The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum 0190879459, 9780190879457

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction: Slums and the Modern World • Alan Mayne
PART I: FUNDAMENTALS
1. What’s in a Name? • Alan Mayne
2. Women and Wages in Britain’s “Classic” Slums • Ellen Ross
3. The Intimate Relationship between Slums and Racial Segregation: A South African Case Study • Vivian Bickford-Smith
PART II: URBAN DISADVANTAGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
4. Informality as Process and the Social Construction of Slums: Southeast Asian Cases • Ross King
5. Slums: City Spaces of Governance and Global Disadvantage • Winnie V. Mitullah
6. Slum Statistics in India • Amitabh Kundu
7. Pride and Shame: The History of the Slums in Recife, Brazil • Flávio A. M. de Souza
8. The Spatial Politics of US Homelessness: The Evolution of Boston’s “Skid Row” • Ella Howard
9. The Rise and Decline of the European Struggle against Social Exclusion • Rob Atkinson
PART III: PERSPECTIVES ACROSS TIME: FROM THE OUTSIDE
10. The Discovery of “Slums” in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati, Ohio • Henry C. Binford
11. Social Geographies of Poverty in Victorian and Edwardian London • Richard Dennis
12. How Slumming Makes the Slum • Fabian Frenzel
13. Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve? • Richard Harris
14. Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1853–1870: A Reassessment • Antoine Paccoud
15. Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement in British Colonial History • Robert Home
16. The Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics from Slums • Alan Smart and Eliot Tretter
17. The Political Construction of Slums in India • Nandini Gooptu
18. The Return of the Slums in Postwar America • Alexander von Hoffman
19. Slums and Communism: (Un-)Slumming the (Post-)Soviet City • Ivan Nevzgodin
20. NGO Representation of Informal Settlements: The Case of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) • Marie Huchzermeyer
PART IV: PERSPECTIVES ACROSS TIME: FROM THE INSIDE
21. Notting Dale: The Making and Breaking of a West London Slum, 1865–1946 • Jerry White
22. The Historic Fires of Singapore • Kah Seng Loh
23. The Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods at New York City’s Five Points • Rebecca Yamin
24. Historical Archaeology and the Evolution of Twentieth-Century Slums in Detroit • Krysta Ryzewski
25. Archaeologies of Disadvantage in the Modern City: Sydney and Melbourne Compared • Tim Murray
26. Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia • Peter Kellett
27. La Perla, Puerto Rico: Beyond Formal and Informal • Florian Urban
28. Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge • Kalpana Sharma
Index

Citation preview

T h e Ox f o r d H a n d b o o k O f

THE M ODE R N SLUM

The Oxford Handbook Of

THE MODERN SLUM Edited by

ALAN MAYNE

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mayne, Alan, 1955– author. Title: The Oxford handbook of the modern slum / Alan Mayne. Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022040674 (print) | LCCN 2022040675 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190879457 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197646991 (epub) | ISBN 9780190879471 Subjects: LCSH: Slums. | Low-income housing. | Poor laws. Classification: LCC HV4028 .M385 2022 (print) | LCC HV4028 (ebook) | DDC 307.3/364—dc23/eng/20220825 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040674 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040675 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780190879457.001.0001 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

In tribute to Jim Dyos (1921–​1978)

Contents

Acknowledgments  Contributors 

xi xiii

Introduction: Slums and the Modern World  Alan Mayne

1

PA RT I   F U N DA M E N TA L S 1. What’s in a Name?  Alan Mayne

19

2. Women and Wages in Britain’s “Classic” Slums  Ellen Ross

37

3. The Intimate Relationship between Slums and Racial Segregation: A South African Case Study  Vivian Bickford-​Smith

53

PA RT I I   U R BA N DI S A DVA N TAG E I N T H E C ON T E M P OR A RY WOR L D 4. Informality as Process and the Social Construction of Slums: Southeast Asian Cases  Ross King 5. Slums: City Spaces of Governance and Global Disadvantage  Winnie V. Mitullah

73 89

6. Slum Statistics in India  Amitabh Kundu

109

7. Pride and Shame: The History of the Slums in Recife, Brazil  Flávio A. M. de Souza

126

viii   Contents

8. The Spatial Politics of US Homelessness: The Evolution of Boston’s “Skid Row”  Ella Howard

146

9. The Rise and Decline of the European Struggle against Social Exclusion  Rob Atkinson

162

PA RT I I I   P E R SP E C T I V E S AC RO S S T I M E : F ROM T H E OU T SI DE 10. The Discovery of “Slums” in Mid-​Nineteenth-​Century Cincinnati, Ohio  Henry C. Binford 11. Social Geographies of Poverty in Victorian and Edwardian London  Richard Dennis

181

200

12. How Slumming Makes the Slum  Fabian Frenzel

224

13. Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?  Richard Harris

244

14. Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1853–​1870: A Reassessment  Antoine Paccoud

266

15. Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement in British Colonial History  Robert Home

281

16. The Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics from Slums  Alan Smart and Eliot Tretter

296

17. The Political Construction of Slums in India  Nandini Gooptu

313

18. The Return of the Slums in Postwar America  Alexander von Hoffman

332

Contents   ix

19. Slums and Communism: (Un-​)Slumming the (Post-​)Soviet City  Ivan Nevzgodin 20. NGO Representation of Informal Settlements: The Case of Slum/​ Shack Dwellers International (SDI)  Marie Huchzermeyer

354

373

PA RT I V   P E R SP E C T I V E S AC RO S S T I M E : F ROM T H E I N SI DE 21. Notting Dale: The Making and Breaking of a West London Slum, 1865–​1946  Jerry White 22. The Historic Fires of Singapore  Kah Seng Loh

403 430

23. The Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods at New York City’s Five Points  Rebecca Yamin

445

24. Historical Archaeology and the Evolution of Twentieth-​Century Slums in Detroit  Krysta Ryzewski

465

25. Archaeologies of Disadvantage in the Modern City: Sydney and Melbourne Compared  Tim Murray

486

26. Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia  Peter Kellett

502

27. La Perla, Puerto Rico: Beyond Formal and Informal  Florian Urban

516

28. Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge  Kalpana Sharma

538

Index

555

Acknowledgments

I was invited by Alexandra Dauler to prepare this volume, when she was a history editor at Oxford University Press. After she left New York for Berlin, Nancy Toff, Vice President and Executive Editor at Oxford University Press, became my guide and confidant. I am grateful for her support throughout the difficulties and delays caused by the COVID-​19 global pandemic. Zara Cannon-​Mohammed, Oxford’s Project Editor for this volume, provided a steadying hand during the production process. Assistant Editors Macey Fairchild and Hayley Singer helped me in the project’s early stages. Copy editing was handled smoothly by Newgen Knowledge Works, and I especially thank Katherine Ulrich for her painstaking review and enhancement of our text. Throughout the Handbook’s long journey from conception to publication my tasks as editor were greatly facilitated by using the online resources of the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the libraries of the University of Melbourne and the University of South Australia. To the contributors I extend my appreciation for their patience and good humor, maintained over a much longer journey than any of us had first imagined. I thank Linda Dyos, Simon Gunn, Peter Jones, Colin McFarlane, Judy King, Helen Meller and Richard Rodger for their support and assistance.

Contributors

Rob Atkinson is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of the West of England. He was editor of the journal Urban Research and Practice from 2008–​2020. His research interests include cross-​national work on urban regeneration, urban governance and community participation, urban social exclusion, and European urban and spatial policy, and he has published widely on these areas. Vivian Bickford-​Smith is an Extraordinary Professor in the History Department at Stellenbosch University. Much of his work has been on modern South African history, and especially urban history, social identity, and the relationship between film and history. His work includes Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town; Cape Town: The Making of a City (co-​authored); Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (co-​ authored); Black and White in Colour: The African Past on Screen; The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in Twentieth Century South Africa; and Illuminating Lives. Henry C. Binford is Professor of History at Northwestern University, where he teaches US history with a particular interest in nineteenth-​century social history and the development of cities. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in American history from Harvard University, and he also holds an M.A. in British history from the University of Sussex. His research deals generally with three themes: urban spatial evolution, technological innovation, and the ways people of diverse cultures have created sub-​ communities within the metropolis. He is the author of The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–​ 1860 and From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade. Richard Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London. He is the author of English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century; Cities in Modernity; and co-​editor of Architectures of Hurry and The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History. He has published extensively on historical geographies of housing in London and Toronto, on public transport and mobility in nineteenth and early twentieth-​ century cities, and on literary representations of urban life. Fabian Frenzel is Reader in Mobility and Organization at Oxford Brookes Business School. His research interests concern the intersections of politics, organization, and mobility, with a focus on bottom-​up and grassroots politics and solidarities. His

xiv   Contributors monograph Slumming It investigated the politics of visiting slums by better-​off travelers, and its historical and contemporary relevance for the study of social change. Nandini Gooptu is a Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford, and teaches at the Department of International Development. Educated in Kolkata and at Cambridge, she is the author of The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early-​Twentieth-​Century India; editor of Enterprise Culture in Neoliberal India; and joint editor of India and the British Empire and Persistence of Poverty in India. Her current research is concerned with social and political transformation and cultural change in contemporary India, particularly in the realm of work. Richard Harris is an Emeritus Professor of urban geography at McMaster University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and past-​president of the Urban History Association (2017–​2018). He has written about the history of housing, housing policy and finance, neighborhoods, and suburbs in Canada, the United States, and British colonies. His most recent work is How Cities Matter. He is currently writing a history of Canadian neighborhoods, 1880s–​2020s. Alexander von Hoffman is Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies and Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. His works on the history of low-​income housing in the United States include “The Origins of the Fair Housing Act of 1968,” in Furthering Fair Housing and “Calling Upon the Genius of Private Enterprise: The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the Liberal Turn to Public-​Private Partnerships,” in Studies in American Political Development. He is the author of Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 and House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods. Robert Home is Emeritus Professor in Land Management at Anglia Ruskin University and is a chartered town planner. His research interests are in planning history, law, and urban development, and his books include Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities and Essays in African Land Law. He is the editor of Case Studies in African Land Law and co-​editor of Demystifying the Mystery of Capital: Land Titling in Africa and the Caribbean. Ella Howard is Associate Professor of History at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, where she teaches urban, public, and digital history. She is the author of Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America. She is currently researching the relationship between historic preservation, segregation, and gentrification in America. Marie Huchzermeyer is Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where she teaches postgraduates in the field of housing and urban studies. Her research has combined questions of justice with housing, informal settlements, and urban policy, and has resulted in Tenement Cities: From 19th-​Century Berlin to 21st-​Century Nairobi and Cities With “Slums”: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa. Her current research

Contributors   xv explores intersections between planning, informal settlement policy, representation, and implementation. Peter Kellett is an architect and social anthropologist based at the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. His ethnographic research focuses on the interrelationship between social, material, and spatial practices in contexts of disadvantage and vulnerability. He has worked on international research projects with a focus on informal settlements, participatory planning, and poverty alleviation, and published extensively, particularly on housing, informality, and urban issues in the Global South, especially in Latin America, Indonesia, and more recently in Ethiopia. Ross King is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, where he was previously Dean. His tertiary education was in Architecture at the Universities of Sydney and Pennsylvania; subsequent research was in urban housing markets with a focus on Melbourne. More recently he has researched urban conditions and their underlying politics in Southeast and East Asian cities. Recent books are Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Thailand and Seoul: Memory, Reinvention and the Korean Wave. Amitabh Kundu is Distinguished Fellow at the Research and Information System for Developing Countries, New Delhi. He was Regional Advisor on Poverty at UNESCWA, Beirut, during 2017 and Consultant to the Government of Sri Lanka during 2016. Until 2014 he was a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, where he served as the Dean of the School of Social Sciences. He was a member of National Statistical Commission during 2006–​2008. He has contributed extensively in research in the areas of development statistics, socioeconomic inequality, and urban planning. Kah Seng Loh is a historian of Singapore and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of the award-​nominated Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore and co-​author of Tuberculosis—​The Singapore Experience, 1867–​2018: Disease, Society and the State. He runs a research consultancy on the rich and varied heritages of Singapore: housing, industrial, medical, and culinary. Alan Mayne is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His publications include The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​ 1914; The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (co-​edited); and Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. Winnie V. Mitullah is a Research Professor in the Institute for Development Studies at the University of Nairobi. Her discipline is political science and public administration, and she is especially interested in urban studies, focusing on service delivery, institutions, governance, and identity. Her recent publications include two edited volumes: Social Protection and Informal Workers in Sub-​Saharan Africa: Lived Realities and Associational Experiences in Kenya and Tanzania and Non-​Motorised Transport

xvi   Contributors Integration into Urban Transport Planning in Africa; and a book chapter, “Urban Governance: Transcending Conventional Urban Governance,” in Defining the Urban: Interdisciplinary and Professional Perspectives. Tim Murray is Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at La Trobe University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. As a practicing archaeologist with an interest in history and epistemology, his research and publications have focused on the history and philosophy of archaeology, the archaeology of the modern world, and heritage archaeology. His most recent books include World Antiquarianism Comparative Perspectives (co-​edited); An Archaeology of Institutional Confinement: The Hyde Park Barracks, 1848–​1886 (co-​authored); From Antiquarian to Archaeologist: The History and Philosophy of Archaeology; The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne: A Historical Archaeology (co-​authored); and Exploring the Archaeology of Immigration and the Modern City in Nineteenth-​Century Australia (co-​authored). Ivan Nevzgodin is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. His recent publications include Constructivism in the Architecture of Novosibirsk and De Kunst van de Regie: Herbestemming, Exploitatie en beheer van Rijkswerf Willemsoord (co-​authored). His main field of research is restoration and re-​ use of architectural heritage, Dutch and Russian architecture, and town planning in the twentieth century. He is a council member of the International Planning History Society. Antoine Paccoud is a researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-​Economic Research. He is a geographer interested in urban planning, socio-​spatial change, continental philosophy, and the political economy of housing and land. He has published on Haussmann’s transformation of Paris, on gentrification linked to the private rental sector in the United Kingdom, and on the inequalities linked to landownership and the production of housing in Luxembourg. Ellen Ross is Professor Emerita of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her research is focused on UK women’s history, the First World War, and the history of social work and humanitarianism. Her publications include Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–​1918; Slum Journeys: Lady Explorers “In Darkest London”; and articles on “Missionaries and Jews in Soho: ‘Strangers within Our Gates’ ” and “St. Francis in Soho: Emmeline Pethick and Mary Neal, the West London Mission, and the Allure of ‘Simple Living’ in the 1890s.” She is currently completing Missionaries, Philanthropists and Humanitarians: From Social Work to Global Activism in Britain, 1914–​1950. Krysta Ryzewski is Chair and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wayne State University. She is an historical archaeologist whose research focuses on the development of late modern-​ to-​ postindustrial North American cities and Caribbean settlements. Her monographs include Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Places; An Archaeological History of Montserrat in the West

Contributors   xvii Indies (co-​authored); and Contemporary Archaeology and the City: Creativity, Ruination, and Political Action (co-​edited). Kalpana Sharma is an independent journalist and author based in Mumbai. In over four decades as a journalist, she has worked with Himmat Weekly, Indian Express, The Times of India, The Hindu and as Consulting Editor with Economic & Political Weekly. She is author of The Silence and the Storm: Narratives of Violence against Women in India and Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia’s Largest Slum. She edited Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women and Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters. She co-​edited Whose News? The Media and Women’s Issues and Terror Counter-​Terror: Women Speak Out. Alan Smart is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Calgary. He undertakes research in Hong Kong, China, and Canada on housing, policy, and urbanism. He is author of The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–​1963; Posthumanism: Anthropological Insights (co-​authored); and numerous books chapters and articles. Flávio A. M. de Souza is Professor of Urban Studies at the Federal University of Pernambuco. He is the author of The Future of Informal Settlements: Lessons in the Legalization of Disputed Urban Land in Recife, Brazil; Perceived Security of Land Tenure in Recife, Brazil; Security of Land Tenure Revised: The Case of CRRU in Recife and Porto Alegre, Brazil; Urban Land Tenure in Brazil: From Centralized State to Market Processes of Housing Land Delivery (co-​authored); and Recife: Much to Do About Nothing. Eliot Tretter is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Calgary and undergraduate adviser of the Urban Studies Program. He is the author of Shadows of a Sunbelt City: The Environment, Racism, and the Knowledge Economy in Austin. He is currently researching Calgary’s urban development and how the city became one of North America’s primary administrative centers for the fossil fuel industries. Florian Urban is Professor and Head of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the Glasgow School of Art. He is the author of Neo-​Historical East Berlin: Architecture and Urban Design in the German Democratic Republic, 1970–​1990; Tower and Slab: Histories of Global Mass Housing; The New Tenement: Residences in the Inner City since 1970; and Postmodern Architecture in Socialist Poland: Transformation, Symbolic Form and National Identity. Jerry White is Emeritus Professor in London History at Birkbeck, University of London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of numerous books on London including The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, between the Wars. His London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, won the 2002 Wolfson History Prize. His most recent book is The Battle of London, 1939–​45: Endurance, Heroism and Frailty under Fire.

xviii   Contributors Rebecca Yamin, a historical archaeologist, is retired from the Philadelphia office of John Milner Associates, Inc., where she spent twenty years doing large urban projects including the Five Points project in New York City and many projects in Philadelphia. She authored Digging in the City of Brotherly Love: Stories from Philadelphia Archaeology; Archaeology at the Site of the Museum of the American Revolution: A Tale of Two Taverns and the Growth of Philadelphia; and co-​authored The Archaeology of Prostitution and Clandestine Pursuits.

I N T RODU CTION Slums and the Modern World ALAN MAYNE

“Slum” is among the most influential words of the modern world.1 The Oxford English Dictionary defines its principal meaning as relating to [a]‌street, alley, court, etc., situated in a crowded district of a town or city and inhabited by people of a low class or by the very poor; a number of these streets or courts forming a thickly populated neighbourhood or district where the houses and the conditions of life are of a squalid and wretched character.2

It is the definition, however, rather than its object, that is truly wretched. In the two hundred years of its verifiable use, the word’s circulation has grown from Cockney slang (“gammon, blarney. Also, gipsy jargon or cant”3), particular in its meanings and specific in its application to the poorest homes and neighborhoods of early nineteenth-​century London, to a word widely and loosely applied, equally at home in 1840s or 1940s New York City, or, today, rubbing shoulders with “favela” in Rio de Janeiro, “shack” in Nairobi and Johannesburg, and “kampong” in Jakarta, Bangkok, and Singapore. It has become a global expression, a popular shorthand that dodges the complexities and fluidity of social disadvantage and poverty in an ever-​urbanizing world.4 It now transcends barriers of language, geography, history, and common sense. The word “slum” has fundamentally shaped, and constrained, public knowledge and opinion about the social geography of cities and the behavioral traits of the urban poor. It has been used to justify massive redevelopment projects by private enterprise, aided by state authorities, that have dislocated millions of the urban poor under the pretext of “city improvement” and “slum upgrading.” It has sustained hugely costly interventionist programs of questionable utility by all levels of government, aid agencies, and the United Nations (especially since the setting of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000) to remedy perceived environmental, social, and cultural problems.

2   ALAN MAYNE Although embraced by experts, policy designers, business leaders, and financiers, it is not a neutral technical term. “Slum” is an emotive word; it is part of everybody’s vocabulary and moral universe. Popular usage in the nineteenth century initially applied the word to discrete areas of extreme disadvantage that seemed perversely out of step with the rapidly accumulating achievements of the modern world. By the early twenty-​ first century, however, it seems to many observers that entire cities, regions, and perhaps an entire hemisphere are being engulfed by what is increasingly becoming a “Planet of Slums.”5 The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum reviews this historical transformation, examining the accumulating historiography that describes it, noting its radical changes in emphasis over time, and using snapshots of the latest research in order to critically reassess the place of slums in the modern world.

The Urbanizing World “Slum” is a quintessentially urban concept. The word’s origins and use are tied to the growth of big cities.6 It describes, and in large part attempts to rationalize, widespread poverty and social disadvantage as enduring and intractable features of modern cities. “Slum” is assigned to those neighborhoods where disadvantage is most concentrated, or most visibly jars with adjoining precincts or development agendas that epitomize modernity and progress. Low-​income neighborhoods have existed in cities throughout human history, and the word “slum” is therefore sometimes applied by modern scholars to earlier periods in time. This is an anachronism. The word was coined in, and its core meanings are specific to, the modern world. Whereas there had always been cities with poor neighborhoods within them, now there were rapidly growing networks and hierarchies of cities, and within them there was inequality and poverty on a scale never before seen.7 It was within this specific context that the word “slum” was coined and gained currency. Its users sought to rationalize the glaring inequities of the modern urbanizing world. And, using the evolving mechanisms of the new urban mass media (the “yellow press”), such fantasies could for the first time in history gain general credence.8 The word’s increasing usage was initially sustained by the appalling and disquieting social consequences of early-​stage capitalist economics and laissez-​faire public policy during the nineteenth century. Mass urban disadvantage was a necessary feature of self-​ serving early capitalism. As urban history pioneers H. J. (Jim) Dyos and D. A. (David) Reeder remarked of Victorian London, “matter-​of-​fact logic demanded that labour costs be cut to the bone. The slums were part of this argument for the economy of low wages, and one of their practical functions was therefore to underpin Victorian prosperity.”9 David Englander later spelled out the implications of their conclusion: The townscape reflected the play of unbridled market forces, nowhere more so than in the maldistribution of such benefits as could be obtained from grossly inadequate

Introduction   3 investment in social expenditure. The needs of the commonalty were sacrificed to the formation of new capital: pressure on working-​class consumption was ruthless, intense, and unrelenting. The resultant absence of effective demand hastened the deterioration of the environment as workers and their families were packed, layered, and compressed like sardines into the made-​down houses of the wealthy, or crowded into such accommodation as the speculative builders were willing to provide.10

American social history innovator Stephan Thernstrom likewise queried the “American legend . . . that the United States has long been ‘the land of opportunity’.” This, he said, “has been the myth. How has it squared with social reality” in the cities of nineteenth-​century America?11 Many historians have responded to Thernstrom’s challenge. Maury Klein and Harvey Kantor answered him thus: The lower classes were crowded into grim, unimaginative housing where such necessities as air, light, heat, and toilet facilities became precious luxuries. The urban ghettos overflowed with human misery. They reeked of filth and foul odors and were ravaged by disease. The lack of space gave rise to tensions and periodic outbursts of violence. In these dismal hellholes the struggle for existence wore down the endurance of even the most ambitious newcomers. Some escaped to a better life, but the vast majority were doomed to pass their entire lives in this bleak setting.12

Today, in what is now called the “developed world,” these extremes of disadvantage have been wound back, and although urban inequality remains entrenched there (albeit reluctantly admitted) the word “slum” is rarely used to describe it. The notorious slum neighborhoods of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have long ago been swept away. In London, for example, as historian Jerry White has pointed out, the city’s “irredeemable slums had probably all gone by the mid-​1950s. Indeed, the great bulk of these eighteenth and early nineteenth century cottages, built in courts and alleys, had been demolished before the war.”13 In the United States, sociologist Herbert Gans meticulously studied how similar redevelopment imperatives played out in Boston during the 1950s and 1960s. Writing in 1962, he explained that [w]‌hen I began this study, [Boston’s] West End was facing destruction as a slum under the urban redevelopment program. For more than seven years, federal and local agencies had been preparing the plans, and getting the necessary approvals for tearing down the old structures and for building a new neighborhood—​not for the West Enders, but for high-​income tenants of luxury apartment buildings.14

Neither “slum” nor “ghetto” feature in discussions of the Black Lives Matter mass protest movement during the early twenty-​first century. Yet “slum” today has greater currency globally than ever before. The reason is clear. We are living at the dawn of an unprecedented urban century.15 In 2007 for the first time in history over half of humanity was living in towns and cities. “Slum” is again, as it was in the nineteenth century, being applied to the newest and most volatile zones of this urban transformation:

4   ALAN MAYNE the rapidly growing cities of what is variously called the “developing world,” the “Third World,” or the “Global South.”16 It is applied by the “developed” to the “developing” world. Here, shaped by globalization and neoliberalism, the imbalance between profit margins and social investment that had characterized early capitalist development in the nineteenth and early-​twentieth centuries is being replicated on a still greater scale.17 Greater in scale, and more visible than ever before: from Nairobi to Mumbai, officials now use satellite images and drones to monitor the spread of urban poverty.18 Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General between 1997 and 2006, expressed his concern that [c]‌ities present some of the starkest of these contrasts: homeless people living in cardboard boxes, next to skyscrapers occupied by corporations whose budgets exceed those of many countries; growing gaps between the salaries offered by labour markets and the housing costs determined by urban land markets; enormous levels of consumption alongside great pyramids of waste that threaten the environment and human health; and hitherto unseen patterns of segregation, with pockets of wealth at the centre and vast enclaves of poverty on the periphery.19

The Attraction of Repulsion There are striking similarities between the critiques of the urban past that were made by Dyos and his colleagues and those made of the urban present by Annan and his policy advisors. However, the close association between “slum” and urban modernity has perhaps less to do with social and spatial realities than with cultural production: with how the thoughts and behaviors of the modern urban world are constructed and reinforced.20 This is the main reason why “slum” is specific to modern times. The word emerged not simply to describe urban disadvantage on a hitherto unprecedented scale; it also created the “webs of significance”21 whereby the appalling social and environmental consequences of mass urbanization could be comprehended and explained, acted upon, trivialized, or denied.22 Charles Dickens astutely remarked during the 1860s that the pulling power of the word “slum” to command general attention and sustained interest lay in what he called the “attraction of repulsion.”23 It was an unambiguously ugly word used to define allegedly bad places and bad people. This apparent grotesqueness continues to enthrall and horrify the urban mainstream. For two centuries, slums have entertained tour groups and readers of newspapers and magazines. Today slum entertainments are presented on internet blogs and streamed on YouTube. Their overall effect has been termed “pejorative”: they all “assume that in some way the urban poor are an aberration, the departure from the norm.”24 Geographer Alan Gilbert cautioned that this 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

Introduction   5 embodied in the word “slum.” Demagogic mayors and government ministers may claim that they will re-​house the inhabitants of Kibera [Nairobi’s best-​known slum] and its like; more authoritarian planners may simply threaten to demolish slums in order to “help” 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.”25

Stereotypes of slum repulsiveness and chaos have been used repeatedly from the nineteenth century to the present day to justify repressive policing, paternalistic community development schemes, and massive projects of heavy-​handed intervention by state authorities and their private enterprise partners to demolish poor neighborhoods and redevelop them in supposedly more appropriate ways: for transport infrastructure, public institutions, business and shopping, and up-​market housing. Invariably, “slum” residents have been marginalized and short-​changed.26 These interventions and the stereotypes that underpinned them were successfully challenged during the 1960s and 1970s (the longer-​term history of grassroots resistance remains to be told) in both the developed and developing worlds, by poor communities, their supporters in the philanthropic sector and the media, lawyers, academic researchers, and a younger generation of professionals in the planning departments that had once championed large-​scale slum clearance.27 It seemed for a brief interval that “slum” would be discarded, both from description and analysis of contemporary urban problems and from programs designed to overcome them. But then, at the beginning of the twenty-​first century, UN agencies—​paradoxically in pursuit of a better world—​embedded the word in the social justice objectives of the Millennium Development Goals and their revisions.28 “Slum” is once again center-​ stage in the debate about urban social deprivation and the measures needed to counteract it. Gilbert is concerned that this renewed “use of the word slum will recreate many of the old stereotypes about poor people that years of careful research has discredited.”29

The Shapes on the Ground “Slum” is unarguably a construct that has fundamentally and deleteriously shaped general knowledge about social disadvantage and urban development. Is Gilbert correct to suggest that it should therefore be jettisoned by researchers, policy designers, and the general public? Or can it be employed as a useful term in description, analysis, discussion, and action? Opinion is divided. Nevertheless, it is widely used today by international development agencies, politicians and planners, social scientists, journalists, and by NGOs in their efforts to attract donors for slum improvement and poverty reduction projects in the Global South.

