What is Slum? Explained

An Introduction.

You must have seen slums nearby your city or may have visited this place as part of your fieldwork. You might be having some understanding in your mind about slums, to know more about them comprehensively the following article will help you.

Content

Definition
Naming and origins
History of Slums
Causes of slum and circumstances.

Migration from rural to urban area
Urbanization
Poor Housing plan
Inadequate infrastructure
Segregation and Colanialism
Informal Economy
Labour Work
Politics

Slums are places where there are too many people living in areas that are full of old buildings that aren't well-maintained, aren't well-organized, and don't have basic services.

Slums are thought of as the physical and social expression of the way that people get the benefits of economic growth. Slums are parts of cities that aren't looked after and have terrible housing and living conditions. Slums can be high-density, squalid tenements in the middle of a city, or they can be squatter settlements that have no legal rights and are spread out on the outskirts of cities. Some people are over 50 years old (in fact in Kolkata some of the slums are 150 years old) Due to rural areas being poor, slums have sprung up all over the world. When there are no other ways to make money, people from rural areas move to cities in search of work. Sometimes they move with their whole families, but other times the men move first, and their families follow later.

A lot of migrants are living in empty places that aren't run by the town's government. In these areas, there aren't any basic civic amenities, so people have to live in dirty and unsanitary conditions. These areas quickly turned into slums. While slums are seen as bad, the people who work in the slum are important parts of the informal economy, which has ties to the formal economy, which is bad. In slums, people live together in groups that keep their affinity and other bonds strong.

A slum is an area of a city that is very crowded and has low-quality housing units. Most people who live in slums are poor, and the infrastructure there is often deteriorated or incomplete. Because slums are usually found in cities, they can also be found in suburbs where housing quality is low and living conditions are bad. Most slums don't have reliable sanitation services, clean water, reliable electricity, law enforcement, and other basic services. This is true even though slums are different in size and other ways. People live in slums in a wide range of ways, from shanty houses to professionally built homes that have fallen apart because of poor construction or lack of basic maintenance.

Slums started to appear in the United States and Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s because more people moved to cities. Slums are still mostly found in cities in developing countries, but they are also still found in developed economies.Orangi, Karachi, Pakistan, is home to the world's largest slum city, which is made up of many poor people.Some parts of the world have slums, and some parts don't. They happen for many different reasons. Economic stagnation and depression, high unemployment, poverty, the informal economy, forced or manipulated ghettoization, poor planning, politics, natural disasters, and social conflicts are some of the reasons why people move from rural areas to cities quickly. Slum removal, slum relocation, slum upgrading, urban planning with citywide infrastructure development, and public housing are some of the ways that different countries have tried to reduce and transform slums.

Definition of Slum

In India, slums have become an important part of the process of becoming more urban. Census 2001 is the first time in history that this country has kept track of slums.

All areas of a town or city that have been designated as a slum by the State, Local, and UT Administrations under any law, including the Slum Act. 'Slum' is a term used by the State/Local Government and Housing and Slum Boards to refer to areas that have been deemed slums by them, even though they haven't been officially deemed slums by any law.
A slum is a small area of at least 300 people or about 60-70 households of poorly built, congested tenements in an unsanitary environment, usually lacking in infrastructure and without proper sanitary and drinking water facilities.

Naming and origins

It is thought that slum is a British word that means "room." It changed to "back slum" around 1845, which meant "back alley, street of poor people."

A lot of other words that aren't in English are also used to describe slums: shanty town; favela; gecekondu; skid row; barrio; ghetto; banlieue; bidonville; taudis; bandas de miseria; barrio marginal; morro; barraca; musseque; iskuwater; Inner city; tugurio; solares; medina; galoos; tanake; and baladi; zopadpattis; basti; estero; looban; and da da

Using the word "slum" to describe an area can be seen as an attempt to make that land use less legitimate in order to repurpose it.

Slums are parts of a city or town that are dirty and poor. Most people live in or near slums, where stores and homes are cheap and old, and the streets are narrow and dark. Slums have been built in many places, and where they are built depends on the political and economic situation in a community. There were slums in the early industrial cities of England and the United States, where low-paid workers lived. The slums were close to factories, so they were close to the city centre. To this day, many slums in English and U.S. cities are still found in these areas, even though many factories have closed down there. In other cities, where land and rent prices were high in the centre, large public housing projects were built on the outskirts, and slums grew and still exist on the periphery (e.g., Paris). Dharavi, which is thought to be the world's largest slum, is on the northern edge of the city of Mumbai, which is on the coast (formerly Bombay). As you move outside of Mexico City, you'll see slums on both sides of the city. This is true for cities in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The squatters who live in these poor shanty towns make them and live in them. Many of them are new immigrants.

