from households.
Cohen as well as Merton theorized that the cycle of slum violence
does not mean slums are inevitably criminogenic, rather in some cases
it is frustration against life in slum, and a consequence of denial of
opportunity to slum residents to leave the slum.
Further, crime rates are not uniformly high in world's slums; the
highest crime rates in slums are seen where illicit economy – such as
drug trafficking, brewing, prostitution and gambling – is strong and
multiple gangs are fighting for control.
A young boy sits over an open sewer in the Kibera slum, Nairobi.
Infectious Diseases and Epidemics
Slum dwellers usually experience a high rate of disease. Diseases that have been reported in slums include cholera, HIV/AIDS, measles, malaria, dengue, typhoid, drug resistant tuberculosis, and other epidemics. Studies focus on children's health in slums address that cholera and diarrhea are especially common among young children. Besides children's vulnerability to diseases, many scholars also focus on high HIV/AIDS prevalence in slums among women. Throughout slum areas in various parts of the world, infectious diseases are a significant contributor to high mortality rates.
For example, according to a study in Nairobi's slums, HIV/AIDS and
tuberculosis attributed to about 50% of the mortality burden.
Factors that have been attributed to a higher rate of disease transmission in slums include high population densities, poor living conditions, low vaccination rates, insufficient health-related data and inadequate health service. Overcrowding leads to faster and wider spread of diseases due to the limited space in slum housing. Poor living conditions also make slum dwellers more vulnerable to certain diseases. Poor water quality, a manifest example, is a cause of many major illnesses including malaria, diarrhea and trachoma.
Improving living conditions such as introduction of better sanitation
and access to basic facilities can ameliorate the effects of diseases,
such as cholera.
Slums have been historically linked to epidemics, and this trend has continued in modern times. For example, the slums of West African nations such as Liberia were crippled by as well as contributed to the outbreak and spread of Ebola in 2014. 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.
Child malnutrition
Child malnutrition is more common in slums than in non-slum areas.
In Mumbai and New Delhi,
47% and 51% of slum children under the age of five are stunted and 35%
and 36% of them are underweighted. These children all suffer from
third-degree malnutrition, the most severe level, according to WHO standards. A study conducted by Tada et al. in Bangkok
slums illustrates that in terms of weight-forage, 25.4% of the children
who participated in the survey suffered from malnutrition, compared to
around 8% national malnutrition prevalence in Thailand. In Ethiopia and the Niger, rates of child malnutrition in urban slums are around 40%.
The major nutritional problems in slums are protein-energy malnutrition (PEM), vitamin A deficiency (VAD), iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and iodine deficiency disorders (IDD). Malnutrition can sometimes lead to death among children. Dr. Abhay Bang's report shows that malnutrition kills 56,000 children annually in urban slums in India.
Widespread child malnutrition in slums is closely related to family income, mothers' food practice, mothers' educational level, and maternal employment or housewifery. Poverty may result in inadequate food intake when people cannot afford to buy and store enough food, which leads to malnutrition. Another common cause is mothers' faulty feeding practices, including inadequate breastfeeding and wrongly preparation of food for children. Tada et al.'s study in Bangkok slums shows that around 64% of the mothers sometimes fed their children instant food
instead of a normal meal. And about 70% of the mothers did not provide
their children three meals everyday. Mothers' lack of education leads to
their faulty feeding practices. Many mothers in slums don't have
knowledge on food nutrition for children.
Maternal employment also influences children's nutritional status. For
the mothers who work outside, their children are prone to be
malnourished. These children are likely to be neglected by their mothers
or sometimes not carefully looked after by their female relatives. Recent study has shown improvements in health awareness in adolescent age group of a rural slum area.
Other Non-communicable Diseases
A
multitude of non-contagious diseases also impact health for slum
residents. Examples of prevalent non-infectious diseases include:
cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease,
neurological disorders, and mental illness.
In some slum areas of India, diarrhea is a significant health problem
among children. Factors like poor sanitation, low literacy rates, and
limited awareness make diarrhea and other dangerous diseases extremely
prevalent and burdensome on the community.
Lack of reliable data also has a negative impact on slum
dwellers' health. A number of slum families do not report cases or seek
professional medical care, which results in insufficient data.
This might prevent appropriate allocation of health care resources in
slum areas since many countries base their health care plans on data
from clinic, hospital, or national mortality registry. Moreover, health service is insufficient or inadequate in most of the world's slums. Emergency ambulance service and urgent care services are typically unavailable, as health service providers sometimes avoid servicing slums. A study shows that more than half of slum dwellers are prone to visit private practitioners or seek self-medication with medicines available in the home.
Private practitioners in slums are usually those who are unlicensed or
poorly trained and they run clinics and pharmacies mainly for the sake
of money.