6   ALAN MAYNE Can a historical perspective help to resolve this issue? During the social history revolution of the 1960s, urban history pioneer Jim Dyos essentially reinvented “slum” as a tool of historical analysis. Discounting the crude slum stereotypes of the past,30 he sought instead to draw a distinction between legitimate and mischievous uses of the word. Thus, on the one hand, he applied it when explaining the social inequalities created by commerce and industrialization and their spatial expression in the big new cities of the nineteenth century (the “Shapes on the Ground” as he and Michael Wolff called them31), and also when studying the efforts by early social investigators (such as Henry Mayhew in Britain and Jacob Riis in the United States) and analysts (such Charles Booth in Britain and the Chicago school of sociologists in the United States) to record and interpret poor communities. On the other hand, however, he discounted the frivolous popular writers whose “pulpy pieces of cheap literature” and sensational newspaper stories “turn[ed] the slums into a public spectacle, perhaps even a public entertainment.”32 Historians have followed Dyos’s lead and painstakingly teased out those “shapes on the ground,” the processes that created them, and the investigators and reformers who studied them. The old stereotypes of slums as a universally vile and chaotic netherworld have been replaced by nuanced analysis of the urban environment and its variations across time and place.33 Historians of medicine and public health have added further complexity.34 These interpretations have also been enriched by historical geographers35 and historical archaeologists.36 Historians of urban planning have added another important dimension to Dyos’s suggestions.37 In Britain, researchers have focused on philanthropy, the framing of slum clearance laws, and their impact on the urban working classes.38 In the United States, attention has fixed on late nineteenth-​century tenement house reform,39 and the post-​1945 preoccupation with “blight” and “renewal” in American cities.40 There is much potential for such analysis of the urban past to dovetail with innovative research by architects and urban planners. Simon Pepper is a trailblazer in this respect in Britain,41 as are Ross King and Kim Dovey in Australia.42 In North America, the Vernacular Architecture Forum has been an exciting focus for such research since the late 1970s.43 The enduring influence of British architect John F. C. Turner, who studied the shanty towns of Lima in Peru, is especially important. Turner urged that attention should “concentrat[e]‌on the human resources of the poor, rather than on their often appalling conditions.”44 He derided those who “regarded urban settlements built by low income people as ‘slums,’ ‘eyesores,’ ‘cancers’ and so on,” and who bemoaned the “substandard” material forms of such places and the “irrational” lifestyles that sustained them.45 Turner argued that attention should be directed instead to the vernacular logic that underpinned the arrangement of homes and neighbourhoods and that expressed the livelihood opportunities available to poor communities. Here, he said, could be found the best opportunities for constructive interventions to assist the urban poor. In parallel with Turner’s arguments, and in accord with Dyos’s agenda for slum research, historians have also set aside the old characterizations of slum dwellers as deviants and criminals to be condemned, or as hapless victims of tectonic urban change who are to be pitied for their powerlessness. Instead, historians have begun to analyze

Introduction   7 the seemingly unconventional yet commonsense efforts of the urban poor to make ends meet by adapting to the invasive new urban wage-​labor market (within which casual labor was becoming entrenched) and exploiting the grassroots informal economy.46 Ellen Ross has highlighted the importance of gender analysis in these revisionist historical interpretations.47 Other American historians have demonstrated how ethnicity and race played out in the shaping of poor neighborhoods and of stereotypes about them.48 Cross-​disciplinary researchers of the contemporary Global South are tackling similar issues in their studies of “informality.”49 Increasingly, across all academic disciplines, slum analysis of the past and present is concerned with the unbalanced exercise of institutionalized power, and subaltern agency at the grassroots when all else fails. Following Dyos’s lead, historians have increasingly emphasized that slum interventions are usually not benign and that slum policy is shaped less by objective fact than by subjective opinion and self-​interest. Sensationalism and paternalism colored even the best intentioned of reform movements and philanthropic outreach.50 Slum clearance projects and improvement schemes, charitable interventions and social work programs are now tested by results rather than by the rhetoric surrounding them, building on Dyos’s probing assessments London’s nineteenth-​century slum demolitions to make way for docks, railways, and new streets.51 These trends are paralleled in social science analysis of the contemporary Global South, where recent enthusiasm for the achievements of hitherto-​overlooked slum-​dweller entrepreneurialism and the informal economy has been linked to the rise of neoliberalism and the drive to wind back the role of the state.52 Historians have also begun to reassess Dyos’s remarks that popular representations of slums debased them into mere spectacle and entertainment. Here too, in what is really Dickens’s “attraction of repulsion,” has been found a fruitful field for historians as—​ influenced by Henri Lefebvre—​they explore the emergence of an urban popular culture that sought to make sense of the startling new conditions of life in the modern city and laid down broad rules for living appropriately within it.53 Dyos, indeed, had conceded that a “reason for historians to read this literature is to be prone to influences which were at work on the social conscience of the time.”54 And thus, appropriately, some of the most influential revisionist histories in this regard are centered on London, Dyos’s particular research field.55 Yet, as historians have increasingly reinterpreted “slum” through the prism of representation and performance, and have explored its expressions in polemic, theater, literature, illustration, and photography, Dyos’s original suggestion of a dividing line between serious and spurious depictions of slums has become blurred.56 A key innovator in this respect was the American historian Robert H. Bremner, whose From the Depths (1956) ranged across depictions of urban poverty in social surveys, literature, art, and illustration.57 Peter J. Keating’s The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (1971) consolidated this serious approach to the study of apparent frivolity,58 in the same year as E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo revealed the theatrical underpinnings of Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851–​52). Mayhew, they demonstrated, “may not have been as disinterested an observer as he pretended.”59 Simultaneously,

8   ALAN MAYNE Charles A. Madison’s 1971 reissue of Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives drew renewed attention to the interwoven text and pioneering photography of New York’s most famous late nineteenth-​century social reformer. Madison’s assessment of Riis’s polemic as being “written with moral indignation and weighted with inescapable facts” now seems dated, so greatly has the field of slumland representation—​with its focus on the overlap between fact and fiction—​developed in recent years.60

Intimate Spaces Notwithstanding these interpretive advances, most discussion about slums—​in both historical and present-​day analysis—​still revolves around “outside” constructions. Many of these preoccupations are entirely appropriate: we need to understand how and why slum stereotypes developed and persisted, and why policy making to “upgrade” or remove slums has been so ineffective. However, much contemporary scholarship, policy design, and philanthropic effort still rely on premises that rest on an unrealistically universalizing and homogenizing term. Dyos asked provocatively almost half a century ago, “How much do we know about what it meant to be alive in a Victorian slum? How much can we know about an experience which was remote from almost all those who wrote about life in towns or took oral evidence about it for various commissions of inquiry?”61 Little has changed. Dyos’s Victorian slum corresponds with what French philosopher Gaston Bachelard called “intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.”62 How can we hope to get beyond the controlling outside narratives in order to understand the local idioms of slumland residents: those supposedly dysfunctional “Others,” as two centuries of slum representation have fashioned them? How do we “get inside” their intimate spaces, to appreciate the unexpected logic of their spatial arrangements and the stratagems of their forays into the formal and informal economies of the city? Is it preposterous to claim that we can ever do so? Yet, as cultural historian Robert Darnton points out, even the most obscure social lives generate evidence, and thus, although that evidence may be hard to recognize, access, and interpret, “we should be able to work our way through to [their lives], not by taking intuitive leaps into airy climates of opinion but by poring over sources.”63 Pioneering social workers and sociologists lived within and reported upon disadvantaged city communities in the “developed world” up until the middle of the twentieth century, but the places they studied have since been torn apart.64 Anthropologists have recently lived among the poor in the Global South, but many of these communities were likewise destroyed in the late twentieth century and their inhabitants dispersed.65 Historical archaeologists are attempting to reconnect interpretively with these vanished communities, sifting through the fragments that remain, preserved beneath parking lots or sealed up in forgotten cesspits. Sometimes these fragments from past lives are unexpected and evocative: pieces of a Staffordshire ornament with the words “Death of Nelson” inscribed or a decorative teacup fragment with the message “Temperance

Introduction   9 and Industry. Industry Pays Debts.”66 These little evidences of patriotic and respectable home lives contradict what “slum” stereotypes tell us. More often, however, researchers struggle to make sense of vast assemblages of seemingly unremarkable stuff: smashed window glass, bottles, pins and needles, brick shards, fragments of bone from frugal dinners. How can one begin to make sense of these “small things forgotten”?67 Historians are sometimes called “Johnny-​come-​latelys” in these efforts to get inside slums and neighborhoods. It is said that they are limited by the controlling narratives of the ruling elites, whose opinions dominate surviving library and archival collections. Yet there is vastly more submerged documentary data in these repositories than any elite could ever sift and control. Take one example. Archaeologist Tim Murray and I have long worked together to interpret material evidence from the site of “Little Lon” in Melbourne, arguably Australia’s most notorious slum. This once vibrant immigrant community, originating in the 1850s, was swept away after the Second World War. Archaeologists have identified more than 2,500 artifacts from a former cesspit on one house site (the “Death of Nelson” figurine fragment was located there), which analysis of land title records, ratebooks (municipal property valuations), sewerage maps, and post office directories revealed as belonging to the household of an illiterate Irish laborer, John Moloney. Armed with a name, historians suddenly had traction: they could trawl for that name (and the names of his immediate family) in the vast but hitherto inaccessible ocean of documentary records generated by the bureaucracies of an expanding state. These records revealed many surprising things, which could be linked not only to the Moloney household and their surrounding neighborhood but to interpretations of the broader patterns and processes of slumland livelihoods.68 Historians today are experimenting with multiple analytical strategies for understanding disadvantaged and hitherto demonized neighborhoods.69 Their overlaps with archaeology, geography, and urban studies are already well established. Sometimes rare working-​class narratives are uncovered.70 Oral history is a newer approach, often enmeshed in local community history.71 It overlaps with family reconstitution methods, which Murray and I applied early on in our analysis of “Little Lon,” and which Rebecca Yamin and her colleagues have highlighted in their interpretation of New York’s “Five Points.”72 As Darnton remarked, the historian’s skill lies in this ability to “work . . . back and forth between texts and contexts.”73 The contributors to the Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum demonstrate this skill as they explore the slum both as an outside construct (the conditioning influences upon its form, the shaping of knowledge about it, and efforts to contain and tame it) and as a place insiders call home. In explaining their own research, the contributors critically review the interpretive fields within which their work sits and identify opportunities for further research and analysis. The Handbook’s design allows for fundamental differences of opinion about slums to be exposed. Some contributors enclose the word with quotation marks to emphasize the distinction between a value-​laden label and the poor neighborhoods to which it was applied. Others apply it as an unproblematic descriptive term for these neighborhoods. It is important to air these disagreements because it is ambiguity—​and the constructive tensions that

10   ALAN MAYNE arise as we attempt to resolve it—​that drives innovation in research and analysis. For the same reason, the Handbook highlights multidisciplinary approaches and crossovers. It includes contributions from anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, journalism, political science, sociology, and urban planning. The cumulative outcomes of historical slum research since Dyos energized the field are wide ranging and impressive, and exciting breakthroughs continue to be made. The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum highlights these achievements and flags the opportunities that emerge from them. However, as this Handbook also demonstrates, histories that are unrelated to the concerns of the present day, and that dodge opportunities to inform debate about those concerns, are of little value. Unless historians can consistently and constructively engage with other disciplines that study human settlements, attract the interest of general readers, and win the serious attention of policy makers, their efforts will at best earn a footnote or two in UN reports and policy documents that perpetuate the entrenched stereotypes about modern slums.

Notes 1. The historical significance of this “naming process” is pinpointed in Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms, eds., What’s in a Name? Talking about Urban Peripheries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 2. Oxford English Dictionary Online, https://​www.oed.com, slum n.1, I, 2a. 3. Ibid., slum n.1, II, 4a. 4. See Xavier de Souza Briggs, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities Across the Globe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 53. See Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2006). 5. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 6. See the trail-​blazing accounts by Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Progress (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1961); Charles Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); Sam Bass Warner Jr., The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). 7. See Eric E. Lampard’s timeless overview, “The Urbanizing World,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Micahel Wolff (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), vol. 1, 3–​57. 8. An influential example of comparative historical research here is Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). 9. H. J. Dyos and D. A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in Dyos and Wolff, Victorian Cityvol. 2, 361. 10. David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain 1838–​1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), x. 11. Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-​Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 1. 12. Maury Klein and Harvey A. Kantor, Prisoners of Progress: American Industrial Cities, 1850–​ 1920 (New York: Macmillan, 1976), xiv.

Introduction   11 13. Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London: Penguin, 2002), 67. 14. Herbert J. Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-​Americans, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, [1962] 1982), 323. 15. See, for example, UN Secretary-​General Ban Ki-​moon’s Foreword in UN-​HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities 2008/​2009: Harmonious Cities (London: Earthscan, 2008), iii. 16. See Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (2011): 225. 17. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (London: Allen Lane, 2015); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Allen Lane, 2012), Joseph Stiglitz, Making Globalization Work (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 18. Rina Chandran, “With Drones and Satellites, India gets to Know its Slums,” Place, July 24, 2018, Thomson Reuters Foundation, http://​www.this​ispl​ace.org. 19. Kofi Annan, “Foreword,” in United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements 2001 (London: Earthscan, 2001), v. 20. See, for example, Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–​1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 21. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5. 22. See Sam Bass Warner Jr.’s early effort to apply Clifford Geertz’s anthropological approach to analysis of ideas about slums. Sam Bass Warner Jr., “The Management of Multiple Urban Images,” in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 383–​394. 23. Charles Dickens, quoted in Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), 52. 24. Patrick McAuslan, Urban Land and Shelter for the Poor (London: International Institute for Environment and Development, 1985), 117. 25. Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 698–​699. 26. See, for example, Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Norman Dennis, Public Participation and Planners’ Blight (London: Faber & Faber, 1972); Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-​First-​Century City (London: Penguin Books, 2009); Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Herbert J. Gans, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gita Dewan Verma, Slumming India: A Chronicle of Slums and Their Saviours (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2002); Ruzbeh N. Bharucha, Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions (New Delhi: Sainathann Communication, 2006). 27. See, for example, Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 28. United Nations General Assembly, United Nations Millennium Declaration, 55/​2, clause 19 (September 18, 2000). The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, approved in 2015, is explained in United Nations Development Programme, Sustainable Development Goals, http://​www.undp.org/​cont​ent/​undp/​en/​home/​sust​aina​ble-​deve​lopm​ent-​goals.html.

12   ALAN MAYNE 29. Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum,” 710. See Alan Gilbert, “Extreme Thinking about Slums and Slum Dwellers: A Critique,” SAIS Review 29, no. 1 (2009): 35–​48; Pushpa Arabindoo, “Rhetoric of the ‘Slum:’ Rethinking Urban Poverty,” City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action 15, no. 6 (2011): 636–​646. 30. See, for example, Howard Marshall, Slum (London: William Heinemann, 1933); Mabel L. Walker, Urban Blight and Slums: Economic and Legal Factors in their Origin, Reclamation, and Prevention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). 31. See “Shapes on the Ground,” being Part III of Dyos and Wolff, The Victorian City, vol. 2, 225–​386. 32. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 7, 16. 33. See, for example, James H. Treble, Urban Poverty in Britain 1830–​1914 (London: Methuen, [1979] 1983); M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-​Class Housing 1850–​1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); S. Martin Gaskell, ed., Slums (New York: Leicester University Press, 1990). 34. Influential pioneering examples include F. B. Smith, The People’s Health, 1830–​ 1910 (London: Croom Helm, 1979); Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1983); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-​Century India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–​1920 (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007). 35. See, for example, Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, and the American City, 1840–​1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Jacinta Prunty, Dublin Slums 1800–​1925: A Study in Urban Geography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998); Andrew Tallon, Urban Regeneration in the UK (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2013). 36. See, for example, Randall H. McGuire and Robert Paynter, eds., The Archaeology of Inequality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pioneering case studies include Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry, Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Grace Karskens, Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999); Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York, 5 vols. (West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, 2000). 37. William Ashworth, The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning: A Study in Economic and Social History of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954) predated Dyos. See Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States and France, 1780–​1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981). The journal Planning Perspectives: An International Journal of History, Planning, and the Environment, has sustained, inspired, and disciplined the field since its establishment in 1986. 38. See, for example, Wohl, The Eternal Slum. See also the pioneering work by J. A. Yelling, in Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986); and Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918–​45, with Particular Reference to London (London: University College London Press, 1992). 39. See, for example, studies of Jane Adams (1860–​1935) and Lawrence Veiller (1872–​1959).

Introduction   13 40. See, for example, James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900–​1980 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Jon C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–​1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robert A. Beauregard, Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York: Routledge, 2003); Samuel Zipp, Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 41. Simon Pepper is Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Liverpool. See, for example, Simon Pepper and Peter Richmond, “Homes Unfit for Heroes: the Slum Problem in London and Neville Chamberlain’s Unhealthy Areas Committee, 1919–​21,” Town Planning Review 80, no. 2 (2009): 143–​171. 42. Kim Dovey is Chair of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, and Ross King is its former Dean. See their “Informal Urbanism and the Taste for Slums,” Tourism Geographies: An International Journal of Tourism Space, Place and Environment 14, no. 2 (2012): 275–​293. 43. See www.vern​acul​arar​chit​ectu​refo​rum.org. 44. John F. C. Turner, “An Introductory Perspective,” in Building Community: A Third World Case Book, ed. Bertha Turner (London: Building Community Books, 1988), 13. 45. Ibid. John F. C. Turner, “Housing as a Verb,” in Freedom to Build: Dweller Control of the Housing Process, ed. John F. C. Turner and Robert Fichter (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 152, 162. 46. See the pioneering study by Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). See also Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 47. See, for example, Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–​1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 48. David Ward was a pioneer in this respect. See his Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth-​Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). See also Thomas Lee Philpott, The Slum and the Ghetto: Neighborhood Deterioration and Middle-​Class Reform, Chicago 1880–​1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).; John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 49. See Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad, eds., Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004). 50. Wohl was an early and influential advocate of such approaches. See Anthony S. Wohl, ed., The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, with leading articles from the Pall Mall Gazette of October 1883 and articles by Lord Salisbury Joseph Chamberlain and Foster Crozier (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1970). See also Wohl, The Eternal Slum. 51. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 38. 52. See Marie Huchzermeyer, Cities with “Slums”: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa (Claremont, South Africa: UCT Press). 53. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; first published in French, 1974). 54. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 24. 55. See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​ Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Seth Koven, Slumming:

14   ALAN MAYNE Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 56. See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). 57. Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1956). 58. P. J. Keating, The Working Classes in Victorian Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971). 59. E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo, eds., The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the “Morning Chronicle,” 1849–​50 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1971] 1973), 35. See also Bertrand Taithe, The Essential Mayhew: Representing and Communicating the Poor (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996). 60. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, ed. Charles A. Madison (New York: Dover, [1890] 1971), vii. Max Kelly made good use of 1900 bubonic plague photography in Max Kelly, A Certain Sydney 1900: A Photographic Introduction to a Hidden Sydney, 1900 (Sydney: Doak Press, 1977). The key defining text in terms of slumland photographic representation is John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). See also Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989). See the recent explorations of “literary slumming” in New York in Robert M. Dowling, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 171; Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–​1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 61. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” 5. 62. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Etienne Gilson (New York: Orion Press, [1958] 1964), 78. 63. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1985), 261. 64. See for example Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957); Herbert J. Gans, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968); Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). See also Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 65. See for example Perlman, Favela. 66. C. Smith and S. Hayes, “An Archaeological Time Capsule: Casselden Place,” Museums Victoria Collections, 2010, https://​coll​ecti​ons.mus​eumv​icto​ria.com.au/​artic​les/​3590. Yamin, Tales of Five Points, vol. 1, B-​35. 67. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life, rev. ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1996). See Alan Mayne, “On the Edges of History: Reflections on Historical Archaeology,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 93–​118. 68. Alan Mayne, “Material Culture,” in Research Methods for History, ed. Simon Gunn and Lucy Faire, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 59–​60. 69. See, for example, Alexander von Hoffman, Local Attachments: The Making of an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994);

Introduction   15 Alexander von Hoffman, House by House, Block by Block: The Rebirth of America’s Urban Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 70. See Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1971] 1980). See also Graeme Davison and Shirley Constantine, eds., Out of Work Again: The Autobiographical Narrative of Thomas Dobeson, 1885–​1891 (Clayton, VIC: Monash Publications in History, 1990). 71. See, for example, Wapping History Group, “Down Wapping”: Hobart’s Vanished Wapping and Old Wharf Districts (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1988); Van Wilson, Rich in All but Money: Life in Hungate, 1900–​1938, rev. ed. (York: York Archaeological Trust, 2007). 72. See Tim Murray and Alan Mayne, “(Re)Constructing a Lost Community: ‘Little Lon,’ Melbourne, Australia,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2003): 87–​101; Yamin, Tales of Five Points. 73. Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre, 262.

Pa rt I

F U N DA M E N TA L S

CHAPTER 1

WHAT’S IN A NA ME ? Alan Mayne

Poverty and inequality are entrenched in the modern world. They increasingly show an urban face, as more and more of humanity live in towns and cities. Disadvantaged communities are thus part and parcel of modern cities. The United Nations estimates that more than 880 million urban dwellers in the developing world now live in slums.1 The developed world, as well, cannot rid itself of poverty. In the United States, for example, which has the highest level of inequality among advanced industrial countries, 40 million people live in poverty.2 In Britain, there are 14 million poor.3 Most of them live in urban areas. Urban poverty is real and enduring. But is “slum” a useful term to describe the poorest districts of modern cities, in the present day and during the historical development of such places since capitalism began to transform society from the late eighteenth century? Has it ever been used to sustain effective programs for overcoming urban poverty? Notwithstanding the persistence of severely disadvantaged districts within the cities of the developed world today, the word “slum” is no longer applied to them as it had been up to the last quarter of the twentieth century. However, in the developing world it is widely used, and it has become an essential element in the United Nations’ strategies to tackle global poverty.4 As Shakespeare asked, What’s in a name?5 Surely it makes sense to use “slum,” a widely recognized and influential word, to draw attention to such a pressing global social and environmental issue?6 The problem with “slum,” however, is threefold. First, it oversimplifies the diverse and changing conditions of urban poverty, and thus invites ineffective responses. Second, the word is so infused with deceitful meanings that it cannot be used as a neutral technical term in constructive analysis, discussion, and progressive social inclusion programs. Third, “slum” is widely resented and contested by the inhabitants of the communities thus labeled. The United Nations currently defines slums as “a physical manifestation of poverty and inequality.”6 That seems to make sense. However, such a shorthand and universalizing term cannot encompass the diverse manifestations of urban poverty today: communities that have endured for many generations in old city centers, informal fringe-​ city settlements of recent origin, flimsy self-​ built shanties and

20   Alan Mayne speculatively built cottages and multistory tenements. Housing expert Charles Abrams was skeptical about the term, stating in the mid-​1960s that “The word ‘slum’ is a catchall for poor housing of every kind as well as a label for the environment. The same word denotes a Chicago mansion turned into furnished rooms and a cardboard carton sheltering a human being in Lima.”7 Similarly the urbanist AbdouMaliq Simone cautioned that “The designation ‘slums,’ while important to the work of political advocacy and political development, tends to group particular kinds of urban places across the world into generalizations that end up obscuring important features about how the poor actually live and use cities.”8 This inadequacy is compounded when the term is applied across time as well as space. Can it designate a collection of shacks in Nairobi today, an urban kampong in 1960s Singapore, a refugee encampment in late-​1940s New Delhi, an immigrant tenement block in mid-​nineteenth-​century New York, or back-​alley shanties in early nineteenth-​century London? Can a single term encompass such diverse time periods, places, building types and materials, cultures, societies, and economic systems? Can it encapsulate the wide variety of limitations that have conditioned the lives of the urban poor over time, and also the range of opportunities they have grasped to sustain meager livelihoods? As one Indian researcher contended in the early 1990s, “the present-​day slums were no longer slums in the strict sense of the term, and it is time that a rethinking process is initiated on the concept or the indicators that define an urban slum.”9 As to the second proposition, the fundamental problem is that, because of the word’s embedded meanings, slums are invariably looked down upon.10 The term denotes ugliness, debasement, and inadequacy, both in relation to the places to which it is applied and the people who live there. Visual representation of urban disadvantage has consistently echoed these characterizations.11 It is widely and persistently maintained that to live in a slum is to live in a subhuman environment and endure dehumanizing conditions, and that slums breed crime, social delinquency, and unrest.12 These ideas have led to slum stereotypes justifying redevelopment projects that snap up cheap land and resell for profit. More insidious still, they have compromised many well-​meaning people who, in using “slum” to characterize shocking conditions and mobilize support for reform programs, have paradoxically perpetuated the skewed stereotypes of urban disadvantage that limit the effectiveness of their attempted reforms. This is as much the case with UN “slum upgrading” programs today as it was of pioneering social investigators, philanthropists, and housing reformers in the nineteenth century, and of housing activists during the twentieth century. As the influential Indian sociologist S. Devadas Pillai noted, Imaginary but well-​meant descriptions about the poor and lower caste people have perpetuated myths that are either sentimental or pity-​evoking or outright contemptuous. The contemptuous ones depict the poor as downright untrustworthy, lazy, drink-​prone and permissive. The sentimental ones run like this: “Slum people have to be saved from their environment of vice, crime and alcoholism;” or “slum people are all drunkards—​they have to drink, you see, to drown their worries.”13

What’s in a Name?    21 Clearly we should consider the slum’s long history of unhelpfulness and distortion in social analysis and reform before perpetuating the word in ongoing analysis and policy making. As the sociologist Peter Marris remarked, “A slum is only a slum in the eyes of someone for whom it is an anomaly,” and thus, until this is acknowledged, “any proposal in terms of slums becomes unconscious ideological imposition.”14 The actual residents of disadvantaged city communities do not regard themselves as living in a slum, even though they may apply the word pejoratively to other city districts. In the southern Indian city of Bangalore, a Dutch researcher noticed in the late twentieth century that “[a]‌substantial number of dwellers thought their own area to be the best in Bangalore, even if they had a low opinion of slums in general. A lot of dwellers obviously did not perceive their area as a slum.”15 Many residents have reacted with incredulity when the label is directly applied to them. An elderly woman, for example, who had lived in London’s notorious Bethnal Green for more than sixty years when it was targeted for demolition in the 1950s, exclaimed that “[s]he had been shocked to hear that the authorities might be labelling her beloved court a ‘slum,’ and was now terrified lest they pull it down.”16 Other residents react angrily to such perceived slurs. When a slum clearance project began in the northern English city of Sunderland in the late 1960s, the sociologist Norman Dennis observed that “[i]t would be difficult to exaggerate the anger and depth of insult felt by many home-​centred and house-​proud residents when they discovered that their own cottages were described as poor.”17 There is a long history of community resistance to slum clearance programs in both the developed and the developing world.18 Such is the potency of slum stereotypes, however, that residents often express shame and embarrassment when the label is applied to their communities. As Liverpool’s once all-​powerful Merseyside industrial economy collapsed in the middle of the twentieth century, residents of the hardest-​hit neighborhoods acknowledged the general stigma felt because of living there.19 At the end of the century, in Bristol’s Southmead district, many residents disassociated themselves from the district because of its low reputation.20 Yet, occasionally, the urban poor do adopt the word “slum,” applying it provocatively to themselves in order to galvanize attention to their plight, challenge the prevailing assumptions about slums, and mobilize support for their proposed solutions. Although such reactions are not clearly evident during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century (this merits further research), they became spectacularly successful in India from the 1970s with the emergence of a National Slum Dwellers Federation, and globally with the formation of Slum Dwellers International (also known as Slum/​Shack Dwellers International or SDI) in 1996.