History of Slum

If you live in a city now, you're not likely to see rich and poor people living together. The wealthy lived on high streets, and poor people lived on the service streets behind them. But in the 19th century, wealthy and middle-class people started to move out of the centre of rapidly growing cities, leaving poor people behind.

There were a lot of people living on a lot in the US and Europe before the early 20th century. London's East End is thought to be where the term came from in the 19th century, when the dockside and industrial areas were rapidly urbanised, which led to overcrowding in a warren of post-medieval streets. A moralist author like Charles Dickens wrote popular stories about the poor, which reflected the Christian Socialist values of the time, like Oliver Twist (1837-9). The Public Health Act of 1848 was a way to make sure that the poor didn't get sick. As the slum clearance movement grew, moralist novels like A Child of the Jago (1896) were written to make the middle class more aware of deprived areas like Old Nichol. This led to slum clearance and reconstruction projects like the Boundary Estate (1893-1900) and the creation of charitable trusts like the Peabody Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which still provide decent housing today.

The term "slum" is often used to describe the poor living conditions in Victorian Britain, especially in industrial English towns, lowland Scottish towns, and the Irish capital, Dublin City. Friedrich Engels called these British neighbourhoods "cattle-sheds for humans." These were mostly still lived in until the 1940s, when the British government started removing slums and building new council homes. Still, there are some places in the UK where people live in slums. Many of these places have been removed by the government and replaced with better public housing. In Europe, people lived in slums. During the 1920s, the word "tavern" started to be used in slang in England. It could mean "loose talk" or gypsy language, or a room with "low goings-on." In Life in London (1821), Pierce Egan used the word to describe the "back slums" of Holy Lane or St. Giles, where poor people lived. A footnote said that "slum" meant "low, unpopular parts of the town." As he wrote in 1840, Charles Dickens used the word "slum" in the same way. "I want to go for a great back-slum kind of walk tonight." There were many people living in slums, which meant they didn't have good housing. Slums were also used as an alternative term for rookeries. In 1850, the Catholic Cardinal Wiseman talked about the area in London called Devil's Acre.

In France, as in most industrialised European cities, slums were common in Paris and other cities in the 19th century. Many of these slums continued into the first half of the 20th century. The first cholera epidemic of 1832 sparked a political debate, and a study by Louis René Villermé[29] of different parts of Paris showed how slums, poverty, and poor health are linked. Melun Law was passed in 1849 and revised in 1851. In 1852, the Paris Commission on Unhealthful Dwellings was set up. This started the process of identifying the worst housing in slums, but it didn't remove or replace slums. After World War II, a lot of French people moved from rural areas to cities. This demographic and economic trend quickly pushed up the rents of existing homes and made more slums. The French government passed laws to keep the price of housing from going up, which made many housing projects unprofitable and led to more slums. At the start of 1950s, France started the Habitation à Loyer Modéré initiative to help build public housing and get rid of slums. It was run by urban technologists called techniciens, and the money came from a tax-free savings account called Livret A. Some slums are still around in France in the early XXIst century, but most of them are demolished after a few months. The largest is the "Petite Ceinture" slum on the northern Paris decommissioned train tracks.

Believed to be the first slum in the United States was built in 1825 by people living in New York City. It was named the Five Points. It was named after a lake called Collect. by the late 1700s. It was surrounded by slaughterhouses and tanning factories that threw their waste into the water, so it was called Five Points. By the early 1800s, the lake had filled up and dried up. In the United States, the first slum was built here. Freed slaves, Irish, Italian, and Chinese people moved into Five Points over time. It was for the poor people who had to leave their farms to find work, and for the people who had been persecuted in Europe who came to New York City. Bars, brothels, squalid and dark homes lined its streets. Violence and crime were all too common, and they were all over the place. Politicians and the rich and famous talked about it with disgust. Slums like Five Points started people talking about affordable housing and getting rid of slums. On January 1, 2019, Five Points, a slum in New York City, was turned into the Little Italy and Chinatown neighborhoods thanks to the city's huge urban renewal project.

American cities were not the only places where people lived rough. Five Points wasn't alone in this. Some of the people who took pictures before the Second World War were Jacob Riis; Walker Evans; Lewis Hine. Slums were found in every major city in the United States for most of the 20th century, even after the Great Depression. In the 1960s, the Federal government of the United States started a War on Poverty. Most of these slums were ignored by the cities and states that were around them until then.