The categorization of slum health by the government and census data
also has an effect on the distribution and allocation of health
resources in inner city areas. 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.
Overall, a complex network of physical, social, and environmental
factors contribute to the health threats faced by slum residents.
Countermeasures
Villa 31, one of the largest slums of Argentina, located near the center of Buenos Aires
Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the number of slums as urban populations have increased in developing countries.
Nearly a billion people worldwide live in slums, and some project the
figure may grow to 2 billion by 2030, if governments and global
community ignore slums and continue current urban policies. United
Nations Habitat group believes change is possible. To achieve the goal
of "cities without slums", the UN claims that governments must undertake
vigorous urban planning, city management, infrastructure development,
slum upgrading and poverty reduction.
Slum removal
Some city and state officials have simply sought to remove slums.
This strategy for dealing with slums is rooted in the fact that slums
typically start illegally on someone else's land property, and they are
not recognized by the state. As the slum started by violating another's
property rights, the residents have no legal claim to the land.
Critics argue that slum removal by force tend to ignore the
social problems that cause slums. The poor children as well as working
adults of a city's informal economy need a place to live. Slum clearance
removes the slum, but it does not remove the causes that create and
maintain the slum.
Slum relocation
Slum
relocation strategies rely on removing the slums and relocating the
slum poor to free semi-rural peripheries of cities, sometimes in free
housing. This strategy ignores several dimensions of a slum life. The
strategy sees slum as merely a place where the poor lives. In reality,
slums are often integrated with every aspect of a slum resident's life,
including sources of employment, distance from work and social life. Slum relocation that displaces the poor from opportunities to earn a livelihood, generates economic insecurity in the poor.
In some cases, the slum residents oppose relocation even if the
replacement land and housing to the outskirts of cities is free and of
better quality than their current house. Examples include Zone One Tondo
Organization of Manila, Philippines and Abahlali baseMjondolo of Durban, South Africa. In other cases, such as Ennakhil slum relocation project in Morocco,
systematic social mediation has worked. The slum residents have been
convinced that their current location is a health hazard, prone to
natural disaster, or that the alternative location is well connected to
employment opportunities.
Slum Upgrading
Some governments have begun to approach slums as a possible
opportunity to urban development by slum upgrading. This approach was
inspired in part by the theoretical writings of John Turner in 1972. The approach seeks to upgrade the slum with basic infrastructure such as sanitation, safe drinking water, safe electricity distribution, paved roads, rain water drainage system, and bus/metro stops.
The assumption behind this approach is that if slums are given basic
services and tenure security – that is, the slum will not be destroyed
and slum residents will not be evicted, then the residents will rebuild
their own housing, engage their slum community to live better, and over
time attract investment from government organizations and businesses.
Turner argued to demolish the housing, but to improve the environment:
if governments can clear existing slums of unsanitary human waste,
polluted water and litter, and from muddy unlit lanes, they do not have
to worry about the shanty housing. "Squatters"
have shown great organizational skills in terms of land management, and
they will maintain the infrastructure that is provided.
Shibati slum in Chongqing, China. This slum is being demolished and residents relocated.
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.
Currently, most slums in Mexico City face basic characteristics of
traditional slums, characterized to some extent in housing, population
density, crime and poverty, however, the vast majority of its
inhabitants have access to basic amenities and most areas are connected
to major roads and completely urbanized. Nevertheless, smaller
settlements lacking these can still be found in the periphery of the
city and its inhabitants are known as "paracaidistas".
Another example of this approach is the slum upgrade in Tondo slum near Manila, Philippines.
The project was anticipated to be complete in four years, but it took
nine. There was a large increase in cost, numerous delays,
re-engineering of details to address political disputes, and other
complications after the project. Despite these failures, the project
reaffirmed the core assumption and Tondo families did build their own
houses of far better quality than originally assumed. Tondo residents
became property owners with a stake in their neighborhood. A more recent
example of slum-upgrading approach is PRIMED initiative in Medellin, Colombia, where streets, Metrocable
transportation and other public infrastructure has been added. These
slum infrastructure upgrades were combined with city infrastructure
upgrade such as addition of metro, paved roads and highways to empower
all city residents including the poor with reliable access throughout
city.
Most slum upgrading projects, however, have produced mixed
results. While initial evaluations were promising and success stories
widely reported by media, evaluations done 5 to 10 years after a project
completion have been disappointing. Herbert Werlin notes that the initial benefits of slum upgrading efforts have been ephemeral. The slum upgrading projects in kampungs
of Jakarta Indonesia, for example, looked promising in first few years
after upgrade, but thereafter returned to a condition worse than before,
particularly in terms of sanitation, environmental problems and safety
of drinking water. Communal toilets provided under slum upgrading effort
were poorly maintained, and abandoned by slum residents of Jakarta. Similarly slum upgrading efforts in Philippines, India, and Brazil
have proven to be excessively more expensive than initially estimated,
and the condition of the slums 10 years after completion of slum
upgrading has been slum like. The anticipated benefits of slum
upgrading, claims Werlin, have proven to be a myth.