Origins As the United Nations human settlements program acknowledges, “There is no internationally accepted definition of a slum.”21 In its absence, pejorative meanings have almost always prevailed, even among well-​intentioned researchers and reformers. Thus English

22   Alan Mayne radical Liberal politician Harry Barnes, who championed slum reform during the 1930s, drew upon a definition of slum used a generation earlier by George H. Duckworth, Charles Booth’s secretary, during the preparation of the progressive and massively influential Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–​1903), as “a street, closed court or alley tenanted by a casual, thoughtless and rough class of inhabitant not necessarily vicious but apt to contain bad characters.”22 The public’s understanding of the word is still more judgmental. As the architects and urban planners Richard Martin and Ashna Mathema put it, “What response does the word slum evoke? For many people there is revulsion, fear, and occasionally outrage. To this we could add an image of filth, crime, disease, slovenliness, helplessness, and poverty.”23 The conventional view of slums, whether in the cities of the developed world where urbanization began, or in the rapidly growing cities of the developing world today, is remarkably similar. This description of Liverpool in the 1970s could have been written of Boston a century earlier or of Mumbai today: “rundown slums, almost ghettos, sandwiched between redeveloped city centres and the suburbs, seen by people only on their journey to work as they look down from the railway across the backs of terraces, or across the vacant land from main roads.”24 Slum localities are frequently likened to sores and cancers. Thus, says geographer Gareth Jones, it follows that “[l]‌eft untouched, slums fester and decay: slum is a corruption of the word slime.”25 The undoubted insanitary and crowded condition of such neighborhoods are invariably emphasized, along with the flimsiness or disrepair of the housing and the apparently chaotic and dysfunctional layout of the built environment and work activities. Inevitably, so the prevailing myths maintain, people who live in such places become contaminated. The sympathetic journalist and philanthropist Ada Elizabeth Chesterton described London’s poor in the 1930s as “[h]alf doped with misery and hunger,” and exclaimed at “how deep the sore of the slum has eaten into the very bones of the city. Like terrible scabs those courts fester, destroying the bodies, blighting the souls of those imprisoned within.”26 A contemporary church worker similarly said of the residents of Kibera, Nairobi’s most notorious slum district, “They live every day in an environment whose conditions are degrading and dehumanising, where corruption and violence are commonplace.”27 Often slum dwellers are characterized as villains. According to one Indian sociologist in the 1980s, in line with views promulgated in both the developed and the developing world since the nineteenth century, a “slum area gives birth to various ills and sins in the society. Violence . . . , assault, fighting, rape, stealing etc. generally emerge in these areas.”28 Increasingly, however, the poor are labeled as victims of circumstance, caught in a low-​wage economy and weighed down by “fatalism and apathy.”29 Invariably, they are seen as “slum minded”: perhaps criminal, perhaps cowed, but definitely “not normal members of the community. Often they are mental defectives who have sunk down and down until they occupy the cheapest and most verminous lodging obtainable.”30 What are the origins of these colorful and value-​laden meanings?31 Abrams suggested that, as a noun,

What’s in a Name?    23 The word “slum” is a piece of cant of uncertain origin, little more than a century old. Its derivation may be from “slump,” meaning “swamp,” or it may be a fortuitous blend of “slop” and “scum;” it also carries with it the cadence of “slob,” “slush,” “slovenly,” “slut,” and other derivatives of the sl combination. Slum reveals its meaning the moment it is uttered.32

The earliest meanings of what Abrams recognized as being an intrinsically value-​laden and hostile word are obscure, because they originated in spoken rather than written English and had a limited currency. “Slum” first appeared in written form in dictionaries of “flash language,” Cockney slang, or the “vulgar tongue” in early nineteenth-​century London, which sought to explain “the cant of thieves, prostitutes, and vagabonds.”33 The word possibly derives from “slumber” (Middle English “slumer”), which was reapplied by Cockney slang to out-​of-​the-​way city places whose apparent sleepiness masked a darker criminal underside.34 The first known inscription of “slum” is in A Vocabulary of the Flash Language, compiled in 1812 and published in 1819. It describes a slum ambiguously as “a room,” but connects this meaning with a criminal “racket” and with “lodging-​slum” (referring to “the practice of hiring ready-​furnished lodgings, and stripping them.”)35 It was in these senses that “slum” was initially used colloquially to refer to hidden-​away rooms of low repute.36 These colloquialisms, their value judgements mixed, were gradually subsumed into general language usage. But as usage broadened, the word’s initial moral neutrality eroded. The language specific to streets and neighborhoods was translated into that of cities, nations, global trading systems, and their ruling elites. As the word’s specific and mixed meanings became overridden by broader and (as outsider viewpoints took over) increasingly judgmental understandings, its originally intimate associations with rooms and premises loosened. Subsequently, the broader-​ ranging phrase “back slum” included whole houses, alleys, and neighborhoods in seemingly out-​of-​the-​way and unsavory parts of the city. Pierce Egan’s monthly journal Life in London (1821–​28) set some of its tales among the “back slums” of London’s St Giles district and described such places as being “low, unfrequented parts of the town.”37 In 1825 Charles Westmacott (“Bernard Blackmantle”) likewise referred to “the number of desperate characters who inhabited the back-​slums lying in the rear of Broad-​street.”38 By the mid-​nineteenth century “back slum” (often used with inverted commas in acknowledgement of its slang origins) was appearing in publications not only in London but in other British cities, and in the cities of Britain’s settler societies in North America, Australia, and South Africa. Increasingly, however, the phrase was pared back to the single word “slum,” although the inverted commas persisted into the early twentieth century. Simultaneously, both terms were translated to the colonial world by British administrators and public health officials.39 E. P. Richards, for example, the first chief engineer of the Calcutta Improvement Trust, established in 1912, compiled a “Slum Map” of the city. Reflecting on the experience, he remarked that whereas “In Great Britain, Europe, and America, the English expression ‘slum’ means generally a group or a few

24   Alan Mayne acres of city dwelling-​houses,” in Calcutta slums were of an entirely different magnitude and were “absolutely appalling and unprecedented” by European standards.40 Colonial characterizations of slums were subsequently perpetuated in postcolonial nations by the well-​established bureaucracies they inherited, and by the new postcolonial political elite who used slum stereotypes to decry the dire social effects of colonial inaction and to endorse post-​independence urban planning strategies. Whereas slum stereotypes lost traction in the developed world in the 1970s, insofar as they could still be generally accepted as encapsulating local conditions of urban social disadvantage, they persisted in the developing world during the late twentieth and into the twenty-​first century.41 This persistence was encouraged by internationally funded community development projects, UN and World Bank social justice initiatives, and by what geographer Alan Gilbert called a proliferation of academic research and media commentary that “is insufficiently critical of received wisdom.” He added: “In a globalizing world, many of us are tempted to gloss over the differences between places, creating a global stereotype that simplifies reality.”42 The word “slum” has evolved as a verb as well as a noun. “To slum” means to visit slums (hence the expression to go “slumming”) rather than living there permanently. This meaning first entered the formal English vocabulary during the 1880s and 1890s, referring to “slummers” who visited disadvantaged neighborhoods out of curiosity or altruistic intent.43 The US journalist, pioneer photographer, and social reformer Jacob Riis, for example, went slumming in order to prepare his influential How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). Among his later slummer publications were A Ten Years’ War: An Account of the Battle with the Slum in New York (1900) and The Battle with the Slum (1901). In Britain, the Reverend Andrew Mearns had likewise had “to slum” in order to prepare his 1883 pamphlet The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, the appalled public reaction to which triggered the appointment of the landmark 1884–​85 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes. Its findings resulted in the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1885, which in turn formed the basis for subsequent housing regulation in Britain and its overseas territories. In British India, where the act was used as a blueprint for local slum improvement regulations, “to slum” was likewise a serious activity. Richards became a slummer in order to create his “Slum Map” of Calcutta. Similarly, the second Baron Sandhurst, a progressive Liberal politician, had gone slumming in Bombay soon after his appointment as governor in 1895 “to acquaint himself at first hand with the slums in Bombay and the sanitary condition of the city.”44 The settlement house movement, beginning in England with Toynbee Hall in London’s East End in 1884 and ballooning in the United States (most famously at Chicago’s Hull House, established in 1889), was likewise a collective act of serious-​ minded slumming, which morphed into the present-​day profession of social work. Such slumming has continued into the twenty-​first century, the best-​known example of which is Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow Cities.45 But “to slum” is far more often a trivial and voyeuristic activity. The Boston Journal noted in 1884 that a “party of young fashionable people of New York thought they would go a slumming,” and in London slumming was mentioned in 1889 as becoming

What’s in a Name?    25 “a modern fashion.”46 It was remarked in the 1930s that “sightseeing trips to the East End are a feature of tourist London.”47 Organized slum tourism became popular in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Rio de Janeiro from the early 1990s, and has spread to many developing-​world cities.48 Today YouTube blogs showcase slumming adventures from Nairobi to Rio de Janeiro. Journalist Bethe Dufresne identified the drawing power of such activities when she described how slum tour operators invite tourists to “[c]‌ome with us to gawk at desperately poor people in one of the smelliest and ugliest places on earth. Observe how they scrape by so you can have stories to tell at home and feel better about your own lot.”49 In Rio, upmarket villa accommodation and bars have been built overlooking the favelas so that, as the British Independent put it, “tourists will be able to taste luxury and the gritty life of the slum at the same time.”50 This contemporary fascination with slums and slumming in the developing world, on the part of international tourists from the developed world and the mainstream of local society, is grounded in the self-​satisfied juxtaposition of opposites. Necessarily, the slum and its inhabitants are characterized as inferior to the visiting slummer. As Martin and Mathema put it, We follow the rules, we live in nice strong houses, we have roads and street lighting. We have children who are well behaved and go to school. We have regular jobs. The other half—​they—​live in squalid conditions. Their ragged children pester us for money and vandalize the place. They carry diseases and have lice. All the criminals live in those places. Their houses are dark and dangerous. It is hard to grasp how powerful and self-​reinforcing the “them” and “us” perceptions can be.51

Anthropologist Janice Perlman argued in her trailblazing 1970s study of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas that these slum stereotypes are “a vehicle for interpreting the social reality in a form which serves the social interests of those in power.”52 These dynamics have been played out since slums and slumming first attracted attention in London during the nineteenth century. They operate through what Charles Dickens called “the attraction of repulsion,” a heady mix of repugnance and fascination, because as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White hypothesize, such “high/​low opposition . . . is a fundamental basis to mechanisms of ordering and sense-​making in European cultures.”53 It is no accident that alongside the growing popularity of slum tourism in the English-​speaking world since the late nineteenth century, there arose “a flood of writing about slums which could be consumed within the safe confines of the home. Writing, then, made the grotesque visible whilst keeping it at an untouchable distance.”54 Readers of the new mass-​circulation daily press, periodicals, and books about slumland horrors could visualize in the slum the antithesis of their own lives and behaviors. It was a profoundly self-​reinforcing experience during unsettling times. This broader process of imaginative slumming from the comfort and safety of one’s own home reinforced the messages coming from the legislatures, the pulpits, the editor’s offices, and the company boardrooms about what should constitute the essential

26   Alan Mayne elements of modernity and responsible citizenship. Slumming helped to crystalize the core values of emerging urbanism from the infinite complexities, ambiguities, temptations, contradictions, and perplexities that arose from modern urban life. The new cities were unprecedented, unsettling, and profoundly polarizing, because, as urban studies specialist Esther Romeyn has argued, “As industrial capitalism unleashed its powers, it brought about the unmooring and restructuring of identities, social structures, and urban space on an unprecedented scale.”55 Thus, David Harvey contends, “the ruling-​class alliance had to find ways to invent a new tradition of community that could counter or absorb the antagonisms of class.”56 The slum was one of their inventions. The “Spectacle of the Slum”57 highlighted what it meant to be good citizens in the modern world (practicing self-​help, and sustained by living and working in orderly and functional zones and neighborhoods) by showcasing their unacceptable opposite: lassitude, deviancy, redundancy, and chaos. This was, and remains, the word’s essence. It clarifies “us” by contrasting and confirming our moral universe with a repulsive “other.”58 Thus this word, with its embedded meanings, provides no basis for objective factual analysis of urban social disadvantage, nor for the reforms to overcome it.

The Way Forward “Slum” has no place in present-​day social analysis and urban policy formation. Yet, paradoxically, it does have an important role in historical analysis, which in turn can usefully inform present-​day thinking and action. Slumming is a good example. The history of slumming, whether focused on earnest investigation and reform or on slum tourism, clearly cannot be studied without reference to the term that defines it. Further historical analysis of slumming can probe the cultural blinkers that narrowed the vision and the reform agendas of social investigators, public health officials, and settlement house workers. Historical analysis has the potential, also, to add complexity to interpretations of slum tourism as a form of theatre and entertainment. These activities should not be dismissed as shallow and frivolous. They demonstrate how collective knowledge and codes of public behavior are fashioned and perpetuated. They also show how slum tourists and tour operators often struggle to break the shackles of the received wisdom about slums as they attempt to understand the “real thing.” As one Swiss tourist put it, she wanted to see “the real Jakarta, behind the façade of fancy buildings and shopping malls.”59 Another good example is the attempted reform programs that slumming gave rise to. Reformers have repeatedly harnessed slum stereotypes to galvanize attention and mobilize support. Governments have also done so in order to justify massive public funding for such programs. As Abrams put it, “A main motivating force for housing reform in both Britain and the United States has been the slum. No word in the language has called

What’s in a Name?    27 up more horrible images of the poor man’s lot or is more capable of marshaling the forces of protest.”60 Abrams’s point is equally true in regard to the Global South. From the nineteenth to the twenty-​first century, much of the energies of philanthropists, all tiers of government, and international agencies to address urban poverty has been channeled into a “war on slums.” Echoes of this much-​used phrase are still evident in contemporary UN policy documents and reports.61 Historical research problematizes the ongoing slum stereotypes that skew urban social policy. In both of these examples, analysis is being advanced by what amounts to a dialectical critique of the embedded meanings of the word “slum.” This should become a general principle for future researchers: tilt against the “slum” to better appreciate grassroots realities. This is a message not only for students of the past; it applies equally to anthropologists, architects, economists, geographers, political scientists, sociologists, and urban planners. Research on what is now called “informality” is a good example, both as it relates to “slum” livelihoods and housing (although we should be cautious about the current neoliberal enthusiasm for slumland entrepreneurialism, which aims to wind back state intervention in urban affairs).62 It is now widely recognized that labor from “slum” neighborhoods underpins the formal economies of cities. Historians demonstrated this process in the nineteenth century.63 Analysts of the Global South attest to its persistence in the present day. Ruzbeh Bharucha, who documented the slum clearance project that destroyed New Delhi’s informal community of Yamuna Pushta in the early twenty-​first century, remarked that it was the residents of such marginalized communities who construct “the buildings, the monuments, the flyovers, the hospitals, the shopping malls, the commercial centres, the very homes you and I live in. More importantly, it is because of them, that our quality of life is so greatly enhanced. Our cooks, maids, drivers, peons, clerks, garbage and rag pickers, road sweepers, electricians, plumbers, and so many, from the work force, live in slums or resettlement colonies.”64 Moreover, researchers in the Global South point out the importance to cities of the informal economy that is rooted in the districts derided as slums. Jeremy Seabrook, who investigated Mumbai’s Indiranagar slum district in the 1980s, noted that “[a]‌lmost everyone in the slum is engaged on some vital economic purpose, however chaotic and unco-​ordinated it may appear.”65 Likewise in Nairobi’s Kiberia district, maligned as Africa’s biggest slum, a local church worker observed that The informal sector economy is vibrant . . . and is seen in the hundreds of kiosks throughout the entire settlement. Virtually anything needed for daily life is available including food, household goods, charcoal, clothes, beds, car parts, and even coffins. There are also stalls where carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, and metal welders advertise their services as well as photograph shops, repair kiosks and barbershops. Many people sell meat and fish. Very few of these businesses have permanent structures or locations and most kiosks are located on the veranda of the owner’s house or on the roadside.66

28   Alan Mayne As urban sociologist Marie Huchzermeyer has argued, the residents of such informal settlements “create and shape urban space . . . , often against the odds.”67 Clearly, their activities are not random. They shape ordered and functional environments for living and working, notwithstanding outsiders’ impressions of chaos and dysfunction. Such informal resourcefulness and grassroots improvisation are also evident in home making. This is especially the case in the contemporary Global South, where plenty of evidence supports architect Amos Rapoport’s contention that “high-​quality environments can be created from torn sacking, cardboard, rusty metal, bits of wood, and other such materials.”68 As one Nairobi “slum” resident explained, “I don’t know how you see my house, but to me it’s beautiful. I appreciate it even if it is small. I have my bed here—​it’s comfortable. I have my seats, the sofa, I have my little kitchen, and I can put my television and CD player there, my speakers there, my aquarium there.”69 Notwithstanding UN concern that slums are overwhelming the cities of the developing world, self-​help housing initiatives by poor communities have actually helped to improve overall housing conditions. Gilbert pointed out that in Latin America, “What begins as a shanty soon becomes a consolidated house. Gradually, electricity and water are installed in the neighbourhood, the roads are paved, bus services begin operating, and schools are built . . . Service improvements have permitted vast areas of shanty towns to be transformed into proper suburbs.”70 Drawing upon his experiences as a UN housing consultant in the developing world during the 1950s and 1960s, Abrams argued that “[s]‌lum life is not always the symbol of retrogression. It may in fact be the first advance from homelessness into shelter, or the way station on the road from abject poverty to hope.”71 Historical evidence about housing and homemaking since the early twentieth century, and more scantily from the nineteenth century, supports these ideas. Studies of the infamous Ancoats district in Manchester during the 1920s and 1930s noted “the people’s pride in their homes”; the investigators remarked that “[i]‌t is wonderful how clean many of the houses are and what infinite trouble is taken to ‘beautify’ crumbling walls and defective woodwork.”72 Chesterton recorded that in one slum house she visited in South London during the 1930s, “The tea-​table was spread with a clean blue check cloth and cheap but pretty china. The mantlepiece was breaking away from the wall, but the mirror just over the centre was polished.”73 A generation later, similar findings were being reported. In the early 1970s, for example, investigators interviewed a millhand who was living in a row of back-​to-​back houses threatened with slum clearance. He said proudly, “This is my own house, my property. I spend to make it good.”74 The final report of the exhaustive Liverpool Inner Area Study identified similar habits among the inhabitants of disadvantaged neighborhoods: Outward appearances are staunchly maintained. Front steps, window sills, stretches of front pavement and even back lanes are regularly scrubbed. Neat lace curtains, washed every few weeks, are discreetly pulled back to reveal brass ornaments proudly displayed or football rosettes pinned up. Rooms are still wallpapered annually, partly

What’s in a Name?    29 against damp, and house fronts regularly painted and rendered by those who have bought their houses.75

Getting Inside an Outside Concept Can we expand upon these tantalizing glimpses of the lives, activities, and outlooks that have been largely obscured by slum stereotypes? Is it possible to understand more fully the internal dynamics of communities that have been derided as slums? Anthropologists, architects, geographers, and sociologists have shown that this can be done in the contemporary world. But their initiatives have not been acted upon. Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s pioneering 1950s study of East London’s Bethnal Green is an early case in point. As one resident told them, “I suppose people who come here from outside think it’s an awful place, but us established ones like it.”76 Gerald Suttles’s analysis of the Addams area in Chicago’s Near West Side during the 1960s led him to conclude that notwithstanding the area’s reputation as one of the oldest slums in Chicago, when seen from the inside “the Addams area is intricately organized according to its own standards.”77 Perlman concluded from her initial fieldwork in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro during the 1960s and 1970s that favelas were not marginal and disorganized places but were integrated into the broader society and economy, and that poor communities were characterized not by hopelessness and despondency but by a “strong sense of optimism.”78 Rapoport drew attention in the 1980s to the strategic thinking and logical choices that have shaped the layout of seemingly randomly arranged and chaotically functioning communities: “Spontaneous settlements, like all human environments, do not just happen; they are designed in the sense that purposeful changes are made to the physical environment through a series of choices among the alternatives available.”79 Do these possibilities for researchers to apply thesis/​antithesis/​synthesis analytical methods to slum prejudices extend also to studies of the past? The evidence is patchy. Jerry White’s historical analysis of poor neighborhoods in London offers a tentative step forward, as does Rebecca Yamin’s analysis of the archaeological record of poverty in New York City.80 I agree with them that it is possible to study historically poor communities, households, and even individuals in juxtaposition to the dominating slum stereotypes that cloak their realities.81 There is a huge opportunity for historians, archaeologists, and historical geographers to rewrite the history of slums. In so doing, we need to eschew the presumptions of “slum-​mindedness.” The urban poor were not inert; their only deficiency was in money, and therefore in the opportunities that money buys. They were active and opportunistic, canny and street-​ wise. They made commonsensical and strategic decisions calculated to maximize their livelihood opportunities, although they might bend the broader society’s rules and expectations in the process. In late nineteenth-​century London, for example, Mrs Stevens, a mother of six and carer for an infirm husband, explained to a district nurse

30   Alan Mayne how she manipulated slum stereotypes to her advantage. She told the nurse that “she always kept an untidy house to ensure the flow of charity. She never put up curtains and she let strips of paper hang off the walls. Before a charity visitor arrived, she dumped coal and rags in the corner and dropped stale cabbage leaves to create a fetid atmosphere.”82 Manchester University Settlement’s studies of the Ancoats district during the 1930s found that “the poor women, on the whole, lay out their limited money well and that they have discovered by rule-​of-​thumb methods how to give their families the essentials of a balanced diet.” The investigators concluded, “In Ancoats they had learned to manage, they knew the cheapest shops, they could make their purchases every day . . . The corner shop was kind and purchases might be entered ‘in the back of the book’ for a few days if money was short. And there were friends in Ancoats who could mind the children, come in for a game of cards, look after invalids, share the news.”83 This strategic energy was grounded in a shared moral universe and mediated by agreed rules. These did not separate them from “normal” society as the vulgarizers of ideas about a “culture of poverty” endlessly maintain; it integrated them with mainstream society. The Reverend Arthur William Jephson said of the London poor in 1910, “These people have their own code. It differs largely from ours, but it is a code, and infractions of it were intensely resented by the people themselves.”84 Hilda Jennings, director of research at the University Settlement Bristol and its former warden, likewise said of her experiences with Bristol’s poor from the 1930s to the 1960s that there existed “a recognized minimum standard below which few were willing to be seen to fall.”85 This shared moral universe provided a firm basis for collective support, friendship, and fun. Chesterton said of East London’s Shoreditch district in the 1930s, “The whole atmosphere teemed with friendliness and life.”86 Jerry White, who probed the history of an East London tenement block demolished in the 1970s, was told by a former resident: “The community was very close . . . You had that sense of warmth, of friendliness among the people.”87 There is a need to critically reassess characterizations of slumland’s physical environment as chaotic, unplanned, and unworkable. Many “slum” houses are improvable; for example Victorian-​era housing in Melbourne that escaped the slum clearance projects of the twentieth century now sell for millions of dollars. Seabrook said of Mumbai’s informal settlements that “in spite of the ramshackle quality of these living places, it is wrong to judge by appearances. What these self-​built shanties speak of is not squalor and degradation, but of the ingenuity and inventiveness of people who have nothing but who nonetheless provide themselves and their families with adequate shelter and a life of dignity.”88 One of the hardest things to grasp in attempting to think beyond slum stereotypes is that the seemingly chaotic layouts of disadvantaged city districts actually display a quirky spatial logic: they have been fashioned by the people who live in them into what the sociologist Herbert Gans called “an effective environment.”89 Rapoport argued that despite the severe constraints upon those who fashioned these vernacular environments, they were “vastly superior”—​socially, economically, culturally—​to those designed by professional planners.90

What’s in a Name?    31 These positives all have a dark underside. Jerry White, in his history of London’s “Campbell Bunk” neighborhood, demolished as a slum in the 1950s, conceded that harsh living conditions “took a psychological toll . . . , unfitting men and women for regular work through various forms of nervous exhaustion or depression, and contributing to widespread alcohol abuse” and sexual abuse of women and children.91 Housing conditions historically in poor communities were appalling. One family, for example, who rented in a rundown district of Victorian housing in Cardiff during the early 1970s, told investigators, “Our house is disgusting inside. The dampness in the house is terrible. All we can use is the back bedroom and the back kitchen and that’s leaking when it’s raining.”92 Violence and crime were widespread, as they are today in some districts of the Global South. In Bangkok’s “Slaughterhouse” neighborhood, according to an American priest who worked there, “Violence is a way of life. You just walk with your head down and don’t look people in the eye. If someone talks to you, you hurry on by without answering, and if it’s a curt remark or a curse, you step up your pace without a peep.”93 Perlman concedes that many of the positives she earlier identified in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas have been overturned by drug-​based violence.94 In such circumstances, many of the urban poor “felt trapped in these places . . . Often they were overwhelmed with a sense of hopelessness and despair.”95 Clearly, there are complex and disturbing histories still to be told, if ever we can break away from the persistent and obfuscating stereotypes of slum people as disorganized and burdened by “slum mentalities.”96 I welcome this new dialectic of “the slum.”

Notes 1. UN-​HABITAT, Working for a Better Urban Future: Annual Progress Report 2018 (Kenya: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2018), 54. 2. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Washington DC, 2017. https://​www.ohchr.org. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 16, 21–​22. 3. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Statement on Visit to the United Kingdom, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, London, 2018. https://​www.ohchr.org. 4. See, for example, United Nations, Tracking Progress towards Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements: SDG 11 Synthesis Report (United Nations, 2018), 38–​44. https://​www.un-​ilibr​ary.org/​econo​mic-​and-​soc​ial-​deve​lopm​ent/​track​ing-​progr​ ess-​towa​rds-​inclus​ive-​safe-​resili​ent-​and-​sust​aina​ble-​cit​ies-​and-​human-​settl​emen​ts_​3​6ff8​ 30e-​en. 5. Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2. 6. See however the critique by Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–​7 13 7. UN-​HABITAT, Working for a Better Urban Future, 54. See also UN-​HABITAT, Annual Progress Report 2017 (Keny

32   Alan Mayne 8. a: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2018), 55. ovements at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2010), 17. 9. D. Vasudeva Rao, in Slum Habitat: Hyderabad Slum Improvement Project, ed. H. U. Bijlani and Prodipto Roy (New Delhi: Har-​Anand Publications with Vikas Publishing House, 1991), 43. 10. See Ashish Bose, “Urbanization and Slums,” in Urbanization and Slums, ed. Prodipto Roy and Shangon Das Gupta (New Delhi: Har-​Anand Publications, 1995), 19, 23. 11. See John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), especially c­ hapter 5 (“God’s Sanitary Law: Slum Clearance and Photography in late Nineteenth-​Century Leeds,” 117–​152). 12. See M. D. David, “Why This Book?” in Urban Explosion of Mumbai: Restructuring of Growth, ed. M. D. David (Mumbai: Himalaya Publishing House, 1996), vii; D. Ravindra Prasad and A. Malla Reddy, Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums: The Indian Experience (Hyderabad: Regional Centre for Urban and Environmental Studies, Osmania University, and Booklinks Corporation, 1994), 3. 13. S. Devadas Pillai, “Slums and Squatters,” in Slums and Urbanization, ed. A. R. Desai and S. Devadas Pillai (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990), 164. 14. Peter Marris, “The Meaning of Slums and Patterns of Change,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 3, no. 1–​4 (1979): 419, 420. 15. Michael Dewit, “Slum Perceptions and Cognitions,” in Living in India’s Slums: A Case Study of Bangalore, ed. Hans Schenk (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), 107. 16. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 86. 17. Norman Dennis, Public Participation and Planners’ Blight (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 147–​148 18. See for example Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), esp. ­chapters 3, 4, and 5. 19. SNAP, Another Chance for Cities (London: Liverpool Shelter Neighbourhood Action Project [SNAP], 1972), 101. 20. Jeremy Brent, “Community Without Unity,” in Contested Communities: Experiences, Struggles, Policies, ed. Paul Hoggett (Bristol: Policy Press, 1997), 80. 21. UN-​HABITAT and Cities Alliance, Analytical Perspective of Pro-​Poor Slum Upgrading Frameworks (Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2006), 1. 22. Harry Barnes, The Slum: Its Story and Solution (London: P. S. King & Son, 1931), 7. 23. Richard Martin and Ashna Mathema, Development Poverty and Politics: Putting Communities in the Driver’s Seat (New York: Routledge, 2010), 15. 24. Hugh Wilson and Lewis Womersley, Roger Tym and Associates, Jamieson Mackay and Partners, Change or Decay: Final Report of the Liverpool Inner Area Study (London: Department of the Environment /​HMSO, 1977), 1. 25. Gareth A. Jones, “Slums,” in Patterned Ground: Entanglements of Nature and Culture, ed. Stephen Harrison, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 190. 26. Mrs Cecil Chesterton (Ada Elizabeth Chesterton), I Lived in a Slum (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 60, 86. 27. Christine Bodewes, Parish Transformation in Urban Slums: Voices of Kibera, Kenya (Nairobi: Paulines Publications, 2005), 9. 28. Sudha Kaldate, Slums and Housing Problems (Jaipur: Printwell Publishers, 1989), 19.

