The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?

The ‘cities without slums’ initiative has resuscitated an old and dangerous term from the habitat vocabulary. Use of the word ‘slum’ will recreate many of the myths about poor people that years of careful research have discredited. The UN has employed the word in order to publicize the seriousness of urban problems and to improve its ability to attract funding with which to tackle the issue. But in using such an emotive word the UN risks opening a Pandora’s box. The campaign implies that cities can actually rid themselves of slums, an idea that is wholly unachievable. The word is also dangerous because it confuses the physical problem of poor quality housing with the characteristics of the people living there. The UN knows that earlier research has rehabilitated most ‘slum dwellers’ but ignores the danger of conjuring up all of the old images. In the process, the campaign also offers an oblique invitation to governments to look for instant solutions to insoluble problems. Demagogic governments have always shown a willingness to demolish slums despite the fact that experience has shown that policy to be ineffective. I fear that the new campaign will encourage more to employ this foolish policy. Words need to be employed carefully. Hundreds of millions of urban poor in the developing and transitional world have few options but to live in squalid, unsafe environments where they face multiple threats to their health and security. Slums and squatter settlements lack the most basic infrastructure and services. Their populations are marginalized and largely disenfranchised. They are exposed to disease, crime and vulnerable to natural disasters. Slum and squatter settlements are growing at alarming rates, projected to double in 25 years (World Bank/UNCHS, 2000: 1). . . . rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums (Davis, 2006: 17). The new millennium has seen the return of the word ‘slum’ with all of its inglorious associations. With the launch of the ‘cities without slums’ initiative in 1999, the UN reintroduced this dangerous word into the habitat vocabulary. After decades when most prudent academics and practitioners had avoided using it, the UN thrust the slum into full focus as the target of its main shelter programme and as one element of the millennium development goals campaign. The UN justifies its onslaught against the slum because: ‘Although figures vary depending on the definition, hundreds of millions of slum dwellers exist world-wide, and the numbers are growing at unprecedented rates’ (World Bank/UNCHS, 2000: 15). ‘The “Cities Without Slums” initiative has been endorsed at the highest political level internationally as a challenging vision with specific actions and concrete targets to improve the living conditions of the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized urban 1 For the history of the campaign, see http://www.citiesalliance.org/activities-output/topics/ slum-upgrading/action-plan.html. Volume 31.4 December 2007 697–713 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2007.00754.x © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA residents’ (World Bank/UNCHS [Habitat], 2000). The goals of that initiative were documented more fully in the provocatively titled book The Challenge of Slums (UNHabitat, 2003a). If the slum has still not become front page news, the anti-slum initiative has managed to persuade a few more journalists and NGOs to address urban issues. The slum has also been the main focus of some recent well-known books (Verna, 2003; Maier, 2005; Davis, 2006). And, in a world where ordinary, grinding poverty is always displaced in news coverage by emergencies like that in Darfur or the Pakistan earthquake, that is no mean achievement. A campaign is justified if it manages to remind liberal-minded people of the injustices that face so many in this world. However, a real danger exists that if journalists and others convey messages about shelter problems in too exaggerated a way, the campaign may backfire on the supposed beneficiaries. Emphasize too heavily the disease, crime and difficulties associated with slum life and it will refuel the kind of fears that already encourage the rich to move to their gated communities. To judge from recent articles from The Guardian newspaper, the media are all too keen to promote a message of doom, despondency and fear (McLean, 2006; Rowell, 2006; Seager, 2006). In a squeezed square mile on the south-western outskirts of Nairobi, Kibera is home to nearly one million people — a third of the city’s population. Most of them live in one-room mud or wattle huts or in wooden or basic stone houses, often windowless. It’s Africa’s biggest slum. The Kenyan state provides the huge, illegal sprawl with nothing — no sanitation, no roads, no hospitals. It is a massive ditch of mud and filth, with a brown dribble of a stream running through it . . . Kibera won’t be an extreme for much longer . . . The UN predicts numbers of slum-dwellers will probably double in the next 30 years, meaning the developing world slum will become the primary habitat of mankind (McLean, 2006). According to such reports, the world will soon be infested with slums, poverty and disease. Rather than journalists picking up the message that self-help settlements can and must be improved, it seems that they have picked up, and milked, the word ‘slum’. By implication, their messages all say that every ‘slum’ is as bad as Kibera. NGOs seem to have reacted in a similar way. The urban adviser of Care International has recently written: ‘Every second, someone in the world moves into a slum. Over the next 30 years, the world’s slum population will, on average, increase by 100,000 each day. Globally, we are seeing a shift from rural areas to cities and, before the year is out, a higher proportion of people will be living in cities than ever before’ (Rowell, 2006). Radical writers, like Mike Davis, are also jumping on the bandwagon. Davis (2006: 201) observes that ‘peri-urban poverty — a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of life of the traditional city — is the radical new face of inequality’. He warns that these ‘urban badlands’ are the new territory from which insurgency will spring (ibid.: 202). Indeed, he seems almost to welcome that insurgency when he states that: ‘the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism’. Verma (2003) too gives a radical slant to the problem when she claims that the root cause of urban slumming in India lies not in urban poverty but in urban greed. I am sure that each of these authors has the best interests of the poor at heart and only intends to draw attention to their neglect. More must be done to help the poor and inequality is a substantial part of the problem. But, because we have always had great difficulty in distinguishing real slums from apparent slums, a generally negative universal image can be dangerous. In particular, it may tempt politicians and planners to make play with the horrors of the urban future as embodied in the word ‘slum’. Demagogic mayors and government ministers may claim that they will re-house the inhabitants of Kibera and its like; more authoritarian planners may simply threaten to 2 Is it wholly unconnected that two recent Oscar winning films, Cidade de Deus and Tsotsi, have been based in ‘slums’? 698 Alan Gilbert International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31.4 © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. demolish slums in order to ‘help’ the people. In the past, removing slums has rarely helped the residents, and as often as not assistance was never the principal aim. As such, anything that over-simplifies a complicated issue is dangerous, particularly when it employs a word that has as long and disreputable a history as the ‘slum’ (see below).