At first, they were all over the Boston Common. Later, they were on the outskirts of the city, and they were called poorhouses because they were so poor.

People lived in this slum in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, in 1913. It's about 5 kilometers from the centre of Paris, and it was full of garbage and trash. People lived in slums around Paris in the 1950s. Some of France's last major bidonvilles (slums) were demolished after the Loi Vivien law was passed in July 1970. By the mid-1970s, France had moved the Algerian, Portuguese, and other migrant workers back to their homes.

When Rio de Janeiro did its first census in 1920, it found its first slum. People in Rio de Janeiro lived in the slum by the 1960s. In Mexico City, 45 percent of the population lived there, as did 65 percent of Algiers, 35 percent of Caracas. In Lima, 25 percent of the population lived there, and 15 percent of Singapore lived there. In Latin America alone, there were about 25,000 slums by 1980.

Causes of Slum and Circumstances

1- Migration from Rural to Uran Area

Rural-urban migration is a factor in the growth and spread of slums. Since 1950, the global population has grown at a substantially higher rate than the total amount of arable land, notwithstanding agriculture's much smaller share of the global economy. For example, agriculture generated 52% of India's GDP in 1954 but just 19% in 2004; in Brazil, agriculture will contribute one-fifth of GDP in 2050, down from 52% in 1951. Meanwhile, agriculture has improved in terms of productivity, disease resistance, physical labour requirements, and efficiency through the use of tractors and other equipment. The proportion of people employed in agriculture has fallen by 30% during the last 50 years, while the global population has increased by 250 percent.

Many people relocate to cities for a variety of reasons, including the promise of more jobs, improved education for disadvantaged children, and more diverse income opportunities than exist in rural areas through subsistence farming.

For instance, 95.8 percent of migrants to Surabaya, Indonesia in 1995 reported that their primary motivation for transferring was employment. However, some rural migrants may face acute job insecurity as a result of a lack of skills and more competitive labor markets. On the other hand, many cities lack cheap housing to accommodate a large number of rural-urban migrant workers. Certain rural–urban migratory laborers are unable to afford city housing and are forced to live in substandard slums. Additionally, rural migrants continue to flock to cities, drawn mostly by higher pay. As a result, they contribute to the expansion of existing urban slums.

According to Ali and Toran, social networks may also contribute to the explanation of rural-urban migration and eventual slum settlement. Apart from work migration, a portion of the population relocates to cities in order to be near relatives or families. Once those rural migrants' family support in urban regions is demoted to slums, they intend to join them.

2-Urbanization

Slum formation is inextricably related to urbanization. In 2008, metropolitan regions accounted for more than half of the world's population. In China, for example, it is anticipated that the urban population will grow by 10% within a decade at the current rate of urbanization. According to UN-Habitat, 43 percent of the urban population in developing nations and 78 percent in least developed countries live in slums.

According to some experts, urbanization develops slums as a result of local governments' inability to regulate urbanization and migrant workers' lack of affordable housing. Rapid urbanization stimulates economic growth and draws people to urban areas for employment and investment opportunities. However, as indicated by inadequate urban infrastructure and housing, local administrations are frequently incapable of managing this change.This incompetence might be linked to a lack of resources and expertise in dealing with and organizing issues resulting from migration and urbanization. Local administrations in some circumstances disregard the influx of immigrants during the urbanization process. Numerous African countries have such examples. In the early 1950s, many African governments assumed that urban slums would eventually disappear as a result of economic expansion. They overlooked slums that were rapidly growing as a result of increased rural-urban migration brought forth by urbanization. Additionally, several governments classified the land inhabited by slums as undeveloped land.

Another form of urbanization does not entail economic expansion but rather economic stagnation or low growth, which is primarily responsible for the growth of slums in Sub-Saharan Africa and portions of Asia. This form of urbanization is characterized by a high rate of unemployment, a scarcity of financial resources, and an incoherent approach to urban development. In these places, a 1% increase in urban population results in a 1.84 percent rise in slum prevalence.

Urbanization may also compel some individuals to live in slums by changing agricultural land into urban areas and increasing the value of the land. Agricultural land is used for additional urban activities as part of the urbanization process. Increased investment will flow into these locations, resulting in an increase in land value. Prior to a piece of land becoming entirely urbanized, there is a period during which it cannot be used for either urban or agricultural purposes. The income generated by the land will diminish, lowering the earnings of the residents in that area. The disparity between low incomes and high land prices causes some individuals to seek out and build inexpensive informal communities, referred to as slums in urban regions. Additionally, agricultural land transformation generates surplus labor, as peasants are forced to seek work in urban areas as rural-urban migratory laborers.