What’s in a Name?    33 29. Rosita Mertens, Forced Relocation of Slum Dwellers in Bangalore, India. Slum Dwellers, Landlords and the Government (Amsterdam: Institute of Cultural Anthropology/​ Sociology of Development, Vrije Universiteit, 1996), 58. 30. B. S. Townroe, Britain Rebuilding: The Slum and Overcrowding Campaigns (London: Frederick Muller, 1936), 138. 31. For further detail on the following paragraphs, see Mayne, Slums, c­ hapters 1, 2, 4, and 5. 32. Charles Abrams, The Language of Cities: A Glossary of Terms (New York: Viking Press, 1971), 286. See Marie Huchzermeyer, “Troubling Continuities: Use and Utility of the Term ‘Slum,’” in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (London: Routledge, 2014), 86. 33. “Flash,” “Cant,” “Slang,” and “Vulgar” in Tom McArthur, ed., The Oxford Companion to the English Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 406, 188, 940–​943, 1098. 34. See “slum” and “slumber” inEric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English, 4th ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 3092. 35. James Hardy Vaux, “A Vocabulary of the Flash Language,” in Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux (London: W. Clow, 1819), 187, 200, 206. 36. H. J. Dyos and D. A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), vol. 1, 362. 37. Quoted in H. J. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 11, no. 1 (1967): 8. 38. Bernard Blackmantle (Charles Molloy Westmacott), The English Spy: An Original Work, Characteristic, Satirical and Humorous, Comprising Scenes and Sketches in Every Rank of Society (London, 1825), vol. 2, 29. Available at https//​www.gutenb​erg.org. 39. See Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013). 40. E. P. Richards, Report on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas (Ware, Hertfordshire: Jennings & Bewley, 1914), 229, 231. 41. See Mayne, Slums, ­chapters 5, 7, and 8. 42. Alan Gilbert, “Extreme Thinking about Slums and Slum Dwellers: A Critique,” SAIS Review 29, no. 1 (2009): 46. 43. See for example Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 44. Sir Bhalchandra Krishna, Overcrowding in Bombay and the Problem of Housing the Poor and Working Classes (Bombay: The Times Press, 1904), 7. 45. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (New York: Routledge, 2005). 46. Boston Journal, October 1, 1884, quoted in Oxford English Dictionary Online, https//​www. oed.com, “slum v. 4a”; Joseph Hatton, Reminiscences of J. L. Toole (London, 1889), quoted in ibid., “slummer, n. 1.” 47. Chesterton, I Lived in a Slum, 11. 48. See Fabian Frenzel, Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty (London: Zed Books, 2016). 49. Bethe Dufresne, “The Ethics and Economics of Slum Tours,” Commonweal 137, no. 22 (2010): 9–​11. 50. Stuart Grudgings, “Best View in Rio? Pushing Limits of Slum Tourism,” The Independent, October 23, 2011, https//​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk.

34   Alan Mayne 51. Martin and Mathema, Development Poverty and Politics, 19. 52. Janice E. Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 247. 53. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 3, 4–​5. On Dickens see Mayne, Slums, c­ hapter 2. 54. Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 139. 55. Esther Romeyn, Street Scenes: Staging the Self in Immigrant New York, 1880–​ 1924 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xiv. 56. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 31. 57. See Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 58. See Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). 59. Amnesty International, “Indonesia—​Tourists in the Slums,” in Slum Stories: Human Rights Live Here, https//​www.slum​stor​ies.org. 60. Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 118. 61. See “war on slums” in Mayne, Slums. 62. See Alan Gilbert, “Love in the Time of Enhanced Capital Flows: Reflections on the Links between Liberalization and Informality,” in Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia, ed. Ananya Roy and Nezar AlSayyad (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 33–​65. 63. See for example Dyos, “Slums of Victorian London”; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 64. Ruzbeh N. Bharucha, Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions (New Delhi: Sainathann Communication, 2006), 14. 65. Jeremy Seabrook, Life and Labour in a Bombay Slum (London: Quartet Books, 1987), 68. 66. Bodewes, Parish Transformation in Urban Slums, 66. 67. Marie Huchzermeyer, Cities with “Slums:” From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa (Claremont, South Africa: UCT Press, 2011), 26. 68. Amos Rapoport, “Spontaneous Settlements as Vernacular Design,” in Spontaneous Shelter: International Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Carl V. Patton (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 61. 69. Jonas Bendiksen, The Places We Live (New York: Aperture, 2008), n.p. 70. Alan Gilbert, “Land, Housing, and Infrastructure in Latin America’s Cities,” in The Mega-​City in Latin America, ed. Alan Gilbert (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 1996), 78. 71. Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 5. 72. Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats: A Study of a Clearance Area. Report of a Survey Made in 1937–​1938 (Manchester University Settlement, 1945), 14. Manchester and District Regional Survey Society, Social Studies of a Manchester City Ward. No. 3: Housing Needs of Ancoats in Relation to the Greenwood Act (Manchester University Settlement, 1930), 10. 73. Chesterton, I Lived in a Slum, 97. 74. Jeremy Harrison, ed., Reprieve for Slums: A Shelter Report (London: Shelter: National Campaign for the Homeless, 1972), 46. 75. Wilson et al., Change or Decay, 46. 76. Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, 85.

What’s in a Name?    35 77. Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 3. 78. Janice E. Perlman, “Rio’s Favelas and the Myth of Marginality,” in Social Movements in Latin America: The Experience of Peasants, Workers, Women, the Urban Poor, and the Middle Sectors, ed. Jorge I. Domínguez (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 148. 79. Rapoport, “Spontaneous Settlements as Vernacular Design,” 52. 80. See Jerry White, Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887–​1920 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Jerry White, Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York, 5 vols. (West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, 2000). 81. See for example my “A Barefoot Childhood: So What? Imagining Slums and Reading Neighbourhoods,” Urban History 22, no. 3 (1995): 404–​413; Mayne, Slums, c­ hapter 6. 82. Quoted in Koven, Slumming, 194. 83. Manchester University Settlement, Ancoats: A Study of a Clearance Area, 4 (my emphasis), 22. 84. Arthur W. Jephson, My Work in London (1910), quoted in Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–​1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 35. 85. Hilda Jennings, Societies in the Making: A Study of Development and Redevelopment within a County Borough (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 57. 86. Chesterton, I Lived in a Slum, 263. 87. White, Rothschild Buildings, 70. 88. Seabrook, Life and Labour in a Bombay Slum, 15. 89. Herbert J. Gans, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 4–​11. 90. Rapoport, “Spontaneous Settlements as Vernacular Design,” 51–​52, 72. 91. White, Campbell Bunk, 49. 92. Harrison, Reprieve for Slums, 34. 93. Father Joe Maier, Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse: The Battle for Human Dignity in Bangkok’s Bleakest Slums (Singapore: Periplus Editions, 2005), 25. 94. Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See also Janice Perlman, “Megacity’s Violence and Its Consequences in Rio de Janeiro,” 52–​68, and Robert Gay, “From Popular Movements to Drug Gangs to Militias: An Anatomy of Violence in Rio de Janeiro,” 29–​51, both in Megacities: The Politics of Urban Exclusion and Violence in the Global South, ed. Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (London: Zed Books, 2009). 95. Katy Bennett, Huw Beynon, and Ray Hudson, Coalfields Regeneration: Dealing with the Consequences of Industrial Decline (Bristol: Policy Press, 2000), 19. 96. See Paul D. Wiebe, Social Life in an Indian Slum (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1975), 165.

Bibliography Abrams, Charles. Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Desai, A. R., and S. Devadas Pillai. Slums and Urbanization. Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1990. Dyos, H. J. “The Slums of Victorian London.” Victorian Studies 11, no. 1 (1967): 5–​40.

36   Alan Mayne Frenzel, Fabian. Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty. London: Zed Books, 2016. Gans, Herbert J. People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions. New York: Basic Books, 1968. Gilbert, Alan. “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–​7 13. Huchzermeyer, Marie. Cities with “Slums:” From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa. Claremont, South Africa: UCT Press, 2011. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Marris, Peter. “The Meaning of Slums and Patterns of Change.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 3, no. 1–​4 (1979): 419–​441. Mayne, Alan. The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​ 1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Rapoport, Amos. “Spontaneous Settlements as Vernacular Design.” In Spontaneous Shelter: International Perspectives and Prospects, ed. Carl V. Patton, 51–​77. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. White, Jerry. Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London Between the Wars. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

CHAPTER 2

Wom en And Wag e s I n B RITAIN’S “CL AS SI C ” SLUMS ELLEN ROSS

When two New Jersey college students driving through New York City in the late 1970s made a wrong turn from Route 95 into the notorious South Bronx, they froze with terror. Well before Tom Wolfe made it world famous through his depiction of a parallel incident in his novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), this district was categorized as a derelict and depopulating zone of gun violence, despair, and arson.1 However, the college students had a guide in one of their recent course readings, Carol B. Stack’s All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community.2 Their recall of Stack’s vivid depiction of slum life reconfigured the South Bronx into a setting of sociable mothers, families, friends, and children cooperating to make ends meet. Stack’s book was part of a body of new feminist-​inspired work in anthropology and sociology in the 1970s that analyzed slums as spaces for more than inbred dysfunction and criminality, challenging the dominant view at that time as exemplified by Oscar Lewis’s “culture of poverty” approach to disadvantage.3 For these new urban-​poverty scholars, slums could be settings for warmth, mutual aid, pride in children, and care of elders. The students asked a resident for directions and drove on to the familiarity of New Jersey. Stack and her colleagues were not denying that lives in poverty were harsh or that districts where it was concentrated could be grim and dangerous. Instead, they took a position that was quite new at that time: along with “street corner” men,4 slums housed workingmen plus women, friends, mothers, and children. Most urban anthropological research projects in the United States at that time had begun through the scholar’s contact with local men of importance such as politicians or ministers; these connections invariably led researchers to male subjects. In Stack’s case, it was a female student at her own university who introduced her to the Midwestern US slum that became her research site. Also, Stack was pregnant when she began her research, and her son, as a baby and child, participated in the neighborhood sociability that his mother uncovered for her book. She did her research in kitchens, laundromats, and second-​hand clothing shops rather than on street corners. Men and trans people were indeed parts of the local

38   ELLEN ROSS networks, Stack discovered, but they participated in ways that most students of poverty had not understood—​by validating their membership by contributing help and goods to women-​centered grids of kin and friendship. Today such women often make up the backbone of community survival, as did their predecessors in the earlier history of North American and European slums. Districts with a “slumscape” of higgledy-​ piggledy housing and disorderly street arrangements nevertheless disclose a gendered pattern that is open to study. Stack’s was a pathbreaking exemplar of the promise of women’s and gender studies to enrich, clarify, or reconfigure research in many disciplines, and in the 1980s and early l990s, ideas about gender divisions and patriarchal power had a strong impact on the historical study of British working-​class communities.5 But social theory, especially that of Foucault, challenged the social-​scientific methodology that so many historians worked with, discouraging this kind of scholarship. When it was then revived in the 2000s it crystalized around a social imaginary less concerned with women’s history, more so with histories of gender, gender relationships, and sexuality. In today’s vibrant scholarship in many fields on extreme world poverty, gender is a sub-​field rather than a central concept;6 scholarship is weighted toward practical subjects like sewerage, housing construction, electrification, policing, the effectiveness of NGO interventions, health, or fertility. Certainly, studies focusing on women and girls as social actors in slums are plentiful, but they tend to be segregated in women’s and gender studies publications rather than being “mainstreamed” into the slum/​poverty studies field’s standard presentations of its knowledge. The conceptual value of gender in decoding slum life needs to be reasserted, and this proposition is demonstrated here by looking at historical research on the family and community life of the British poor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Clearly, the daily experience of poverty in liberal capitalist Britain differed significantly from that of today’s shantytowns and favelas. In industrial capitalist Britain, the poor lived mainly on wage labor, which gave community and family life a distinct framework. The liberal state in which they lived offered some services and stability. Today, however, both in the “developed” and the “underdeveloped” worlds, the “gig” economy—​ workers paid by the specific task or scrambling for odd jobs—​is increasingly important in shaping communities. Neoliberal states and many capitalists too have pulled out of municipal life. As Katherine Boo put it in her 2012 discussion of the harshness of life in the Mumbai shantytown that she calls Annawadi, bosses and wages are “anachronistic.”7 Women and gender need to be core categories in poverty research. Clearly, women make up the majority of the world’s very poor.8 “Drivers” such as domestic or village violence, loss of work or property, or a death often draw them from the countryside to the poorest districts of large cities or into improvised communities adjacent to megacities like Mumbai, Nairobi, or Rio de Janeiro. These migrants experience female-​specific forms of poverty and dislocation. Girls in the Kibera slum just outside Nairobi, for example, share with all of their neighbors the slum’s horrific sanitation, its overcrowding, and the stigma of living there. “Many people, especially from those poshy [sic] areas, look down on residents of Kibera,” wrote a sixteen-​year-​old girl. But in their own personal

Women and Wages    39 statements, the girls very often mention the prevalence of unwanted pregnancies, of rape, and of other forms of sexual and domestic violence. One angry teenager declared that violent men should be jailed or thrown “to the crocodiles.”9 In Ngangelizwe township in South Africa, to take another recent example, the economic and cultural devastation of many communities’ adults has led to grandmothers’ responsibility for the care of grandchildren as their own offspring` succumb to HIV disease, crime, or substance abuse. The township grandmothers survive on small government pensions, neighbors’ aid, and odd jobs, but their lives are dominated by the worry of educating their often-​ reluctant grandchildren—​a project that requires money and energy, and is thwarted by the utter failure of law enforcement and social services to keep drugs out of schools.10 A further illustration of the gendered resource needs of slum dwellers is access to water. Supplies of water in many of the world’s poorest Sub-​Saharan countries are declining, not only due to global warming but sometimes to government privatization programs.11 More than a quarter of Ghana’s urban population did not have access to clean and potable water in the 2012, for instance.12 Women’s groups in Tanzania have noted the enormous difference that water access makes in the lives of women compared to those of men. It is women and girls whose days consist of carrying water and then washing, wiping, and scrubbing with it. The care of infants demands extra water—​water access correlates with infant deaths and child health13—​and the practice in Tanzania of caring for HIV-​infected patients at home is another enormous claim on water supplies.14 A 2012 handbook titled Menstrual Hygiene Matters: A Resource for Improving Menstrual Hygiene Around the World emphasizes the crucial importance of decent water supplies in allowing girls to go to school and to maintain their social participation in the face of a problem—​menstruation—​that half of the world’s female population at any given time is coping with but is seldom on planners’ radar.15

Liberal versus Neoliberal Poverty The discussion of poverty and slum life in Britain before the First World War that follows focuses on the distinct ways in which women inhabited slum spaces well over a century ago. Placing historical slums in the same frame as shantytowns today not only “historicizes” the Victorian poor but also does the same for that generation of scholars who were grouped around the innovative social history journal History Workshop in the 1970s through the 1990s. In general, these historians of British poverty and working-​class life felt a deep sympathy for those they wrote about: their uncomfortable and overcrowded homes, long hours of backbreaking work whether in the home or at the workplace, the heartbreak of infants’ and children’s deaths, desperate periods of unemployment—​but also gambling, schooling, and union organizing. These historians supported the causes of the poor in their own time and assumed that in Britain, elsewhere in the developed world, and perhaps throughout the entire world, lives like theirs were becoming rare; the word “slum” itself was falling out of favor.

40   ELLEN ROSS But this did not happen. The most extreme forms of deprivation have lessened but hundreds of millions worldwide remain in great poverty and distress. They are products of neoliberal policies that have created astonishing concentrations of wealth; also of changes in forms of production, of population growth, and of failed and corrupt governments—​all exacerbated by the covid-​19 pandemic of 2020 and 2022. It seems that pre–​First World War British slum dwellers, notwithstanding their dire poverty, enjoyed advantages over, for example, the struggling inhabitants of today’s Annawadi, the improvised settlement of three thousand people on the outskirts of Mumbai that was thoughtfully recreated by Katherine Boo in the 2010s.16 Though unemployment was a grave threat for nineteenth-​century British workers, they were nonetheless a wage working population, more likely than the Annawadians to have reliable incomes. Even pre–​First World War British women, many of whom did not “work” in industry, were shaped by wage work, as they had worked before their marriages, and “wages” were structured culturally into marriage practices and household rhythms. And the British slum dwellers were also part of a liberal state that offered them some resources and protections such as a functioning system of elementary education after 1871, safety from some epidemic diseases, and a police force where corruption, though common, was not the rule. Today’s shantytown populations in the Global South often have very little access to the formal labor market presided over by capitalist employers; most work in the “unorganized sector” as servants, sorters and recyclers of waste materials, street sellers, or in such illegal trades as selling drugs and contraband. Their difficult lives were vividly encapsulated in Kaveri Gill’s remarkable 2010 study of solo scavengers, garbage collectors, and recyclers in two Indian cities—​workers at the very bottom of the social hierarchy.17 Gill invoked the Marxist economist Joan Robinson’s remark that while it is very bad to be exploited by a capitalist, what is far worse is the situation of millions today: “being exploited by no one at all.”18 To be sure, mega factories in Central America, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and elsewhere hire millions of workers at poverty wages, but a large and growing part of the world’s population lives without an employer’s demand for their labor. Victorian-​era British workers—​their “wage slavery” notwithstanding—​seem downright privileged compared to the inhabitants of Annawadi, where only six of the population of three thousand had permanent jobs.19 Others subsisted on temporary low-​waged work, thieving, scavenging and recycling, and waste picking near the airport. As Boo’s book begins, a disabled woman’s leg is badly burned, and police from the local station make brief appearances seeking a quick arrest, adding to their regular forays into the settlement to extort money. The absence of conventional northern hemisphere state services and functions multiplies the inhabitants’ struggles. There is an elementary school nearby, though a very poor one whose teachers did not show up regularly. The public hospital requires patients to supply their own medicines and supplies and doctors demand pay-​offs. The infant mortality rate in India as a whole was thirty-​five per thousand in 2016, far better than in Britain in 1900, though surely the tally is much higher for the Annawadi settlement.20 In Boo’s account, as a national election approaches, Congress Party workers come to install desperately needed sewers and then think the better

Women and Wages    41 of it and leave, the job undone. Journalists and animal rights activists pass through Annawadi for a few days after a carriage accident has killed two horses. A local political official and a Shiv Sena party fixer decide to help real estate developers lay claim to Annawadi property in a crooked “slum clearance” project, and then to help a corrupt politician defraud the federal government in an education scheme. To be sure, illegal, informal, non-​monetary and non-​waged activity accompanied poverty in Britain before 1914. A significant minority of male livelihoods in London’s Notting Dale district came from outside of the wage economy, according to census figures from the late nineteenth century; they were street entertainers; sellers of old clothing, vegetables, or fruit; or repairers of umbrellas, pots and pans, or furniture. But wage work for a capitalist—​who, in London, could be a small-​scale producer of trousers, shoes, or cabinets—​was the norm. Work of this kind defined the loves, the fears, and the calculations of the working-​class populations. The struggle for wages, even if successful, meant overwork’s damages to bodies: injuries, chronic pain, occupational diseases, premature aging. The waged employment available to the nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century British poor varied by region—​construction, mining, ship building, textile weaving or spinning, making sweets and biscuits, sewing shoes or clothing, preparing fur for hats, building railroad locomotives. Families—​children, women, and men—​ pieced wages together wherever they could be found. In Lancashire textile towns families could live decently when both husbands and wives worked full-​time in the mills. In London, male jobs that were seasonal, such as construction or dock work for men, might be paired in the offseason with wages for women in commercial laundries or confectionary factories. Families who had struggled to feed and clothe batches of infants and small children in an era when birth rates for the poor remained high, counted on these children as teenagers—​girls as well as boys—​to share their wages so as to give their parents greater ease. Schoolchildren, prohibited from jobs during school hours, also earned money before school and on Saturdays. No wages at all for more than a few weeks meant doom for a household.

Scrambling for Wages in London before the First World War The physical settings of slum life in late nineteenth-​century London and other British cities were the contours of local poverty cultures. London expanded horizontally rather than vertically in the nineteenth century, and buildings seldom exceeded three stories, but the poorest districts were nonetheless overcrowded because of their populations’ need to live near waged jobs or substitutes for them. About a tenth of London men worked in the building trades, while another large group, 8.3 percent of the male workforce, were “general unskilled” workers.21 Workers whose wages were irregular, or whose pay was low, were dependent on personal connections in their immediate

42   ELLEN ROSS environs; families could buttress an unreliable wage for a time through a range of neighborhood resources: credit from shopkeepers, wives’ knowledge of cheap markets and sales, earnings by children, aid from nearby relatives, or a relationship with one or more local charities. Thus, for security, workers needed to live within a space that could be crossed on foot in an hour or two. These districts were thus densely populated and shabby—​“an affront to civic dignity,” as one promoter of clearances put it.22 The draconian London slum clearances carried out by acts of Parliament in the 1870s disrupted subsistence for tens of thousands of London workers. The acts were intended by the Conservative government as a way to eliminate overcrowded “rookeries” and to improve the habits of the poor. But by the 1880s, the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes concluded that overcrowding in central London had not decreased but simply relocated. Evicted tenants had packed into nearby streets for the resources they could offer.23 Typical jerry-​built London housing meant that workers lived at close quarters. One common plan consisted of small attached dwellings (locally called “terraces”) with two rooms per floor and a kitchen and scullery in back, and with earth-​closet toilets in a yard behind—​shared by several households and allegedly kept clean by the residents. These houses could be comfortable or miserable depending to a great extent on how many people lived in them; one, two, three, or four families might live in each house. A definition of overcrowding first formulated in 1891 defined it as more than two adults per room with children under ten counting as half, and babies not counting. According to this definition more than 11 percent of the population of England and Wales was overcrowded in 1891, 16 percent in London. Over a third of the inhabitants of the Finsbury district of inner East London were overcrowded.24 An attendance officer for the London School Board reported in 1884 that there were “at least 60,000 families in London” residing in only one room.25 Narrow streets and closely packed lodgings had the advantage of allowing women to watch playing children outdoors while doing household chores, and contrast favorably with favela spaces and architecture, which often restrict mothers’ views of the outdoors.26 Among the scourges for the inhabitants of poor districts throughout the United Kingdom—​and shared with slum dwellers today—​were vermin (bedbugs, lice, fleas, and rats mentioned the most often), insufficient and filthy (mainly earth-​closet) toilets, and irregular and distant sources of water that meant dragging buckets and basins long distances. Alcoholism was another constant danger; heavy drinkers, usually husbands, not only provoking street fights and domestic violence, but more chronically, siphoning off money desperately needed for family food and shelter. Mitigating the hardships of slum life in London, at least by the 1880s, were several districts’ relatively stable populations. The presence of relatives and long-​term neighbors provided security and friendliness well into the 1950s in some districts, as described so vividly for the East London district of Bethnal Green in Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London.27 Remarkable levels of endogamy—​ people contracting marriages with local partners often literally from the same street—​ are further evidence of the supportive and tight societies that some neighborhoods could become.