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.
Slum upgrading is largely a government controlled, funded and run
process, rather than a competitive market driven process. Krueckeberg
and Paulsen note
conflicting politics, government corruption and street violence in slum
regularization process is part of the reality. Slum upgrading and
tenure regularization also upgrade and regularize the slum bosses and
political agendas, while threatening the influence and power of
municipal officials and ministries. Slum upgrading does not address
poverty, low paying jobs from informal economy, and other
characteristics of slums. It is unclear whether slum upgrading can lead
to long term sustainable improvement to slums.
Urban infrastructure development and public housing
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Urban infrastructure such as reliable high speed mass transit system,
motorways/interstates, and public housing projects have been cited as responsible for the disappearance of major slums in the United States and Europe from the 1960s through 1970s. Charles Pearson
argued in UK Parliament that mass transit would enable London to reduce
slums and relocate slum dwellers. His proposal was initially rejected
for lack of land and other reasons; but Pearson and others persisted
with creative proposals such as building the mass transit under the
major roads already in use and owned by the city. London Underground was born, and its expansion has been credited to reducing slums in respective cities (and to an extent, the New York City Subway's smaller expansion).
As cities expanded and business parks scattered due to cost
ineffectiveness, people moved to live in the suburbs; thus retail,
logistics, house maintenance and other businesses followed demand
patterns. City governments used infrastructure investments and urban
planning to distribute work, housing, green areas, retail, schools and
population densities. Affordable public mass transit in cities such as
New York City, London and Paris allowed the poor to reach areas where
they could earn a livelihood. Public and council housing projects
cleared slums and provided more sanitary housing options than what
existed before the 1950s.
Slum clearance became a priority policy in Europe between
1950–1970s, and one of the biggest state-led programs. In the UK, the
slum clearance effort was bigger in scale than the formation of British Railways, the National Health Service
and other state programs. UK Government data suggests the clearances
that took place after 1955 demolished about 1.5 million slum properties,
resettling about 15% of UK's population out of these properties. Similarly, after 1950, Denmark and others pursued parallel initiatives to clear slums and resettle the slum residents.
The US and European governments additionally created a procedure
by which the poor could directly apply to the government for housing
assistance, thus becoming a partner to identifying and meeting the
housing needs of its citizens.
One historically effective approach to reduce and prevent slums has
been citywide infrastructure development combined with affordable,
reliable public mass transport and public housing projects.
In Brazil, in 2014, the government built about 2 million houses
around the country for lower income families. The public program was
named "Minha casa, minha vida" which means "My house, my life". The project has built 2 million popular houses and it has 2 million more under construction.
However, slum relocation in the name of urban development is
criticized for uprooting communities without consultation or
consideration of ongoing livelihood. For example, the Sabarmati
Riverfront Project, a recreational development in Ahmedabad, India,
forcefully relocated over 19,000 families from shacks along the river to
13 public housing complexes that were an average of 9 km away from the
family's original dwelling.
Prevalence
Percent urban population of a country living in slums.
(Source: UN Habitat 2005)
(Source: UN Habitat 2005)
0-10%
10-20%
20-30%
30-40%
40-50%
50-60%
60-70%
70-80%
80-90%
90-100%
No data
Slums exist in many countries and have become a global phenomenon. A UN-Habitat report states that in 2006 there were nearly 1 billion people settling in slum settlements in most cities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and a smaller number in the cities of Europe and North America. In 2012, according to UN-Habitat, about 863 million people in the developing world lived in slums. Of these, the urban slum population at mid-year was around 213 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, 207 million in East Asia, 201 million in South Asia, 113 million in Latin America and Caribbean, 80 million in Southeast Asia, 36 million in West Asia, and 13 million in North Africa. 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%).
The distribution of slums within a city varies throughout the world. In most of the developed countries, it is easier to distinguish the slum-areas and non-slum areas. In the United States, slum dwellers are usually in city neighborhoods and inner suburbs, while in Europe, they are more common in high rise housing on the urban outskirts. In many developing countries, slums are prevalent as distributed pockets or as urban orbits of densely constructed informal settlements. In some cities, especially in countries in Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa,
slums are not just marginalized neighborhoods holding a small
population; slums are widespread, and are home to a large part of urban
population. These are sometimes called slum cities.
The percentage of developing world's urban population living in
slums has been dropping with economic development, even while total
urban population has been increasing. In 1990, 46 percent of the urban
population lived in slums; by 2000, the percentage had dropped to 39%;
which further dropped to 32% by 2010.