Numerous slums are part of agglomeration economies, in which economies of scale at the company level, transportation expenses, and the mobility of the industrial labor force all benefit.

Increased returns on scale imply that each good will be manufactured in a single location. And, while an agglomerated economy benefits these places by introducing specialization and several competitive suppliers, slum conditions continue to fall behind in terms of housing quality and affordability. According to Alonso-Villar, the existence of transportation expenses suggests that the best locations for businesses are those with easy access to markets, and the best locations for workers are those with easy access to commodities. Concentration occurs as a result of a self-reinforcing agglomeration process. Concentration is a typical pattern in population distribution. Urbanization is accelerating in less developed countries, where a substantial number of megacities have begun to emerge, resulting in increased poverty, crime, pollution, and congestion.

3-Poor Housing Plan

Due to a lack of affordable low-cost housing and bad planning, slums thrive on the supply side. The Millennium Development Goals suggest that member countries improve the lives of at least 100 million slum residents by 2020. If member countries achieve this aim, 90 percent of the world's total slum residents may remain in substandard housing by 2020. Choguill asserts that the high number of slum inhabitants demonstrates a lack of effective housing policy. When there is a considerable gap between rising demand for housing and an insufficient supply of affordable housing, slums are sometimes used to close the gap. The Economist summarises this as follows: "While excellent housing is clearly preferable to a slum, a slum is preferable to none."

Inadequate financial resources and a lack of coordination among the government bureaucracy are two major contributors to bad house planning . Financial constraints in some governments may explain the absence of affordable public housing for the poor, as improving slum conditions and expanding public housing programs require a significant increase in government spending. The issue could also stem from a lack of coordination among the several departments responsible for economic growth, urban planning, and land allocation. In certain cities, governments presume that a change in demand will cause the housing market to adjust the supply of homes. Without economic incentives, the housing market, on the other hand, is more likely to generate middle-income housing than low-cost housing. The urban poor eventually become sidelined in the housing market as a result of the scarcity of homes available for sale to them.

4-Inadequate infrastructure, social marginalization, and economic stagnation

Due to social marginalization and inadequate infrastructure, the poor are forced to adapt to circumstances beyond their control. Poor families unable to afford transportation, or those without access to reasonable public transit, frequently end themselves in squat communities within walking distance or close enough to their formal or informal employment. Ben Arimah attributes the proliferation of slums in African cities to social isolation and inadequate infrastructure. Slums are facilitated by poor quality, unpaved streets; Arimah asserts that a 1% improvement in paved all-season roads reduces the slum incidence rate by around 0.35 percent. Affordable public transportation and economic infrastructure enable poor people to move and contemplate alternatives to their current slum dwellings.

A developing economy that creates jobs at a higher rate than population increase provides possibilities and motivation for individuals to relocate from impoverished slums to more developed regions. By contrast, economic stagnation generates uncertainty and risk for the poor, pushing them to remain in the slums. Economic stagnation in a growing population nation diminishes per capita disposable income in urban and rural areas, hence increasing poverty in urban and rural areas. Rural poverty is also increasing, which stimulates migration to metropolitan areas. In other words, a failing economy encourages poverty and rural-to-urban migration, resulting in the growth of slums.

5-Segregation and colonialism

Some of the world's slums today are the result of colonialism's urbanization. For example, in the nineteenth century, Europeans arrived in Kenya and established metropolitan areas such as Nairobi primarily to suit their financial interests. They viewed Africans as transient migrants and relied on them solely for labour. The government's housing policy for these workers was not adequately implemented, and the government constructed settlements consisting of single-occupancy bedspaces. Due to the time and financial costs associated with their transportation between rural and urban areas, their families eventually migrated to the urban center. Due of their inability to own homes, slums developed.

Others were developed as a result of colonialist-imposed segregation. For example, the Dharavi slum in Mumbai – today one of the largest in the country – was originally a village called Koliwadas, and Mumbai was referred to as Bombay. In 1887, the British colonial administration relocated the tanneries, other noxious industries, and impoverished indigenous workers from the peninsular section of the city and colonial housing area to what was then the city's northern outskirts - a settlement now known as Dharavi. There was no colonial oversight or investment in terms of road infrastructure, sanitation, public services, or housing in this colony. The poor settled in Dharavi, where they found work as servants in colonial offices and homes, as well as in foreign-owned tanneries and other polluting enterprises located nearby. To survive, the poor established shanty villages close to their places of employment. By 1947, the year India gained independence from the British Empire, Dharavi had developed into Bombay's largest slum.