Women and Wages    43

Women in the Slum It is not an exaggeration to claim that women ruled Victorian and Edwardian London’s slums. One historian refers to the “hidden matriarchy” through which women, especially older ones, shaped community norms.28 Younger married women, scrambling to care for multiple small children and to convert inadequate incomes into food and fuel, had less leisure and community influence than their elders. The primary neighborhood connection was talk—​a term that is often erroneously downgraded to “gossip”—​and the poorest districts with their small and overcrowded residential quarters usually had higher proportions of outdoor sociability than the better-​off ones. The bulk of talk took place among small groups of women at front doorsteps or in shopping districts. Men were often scarce during the day, at workplaces, pubs, or on long treks from work to home.29 For scholars of slum life today it is instructive to consider some of the distinct ways in which women and the “hidden matriarchy” shaped poverty in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Britain. The caste-​and occupational taboos so many shantytown residents struggle with today30 took such forms for slum mothers in Britain as the shame of having to dress their children in cut-​down and ill-​fitting clothing, or the mortification at the head lice that got children publicly identified, shorn, or removed from school. In the public market mothers bought forms of meat set aside for the poor to buy: “cag-​mag” in Birmingham, sheep’s heads, or very cheap “faggots,” sausages whose “low” ingredients were hidden by a casing. In Salford poor wives bought “slink”—​prematurely born calves—​and “broxy,” sheep who had died of diseases or accidents. (In Britain horsemeat was a taboo protein.)31 Another component of shame was pawning, a signature element of poor women’s survival systems, one that made it possible to use everyday goods to generate income to tide a household over between wages.32 Groups of women sometimes went to pawnbrokers together, and in some districts there were specialists who negotiated others’ pawning for a small fee; they packaged goods attractively and bargained forcefully with pawnbrokers’ assistants. The embarrassment associated with pawning was partly neutralized by the neighborhood and music hall jokes that clustered around it. Pawning was a procedure geared to a waged population, a way of making a male wage last longer, and indeed men’s Sunday suits were standard items pledged—​pledged on Monday morning and retrieved for the weekend. Britain’s industrial north—​dense with wage earners—​had the greatest concentrations of pawnshops, 27 percent of the country’s total in 1870: Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham were the cities with the largest number. Regular Monday pawning was based on the assumption—​not always correct—​of another wage arriving the following Friday. When interest charged over a period of months is calculated, pawning was an expensive practice. After three months, the interest on an item left unredeemed would total thirteen shillings when a pound—​twenty shillings—​was an average male weekly wage.33 Yet pawnshop interest in Britain was government regulated,

44   ELLEN ROSS and pawnbrokers may well have been less exploitative than dishonest moneylenders in today’s slums or than the predatory payday lenders that are allowed to cluster now in the poorest districts of US cities. The narrative of stigma could be reframed around “respectability,” a valued antidote to shame and one in which women were central. Cleaning was its essence. Respectability was announced inside and outside of homes with swept yards, clean windows, and tidy washing hung outdoors. Communities like the textile town of Salford in the 1920s and 1930s as described by Robert Roberts turned themselves out in a collective Friday-​night effort to scrub floors and hearths, blacken grates, polish household ornaments, wash curtains, and to clean houses’ front steps.34 A woman could also demonstrate that she was not “low” through her body: dress, gestures, movements, childcare style, and language. Households with ambitions to respectability did not allow their children to spend time in the streets with playmates who were “dirty” or who “ran wild.”35 Respectable married women wore aprons, bonnets, and cloaks, and avoided being seen outdoors talking with other women, or, worse, sitting on doorsteps. The epithet “whore” was a widely used denunciation and had such power that it was a central defamation complaint in London police courts.36 The obverse of intrusive gossip was the talk that enabled neighborhood assistance. Mutual aid, which seemingly exists in all slum communities, was organized through women by neighborhood or sub-​neighborhood. This was not only true in the settled London districts where migration had slowed, but also in places where few inhabitants knew each other,37 shaped by what sociologists in the 1950s called the “neighbor role.”38 Children were particularly frequent objects of collective assistance, and also agents of social cohesion. They might be fed if hungry, taken in for the night, and supervised by other mothers in the street. Despite their occasional “walloping” by a neighbor for misbehavior, London children were viewed as trusting, expecting “to experience kindness at the hand of all they meet.”39 It was usually children who were delegated to bring gifts of dinners to needy neighbors.40 In some specific instances documented in Anna Davin’s exhaustive study of London children before 1914, crying children were comforted by local adults, a female neighbor snatched a six-​year-​old from a kidnapper, and watermen on the Thames watched over swimming boys. A South London magistrate estimated that neighbors’ offerings and shopkeepers’ credit could sustain a deserted mother—​cut off from a wage—​for about two weeks, though other estimates were more sanguine.41 The assistance a neighborhood could offer a deserted woman or one with an injured or imprisoned husband included taking children into their homes, shopping, doing laundry, lending small sums of money, and bringing food. The principle, as it was with the Midwesterners in Carol Stack’s study, was reciprocity. It was assumed that what was given would come back, though perhaps from someone else.42 A Poor Law report from 1870 marveled at the “interchange of charitable assistance among the poor in London,” which went so smoothly and seemed to proceed without dishonesty or dispute.43 The neighborhood’s resources were just adequate enough and well enough targeted to those in need that it would often take more than one disaster actually to break up a London household; only a series of wage losses through firings,

Women and Wages    45 deaths, or illnesses could drive a family to the Poor Law or the voluntary child rescue agencies. There were, of course, women who did not take part in neighborhood sharing—​out of shyness, orneriness, having something to hide, or a sense of superiority. But this was a risky stance. As Stack’s informants said in so many ways, contributing to others was a safeguard for the time you too would need something: food, diapers, shelter, a working television, money, a ride somewhere. Slum mutual aid in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, as in Stack’s Midwestern city, evolved through daily social intercourse; “gossip” was the channel through which information and aid moved: an ill parent, hungry children, loss of a job, domestic abuse from which a wife needed immediate rescue. As the 1894 story “Behind the Shade,” by Arthur Morrison, illustrates, a mother and daughter too “respectable” to participate in neighborhood gossip or sharing—​as indicated by the display of artificial fruit in their curtained window—​take a life-​or-​death risk. The fictional pair starve to death, though neighbors if aware of their poverty might have brought in fuel, meals, or even charity workers.44 To be sure, there were districts and individual streets where life was more violent and less orderly than the “hidden matriarchy” image suggests, and where fighting and stealing outweighed mutual aid. The Flower and Dean Street neighborhood in Whitechapel from the 1840s through the mid-​1890s, its original eighteenth-​century three-​story buildings falling down, was packed with what were called common lodging houses—​where dormitory beds were rented mainly to single people by the night, and thieves and prostitutes were numerous.45 Lodging house residents’ thefts of each other’s property occupied a great deal of police and court time. A woman who lived in a mainly Irish district in west London remembered that on Saturday night children would amuse themselves by visiting the jail and jeering at people imprisoned for drunkenness, while whole families could stand on their doorstep and be entertained by watching the fights that broke out up and down the street.46 In Campbell Road, a notorious slum in London’s Holloway’s district, tenants stole from each other, and there was plenty of fighting and heavy drinking. In the 1920s the new job opportunities for young women created a new kind of family conflict between mother and daughter, as slum mothers tried to claim girls’ wages as they had always done, and girls resisted. More than once, a Campbell Road mother pawned her daughters’ newly purchased stylish clothing for drink money.47 The research done by Jerry White on this notorious street also showed, not surprisingly, a dearth of respectable “matriarchs” there, and of motherly attention in general, a gap that a number of voluntary organizations attempted to fill in the interwar decades.48 In the English case, marriage and community life were shaped by wage labor. The husband as wage earner and provider meshed with this stage of industrial capitalism in Britain; the father as “provider” was a concept that organized male workers often used to strengthen their bargaining positions. True, the male as the sole breadwinner was not universal in late nineteenth-​century Britain. In textile towns such as Blackburn, Preston, and Macclesfield, women and children worked in industry as well as men, and all income was shared.49 All over Britain young people worked for wages during their

46   ELLEN ROSS teens. Figuratively married women were also wage workers displayed by the custom—​ dominant in London—​of husbands paying wives what were called weekly “wages.” The wife’s “wage” was a portion of her husband’s weekly earnings, the men keeping “pocket money” for themselves to spend on beer, tobacco, or whatever they chose. The wife’s money was considered entirely hers for running the household, and husbands very often knew little about it. Wives living under this system might never know how much the husband was actually making, and some women got the same weekly amount whether they had one or seven children to feed, and without regard to a husband’s wage increases. Wives could enlarge their “wage” through such informal employment as taking in laundry or doing cleaning for better-​off neighbors, or by pawning household goods.50 Some also took waged jobs themselves, especially when husbands’ work was seasonal.51 The childcare and housework that were women’s “job” in the home constituted heavy labor, analogous to the work of many husbands. One common female task, for example, invokes the exertion needed to bathe several children, as described by historian Anna Davin: Bathrooms were rare. Luckier families, with access to a copper [a large and immovable kettle] in a scullery, used that, either filling it and heating the water specially, or re-​using the water from the final rinse on washday. For those in upstairs lodgings with no water laid on, bath-​night meant endless trips by the mother and older children with jugs, basins or buckets, and the long business of heating the water in kettles and pans, to fill a galvanized iron tub in front of the fire.52

The wage had an emotional as well as a material dimension. The practice of separating male/​female domestic responsibilities, resources, and spaces was partly based on biology (women bore children), but it was of course also structured by labor market conventions that reserved most jobs for men and by national customs about the roles of women and of men. This system led to intense ties between children and their mothers—​poverty and the scramble to wring money and food from a male wage being the powerful force that brought them together. Children recognized the superhuman efforts mothers made on their behalf. Mothers and their children were often literally separate survival units from husbands/​fathers. Even likeable and kindly men, completely unaware of their privileges, lived at a distinct remove from their families; violent, surly, or stingy men were objects of anger and sometimes aggression from wives and children who would steal from them (especially when the men were drunk) or grab their change at the public house. Brutal husbands risked attacks by their children (even small ones could bite) and might be punished more severely the day that their sons had grown big enough to beat them up. Living on a male wage turned millions of poor women into drudges—​ill, old, and worn out by their thirties, as contemporary social workers and philanthropists sympathetically noted. By the same token the “pocket money” system freed many low-​waged men from some of the discomfort, hunger, and humiliation for which their employers

Women and Wages    47 were actually responsible; it also sheltered married men to a considerable extent from the consequences of the unprotected sex they took for granted and which many women tried to shirk by sitting up until their husbands fell asleep or aborting pregnancies. A London social worker in the early twentieth century bitterly critiqued the “pocket money” wage system whose consequences she had observed for many years. Anna Martin, a suffragist affiliated with the large Methodist Bermondsey Settlement in South London in the early twentieth century, believed that a large proportion of men in her very poor dockside district “underpaid” their wives. She likened wives to “sweated” laborers, and declared their “ruthless” husbands as bad as any boss.53 Martin went so far as to parse the lack of labor militancy among London working men to the superhuman efforts and sacrifices of their wives and children;54 male wage earners were weekly getting a cash “bonus” not from their employers but through the struggles and deprivations of their proletarianized wives and children. Their common fate as wives crystalized ties among neighborhood women. They had bonds as mothers trying to sustain children but also as “workers” who needed to cope with a “boss” who could be surly, unpredictable, and violent—​or who could simply abandon them. Accounts of husbands’ attacks on their wives show local women attempting to intervene in these altercations once they became extreme.55 Women colluded also to escape from husbands on the rampage and to protect children from them. One memoir cited by Anna Davin described a local and apparently regular procedure when drunken men arriving home from the pub threatened to molest their daughters. The mother would try to lock the girls in a bedroom and if no locked room was available “passed the girls over the back walls for the neighbours to look after them until the husband had slept it off.”56

The Liberal and the Neoliberal State Neoliberal theorists and far-​right politicians today, eager to drain the resources of nation states, are attacking the small and large publicly supplied services, food, monies, protections, and regulations that enable the survival of the poor, and also ease the lives of the rest of the population. Entering a dialogue with the scholarship on workers in Great Britain in the two generations before the First World War reveals not only their gender-​specific modes of coping with poverty but also provides a glimpse of some the ways in which state policies and monies assisted them. The widely hated English Poor Law system was founded in 1834 as a last resort for the destitute and was reluctantly and modestly improved later in the century. But Britain’s liberal state (including its local governments) expanded its reach into slum communities both to moralize them and to promote the inhabitants’ health and safety.57 The mothers-​and-​children segment of families became the main beneficiaries of new government policies, many initiated by local governments, that both policed and supported the households of the poor. They rebuilt drains, vaccinated infants, funded school dinners, and offered a system of

48   ELLEN ROSS education—​flawed but more efficient than that of several hollowed-​out American states today. Every London borough had a medical officer who kept tabs on health hazards. Municipal councils hired “health visitors” to check homes where there were new babies; some gave away carbolic soap disinfecting powder.58 Civil society too had a hand in the improved welfare of the poor. Aiding the poor was an attractive option for rich young people and well-​off adult women, and sometimes a good business practice. Charity and public service had prestige, even excitement, for some of the wealthy. Birmingham schoolchildren wore clothing and shoes provided by the Daily Mail newspaper or by the police-​aided Association for Clothing Children. Charities provided education for disabled children and eyeglasses for school children. Wealthy sponsors established and populated settlement houses in the slums specializing in free activities for children, country holidays, and classes, concerts, and exhibits for adults. Rather than selling the land to speculators, some of these do-​gooders campaigned to preserve spaces in cities as public parks such as London’s Hampstead Heath. Compared with nineteenth-​century Londoners, inhabitants—​infants and adults—​ of Annawadi and its analogues today may have better healthcare and possibly better health. They benefit to some extent from modern vaccines and medicines; some receive efficient hospital care. UNICEF and NGOs of many kinds may offer aid. But the services normally provided by local or national governments are in short supply: firefighters, electrification, sanitation of all kinds, paved streets, well-​staffed schools, construction standards, a structure of law, and policing. Britain itself has not continued into the present the welfare trajectory that was growing up in the nineteenth century and which led to a functioning welfare state in the twentieth century, particularly between 1945 and the late 1970s. In the fall of 2018, after eight years of Conservative government, Philip Alson, a UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty, toured the United Kingdom and found the country falling back to the poverty levels of the 1800s. As opposed to the 30 percent of the 1900 population classed as poor, the proportion was now about 20 percent—​despite the country’s staggering wealth. Even the hated workhouse had been recently restored in a “digital and sanitized version” by the neoliberal government’s Department of Work and Pensions. Victorian-​era-​style soup kitchens and homelessness were on the rise; charitable food banks are a more recent innovation. As historian Pat Thane presents it in her history of the United Kingdom since 1900, the continued welfare advances so many of us expected just a few decades ago are being quickly reversed in Britain—​the world’s first industrial nation—​and worldwide.59

Notes 1. Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987). Like other slums, the South Bronx lacked basic municipal services like police and firefighters, sanitation, decent housing, and healthcare. But it was the birthplace of hip-​hop music, break dancing, and graffiti street art, according to local New York radio station WNYC. See https://​www.wnyc.org/​story/​89709-​south-​bronx-​hip-​hop-​year-​zero/​

Women and Wages    49 2. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Also: Bettylou Valentine, Hustling and Other Hard Work: Life Styles in the Ghetto (New York: Free Press, 1978); and Nici Nelson, “‘Women Must Help Each Other’: The Operation of Personal Networks among Buzaa Beer Brewers in Mathare Valley, Kenya,” in Women United, Women Divided: Cross-​Cultural Perspectives on Female Solidarity, ed. Patricia Caplan and Janet M. Bujra (London: Tavistock, 1978). 3. Among many works by Oscar Lewis, see The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, originally published 1961 (reprint, New York: Vintage, 2011); and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Random House, 1966). 4. The classic study of this kind is Elliot Lebow and Hylan Lewis, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little Brown, 1967). Social scientists have continued to produce community studies of urban poverty using interviews, participant observation, public documents, and so on. The emphasis in US scholarship shifted away from poverty as culture to structural poverty in the late eighties. Crucial in this shift was William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; 2nd ed., 2012). 5. See for example Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–​65; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-​Class Women, 1890–​1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); Carl Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–​1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-​Class Credit (London: Methuen, 1983); Leonore Davidoff, “Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Case of Hannah Cullwick and A. J. Munby,” in Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class, ed. Leonore Davidoff (New York: Routledge, 1995), essay first published in 1979; Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–​1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Melanie Tebbutt, Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-​Class Neighbourhoods (Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995); Andrew August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work, and Poverty in Late-​Victorian London (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999). 6. One vivid exception to this statement is provided by feminist geography, a good example of which is the innovative journal Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography. 7. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (New York: Random House, 2012), 253. 8. For one United Nations estimate, which points out that poverty correlates with different points in women’s life cycle, see http://​www.unwo​men.org/​en/​news/​stor​ies/​2017/​11/​news-​ un-​women-​and-​the-​world-​bank-​unv​eil-​new-​data-​analy​sis-​on-​women-​and-​pove​rty. 9. Light Box: Expressions of Hope from Young Women in the Kibera Slum of Nairobi, ed. Emily Verellen (New York: Carolina for Kibera, 2006), 23, 25, 26, 42, 98. 10. Sinethemba Sidloyi, “Elderly, Poor and Resilient: Survival Strategies of Elderly Women in Female-​Headed Households: An Intersectionality Perspective,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 47, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 379–​396. In 2009 the unemployment rate in South Africa was an extraordinary 59 percent (381). 11. Issdaka Kanton Osumanu, “Health Challenges of Urban Poverty and Water Supply in Northern Ghana,” in The Social Life of Water, ed. John R. Wagner (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 159. 12. Ibid., 167.

50   ELLEN ROSS 13. Ibid., 175, Fig. 8.6. 14. Rebecca Brown, “Unequal Burden: Water Privatisation and Women’s Human Rights in Tanzania,” Gender and Development 18, no. 1 (March 2010): 59–​68. 15. Sarah House, Thérèse Mahon, and Sue Cavill, Menstrual Hygiene Matters: A Resource for Improving Menstrual Hygiene Around the World (New York: WaterAid, 2012). Internet resource. https://​wash​matt​ers.water​aid.org 16. Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. 17. Kaveri Gill, Of Poverty and Plastic: Scavenging and Scrap Trading Entrepreneurs in India’s Urban Informal Economy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010). 18. Ibid., 123. 19. Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, 6. 20. Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births): https://​data.worldb​ank.org/​indica​tor/​ SP.DYN.IMRT.IN 21. August, Poor Women’s Lives, 52. 22. James A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 11. 23. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971), 162–​194; Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance, 111. 24. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1815–​1985, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1978), 145. 25. Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–​1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), chap. 3. 26. One example: Yomi Oruwari, “Planners, Officials, and Low Income Women and Children in Nigerian Cities: Divergent Perspectives over Housing and Neighborhoods,” Canadian Journal of African Studies /​Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines 37, no. 2/​3 (2003): 396–​ 410, 403. 27. Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1957). 28. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 12, 24, 28. 29. Tebbutt, Women’s Talk?, chap. 2 30. Sharply observed and presented by Gill in Of Poverty and Plastic. 31. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 65. 32. Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet. 33. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 74, 77. 34. Ibid., 127. A classic source on respectability and social gradations in a textile town is Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971). 35. Ellen Ross, “ ‘Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep’: Respectability in Pre–​World War I London Neighborhoods,” International Labor and Working-​Class History 27 (Spring 1985): 39–​59. 36. Ibid. 37. Roberts, Woman’s Place, 186–​197. 38. The “neighbors” and “the neighbor role” remain subjects of research and study in many academic fields, as they touch on race segregation and urban housing issues. Earlier, the subject often involved the accommodation of residents to multistory housing. See Peter McGahan, “The Neighbor Role and Neighboring in a Highly Urban Area,” Sociological

Women and Wages    51 Quarterly 13, no. 3 (Summer 1972): 397–​408; and Yona Ginsburg and Arzo Churchman, “The Pattern and Meaning of Neighbor Relations in High Rise Housing in Israel,” Human Ecology 13, no. 4 (December 1985): 467–​484. 39. Davin, Growing Up Poor, 57. 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, Parliamentary Papers 1912–​1913, Vol. XVIII, p. 91, testimony of J. Rose, Metropolitan Police Magistrate, Tower Bridge. 42. Roberts, Woman’s Place, 187–​191. 43. Davin, Growing Up Poor, 59. 44. Arthur Morrison, “Behind the Shade,” in Tales of Mean Streets (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895). 45. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: ‘A Human Awful Wonder of God’ (London; Jonathan Cape 2007), 323–​325. On children’s experience of overcrowding: Davin, Growing Up Poor, chap. 3. 46. Oral history interview with Mrs. Winifred Prentice, born in 1905 in the Kensal Green district of London. Interviewed by Raphael Samuel in 1974; used with the interviewer’s permission. 47. Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1986); on mothers and daughters, see White’s chap. 7. For White’s interesting later reflections on this study and for comments on the book from those who lived there, see his “Revisiting Campbell Bunk,” in Spaces of the Poor: Perspectives of Cultural Sciences on Urban Slum Areas and Their Inhabitants, ed. Hans-​Christian Petersen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 135–​146. 48. White, Worst Street in North London. 49. Sara Horrell and Deborah Oxley, “Crust or Crumb? Intrahousehold Resource Allocation and Male Breadwinning in Late Victorian Britain,” Economic History Review, New Series, 52, no. 3 (August 1999): 494–​522; 495. 50. Ross, Love and Toil, 76–​78. 51. August deals with female wage earning in Poor Women’s Lives, chaps. 2 and 3. 52. Davin, Growing Up Poor, 51. 53. Anna Martin, Mothers in Mean Streets; or, The Toad under the Harrow, pamphlet (London: United Suffragists, n.d. [1914–​1917]). 54. Ibid., 16–​18. 55. Nancy Tomes, “‘A Torrent of Abuse’: Crimes of Violence between Working-​Class Men and Women in London, 1840–​1875,” Journal of Social History 11 (Spring 1978): 329–​345; Ellen Ross, “‘Fierce Questions and Taunts’: Married Life in Working-​Class London, 1870–​1914,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 575–​602. 56. Davin, Growing Up Poor, 60. 57. George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–​1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State: Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800–​1945 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–​1914 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1993); and Susan D. Pennybacker, A Vision for London, 1889–​1914: Labour, Everyday Life and the LCC Experiment (London: Routledge, 1995). 58. Chinn, They Worked All Their Lives, 123–​124.

52   ELLEN ROSS 59. Ceylan Yeginsu, “Austerity Program in Britain Has Inflicted ‘Great Misery,’ Says U.N. Poverty Expert,” The New York Times, May 22, 2019, p. A11; Pat Thane, Divided Kingdom: A History of Britain, 1900 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Bibliography August, Andrew. Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work, and Poverty in Late-​Victorian London. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Boo, Katherine. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House, 2012. Chinn, Carl. They Worked All Their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England, 1880–​1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988. Davin, Anna. Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–​1914. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996. Davin, Anna. “Imperialism and Motherhood.” History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 9–​65. Gill, Kaveri. Of Poverty and Plastic: Scavenging and Scrap Trading Entrepreneurs in India’s Urban Informal Economy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. Harris, José. Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–​1914. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1993. House, Sarah, Thérèse Mahon, and Sue Cavill, Menstrual Hygiene Matters: A Resource for Improving Menstrual Hygiene Around the World. London: WaterAid, 2012. Martin, Anna. Mothers in Mean Streets; or, The Toad under the Harrow, pamphlet. London: United Suffragists, n.d. [1914–​1917]. Roberts, Robert. The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1971. Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–​1918. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Ross, Ellen. “‘Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep’: Respectability in Pre–​World War I London Neighborhoods,” International Labor and Working-​Class History 27 (Spring 1985): 39–​59. Stack, Carol B. All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic Books, 1974. Tebbutt, Melanie. Women’s Talk? A Social History of ‘Gossip’ in Working-​Class Neighbourhoods, 1880–​1960. Aldershot, Hants: Scolar Press, 1995. Young, Michael, and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1957.

CHAPTER 3

THE INTI MAT E RE L ATIONSHIP BET WE E N SLUM S AND RAC IA L SEGREGAT I ON A South African Case Study VIVIAN BICKFORD-​S MITH

Perhaps the most notable feature of academic work on “the slum” in South African history is its ostensible rarity. It is as if historians of South African cities in recent times have not dared use the term, or at least not in the titles of their projects and publications. A rare exception can be found in the early-​career work of the historical geographer Susan Parnell. This stemmed from research completed for a PhD in 1993, overtly on the slums of inner Johannesburg in the early twentieth century.1 Yet Parnell’s work has remained an exception that proves the rule among South African urban historiography.2 Certainly, there is a considerable body of literature on areas within South African cities that were once dubbed slums by many contemporary commentators. This is a literature that is especially rich for inner-​city places and communities that no longer exist: often inhabitants were removed, and gentrification of existing housing stock followed; or removal accompanied the demolition of almost all the old buildings with others built in their stead, or with the land left vacant. Places destroyed in this way include District Six in Cape Town and Sophiatown in Johannesburg.3 The destruction of buildings or communities (or both) was justified as “slum” clearance, as progress, the places themselves demonized by the deployment of negative, pathologizing language.4 In South Africa, most inhabitants of places designated “slums” from the nineteenth century onward were removed far from the city center, ever further over time, and were black. In the apartheid era, these were people legally assigned to a racial categorization under the Population Registration Act (1950). The majority

54   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH of those removed from District Six, for instance, were officially classified as Colored (or Mixed Race); in the case of Sophiatown, as Africans. In other words, in the South African context, slum clearance was commonly a synonym-​cum-​euphemism for racial segregation. In the case of Sophiatown, this association was made all too obvious by the (predominantly Afrikaner) National Party government, who not only proclaimed the area for whites-​only occupation (as was also the case with District Six) but also renamed it Triomf (Triumph). It is worthwhile exploring further how and why areas of deprivation and poor housing in South Africa came to be imagined as slums through the prism of race. It seems that such imagining played a major role in the creation and maintenance of racial categorization and consequent segregation. South Africa was created as a country in 1910, through legislation that united the two British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the ex-​Boer republics of the Transvaal (South African Republic) and Orange Free State. It was in the two British colonies that the term “slum” and accompanying imagery were first deployed because of the networks that linked them to ideologies of the mother country, and also because this was where modern urbanization with its concomitant social disorders was first located. Up to the 1850s, such urbanization was still very limited, though growing faster after the British seizure of the Cape from the Dutch in 1806. The colony’s economic fortunes were now tied to that of the world’s first industrial power. Yet before the discovery of diamonds and gold in the interior (what South Africanist historians have dubbed “the Mineral Revolution”) in the second half of the century, urbanization remained slow. The Cape Colony’s capital Cape Town’s population was only around 30,000 by the 1860s, but at that stage it was by far the largest urban center in southern Africa. Cape Town was big enough to have produced a more spatially distinct social geography. This included the acceleration of British-​immigrant-​fueled and almost exclusively white middle-​class suburbanization, and for parts of the inner-​city area to be inhabited by the cosmopolitan poor of a wide variety of (often mixed) African, European, and Asian origins. British immigration and anglicization also meant that the town could support an English-​language local newspaper called the Cape Argus, established in 1857. It was the Argus that undertook early South African investigations of housing conditions of the poor that evolved into the discovery of the “slum.” One notable example of the Argus’s early urban exploration consisted of four articles late in 1858 on “The Dwellings of the Poor,” published in the wake of a serious smallpox outbreak in Cape Town. This was a moment when one might have expected racial scapegoating to play a major role in the newspaper’s findings.5 Yet their collective argument was to blame the municipality for allowing public open land to fall into the hands of speculative developer-​landlords. It was these “capitalists” following their “instincts,” not the tenants, who were held responsible for the often-​dreadful housing conditions described. Landlords had spent as little as possible on building materials, drainage, water provision, adequate ventilation, or surrounding pavements. A certain J. A. H. Wicht, owner of 374 small homes or just under 10 percent of the municipality’s entire housing stock, was singled out for criticism. The attention of the paper’s readers was

Intimate Relationship   55 drawn to his claustrophobic and overcrowded block of houses, built around a square close to the port’s landing stages where “all the filth gathered.” In a wry reference to the Crimean War, Wicht’s buildings were nicknamed “Sebastopol,” a sobriquet that lasted several more decades. Two years later a further set of Argus pieces with the heading “Our Lower Ten Thousand,” under the byline “Alpha,” were markedly different in their introduction of a complex pseudo-​Darwinian ladder of racial categorization and distinction of the poor. This difference is not immediately apparent at the beginning of the first article, which summarizes Disraeli’s description of the London poor taken from Sybil.6 After all, the novel did contain the sentiment that those in power have but the one major duty, namely securing the social welfare of the poor.7 Yet the first article later contained a vignette of a “Paterfamilias” accompanying his daughter by carriage (presumably from the middle-​ class suburbs) to a ball in the seemingly foreign land that is the city center, near where the poor reside. The daughter alights “clinging to papa’s arm, through the crowd of half-​ lighted swarthy faces on either side, and hears behind her strange guttural expressions of admiration, as the delicate feet, encased in white kid slippers, twinkle up the steps, and vanish within the entrance.” The piece ends with the statement that those with swarthy faces making the guttural sounds are “actually fellow-​creatures with ourselves.”8 The two subsequent articles in the series examine these “fellow-​creatures” in more detail. In doing so, they find three supposed racial groups who are described and stereotyped at some length. The first and supposedly superior of these are “Malays” (Muslims, mainly ex-​slaves and descendants, many of Southeast Asian origin), who are “prospering”; another is the “pure negro” (Bantu-​speaking African), who is “merry” and surviving reasonably well in unfamiliar urban circumstances; and third, the “mixed-​ breeds” or “Capemen,” who are described as “perishing.” These Capemen, according to Alpha, constituted Cape Town’s “dangerous classes,” a colonial echoing of an early British mother country use of this term, because “there, you think, is the natural food of small-​pox, and typhus, and cholera, and whatever other monsters are bred out of filth and low feeding.” Yet Alpha stops short of suggesting that this section of the poor is actively dangerous or amount to a hopeless residuum, concluding rather that it consisted of “the classes whose material conditions we must look after, or we shall suffer for the neglect in our own persons . . . the classes through whom the subtle disease is generated, by which the white population suffers.”9 The Argus was propagating the association of race with particular characteristics akin to a human ladder of attributes and failings. One supposed failing of members of the “weaker” (partly because “mixed”) race was that they struggled to survive in the city, ate badly, and were susceptible to diseases that they might pass to whites. However, there was still no mention of the term slum, or accusation that the poor were responsible for their own dire material circumstances. Significantly, there was as yet also no call for racial segregation. To the contrary, a lead article in the Argus in 1865 overtly argued against those missionaries who wanted segregation (one of the earliest uses of the term) to protect Africans from corruption by whites, by saying that contact with “European vices and virtues” was inevitable, and

56   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH exposure to the good and bad was necessary for African “growth.”10 These sentiments reflected those of its likely writer, the editor and owner of the newspaper, Saul Solomon. They were certainly in keeping with his support for the post-​emancipation principle of equality before the law and the non-​racial franchise (with a low economic threshold) that accompanied the granting of Representative Government at the Cape in 1853 and Responsible Government in 1872. This continued to be the position of the Argus up to the 1880s, even after “slum,” a term by now circulating round the anglophone world, had become part of its discourse in the late 1860s. In 1867, for instance, Solomon’s newspaper featured another investigation into the housing of the poor, as the Cape Colony and its capital were struggling with a prolonged period of economic depression. This time the articles were titled “The Back Slums.”11 Each article attempted to take the reader on an imaginary tour of different slum areas. Like later international iterations of slummer-​journalism, the intention was to shock the previously indifferent among the middle-​classes into action, while simultaneously and pruriently to entertain them. Suburban readers were vicariously taken to small houses in St John’s Street, to the east of the city center, which were said to contain between forty and eighty inhabitants each, “filled to overflowing with Malays [Muslims] and other coloured people . . . who are never free from fever.”12 It was also alleged (without any evidence) that though Muslims were cleanly dressed they did not mind dirt in their houses. Like Alpha’s articles, there was racialization and negative stereotyping. Yet the inhabitants’ race was still not made the key causal factor in explaining the condition in which they lived. Much of the description of these conditions, bar some names of places, could have come from many cities in the anglophone world of the 1860s. Thus, near the intersection of Strand and Waterkant Streets, on the western edge of the city center, there were “a vile lot of passages as could be imagined”;13 or, in Glynn Square to the east you could find a “saturnalia of prostitutes and thieves of the worst description”;14 or, near the Amsterdam Battery on the sea front, people lived in burrows “made out of filth.”15 The main thrust of “The Back Slums” series was that these conditions threatened all in the city with disease, but that the blame lay first and foremost with the municipal council, its neglectful inaction, and not with some biological pathology of the poor. The town clerk was labeled in Dickensian fashion a “Mr Bumble” for claiming that the city was clean in the light of so much evidence to the contrary.16 By the 1890s, though, the thrust of Argus articles on slums and their inhabitants had undergone a sea-​change. Part of the reason was that Solomon was no longer either its owner or editor. Instead, the paper had been secretly purchased by Cecil Rhodes in the 1880s, and the far more conservative Edmund Powell installed as editor in 1889. In keeping with the tone of slummer-​journalism now appearing in a number of other journals like the Cape Times, Argus articles became stridently racist, distinguishing in Manichean fashion between innocent white and blameworthy black poverty. Cape Town newspapers had embraced the distinction made by middle-​class observers in London between the deserving poor and a dangerous and hopeless residuum, and this distinction was racialized when appropriated to the Cape Town context.17

Intimate Relationship   57 For example, early in 1893, in a series of articles called “Unexplored Cape Town,” the Argus now distinguished between white poverty that deserved sympathy and black poverty that did not. On the contrary, the white poor needed to be rescued from likely “degeneration” through proximity to a poor black residuum.18 In propagating this message, the first article took the reader into an area of Cape Town near the harbor known as Waterside where “poor white and filthy black live side by side.” In the second, beyond “the dangerous hovels tenanted by coloured folk,” there was “poverty to be sympathised with,” “poorer white” families who were “compelled” to live in the area and who were “degenerating by reason of their surroundings.” A further article, this time with the sub-​heading “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” contained a typical “slum performance” vignette of a netherworld of desperate white poverty. This contained many international “Scenes-​from-​Slumland” tropes: ages and sexes mixed indiscriminately together in stifling proximity; old age brought low by hard labor; the near nakedness of the young and vulnerable; the implied possibility of immorality; and the presence of disease. All of this was in conscious pursuit of the newspaper’s slummer-​journalism objective to “ram home a clear ideological message” for any doubtful readers.19 The vignette’s setting was a house on Coffee Lane where, in the first room visited, eight people shared a single bed. In the next room there was an old man, exhausted from “a long day’s labour in the sweltering sun,” lying in bed beside his sick daughter. On a pile of rags in a corner lay another teenage girl, wearing nothing but a “torn chemise that failed to cover her weary body,” and who was “dying from consumption.”20 The clear ideological message conveyed in these, and many other Argus articles by the 1890s, was that dealing with the slum problem should first and foremost be about helping the white poor to move away from a dangerous black residuum, “Cape Town’s Curse,” characterized by “criminal and vicious tendencies.” This residuum did not consist of the deserving poor but of people who were “wasteful, indifferent, and worst of all filthy.”21 The slummer-​journalism of other English-​language newspapers in Cape Town, themselves influenced by the rhetoric of counterparts in Britain, had paved the way in the 1880s for such invective. One called the Lantern was a pioneer in this genre. It published articles with titles like “Seamy Cape Town,” “Loafer Town,” or “Round Dangerous Cape Town with a Detective” in a decade marked both by a severe smallpox outbreak and economic depression. The Lantern led the way in describing the supposed immorality and dangerous nature of Cape Town’s black residuum in highly racist fashion. Prostitutes were described as “the foulest daughters of the African Eve,” while Malays were accused of being “white slavers,” the controllers of brothels and disreputable bars. In 1888 two articles in the Lantern, overtly titled “Cape Town Slumdom,” stated that slums were places where “the Malays and Kaffirs [Africans] prefer to locate themselves.”22 Newspaper articles like these were attempting to prod both local and central government into action in this respect. To this end they were aided by government officials themselves, like Cape Town Council’s Dr G. H. B. Fisk, appointed Medical Sanitary Officer in 1883 after the smallpox epidemic, who leant their “expert” weight to the equation between slums and race. In a

58   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH report of 1886, for instance, Fisk blamed slum conditions on the “domestic habits of [a]‌ peculiarly dirty and reckless coloured population.”23 The solution that newspapers and sanitary officials were helping to promote, and which began to be realized in the years before the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, was racially discriminatory legislation. Particularly in the form of educational and residential segregation, this would in time help whites to escape poverty. Meanwhile it could protect them from the dangerous black residuum. The Anglican Dean of Cape Town used a sermon to advocate such segregation in 1888.24 Five years later the prime minister of the Cape, Cecil Rhodes, argued for the appropriation of “Malay” land and its redevelopment with “proper buildings,” implicitly for whites. Equally Rhodes’s political ally of the day, Afrikaner Bond leader J. H. Hofmeyr demanded to know why there were no locations in Cape Town to which the “rag, tag and bobtail” and “barbarians” could be removed as they had been in Port Elizabeth, five hundred miles to the east of the capital.25 This idea that racial segregation could help solve a variety of problems posed by the material circumstances of the poor, pathologized by referring to the places they lived in as slums, was the product of a broader search for urban order among Cape Town’s white middle-​class that became more urgent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This search and its consequences were the focus of a detailed monograph published in 1995, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town.26 Ethnic Pride’s argument was that middle-​class fears of social disorder were prompted by Mineral Revolution–​ fueled urban growth. Cape Town’s population grew from 45,000 in 1875 to 170,000 in 1904, putting far greater strains on an already insufficient housing stock and urban infrastructure. A sizeable portion of the poor was composed of recent white immigrants. The achievement of Responsible Government in 1872 loosened metropolitan Britain’s control of internal affairs at the Cape by granting greater powers to white settlers. This encouraged the process of white racial mobilization at a time when white voters were in the majority, and with it the racialization of problems of urban poverty. Maintaining this majority was aided both by keeping most newly conquered Africans in the new reserves off the voters’ roll and by making it harder for black Cape Colonists in general to gain the vote (through raising wage and property qualifications and introducing an education test) in the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892. Segregation was promoted by white officialdom, journalists, and members of the white public alike as the panacea for almost all perceived urban disorders. These included inadequate sanitation, disease, crime, multiracial action by the unemployed, or indeed any unrespectable black behavior. Segregation was also promoted and rationalized by pseudo-​scientific theories about the dangers of miscegenation and racial degeneration associated with Social Darwinism.27 Residential segregation, then, was increasingly suggested as a solution to the existence of slums in inner Cape Town, while providing assistance to the white poor. Significantly, the idea of relocating the black poor to the edge of the city was not accompanied in the rhetoric of its advocates by the fear that this might simply be moving slums from one location to another. It was poverty near the city center that was imagined and pathologized as a slum, and with the addition of virulently racist rhetoric when substantial numbers

Intimate Relationship   59 of poor white inhabitants were found alongside black. Ending this proximity was central to the rhetoric demanding a solution to the slum problem. In turn, racial residential segregation became a prime element of the remedial recipe. Existing models of racial segregation within and beyond the Cape were already to hand that informed the ideological and practical process by which it became part of “solving” the South African slum problem. The spatial division of cities according to perceived national or racial difference has a long history. Nineteenth-​century European colonialism drew on ideas about how to divide cities in this way that borrowed from a wide variety of earlier periods and places, as Carl Nightingale has demonstrated.28 The British Dutch East India Company, for instance, had demarcated a fortified White Town distinct from a Black Town for Madras and Calcutta in the eighteenth century. The establishment of peri-​urban “Native Locations” for Port Elizabeth and East London, British immigrant port settlements planted on the mobile and frequently violent frontier between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa (hundreds of miles to the east of Cape Town), were in this European colonial tradition of separation and control. So was the system of establishing African reserves within walking distance of the port settlement of Durban with the establishment of a Natal Colony in 1845, followed in the 1870s by a togt (casual laborer) system to regulate African presence in the town. This established a register of all African day laborers and attempted (not that successfully in the event) to confine them to municipal barracks. In the case of the Cape Colony, Africans had to demonstrate permission, in the form of a “pass,” for legal entry to towns. The desire for control over “barbarians” was also evident in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal’s decree in 1844 that no African could settle near towns without official permission.29 The rapid conquest and annexation of African polities on a hitherto unknown scale, associated with the New Imperialism of the late nineteenth century, brought into numerical question the ongoing viability of earlier Cape Colony policies of political and social integration. Such policies had been pursued by Governor Sir George Grey and supported by Saul Solomon up to the late 1870s. A contrasting system of indirect rule and rural spatial separation had been adopted and championed for Natal from its inception as a British colony in 1845 by its Secretary of Native Affairs, Theophilus Shepstone, not least because of the huge majority of Africans compared to whites. The “Shepstonian system” of territorial segregation began to attract increasing numbers of white supporters in the Cape following the conquest and extensive annexations of Xhosa territories between 1879 and 1890 that threatened white political dominance. Support for the Natal model in the Cape was further encouraged by apparent rejections of the supposedly civilizing British colonial mission presented by the Indian Rebellion in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica eight years later. Even Saul Solomon’s election manifesto of 1879 for a parliamentary seat in Cape Town now expressed Shepstonian concern about contact between “civilization” and “barbarism,” especially when the latter was “fed from unfailing sources, and the uncivilised race . . . is attracted in increasing numbers to settle among, or near to, their civilised neighbours.”30 It was large-​scale colonial conquest coupled with the Mineral Revolution that had rapidly accelerated this process. The “shock-​city” style emergence from the veld of

60   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH Kimberley and Johannesburg in the 1870s and 1880s respectively resulted from the discovery first of diamonds in Kimberley then gold on the Witwatersrand. The emergence of Johannesburg in particular had an effect akin to that of Manchester’s growth on British observers in the 1840s, while also swelling the population of existing port cities like Cape Town, Durban, and Port Elizabeth.31 This urbanization was fed by internal migration from across rural southern Africa, including African reserves, as well as by white immigration from Europe. From a white employer perspective, the black urban presence was necessary to provide sufficient cheap labor, with the Cape and Natal governments’ taxation of Africans in reserves actively promoting migrant labor to the cities that aided this result. The question, though, not only for employers but also for local and central government politicians and officials, was how to “provide for the mutual access of black labourers and white employers . . . without having to pay the heavy social costs of urbanisation [including the emergence of slums] or losing the dominance of white over black.”32 The mine owners of Kimberley had helped provide an answer by the mid-​ 1880s through establishing compounds at their mines to house and control the migrant African labor force, with a view in particular of preventing the theft of diamonds. With taxation in the reserves prodding Africans to look for work, migrant labor could be recruited there, issued passes, registered by a labor bureau once in Kimberley, confined to barracks in fenced compounds, then returned to the reserves.33 Goldmine owners in Johannesburg duly emulated this system.34 The problem remained as to who would shoulder the cost of paying for more comprehensive residential segregation in the racially mixed slums that existed in all the major cities by 1900. It was in this year that a “Native Location Commission” for Cape Town investigated the possibility of removing Africans at least from among the black residuum in the city’s inner-​city areas. The Commission consisted of the Colonial Secretary for Native Affairs, the Municipal and Colonial Officers of Health, and the Chief of Police. In other words, three of the four had jobs directly involved in countering urban ills, especially disease and crime, and for whom extracting at least a portion of the black residuum from slums was perceived to be a step in the right direction. The Municipal Health Officer, Dr Bernard Fuller, had previously argued that Africans lived in “scattered nests of filth” in the city that made epidemic outbreaks likely. Similar language had been used by journalists and municipal officials in Durban when describing parts of the city inhabited by Indians: “[who] are . . . about as prolific as rabbits, and almost as destructive to the welfare of Europeans.”35 The term “coolie location,” referring to areas near the city center inhabited predominantly by Indians, was employed as a local Durban synonym for “slum.” The Commission duly found in favor of segregating Africans in Cape Town in locations, which also supported that desire of missionaries for Africans to be protected from European vice. Yet this decision went against the recommendations of Cape Town’s two leading builders as well as members of its Chamber of Commerce.36 The result was a temporary stand-​off; the question of who would pay for locations remained.

Intimate Relationship   61 A migrant-​labor compound or location system suited the needs of mine owners and other large employers who needed labor permanently close to the work site, such as those who employed dock workers in Cape Town and duly supported the location proposal. This system was far less attractive though to some involved in smaller scale industrial, commercial, or service industries in port cities like Durban, Port Elizabeth or Cape Town, or the non-​mining sector in Kimberley and Johannesburg. Labor compounds placed on the edges of a city would not work as well for the likes of builders or other employers of casual or seasonal labor, who also feared that forcing Africans to live in locations or compounds might adversely affect labor supply. As Durban’s municipal police commander stated to the South African Native Affairs Commission (SANAC) of 1903–​1905: “The moment it is found that the white employer must sacrifice something for the public good you will be told that you are attempting to interfere with the freedom of the subject and with the labour market.”37 It was the advent of a global bubonic plague pandemic in 1894 that spurred colonial authorities across Africa and Asia into action, overcoming financia,l reservations and employer hesitations in many cities, and transforming segregation doctrine into practical actions. As the epidemic spread across continents, Chinese, Indians and Africans in turn were made scapegoats for outbreaks, with European health experts advocating residential segregation as essential in protecting whites from disease. American historian Maynard Swanson dubbed this belief the “Sanitation Syndrome.”38 It was clearly in play as the plague reached South Africa in February 1901. A key conveyer of such ideology across the British Empire was Professor W. J. Simpson, ex-​Medical Officer of Health in Calcutta and founder of the London School of Tropical Medicine, who by 1900 had become “the empire’s foremost plague expert” and firm advocate of the panacea of residential segregation. The Cape government sought his “expert” advice after the presence of plague was confirmed, and in a lecture in May 1901 Simpson duly blamed the outbreak on slum residents. Significantly, he deemed Africans in particular to be completely unfit for urban life.39 Echoing Simpson’s sentiments, Dr. Fuller complained that “uncontrolled Kaffir hordes were at the root of the aggravation of Capetown slumdom brought to light when the plague broke out. [Because of their presence] it was impossible to keep the slums of the city in satisfactory condition.”40 This was giving the official stamp of approval to earlier racialized pathologizing of the slum. Phrases like “scattered nests of filth” were used to imply further moral or physical threats. This time, though, the present and real danger posed by plague made the colonial authorities in Cape Town spring into action and establish two locations for Africans, one at the Harbor (for migrant dock-​laborers in emulation of the compound system) and the other on the city outskirts named Ndabeni. Both were paid for by the colonial government at a cost of some £100,000. In March 1901, Africans were rounded up and marched under armed guard out of the slums of District Six and into the locations, the first such urban forced removal in South African history. Despite opposition by the new residents of Ndabeni to the high cost of rents and train fares, removals received post facto ratification through the Native Reserve Location Act of 1902. The same act gave legal sanction to further urban forced removals when plague hit Port Elizabeth in 1903,

62   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH and Africans living close to the center were relocated to a new location further out called New Brighton.41 A minor outbreak in Durban the same year produced a Natal Native Location Act, but this stipulated that municipalities would have to pay for location costs. Durban chose instead merely to extend the togt system by providing a further 1,800 beds in barracks for the portion of its day laborers who did not evade the system.42 When the plague reached Johannesburg in March 1904, troops were again deployed, surrounding the so-​called “Coolie Location” near the town center where plague was discovered, removing some of its Indian, African, and colored residents, and burning down their houses. Two weeks after the first cases were identified, the entire area of six street blocks was surrounded by a corrugated-​iron fence, paraffin poured over the 1,600 buildings, and all burnt to the ground. The three thousand residents were taken some 16 kilometers southwest of the city center to a location at Klipspruit, the forerunner of what became known as South-​West Townships, or Soweto, by the 1960s.43 Residents of Klipspruit found themselves neighbors to a city sewerage scheme and ravaged by the likes of gastroenteritis. Yet, tellingly, the place was not denounced as a slum in Johannesburg newspapers, or indeed in other contemporary literary accounts. Such denunciations were abundant and strident but were reserved for multiracial inner-​city areas like Vrededorp and Doornfontein. Such places were described shortly before the First World War as places of undesirable racial mixing, crime, drugs, and promiscuity, where white daughters were pimped by their parents to “Kaffirs” and white children were “scattered through this murk playing in the gutters, picking up the words and vices of the coloured scum.”44 Yet, as Parnell’s work on Johannesburg slums demonstrated, the municipality not only hesitated to follow-​up on the Klipfontein removals because of cost considerations but also because, as in Cape Town, many employers in manufacturing industries spread across the central city area wanted their labor close by. The result was collusion between these employers and the municipality that meant Africans continued to live alongside others in the slums, that whites-​only clauses in many title deeds to be were readily ignored. After the First World War, the Johannesburg municipality did establish two locations for Africans just to the east and west of the city center, but areas of multiracial poverty in the inner city that were periodically denounced as slums nonetheless remained.45 This was the case for all the largest cities. As well as the fact that potential cost to employers and municipalities could delay the enforcement of segregation, Indian and colored South Africans were not subject to “Native” location legislation. Some Africans were also able to live in several inner-​city African freehold areas, most famously Sophiatown. Early location legislation had anyway been ineffectively enforced due to insufficient location or barrack accommodation for increasing numbers of African laborers. This situation began to change when municipal officials used the Natal Beer Act of 1908 to proclaim a monopoly over the brewing of traditional African sorghum beer within the city to the detriment of domestic brewers. The Act stipulated that such beer could be sold only in beer halls under Durban municipality control, with funds gained from sales used for increasing segregated African accommodation. The municipality used profits to extend barrack accommodation further. When a Natives (Urban

Intimate Relationship   63 Areas) Act was promulgated by the central South African government in 1923, giving municipalities clearer powers to enforce the segregation of Africans in locations and linking their urban presence to labor needs, it also made municipalities responsible for establishing and running those locations. But “the Durban system” had shown how revenue from sale of traditional beer (added to the likes of location rentals) could be put toward this end.46 Although many more of the African poor were consequently removed from “slums” to barracks or locations after 1923, whether they wanted to be or not, so were many poor whites, albeit for radically different reasons. This happened between the world wars through legislation that built on earlier Cape Colony initiatives to aid white escape from the poorest multiracial areas through education. Further prodded by the Carnegie Commission into poor white poverty, launched with the advent of the Great Depression, the Union Government oversaw the reservation of trade apprenticeships and skilled jobs for whites and prioritized their recruitment in all sectors of government employment including the parastatal electricity and steel industries. Often such employment came with highly subsidized government accommodation.47 Presumably because of such initiatives that helped the white poor, slummer-​ journalism became less stridently racist in the interwar period. Contributing to this may have been the perception of “progress” produced by the construction of new locations like Langa and Orlando (on the outskirts of Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively) in the early 1930s, which allowed further removals of Africans from inner-​city areas. In the wake of the calamitous Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which again turned the spotlight on “slums,” the South African government from 1920 also offered loans to municipalities to help with the demolition of slum housing and the building of alternative accommodation. Yet local authorities struggled to get legal permission to demolish “slum nuisances,” and ratepayers baulked at the cost of providing (legally required) alternative housing. Consequently, the continuing existence of South African slums went on being denounced by local newspapers, city novels, and visitors from other parts of the anglophone world. One such visitor was the renowned British playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw. On his departure from South Africa, Shaw was asked by a radio reporter whether he might say something nice about the country. His response was that Cape Town deserved to be “destroyed by fire from heaven” because of its slums.48 Such internal and external pressure, combined with the news that Britain was tackling its slum problem through a new Housing Act (1930), lay behind South Africa passing its Slum Act in 1934. This finally gave municipalities clear authority to demolish any properties deemed by them to be slums without any financial compensation to slum-​ landlords and as long as they provided alternative accommodation for tenants. The Cape Town municipality used the Slum Act more energetically than most South African counterparts before the Second World War, especially to demolish dwellings in District Six and build more than a thousand new council houses. Some of these were still within the District, but most were several kilometers away in racially segregated colored and white housing estates on the Cape Flats.49 Significantly though, the Slum Act excluded

64   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH African barrack, compound, and location accommodation from its provisions, and thus from its definition of a slum.50 This brings us back to the intimate relationship between the imagining of slums and racial segregation. Denouncing places as slums from the 1880s onward had been accompanied by the rhetorical scapegoating of all black South Africans and justified the racial segregation of Africans. Yet the places that Africans were removed to, whose conditions were or became just as bad over time, were now excluded from the provisions of a Slum Act. Officially sanctioned places where most urban Africans lived were consequently not officially slums and were seldom referred to as such by South African observers. It was inner-​city places where Africans still lived, like Prospect Town in inner-​city Johannesburg, whose demolition was lauded as progress in the late 1930s. Most official municipal reports, newsreels, publicity material, and city histories were upbeat about progress in this respect at the time, even if city novels and occasional newspaper investigations remained considerably less so.51 What disturbed this official optimism was the rapid acceleration of rural-​urban migration, especially that of Africans, during the Second World War. It was the result of import-​substitution industrialization, the consequent suspension of the pass laws to allow for an adequate urban labor force (depleted by enlistment), and the push factor of rural impoverishment in the reserves. African employment in industries almost doubled during the war while the building of additional housing for Africans all but stopped. A new form of slum became highly visible to white observers in the form of large conurbations of self-​built shacks, the shantytowns, around the major cities. Older multiracial inner-​city areas became overcrowded, as did existing African locations, with living conditions deteriorating accordingly. Much of the debate about South Africa’s future in the immediate post-​war period involved opining on these developments. Written and visual contributions to this debate that worried about slums of the old and new kind burgeoned apace. One result was a new South African wave of Mearns’s The Bitter Cry of Outcast London–​style literature.52 Only most prominent among them was Alan Paton’s bestselling novel, Cry the Beloved Country (1948) and its cinematic adaptation a few years later.53 They told the story of the Reverend Kumalo’s journey from rural Natal to look for both his sister and his son who had disappeared in the slums of Johannesburg. The sister had become a prostitute in Sophiatown, the son a gangster who ends up killing the liberal white son of a farmer, neighbor to Kumalo in Natal. Paton’s argument was that South African cities in the 1940s were dystopias of misery and immorality. African people were forced into immorality and crime in poverty-​ridden slums like the shantytowns that now surrounded Johannesburg proper and that now threatened all in the city, including middle-​class whites in the suburbs. Full-​on racial conflict was likely to happen unless white South Africans discarded racism, adopted Christian values, recognized the common humanity, rights, and equal citizenship of their black compatriots, and thereby helped uplift them. Paton’s novel and the film adaptation had an enormous impact on the way that South Africa, its cities, and its slums were thought about by many in the anglophone western

Intimate Relationship   65 world. The novel alone sold fifteen million copies over the next forty years. Up to the 1960s, hardly any literary or visual engagement (by residents and visitors alike) with South Africa failed to refer directly or indirectly to Paton (and many continued to do so even after the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 shifted much attention from slums to the evil of the apartheid state more generally). What they all had in common was the desire to describe or show—​and in one way or another condemn—​the existence of South African slums, and particularly their new exotic incarnation, the shanty or pondokkie, shacks commonly made of corrugated iron, wood, and hardboard. Indeed, the success of Paton’s book did much to ensure that slumming became part and parcel of any investigative trip to South Africa, and its author usually received a mention in the book or film that resulted. One example must suffice. Twilight in South Africa was a 1949 description of his visit to South Africa by British writer and self-​declared “independent conservative” Henry Gibbs that ran into eight editions within two years. It had an entire chapter called “In Search of Kumalo” in which the author described his own wanderings through Johannesburg’s shantytowns and similar “cesspools” he discovered outside Port Elizabeth and Durban. Cato Manor in Durban was singled out as the worst slum in the world; District Six was condemned as a place of “despair, poverty, overcrowding.”54 An early consequence of the discovery of what was perceived to be a new form of slum was that the South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, appointed the Fagan commission in 1946 to investigate appropriate political policy. It concluded that African urban presence was permanent, that family life rather than migrant labor should be encouraged, and that the transformation of often spartan and dismal locations into “African villages” should be pursued.55 The problem was that the National Party (NP) came up with an alternative plan in its self-​commissioned Sauer Report. This argued for far stricter control over African urbanization, favored impermanent migrant labor rather than a permanent African presence, and proffered the ideal of thorough separate development of all racial groups, or apartheid. Promises to help whites who remained in poor urban living conditions, the majority of whom were Afrikaners, by protecting them from the “swart gevaar” (black danger) in the city helped the NP win a narrow victory over Smuts’s United Party in 1948. Once in power, it soon acted to remove areas identified as “black spots,” by dint of relocating predominantly African inhabitants from inner areas of “white” cities, typically justifying such removal as “slum clearance.” To this end the NP seized on the findings of a Johannesburg City Council (JCC) slum survey in 1950 of the predominantly black southwestern freehold suburbs that found that around 57 percent of households consisted of slum properties.56 In March 1951 the government announced the clearance of these “western areas,” which included Sophiatown, and announced that their African inhabitants would be transferred to parts of what became Soweto. In 1953, using the JCC survey, Minister of Native Affairs Hendrik Verwoerd declared that since 95 percent of the inhabitants were tenants, removals would be to their benefit. Despite African National Congress opposition, these removals duly took place, starting from February 1955.57 The NP’s Group Areas Act (1950) introduced comprehensive urban residential segregation for all four official “races”—​whites, coloreds, Africans, and Indians—​and eventually sealed the fate of other largely non-​African inner-​city areas.