Similarly, some of Lagos, Nigeria's slums arose as a result of colonial-era neglect and policies.

During South Africa's apartheid era, racial and ethnic group segregation was pursued under the guise of sanitation and plague epidemic prevention, and people of color were pushed to the outskirts of the city, policies that resulted in the creation of Soweto and other slums – officially known as townships. Large slums began on the outside of Latin America's segregation-conscious colonial city centers. Marcuse argues that ghettos in the United States and elsewhere were formed and sustained as a result of the state's and locally dominant group's segregationist practices.

6-Informal Economy

Numerous slums expand as the informal sector expands, creating a demand for employees. The informal economy is that portion of the economy that is not recognized as a business or licensed, does not pay taxes, and is not regulated by the local, state, or federal government. When government laws and regulations are obscure and overbearing, when government bureaucracy is corrupt and abusive of entrepreneurs, when labor laws are rigid, or when law enforcement is inadequate, the informal economy grows faster than the formal economy. In most emerging nations, the informal sector accounts for between 20% and 60% of GDP; in Kenya, the informal sector accounts for 78% of non-agricultural employment and accounts for 42% of GDP. In many places, the informal sector employs up to 60% of the urban population. For example, slum dwellers account for 75% of informal sector workers in Benin, while they account for 90% of informal sector workers in Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Ethiopia. Thus, slums establish an informal alternate economic ecology that requires low-wage, flexible labor, which impoverished residents of slums provide. In other words, countries where it is difficult to start, register and operate a legitimate firm tend to foster informal businesses and slums. Without a viable formal sector capable of increasing earnings and expanding opportunities, wretched slums are likely to persist. A slum in the Mexican city of Ramos Arizpe. According to the Countries Bank and UN-Habitat, more than 80% of new jobs in developing world cities may be in the informal sector, providing no major economic changes are implemented. Leaving all else constant, this exponential expansion in the informal sector is almost certain to be matched by an explosion in the number of slums.

7-Labor Work

Recent research on slums, based on ethnographic investigations conducted since 2008 and published originally in 2017, has established the key relevance of labour as the primary cause of informal settlements' inception, rural-urban migration, consolidation, and growth. Additionally, it demonstrated that work plays a critical role in the self-construction of houses, alleys, and the overall informal planning of slums, as well as serving as a focal point for residents living in slums when their communities undergo community upgrading or are resettled to formal housing.

For example, it was recently established that the migration of dismissed sugar cane plant workers to the city of Maceió (who launched the favela's self-construction) was motivated by the need to find work in the city.

The same finding was made about newcomers who contribute to the slum's consolidation and growth. Additionally, the topography for the favela's creation (the margins of a lagoon) was chosen with the idea that it may provide them with opportunities for labour. Around 80% of residents in the hamlet subsist on a mussel fishery, which segregates the population by gender and age. Alleys and houses were planned to facilitate the community's subsistence and livelihood operations. When residents were resettled, the primary reason for changing formal housing units was a lack of opportunities to perform their work in new houses designed according to formal architecture principles, or even the distances they had to travel to work in the slum where they originally lived, which residents addressed by self-constructing spaces to shelter the work originally performed in the slum in the formal housing units. Observations of a similar nature have been made in different slums. Additionally, residents stated that their employer provides them with dignity, citizenship, and self-esteem in their impoverished communities. The reflection of this new research was made possible through participatory observations and the author's residence in a slum in order to verify the socioeconomic practices that shaped, planned, and governed space in slums.

8-Politics

Local and national governments have often blocked efforts to get rid of, reduce, or improve slums so the poor can live in better places. During the second half of the 19th century, for example, French political parties relied on votes from people living in slums and had a lot of money invested in keeping that group of people voting. Conflict of interest: The removal and replacement of the Slum caused a conflict of interest. Politics stopped efforts to remove, relocate, or upgrade the Slums into better housing projects than the Slums were. Similar things happen in favelas in Brazil,[99] slums in India, and shantytowns in Kenya.

There are 100 "contiguous" mega-slums in the world that are bigger than the rest of them. Many other places have slums, but the slums are spread out. The numbers show how many people live in each mega-slum, and the letters come from the name of the city. There are some of the world's most crowded slums in places where there are political or social problems.

Scholars say that politics also plays a role in people moving from rural areas to cities and where they settle down. A group of people, sometimes in the form of gangs and sometimes in the form of political parties or social activists, try to keep their economic, social, and political power inside a slum. Social and political groups have a reason to want to keep the slums going, even if the slums they want to get rid of are better in every way than the alternatives they want to get rid of.