66   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH These included the predominantly Indian Grey Street “Complex” in central Durban in 1957 and Cape Town’s largely colored District Six in 1966, with removals again justified as “slum clearance.” In the case of District Six, some sixty thousand inhabitants were moved to the Cape Flats, and the area was bulldozed to the ground. Only religious buildings were left standing. From the 1950s onward, many black South Africans forced to leave under these circumstances responded not only by attempting overt political resistance but sometimes by also writing or speaking back against the entirely negative “imagined slum” pathologizing used to justify what was happening to them.58 Writers like Can Themba, Bloke Modisane, and Richard Rive described much creativity amid the urban hardship they experienced. They evoked a strong sense of place and belonging in doing so that has been described in detail elsewhere.59 Their writing and disgust with apartheid’s inhumanity influenced the way that a minority of influential white writers, musicians, and film makers such as Anthony Sampson, Nadine Gordimer, David Kramer, and Lionel Rogosin portrayed places like District Six and Sophiatown in positive fashion. With “slum” eradication intensifying in the apartheid era as part of the implementation of a grand design to protect white supremacy, black reminiscences of living in places so destroyed became evocations of communal urban life, frequently described in almost utopian terms. In the fashion of Jane Jacobs bemoaning the results of modern planning in American cities, the likes of oral testimonies, novels, and autobiographies lauded a finer urbanism of vibrant, albeit poor, culturally creolized and cosmopolitan communalism. Places deemed slums by some became paradises lost for others.60 As ex-​ resident Bloke Modisane put it in his autobiography: “Something in me died, a piece of me died, with the dying of Sophiatown.”61

Notes 1. Susan Parnell, “Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South African Cities, 1910–​ 1936” (PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1993). Articles drawn from research for this work include: Susan Parnell, “Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act, 1934–​1939,” South African Geographical Journal 70, no. 2 (1988): 112–​128; Susan Parnell, “Winning the Battles but Losing the War: Racial Segregation of Johannesburg under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923,” Journal of Historical Geography 29 (2002): 1–​31; Susan Parnell, “Race, Power and Urban Control: Johannesburg’s Inner City Slumyards, 1910–​ 1923,” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 615–​637. 2. Review articles on South African urban historiography that prove this point and may also serve as a guide to further reading include:Gordon Pirie, “South African Urban History,” Urban History Yearbook (1985): 18–​29; Chris Saunders, Writing Urban History: South Africa’s Urban Past and Other Essays (Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1992); Hilary Sapire and Jo Beall, eds., Journal of Southern African Studies: Special Issue on Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa 21, no. 1 (March 1995); Bill Freund, “Urban History in South Africa,” South African Historical Journal 52 (2005): 19–​31; Vivian Bickford-​Smith, “Urban History in the New South Africa: Continuity and Innovation since the End of Apartheid,” Urban History 35, no. 2 (2008): 287–​315.

Intimate Relationship   67 3. See for instance: John Western, Outcast Cape Town (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1981); Claire Keeton, “Aspects of Material Life and Culture in District Six, c.1930–​1950,” (B.A. Hons. diss., University of Cape Town, 1987); Shamil Jeppie and Crain Soudien, eds., The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present (Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990). Uma Dhupelia-​Mesthrie, “Dispossession and Memory: The Black River Community of Cape Town,” Oral History (2000): 35–​43; Sean Field, ed., Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001); Vivian Bickford-​Smith, Sean Field and Clive Glaser, eds., “Special Issue: Oral History in the Western Cape,” African Studies 60, no.1 (2001). David Goodhew, Respectability and Resistance: A History of Sophiatown (Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004). 4. See Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993); Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Press, 2017). 5. Cape Argus, November 30, 1858; December 4, 1858; December 9, 1858; December 14, 1858. 6. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil or Two Nations (London: Penguin [1845] 1954). 7. Cape Argus, March 27, 1860; March 3, 1860; April 5, 1860. 8. Ibid., March 27, 1860. 9. Ibid., March 31, 1860. 10. Ibid., April 1, 1865. 11. Ibid., January 26, 1867; January 29, 1867; January 31, 1867; February 2, 1867. 12. Ibid., January 29, 1867. 13. Ibid., January 29, 1867. 14. Ibid., January 26, 1867. 15. Ibid., February 2, 1867. 16. Ibid., February 2, 1867. 17. Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). 18. Cape Argus, January 26, 1893; March 2, 1893; March 3, 1893. 19. Mayne, Imagined Slum, 9–​12. 20. Cape Argus, March 3, 1893. 21. Ibid., January 21, 1896. 22. Lantern, September 8, 1883; February 16, 1884; March 8, 1884; March 29, 1884; May 3, 1884; July 11, 1885; May 14, 1887; May 28, 1887; October 6, 1888; October 13, 1888. 23. Cape Times, February 18, 1887. 24. Ibid., August 9, 1888. 25. Cape Command Papers, Cape of Good Hope House of Assembly Debates (Cape Town: Cape Times, 1893), 167. Cape Argus, July 13, 1893. 26. Vivian Bickford-​Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 27. Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012). 29. David Welsh, “The Growth of Towns,” in The Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 2, ed. Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 186. 30. W. E. G. Solomon, Saul Solomon (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1948), 232. 31. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Odhams, 1963). 32. Maynard Swanson, “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–​1909,” Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 387–​410.

68   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH 33. R. V. Turrell, Capital and Labour in the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–​1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 34. Keith Beavon, Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2004), 10, 33–​36. 35. Maynard Swanson, “‘The Asiatic Menace’: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–​1900,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (1983): 411. 36. Bickford-​Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice, 158–​159. 37. Maynard Swanson, “‘The Durban System’: Roots of Urban Apartheid in Colonial Natal,” African Studies 35, nos. 3–​4 (1976): 165. 38. Maynard Swanson, “Sanitation Syndrome,” 387–​410. See Nightingale, Segregation, for further details on the global pandemic and its ideological and material consequences. 39. Nightingale, Segregation, 168–​ 169, 172–​ 173; Vivian Bickford-​ Smith, Elizabeth Van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 18–​20. 40. Swanson, “Sanitation Syndrome,” 392. 41. Ibid. See also Christopher Saunders, “The Creation of Ndabeni: Urban Segregation and African Resistance in Cape Town,” Studies in the History of Cape Town 1 (1979): 165–​193. 42. Swanson, “Durban System,” 170, 172–​173. 43. Beavon, Johannesburg, 75–​78. Howard Phillips, “Locating the Location of a South African Location: The Paradoxical Pre-​History of Soweto,” Urban History 41, no. 2 (2014): 311–​332. 44. Ambrose Pratt, The Real South Africa (Milton Keynes: General Books, [1912] 2010), 56. 45. Parnell, “Johannesburg’s Inner City Slumyards,” 618–​637. 46. Vivian Bickford-​Smith, The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 138–​139. 47. Ibid., 134–​135. 48. Gerald Shaw, The Cape Times: An Informal History (Cape Town: David Philip, 1999), 86. 49. Bickford-​Smith, Van Heyningen, and Worden, Cape Town in the Twentieth Century, 147–​149. 50. Union Government, Report of the Select Committee Report on the Subject of the Slums Bill (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1934), 5–​8, 11, 13–​14, 31–​32. 51. For one such report, see the Rand Daily Mail, March 28, 1935, “Plague Spots Must Go,” referring to western inner-​city areas like Newclare and Malay Camp. See also Bickford-​ Smith, South African Metropolis, 130–​196. 52. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London: William C. Preston, 1883). 53. Alan Paton, Cry the Beloved Country (London: Jonathan Cape, 1948); Z. Korda (dir.), Cry the Beloved Country (UK, 1951). 54. H. Gibbs, Twilight in South Africa (London: Jarrolds, 1949). 55. Union Government, Report of the Native Laws Commission [Fagan Report], 1946–​1948 (Pretoria: Government Printer, 1948), 30, 50. 56. Beavon, Johannesburg, 131. 57. Ibid., 132–​133. 58. See note 3 for secondary work that covers some of this response, especially for District Six. 59. Bickford-​Smith, South African Metropolis, 197–​255. 60. Ibid., 256–​271. 61. Bloke Modisane, Blame Me on History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1963), 5.

Intimate Relationship   69

Bibliography Beavon, Keith. Johannesburg: The Making and Shaping of the City. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2004. Bickford-​Smith, Vivian. The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Bickford-​Smith, Vivian. Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Bickford-​Smith, Vivian. “Urban History in the New South Africa: Continuity and Innovation since the End of Apartheid.” Urban History 35, no. 2 (2008): 287–​315. Bickford-​Smith, Vivian, Elizabeth Van Heyningen, and Nigel Worden. Cape Town in the Twentieth Century. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999. Bickford-​Smith, Vivian, Sean Field, and Clive Glaser, eds. “Special Issue: Oral History in the Western Cape.” African Studies 60, no.1 (2001). Briggs, Asa. Victorian Cities. London: Odhams, 1963. Cape Command Papers. Cape of Good Hope House of Assembly Debates. Cape Town: Cape Times, 1893. Dhupelia-​Mesthrie, Uma. “Dispossession and Memory: The Black River Community of Cape Town.” Oral History 28, no. 2 (2000): 35–​43. Disraeli, Benjamin. Sybil or Two Nations (1845). Reprint, London: Penguin, 1954. Field, Sean, ed. Lost Communities, Living Memories: Remembering Forced Removals in Cape Town. Cape Town: David Philip, 2001. Freund, Bill. “Urban History in South Africa.” South African Historical Journal 52 (2005): 19–​31. Gibbs, H. Twilight in South Africa. London: Jarrolds, 1949. Goodhew, David. Respectability and Resistance: A History of Sophiatown. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2004. Jeppie, Shamil, and Crain Soudien. The Struggle for District Six: Past and Present. Cape Town: Buchu Books, 1990. Keeton, Claire. “Aspects of Material Life and Culture in District Six, c. 1930–​1950.” B.A. Hons. diss., University of Cape Town, 1987. Mayne, Alan. The Imagined Slum. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion Press, 2017. Mearns, Andrew. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. London: William C. Preston, 1883. Nightingale, Carl H. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Parnell, Susan. “Johannesburg Slums and Racial Segregation in South African Cities, 1910–​ 1936.” PhD diss., University of the Witwatersrand, 1993. Parnell, Susan. “Race, Power and Urban Control: Johannesburg’s Inner City Slumyards, 1910–​ 1923.” Journal of Southern African Studies 29 (2003): 615–​637. Parnell, Susan. “Racial Segregation in Johannesburg: The Slums Act, 1934–​1939.” South African Geographical Journal 70, no. 2 (1988): 112–​128. Parnell, Susan. “Winning the Battles but Losing the War: Racial Segregation of Johannesburg under the Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923.” Journal of Historical Geography 29 (2002): 1–​31. Paton, Alan. Cry the Beloved Country. London: Jonathan Cape, 1948. Phillips, Howard. “Locating the Location of a South African Location: The Paradoxical Pre-​ History of Soweto.” Urban History 41, no. 2 (2014): 311–​332. Pirie, Gordon. “South African Urban History.” Urban History Yearbook (1985): 18–​29.

70   VIVIAN BICKFORD-SMITH Pratt, Ambrose. The Real South Africa (1912). Reprint, Milton Keynes: General Books, 2010. Sapire, Hilary, and Jo Beall, eds. Journal of Southern African Studies: Special Issue on Urban Studies and Urban Change in Southern Africa 21, no. 1 (March 1995). Saunders, Christopher. “The Creation of Ndabeni: Urban Segregation and African Resistance in Cape Town.” Studies in the History of Cape Town 1 (1979): 165–​193. Saunders, Christopher. Writing Urban History: South Africa’s Urban Past and Other Essays. Pretoria: Human Sciences Research Council, 1992. Solomon, W. E. G. Saul Solomon. Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1948. Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Swanson, Maynard. “‘The Asiatic Menace’: Creating Segregation in Durban, 1870–​1900.” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 16, no. 3 (1983): 401–​421. Swanson, Maynard. “‘The Durban System’: Roots of Urban Apartheid in Colonial Natal.” African Studies 35, nos. 3–​4 (1976): 159–​176. Swanson, Maynard. “The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–​1909.” Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 387–​410. Shaw, Gerald. The Cape Times: An Informal History. Cape Town: David Philip, 1999. Turrell, R. V. Capital and Labour in the Kimberley Diamond Fields, 1871–​1890. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Union Government, South Africa. Report of the Select Committee Report on the Subject of the Slums Bill. Pretoria: Government Printer, 1934. Welsh, David. “The Growth of Towns.” In The Oxford History of South Africa, vol. 2, edited by Monica Wilson and Leonard Thompson, 172–​243. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Western, John. Outcast Cape Town. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1981.

Pa rt I i

U R BA N DI S A DVA N TAG E I N T H E C ON T E M P OR A RY WOR L D

CHAPTER 4

INFORMALI T Y AS PRO C ESS AND T H E S O C IA L C ON STRUCTION OF SLUMS Southeast Asian Cases ROSS KING

In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote: Smooth space and striated space—​nomad space and sedentary space—​the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus—​are not of the same nature. . . . [W]‌e must remind ourselves that the two spaces exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously.1

In Deleuze and Guattari’s aphoristic provocation, smooth space is that of chaos, disorder, dishevelment; in the city it is that of the urban nomads, unfixed, informal settlements and economy, slums. Typically, both finance capital and the sanctioned violence of the state will seek to bring order to the disordered space of the nomads, the refugees, and the informal. The latter, in turn, constantly erode the realm of good order. The key point here is the assertion of mixture and of translation, reversal, as each invades the other. These processes of spatial mixture, translation and reversal are apparent in a number of Southeast Asian urban conditions, and nowhere more so than in Bangkok, where incommensurable spaces seem especially jumbled together. High-​end capital and the infiltrating migrant intermingle, a mansion with an improvised dwelling, a global shopping mall with street vendors and illegal markets.

74   ROSS KING Bangkok, in common with other low-​lying Southeast Asian port cities, was largely an aquatic city in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Non-​elite communities were mostly on riverbanks and along the network of khlong (canals), without formal security of tenure, in dwellings variously on stilts or pontoons, constructed from wood, bamboo, and other marshland and jungle material. As khlong were dug for purposes of defense or trade, the diggers, commonly prisoners of war or other forced migrants, would be allowed to settle in informal settlements on their banks, farming the land behind. On (slightly) drier land, Sino-​Thai commercial communities developed, where the standard building type was the seemingly ubiquitous Southeast Asian shophouse row. Westerners reporting on Bangkok in the nineteenth century, both occasional visitors and foreigners in the service of Siamese royal oligarchs, would comment on its estuarine communities, referring to Bangkok as a floating city, variously exotic, incomprehensible, or wretched. Though negative judgments would prevail, with descriptions of “wretchedness” ubiquitous, “slum” would rarely be ascribed; nor, in a society mostly marked by non-​reflection on its own conditions, was the term really used by indigenous writers on the city and its history. Today there are discussions on traditional communities, often on their alleged wretchedness, and also on the seemingly linked neglect and decay of both river and khlong. The exception to this historic eschewing of “slum” comes with the modern history of the Bangkok port: the relocation of the port, downstream from the historic city center of Rattanakosin, began in 1938 and continued after the Second World War. The low-​income workers brought in to build it and those who continue to operate it were permitted, in the Thai manner, to settle on unwanted land behind the port, in the vicinity of a remnant canal, Khlong Toei. This extensive district, effectively a city excluded from the “real” city, in more recent decades acquired the label “Khlong Toei Slums.” It has proved a useful innovation: if an urban place is perceived as offering development opportunities, to imply it is a slum can free such opportunities. “Slum” is a troublesome term. An indigenous village with appalling services is not a slum; but when residents see it replicated in the city it is decreed a slum. While this distinction certainly references Southeast Asia, it may be far from a universal verity. It raises two questions: what are the processes of such seeming replication of indigenous space in the city, and what are the processes whereby such places are decreed “slum”? Crucially in Southeast Asian cities, more recent urbanization, overcrowding, and the proliferation of poor housing relate to rural-​to-​urban migration (rural decline, the allure of the cities, the Isan-​Lao in Bangkok), also political and economic flight (Burmese and Khmer in Bangkok), far less so to urban displacement (the de-​industrialization prevalent in the West). However, Bangkok has no more khlong-​sides to populate, so where is the economic or political refugee to go? Answer: to the vast over-​supply of formal space, notably Bangkok’s speculatively built shophouses. At least in the context of the Southeast Asian city, the production (and the disappearance) of “the slum” as a physical expression is to be understood in the dialectic of “the formal” and “the informal” as process—​as becoming. Judgment about “slum”—​the social production of the idea of slum—​took place within that context.

Informality as Process    75

Case 1. Bangkok: Sukhumvit and the Khlong Toei Slums Bangkok’s twentieth-​century urban growth was, in large measure, definable in reference to its expansion along the southeast corridor of Sukhumvit Road. “Lower” Sukhumvit commonly refers to the road and its soi (its numbered and radiating side streets) stretching some six kilometers from the commercial center; the next ten kilometers is “Middle Sukhumvit”; beyond, the road goes almost to the Cambodian border. Lower Sukhumvit had once been a landscape of commingled orchards and high-​end housing estates; however, from the 1940s both the road and its soi progressively acquired seemingly endless rows of two-​and three-​story speculatively built shophouses. In the 1980s and 1990s speculation became an ultimately mindless stampede of Sino-​Thai capital along Sukhumvit and its soi. The consequence was gross over-​investment, over-​supply, and the 1997–​98 Asian Financial Crisis.2 Though the financial crisis may have marked the end of the shophouse age, other sectors subsequently boomed: high-​rise, up-​market condominium towers and hotels, office towers, and shopping malls replaced decrepit shophouse rows in transport-​ strategic locations, as the next wave of speculative investment progressed along the Sukhumvit corridor, overlaying previous waves. Elsewhere the rows remained, under-​ occupied, often empty. Lower and Middle Sukhumvit run approximately parallel to the Chao Phraya River. An area immediately south of mid-​Sukhumvit, definable as Sukhumvit Sois 18 to 36, became Bangkok’s premier district for up-​market condominium blocks: Bangkok’s Fifth Avenue. However, the high-​rises of these soi command magnificent views into what by contrast seemed the disordered realm of the Khlong Toei Slums. A place name in which “Slums” featured as part of a proper noun, capitalized, a place, with no “slum” judgment implied, was gradually reformulated. When a new elevated highway, built in the 1990s, further increased the visibility of the Khlong Toei Slums, the outrage of a righteous press intensified the condemnation of both place and population and the invocation of the “slum” appellation to justify strategies of both urban beautification and new profitable reinvestment. In more recent times, the Khlong Toei Slums have acquired the attention of the slum improvement industry of government agencies, international aid projects, and corporate developers.3 There have been various waves of informal settlement clearance and their subsequent replacement by multi-​story apartment buildings; as these have then been occupied by both the erstwhile informal settlers and rural-​to-​urban migrants, the “formal” space of the apartment blocks has then been colonized by an array of households struggling to augment the meager space allocated to them, variously for living and for entrepreneurial micro-​industry. The effect has been waves of formalizing and subsequent informalizing. Meanwhile in the vaster expanse of the district, there would be attempts at some tentative forms of security of tenure

76   ROSS KING for informally occupied land yet, simultaneously, a constant process of demolition, rebuilding, extension, and modification of dwellings, mostly by their informal-​sector occupants. Houses that were once of wood, bamboo, and scavenged materials would be reconstructed in masonry and other more permanent materials, only to then be enlarged or otherwise changed. As such rebuilding is frequently illegal, it will mostly occur at night or behind screening tarpaulins. Again formalizing and informalizing are mutually dependent. Although much of the area’s housing is poor and infrastructure is lacking, to judge the Khlong Toei Slums (proper noun) as “slum” is problematic. “Informal,” yes for the most part, even when putatively formal. Yet to conditionally accept the “slum” label, and to observe the constant pressures on the area from continuing rural-​to-​urban migration and international flight, brings the discomforting observation that Bangkok is running out of “slums.” New “slums”—​new low-​cost space—​are needed; they are provided via the profligate oversupply of Sino-​Thai provisioned shophouses.

Metamorphosis: Bangkok And Sukhumvit 71 About seven kilometers along the Sukhumvit corridor is Soi 71. It is at something of an intersection, between the corporate world of Lower Sukhumvit (global capital’s investment rush down the corridor) and the older shophouse world of only three or four decades back, now progressively and frenetically invaded by “the new.” There is another intersection. Soi 71 branches off to the north from Sukhumvit; to the south, nearby, are Sois 40 and 42 (soi to the north are odd-​numbered, those to the south even-​numbered; however, the numberings do not correspond). One kilometer along Soi 40 or 42 (venues for high-​end condominium towers) brings one into the Khlong Toei Slums. Soi 42, running from the Khlong Toei Slums to high-​end Sukhumvit, is a paradox: in places its earlier (1980s–​1990s) shophouses have been replaced with corporate-​ sector showrooms and offices; elsewhere and intermingling with the corporate world, its dilapidated shophouses are now occupied by Khlong Toei overspill—​except, of course, that these settlers are more refugees to the city but for whom Khlong Toei is no longer an available option. There are two invasions simultaneously, from entirely different socio-​ economic sectors: the corporate and the refugee. North of Sukhumvit in Soi 71, the intersecting communities define a landscape of utter incongruity. In the early 2010s an up-​market, high-​rise housing estate had intruded into an older, poorer assembly of shophouses and struggling commercial premises. It comprises twin towers of roughly forty and thirty floors, variously advertised as “Eltz Residences” and “Sukhumvit Midtown,” and replete with an attempted “art district,” tawdry, fake, and failing. There are some slightly older up-​market intrusions on the southern side of Sukhumvit; more significant are insertions into Soi 71 itself: “The Bloom” is on Soi 71, some twenty-​one floors with emblematic “gardens” at each third floor, each with its token tree to pretend a green image that might attract the gentrifying horde infiltrating along the corridor. The Bloom, however, is at the edge of a complex

Informality as Process    77 of tiny sub-​soi that constitute the quite unique Phra Khanong market, unique in that it is mostly a market for clothing—​better and cheaper than could be found elsewhere in Bangkok. In contrast to the lifeless art district of Eltz Residences, the Phra Khanong market booms with life and vigor; however, it does not cater to the denizens of Eltz Residences or The Bloom, but to those of the Khlong Toei Slums and their overflow into the area of Sois 67 to 71 and beyond. The Eltz and Bloom gentry are more likely to patronize the proliferating up-​market malls with their glorious allure, which are also progressively advancing down the corridor. At one of the entrances to the labyrinthine Phra Khanong market is a row of originally three-​story shophouses that is emblematic of the infiltration of “the poor” into the shophouse world of Sukhumvit. It may, superficially, resemble a construction site. Rather, it is a de-​construction site: all understandings of what is formal, what is informal, what constitutes a slum, are confounded, challenged, deconstructed.4 This would seem to have been one or more shophouse rows from the 1970s, or perhaps the 1980s, or perhaps the 1990s. It has no written history, its origins mostly forgotten, yet it is absolutely definitional of Thai space itself. Clearly this is “formal” in that its developer would have had some form of development approval (however obtained and from whatever “authority”), it is owned, it pays taxes, and it enjoys municipal connections. It is also informal as poor occupants have adapted its spaces and extended outward from its façade in a mélange of new screens, residual wreckage, old signboards of either surviving or departed enterprises, and other tactics to seize a modicum variously of privacy and additional space (Figure 4.1).

Formalizing the Informal, Informalizing the Formal A superficial, reductionist assessment of the poor rural-​to-​urban migrants’ insertions into Soi 71 might identify these as the production of “new slums”—​augmenting the low-​cost housing supply upon the seeming saturation (and the increasing formalization) of both the Khlong Toei Slums and the khlong-​side communities. Such assessment invokes non-​rigorous, unhelpful categories (slum, non-​slum) that are best eschewed. Rather, what are being observed instead are processes, whereby the informal is increasingly formalized, leaving the new nomads of the city to seek habitats in surplus, bypassed though formally constituted spaces of the city. As the nomads appropriate such spaces, albeit paying rent for them, they adapt, modify, and subvert them for that modicum of extra space or convenience, or to enable some small, income-​enabling activity. Simultaneous formalization and informalization are constants; they are interdependent although the mechanisms of that interdependence are contingent on the social context. Two of these contingent forces, in the case of the Khlong Toei Slums and Soi 71, are exemplary. There is first the aesthetic imperative. The Khlong Toei Slums have long been denigrated in popular media for alleged crime and depravity; however, they have also been out of sight, something disturbing but happily not seen. The elevated

78   ROSS KING

Figure 4.1  Sukhumvit Soi 71: formality informalized. The image shows the upper levels of this extraordinary complex. At ground-​floor, street level, however, the entrepreneurial wizardry of Bangkok’s underclass manifests: this is a “street” of computer re-​cyclers, software innovators and pirates, inventers, and entrepreneurs. It is the “other side” of the social inventiveness of Khlong Toei. Photograph by author

expressway made them visible; also the city’s finest district of high-​rise condominium blocks, in Sukhumvit Sois 18 to about 40, brought them into splendid view of the city’s elite. Bangkok has had a significant modern history of condemnation of the informal settlements on the grounds of their damage to an elitist vision of the good Thai society.5 In 2014 a coup brought a military dictatorship to power in Thailand. Militaries deplore disorder, and informality presents as disorder. A second contingent force can be conceived as the spiritual. Forever linked to Khlong (canal) Phra Khanong, parallel to Soi 71 and immediately behind the Phra Khanong market, is the story of Mae Nak Phra Khanong. It is a love story, also a tragedy, because Mae Nak dies in childbirth and returns as a ghost to haunt the place and its community; it is also a story of terror, celebrated in story, novel, films, a musical, television series, and even an opera. The Phra Khanong market, an informal economy in essentially informal space, presents as a wonderful development opportunity for further high-​end condominium towers—​to further eradicate the informal. The market’s stallholders and their less-​than-​affluent clients plan their defense. On a March afternoon in 2012, as on

Informality as Process    79 other occasions, a pickup truck was parked in the entrance to the market; on its bed sat a much-​revered monk, slightly below a gold statue seemingly of himself but actually of Somdet Toh, the nineteenth-​century monk accredited with capturing the ghost of Mae Nak. To the foreigner’s question, “What is he doing?” a stallholder’s response was “[t]‌o bring back the ghost of Mae Nak, to bring misfortune to the developers.”

Case 2. Bangkok: The Khlong Communities In the 1930s and 1940s the Khlong Toei workers had been permitted to settle informally on unwanted land adjoining their workplaces. This had followed the time-​honored practice of Siamese infrastructure building. Bangkok is marshland and the nineteenth-​ century digging of navigable khlong variously for drainage, irrigation, and navigation left the communities of erstwhile diggers settled on the khlong banks and practicing subsistence agriculture on the hinterland behind. An extensive system of such khlong had been built in Bangkok’s northern Bangkhen district. Twentieth-​century roads ended their transportation role; however, their informal communities persist, albeit dilapidating and, where visible, dismissed as eyesores and “slums.” The slum improvement industry steps in, land is re-​blocked and allocated to previous residents on allegedly “fair” criteria, then state funds are provided as subsidies to the redistributed residents to build “modern” houses according to a middle-​class housing estate model, though at greatly reduced scale. One of these canals is Khlong Bang Bua. While it dates from the late nineteenth century, the communities lining its banks grew through rural-​to-​urban migration after the Second World War and especially during the 1960s. In time urban expansion destroyed the rural base; the wooden houses deteriorated and, in the changing perceptions and judgments of Bangkokians, the communities of Khlong Bang Bua came to be defined as slums. Between 2003 and 2005 various communities, decayed physically and increasingly socially dysfunctional, became focuses for slum upgrading under the government Baan Man Kong (BMK) program. A decade later the old disheveled, improvised, dilapidating wooden houses had mostly been replaced, in a near-​total transformation, with modern two-​story concrete houses on the model of a more-​or-​less uniform, middle-​class housing estate. It was to be an ideal urban world described in master plans prepared by academic architects from the nearby Sriphatum University. Even as the older informal settlement was formalizing, it was also constantly informalizing: newly provided communal space was appropriated and personalized with plants and possessions indicating a claim of semi-​possession; the standardized houses would be altered and extended; some households have resisted the standardized houses and gone for their own designs. The outcome of this defiance against order is a seemingly rapid return to the disorder of Bangkok space. Most simply, the re-​informalizing of Bang Bua can be seen

80   ROSS KING

Figure 4.2  The formal informalized: the Chao Phraya riverbank. A formally constituted, four-​ story building is extruded outward and upward as it appropriates its public space, in this case the Chao Phraya River, thereby becoming quintessentially “Bangkok informal space.” Photograph by author

as the same search for extra space that is revealed in the Sukhumvit 71 buildings of Figure 4.1. Similarly, in Figure 4.2, the building displayed is again from the formal sector, along the Chao Phraya River rather than one of its khlong, appropriated and informalized. For the poor, transgression and disorder may be seen as a survival tactic; it also becomes an assertion of identity—​perhaps of psychological survival. A further and almost universal tactic in the claim for space in Thailand is the pop-​up shrine, sometimes as a simple spirit house for the spirits of the place, sometimes as more elaborate places of reverence. The Bang Bua communities have accordingly installed their Buddhist shrines—​Bang Bua’s equivalence with Phra Khanong’s call on ghostly vengeance. A passing comment: Bang Bua presents an array of discordant, contradictory ideals. There is the slum rehabilitation industry of well-​intentioned people; also their linked academic architects who believe in a world of geometric order, good design, and “quality” materials. These are ideologies. They stand against a culture of the informal and a culture-​based realm of inventiveness, survival, and informal economy. Though seemingly (arguably) non-​ideological—​not reverting to legitimizing ideologies—​there is also the turn to the spiritual, both as comfort and as defense.

Informality as Process    81

Case 3. The Chao Phraya The formalizing-​informalizing of Sukhumvit 71 is expressed as a conflict between cultures: between the nomads and corporate capital (fought on the ground of an earlier culture of Sino-​Thai shophouse developers, now left interstitial); Bang Bua is more a conflict between realities, between an ideology of modernity and its images and its ideas for a modern Thai state, and a more disordered, indigenous culture of survival and the everyday. The conflicts of the Chao Phraya riverbanks would seem to raise far higher stakes. The Chao Phraya is Thailand’s “Main Street,” its Grand Canal; here the nation is defined, with the Grand Palace, the grandest of the royal wat (temples), emblems of the defining triad of nation, king, and religion. It is also, however, a wonderfully alluring realm of the “real Bangkok”—​a grand array of disordered, chaotic, informal settlements—​an accidental focus of slum tourism. From the tourist boats the great temples are, in large measure, obscured by the riverbank communities and their variously improvised or decaying dwellings, also their appropriation of once formally provided structures (Figure 4.2 as an instance). The guardians of national identity, notably the Bangkok royalist elite and especially the post-​ 2014 military junta, wage an increasing and self-justifying war against disorder and informality. Sensing wonderful development opportunities, the corporate sector will join the royalist-​military elite in their indignation at disorder. The riverbank, its linked khlong, and also the street markets of the city itself are, since the mid-​2010s, targets of the compulsion to order, to beautification, and to the elimination of “the poor.”6 Capital and the authoritarian order of the (military) state take on Deleuze and Guattari's striating role. The three cases reviewed here are repeated across the city at a variety of scales, both vast and fine-​grained. Thailand was never formally colonized and hence never faced the land-​use zoning fervor of European planners (Thailand would employ Western engineers and architects but not planners). So the mansions and the improvised houses of the poor intermingle. The gate provides the separation that zoning would otherwise ensure, and inequality also becomes fine-​grained. As the Chao Phraya riverbanks would present the very definition of the Thai state and society, the seemingly ubiquitous intrusion of the informal as process into that space is also intrusive into the understanding of the nation: a disordered society and economy confronts the indigenous observer, while the international visitor will observe a culture of survival and out-​of-​control inventiveness and elite-​defying diversity. The dialectic of formality-​informality becomes definitional of the nation.

Case 4. Kips and the Kali Wonokromo Unlike Thailand, Indonesia (the East Indies) was long under Western (Dutch) colonial rule, urban land was zoned, and the suburbs of the European elite were partitioned from

82   ROSS KING the villages of the indigenes. However, the waves of rural-​to-​urban migration in Indonesia following the end of the Independence War in 1949 and the collapse of the Dutch semblance of order led to massive unplanned expansion of the cities in the form of aggregations of kampung: urban settlements of rapidly improvised housing. The kampung replicated aspects of the rural villages though mostly at significantly higher densities and without the amenity of the villages. However, traditions of self-​help and inventiveness were translated into the kampung so that they became places of innovation, informal economy, and illegality. The kampung of Jakarta have long been caught in the often-​violent contest between formal and informal economies: between kampung residents and the corporate sector with its police allies. Kampung dwellers would be evicted for high-​end offices, condominium blocks, hotels, and shopping malls on the grounds that their residences had been labeled slums; the image of the city would also be invoked as justification. In flood-​ prone Jakarta, the encroachments of riverbank settlements were seen to obstruct water flow, leading to constant campaigns for their removal. Indonesia’s second city, after Jakarta, is Surabaya. Over many decades the two have exhibited very different political cultures. Jakarta must present as the great national capital and the slums (kampung) are to be eradicated or, at the least, obliterated from all view. On the other hand, since 1969 in Surabaya there have been the Kampung Improvement Programs (KIPs), especially spearheaded by architect Johan Silas and colleagues at ITS (the Institute of Technology at Surabaya), allied with a sometimes-​benign city government and various NGO supporters. Whereas Jakarta rhetoric would emphasize the alleged poverty, disease, crime, and unsightliness of the kampung, the visitor to Surabaya would be sternly admonished by their university guide with “A kampung is not a slum!” One would be taken on a tour of a variety of kampung, to admire their cleanliness, industry, inventiveness, recycling enterprises, green-​ness, and manifestations of self-​sufficiency. Although the visitor might in some places see a green, urban-​bucolic landscape, almost romantically evocative, one’s academic guide would counter this with reminders of reality: people are poor, opportunities too often blighted; then one would be taken to other, scarcely habitable kampung, below any threshold for KIP regeneration. There would be walkways only 600mm wide, no services, raw sewage, and rubbish; the guide’s comment: “This has to go!” (the Jakarta response?). The KIP “solution” is only for “worthy” kampung, so the answer would be resettlement in new flats: from informality to formality. Fieldwork to such flats in 2007 revealed an innovative attempt at an altogether new building type to meet this agenda: a multi-​story building to provide a mélange of private, shared-​communal, and public space. It also revealed the failures of the attempt: while there was always an assumption that residents would adapt to this provision, the reality seemed instead to be that spaces would instead be appropriated and colonized by disordering residents. Order is disordered, the formal informalized. In Surabaya, the immense Tunjungan Plaza had been carved out of a corner of the far more extensive Kampung Kaliasin, beginning in 1986 and continuing in its expansion to the present (the early 2020s). It now comprises five shopping malls, office towers, multiple hotel and condominium towers, department stores, and entertainment venues. It is the essence of formal, corporate space; its enclosing kampung, in contrast, is ambiguous space. The informal has progressively been brought to aspects of formality: putative

Informality as Process    83 forms of tenure, municipal services, permanent building materials replacing the impermanent. The Pakuwon Group as Tunjungan Plaza’s developers strategically eye the kampung space as opportunity for future expansion; however, there is also some recognition of the dependence of formal plaza on informal kampung for its cheap labor.7 Surabaya’s other significant reform was the progressive rehabilitation of the Kali (river) Mas riverbanks; the image of the city as a “waterfront city” became a civic focus, articulated in a city planning document of 2005. All riverbanks along the Kali Surabaya and Wonokromo would be cleared to yield a “green corridor” to define the city. This goal, however, would cut through a diversity of Wonokromo riverbank kampung. In the 2000s Dyah Erti Idawati had studied five of these Wonokromo communities and their strategies to resist eradication by the city’s Irrigation Department on alleged grounds of flood mitigation and the “green corridor” goal.8 Among these five, Kampung Bratang had been established in 1954 on land “sold” illegally by an Irrigation Department foreman selling what he did not own. Like many Surabaya kampung, decades of house improvement, landscaping, a veritable forest of cages with singing birds, combine to yield an almost-​romantically-​charged milieu, albeit still below median Surabaya standards in housing, services, and opportunities. Kampung Bratang might, in some eyes, be assigned as “picturesque”; its NGO defenders against its would-​be eradicators present this imagery as “green” and a counter to official ideas of a “green corridor.” It is an aesthetic of the informal against one of the formal. There is another defense: an Islamic surao or small mosque has been built strategically atop the levee that defines the community. Any demolition of the kampung will defile the religion in Muslim-​majority Indonesia. Kampung Bratang’s projection of civic virtue as defense is somewhat undermined by its unwanted but adjoining neighbor Kampung Baru (New Kampung). A few shacks were assembled here in the 1960s for prostitution by night and scavenger use by day. The settlement expanded in the 1990s, was then demolished in a 2002 clearance program, only to be quickly rebuilt. Its earlier roles persisted; it is the most run-​down and most visible of the Wonokromo kampung and allegedly a den of criminality. The broader community views it with fear and loathing. Among other riverbank kampung is Kampung Kebraon. It may date from before Independence. After a fire, in 1975 members of the Indonesian Navy moved onto its land to establish their own housing compound, later to be joined by some army squatters. Given its military background, it is the most ordered of the kampung, and the most legally ambiguous—​both formal and informal. Other riverbank kampung exhibit yet further diversity, reflecting the varied processes of their genesis.

Case 5. Kuala Lumpur and Kampung Baru Like Indonesia, Malaya and Singapore were colonized, specifically in their case by the British. Notably in Singapore, the residences of the different races were strictly

84   ROSS KING segregated, and this imposed order was subsequently replicated in Kuala Lumpur. Independence in Malay(si)a and Singapore (in 1957 and 1963–​1965 respectively) was more by negotiation than by war as in Indonesia, and the traditions of “good planning” persisted. Kampung Baru is at the very city center of Kuala Lumpur (KL), immediately adjoining KLCC (KL City Centre) and its iconic Petronas twin towers. It dates from 1900 and the British colonial government’s benevolent, patronizing intention to give the underprivileged Malays a place in the Chinese town center. Though occupied informally by its Malay beneficiaries, the area was granted broad protection; land could never be sold to non-​Malays. A century later the law still stands. It is quintessentially nomad space, the space of the war machine: early resistance to the British fomented here; Malaysia’s once-​dominant political party, UMNO, had its origins here, while in more recent times Kampung Baru has been the source of protest, dissidence, and insurrection. Informality reigns, finance capital eyes it covetously, frequently labeling it an eyesore, even a slum, while its community shelters behind its old (British) law.9 There are other kampung of the Malay under-​class that are decidedly more shambling than Kampung Baru, also mostly protected by old laws and also keenly sought for corporate-​capital development. The aesthetic argument will be brought against them. However, KL is distinctive for its stalemates in the multiple contests between the formal and the informal, also for its guarded use of rhetoric (“slum,” “third-​world”) against what is really informal and “different.”

Lessons Three fairly immediate lessons are to be drawn from these stories. The first is that informality as process weaves through the spaces of the city as multiplicity; it is “of the culture” and intersects with the diversity that arises from the history and the geography of the city. The second lesson is that the formal and the informal are mutually dependent. In Bangkok they exist in mixture, occupying the same physical space, often fine-​grained. In Surabaya’s Kaliasin/​Tunjungan, the relationship is more one of adjacency. Without the cheap labor of the kampung and Bangkok’s informal settlements, the city would cease to function. A third lesson relates to the aesthetic imperative. The ideology of the “green corridor” drives the reforming zeal on both the Kali Mas and Wonokromo, as on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya. However, Kampung Bratang in particular raises the question of whose idea of green is to prevail. The aesthetic judgment of “green,” like that of “slum,” is just that: a judgment. These “conclusions,” however, leave more questions than they answer. How is one to understand this seeming dialectic of the formal and the informal? What is to be said of

Informality as Process    85 the experience of realms of conflicting yet interdependent economies and of making sense of such experience?

Reflection We can usefully return to the Deleuze and Guattari utterance on smooth and striated space: they could equally be referring to the intersecting spaces of Sukhumvit 71 or of Bangkok more generally. Smooth space implies randomness and disorder, unbounded and deterritorializing; striated space is ordered, ordering, surveillanced, the space of legality and the state. The city presents a striated space par excellence, though its order is always threatened as smooth space constantly turns back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads (migrants, the displaced), scrap metal and fabric, patchwork, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant.10 The Deleuze and Guattari argument can offer insights into formality (striated space, the state, order, capital) and informality (smooth space, disorder, nomads and refugees, subsistence) as process, and thereby into “slums” as a shifting reality, as becoming—​their production, transformation, or else persistence. Less clear are the mechanisms whereby the informal is decreed “slum.” On what criteria is this judgment to be made, and for what purpose? Scientific rationality may be invoked: certain attributes of a living environment may be declared “essential” although these always seem arbitrary. To repeat from earlier, the conditions of the rural village might be seen as “natural”; translated into the city and they are seen as slum. So it seems that difference—​relativity—​enters the judgment. In such cases aesthetic judgment—​the judgment of taste in Kantian terms—​ takes command: the riverfront must be greened, eyesores removed or at least screened. However, both the pseudo-​scientific judgment and the judgment of taste ultimately collapse into moral judgment. To damn a community because it falls below the conditions “reasonably expected” is to call up the question of one’s own viewpoints and actions—​how is inequality thereby to be addressed? Likewise aesthetic judgment is more a judgment on the judge than on the judged. The questionings must go further: what are the conditions of possibility—​the enabling social experiences—​that make possible the coexistence and interdependence of formality and informality as process and then the regime of judgments that rises up variously to condemn, aestheticize, romanticize, or ignore the slums as difference. It is not so much where the slums come from as where the judges come from: the production of judgment. Ernst Bloch (writing in 1932) coined the term “nonsynchronism” to identify the phenomenon of living in a range of different times at once and in the same place, where the montage of new and old hold potential for the emergence of new hybrid meanings and producing a “coexistence of realities from different moments of history.”11

86   ROSS KING Rural-​to-​urban migration in Southeast Asia brings urban society into an unsettling conjunction of traditional trade and its leisurely sense of time, with the even slower paced economy and culture of the village. Then globalization has in turn jumbled-​ up these senses of time with the frenetic, accelerating time of global capital and digital communication. Disorientation is ubiquitous though its experience will differ with the individual’s place in the maelstrom of times. Specifically, urban elites begin to judge their own city by what they imagine the modern city should look like: green-​ness, order, no informality. Jan Nederveen Pieterse has drawn attention to the way that globalization produces a proliferation and hybridization of modes of production and organization: The notion of articulation of modes of production may be viewed as a principle of hybridisation. . . . Counterposed to the idea of the dual economy split in traditional/​ modern and feudal/​capitalist sectors, the articulation argument holds that what has been taking place is an interpenetration of modes of production . . . Furthermore, not only these modes of organization are important but also the informal spaces that are created in between, in the interstices. Inhabited by diasporas, migrants, exiles, refugees, nomads, these are sites of what Michael Mann [1986] calls “interstitial emergence” and identifies as important sources of social renewal.12

Stated otherwise, the intersections of economies and cultures represented in the mutual infiltrations of the formal and the informal create new ways of seeing society and new forms of production and organization. With globalization and the opening of the elitist mind to the imagined orderly virtues of other societies, there can also be a widening of the judgment of “slum” to be attached to various of these new forms of organization. The story is thus one of processes, inevitabilities, lines of force. There are two counter-​forces, however. The first: institutional benevolence (variously of the state and the NGOs—​BMKs in Bangkok, KIPs in Surabaya), but also institutional violence (the seemingly wonderful success of the Singapore River redevelopment), as the informal is formalized. The second: the expansion of the middle class in Bangkok and its all-​consuming invasion down the Sukhumvit corridor; the forces of capital are forever trapped in the dilemma of riding on two, opposed, contradictory currents of accumulation. All of these forces seem to intersect most dramatically in that domain of Sukhumvit Soi 71. The equivalent points of most dramatic intersection in Surabaya would be Kampung Kaliasin and Tunjungan Plaza, in Singapore the Singapore River (a wonderful illustration of an endpoint, awaiting the next wave of informalization), in Kuala Lumpur it would be the KLCC-​Kampong Baru dilemma. Ultimately we are dealing with processes and forces and not with states (it is endless becoming, not being). Slums are better seen as a phenomenon rather than a thing, products variously of capital, nationalism, bigotry, violence, exclusion from sight. They are certainly neither permanent nor stable. In some regions of the world, they are more likely to destroy the nation and capitalism rather than be destroyed by them, as de-​industrialization erodes the social fabric and its urban space, thereby to generate

Informality as Process    87 new milieus of an insurgent politics. However, that is not the case in most nations of Southeast Asia (though not necessarily in all), as “the slums” are the venue of social mobility and spatial/​social evolution and invention.

Notes 1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474–​475. 2. Ross King, and M. R. Pumin Varavarn, “Hidden Heritage (2): Sukhumvit 71,” in Ross King, Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Thailand: Memory, Place and Power (Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), 161–​180. 3. Ross King, Reading Bangkok (Singapore: NUS Press), 155–​159. 4. Ross King and Kim Dovey, “Reading the Bangkok Slum,” in Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics, ed. Fabian Frenzel, Ko Koens, and Malte Steinbrink (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 159–​171. 5. Michael Herzfeld, “The Blight of Beautification: Bangkok and the Pursuit of Class-​based Urban Purity,” Journal of Urban Design 22, no. 3 (2017): 291–​307. 6. Ibid. 7. Purwanita Setijanti, “Low-​Income Inner-​City Settlement Processes: A Surabaya Study,” PhD diss., University of Melbourne (2006). 8. Dyaherti Idawati, “Distorted Communication in the Struggle of Squatter Settlements along the Surabaya Riverbank,” PhD diss., University of Melbourne (2009); Ross King, and Dyaherti Idawati, “Surabaya Kampung and Distorted Communication,” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 25, no. 2 (2010): 213–​233. 9. Ross King, Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space in Malaysia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008). 10. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 181. 11. Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics,” New German Critique 11 (1997): 22–​38; Frederic Jameson, “Foreword,” in Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994). 12. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization as Hybridization,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995): 50–​51.

Bibliography Bloch, Ernst. “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to its Dialectics.” New German Critique 11 (1997): 22–​38. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Herzfeld, Michael. “The Blight of Beautification: Bangkok and the Pursuit of Class-​Based Urban Purity.” Journal of Urban Design 22, no. 3 (2017): 291–​307. Idawati, Dyaherti. “Distorted Communication in the Struggle of Squatter Settlements along the Surabaya Riverbank.” PhD diss., Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 2009.

88   ROSS KING Jameson, Frederic. “Foreword.” In Karatani Kojin, Origins of Modern Japanese Literature, vii-​ xx. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1994. King, Ross. Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya: Negotiating Urban Space in Malaysia. Singapore: NUS Press, 2008. King, Ross. Reading Bangkok. Singapore: NUS Press, 2011. King, Ross, and Kim Dovey. “Reading the Bangkok Slum.” In Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics, edited by Fabian Frenzel, Ko Koens, and Malte Steinbrink, 159–​171. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. King, Ross, and Dyaherti Idawati. “Surabaya Kampung and Distorted Communication.” SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 25, no. 2 (2010): 213–​233. King, Ross, and M. R. Pumin Varavarn. “Hidden Heritage (2): Sukhumvit 71.” In Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Thailand: Memory, Place and Power, by Ross King, 161–​180. Singapore: NUS Press, 2017. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. “Globalization as Hybridisation.” In Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, 45–​68. London: Sage, 1995. Setijanti, Purwanita. “Low-​Income Inner-​City Settlement Processes: A Surabaya Study.” PhD diss., Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, 2006.

CHAPTER 5

SLUM S City Spaces of Governance and Global Disadvantage WINNIE V. MITULLAH

Informal settlements and slums are persistent urban development challenges that continually confront urban governors. The households in such settlements often lack basic services, fall within the lowest income group, and largely earn their subsistence within the precarious informal economy. The concept “slum” has been used since the industrial revolution, which triggered the migration of population from largely agricultural spaces to densely built industrial urban spaces. The concept is contested, with scholars such as Alex Ezeh et alia noting that the word “slum” is emotive and pejorative and that the term “informal settlements” is a better alternative.1 However, the concept “informal settlements” is equally contentious. Dolf Te Lintelo and others maintain that the term “informal settlements” masks stark intra-​and inter-​site differences.2 Informal settlements are heterogeneous and subject to myriad governance arrangements, and they cannot be handled in the same manner. Mercy Brown-​Luthango et alia concur, insisting upon the need for thorough analysis and understanding of the socioeconomic and governance contexts within informal settlements before designing and implementing upgrading interventions.3 Despite deep-​rooted conceptual concerns, the United Nations continues to use the word “slum,” most importantly in 2015 in its landmark Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the same year its agency UN-​HABITAT provided a clue as to why this should be so, characterizing slums as being an integral part of the broader problem of informal settlements. It contended that slums are the most deprived and excluded form of informal settlements, characterized by poverty and large agglomerations of dilapidated housing that are often located on the most hazardous land.4 The word “slum” has, indeed, had distinctly negative connotations since its first appearance in the English language early in the nineteenth century, inferring poverty and misery, danger and decay.5 Gusti Suartika and Alexander Cuthbert contend that there

90   WINNIE V. MITULLAH is a general tendency in depictions of slums to denigrate the physical quality of building structures and then to link this “debased” environment with “lower” class behavior.6 Suzanne Smit and others concur, stating that slums are characteristically analyzed along various dimensions of diminishing value, including housing typology, ownership and adherence to planning regulations, employment and income, access to services and infrastructure, and general social characteristics.7 More than one billion people live today in what are called slum conditions, with most of them dwellers in the Global South.8 UN-​HABITAT’s report State of the World’s Cities 2006/​2007 defined a “slum household” as comprising those individuals living under the same roof in an urban area, who lack durable and permanent housing that shelters them from extreme weather conditions. The report called instead for “sufficient” living space for the poor, which it estimated would mean not more than three people sharing a room; together with access to safe water in sufficient amounts and affordable prices, access to adequate sanitation in the form of a public or private toilet shared by a reasonable number of people, and security of tenure that prevents forced eviction.9 By contrast, Gijsbert Hoogendoorn and Julia Giddy, for example, dispute such universalizing tendencies, arguing that the definition of a slum varies from one geographical, historical, and socio-​spatial context to another, with the Global South utilizing a variety of locally specific or vernacular names to describe slum locations, such as favelas in Brazil, townships in South Africa, villas miseria in Argentina, and kijiji in Kenya.10 Contrary to the pool of literature that designates communities living in slums as being disintegrated, disorganized, and marginalized, it is preferable to rely on Heylan Lewis’s situational constraint thesis, which contends that the poor are not insulated from the mainstream culture.11 They share the values of society, and struggle to provide for themselves subsistence livelihoods.12 Most slum dwellers rely on social capital and their own efforts to provide for basic infrastructure and services. These are services which should be provided by urban authorities, and their absence should be understood as a governance deficit. Governance of cities and urban areas has been a pressing development concern in the post-​colonial world since at least the 1980s. Many cities and urban areas in developing countries have weak institutions, inadequate resources, poor inter-​governmental relations, and weak stakeholder engagement. This undermines efforts to ensure inclusive development, which is more glaring in slum areas where infrastructure and services are either absent or inadequate. Attempts to serve such areas through participatory networked forms of governance (which are understandably thought to be more responsive to the urban poor than previous interventions) have yielded minimal results, leaving a profound governance deficit.13 Informal settlements and slums lack the officially required infrastructure and services, and receive minimal municipal budget allocations, which implies less engagement by public authorities. The civil society organizations that have been persistent in working with such communities are overwhelmed by the numbers of households that require support. In any case most of these organizations focus on basic livelihood support, leaving a whole array of unsupported needs. A UN-​HABITAT issues paper on

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    91 urban governance notes that effective urban governance should be democratic and inclusive, long-​term and integrated, multi-​scale and multi-​level, territorial, proficient, and conscious of the digital age.14 While cities supported by development agencies struggle to achieve these attributes, the situation remains still more serious in informal settlements and slums. Since 1976, when UN-​HABITAT held its first human settlements conference in Vancouver, various efforts have been made to develop and upgrade low-​ income housing. These include interventions by government, UN agencies, and development financiers such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. For example, the UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 7, Target 7D (approved in 2000) aimed to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. The MDG 7 represents the most ambitious formal attempt by the world community to address the needs of slum dwellers and has been reinforced by the new SDGs, but many challenges facing these city dwellers remain. These problems demonstrate the depth of accumulated disadvantage facing these communities and the complexity of solving their precarious position. Since the late 1970s, the situation of the disadvantaged has been made worse by neoliberal policies that developing countries have embraced. Neoliberalism promotes free markets, personal freedom, individual rights, and private property, with minimal interference from the state. The theory is hinged on what David Harvey calls “human well-​ being based on individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market and free trade.”15 Neoliberal rationality has been used since the 1980s to influence most policies, including those for upgrading informal settlements and slums. The emphasis on home ownership and affordability in slum upgrading and the provision of low-​income housing was informed by the neoliberal policies pursued by international financiers such the IMF and the World Bank.

Background For decades, the literature on slums has highlighted the poor housing conditions and services in such settlements, without framing the discussion in the context of the overall fragmented development of urban areas. Furthermore, discussion about slums is often tied to urban poverty and the need to provide basic services, including housing, to the urban poor. It is in this context that both the UN’s MDGs and the current SDGs have prioritized poverty and poor housing as areas for urgent global intervention.16 The MDGs’ Goal 1, which aimed to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, made minimal progress, largely due to the continual growth in the number of people living in extreme poverty. An analysis by the Economic Commission for Africa in 2016 revealed that although the target was theoretically being achieved, more people were living in poverty than in the base year of 1990. For example, in Africa 280 million people were

92   WINNIE V. MITULLAH classified as extremely poor in 1990, but by 2012 the number had risen to 389 million—​ notwithstanding the positive effects of MDG programs—​on account of the failure of income growth to keep pace with rising population growth.17 By 2015 the global poor—​ largely living in slums—​was estimated by the World Bank to be 769 million, with Africa and South Asia taking the largest share (413 and 216 million people respectively).18 The bank drew particular attention to the slow pace of poverty reduction in Africa (excluding North Africa), and attributed this to slower growth rates, conflicts, weaker institutions, and lack of success in channeling growth into poverty reduction. The overwhelming number of people living in slums drove Mike Davies to coin the phrase “Planet of Slums.”19 Robin King and others currently estimate the global affordable housing gap to be 330 million urban households, and it is forecast to grow by more than 30 percent to 440 million households or 1.6 billion people by 2025.20 The failure to eradicate poverty and slums during the MDG era justified its goal one remaining in the SDGs as number one (being split into SDG 1and SDG 2: no poverty and zero hunger). It is evident that attaining all the other SDG targets depends largely on promoting sustainable cities, which is crucial in the journey toward overall sustainable development. The continual shortage of adequate and affordable housing in cities has a linear correlation with the proliferation of slums. Conservative 2018 estimates, from the UN’s Sustainable Development Synthesis Report, place the population living in slums at one billion people.21 Halima Begum, Philip Heywood, and Connie Susilawati argue that providing affordable low-​income housing is one of the most formidable challenges facing the Global South, where the extent and nature of the problem differs on historical, sociopolitical and economic grounds.22 The authors further note that in the Global South this has led to a wide variety of approaches to address the problem, including state-​led, state-​ enabled, and community-​based participation and partnerships. Consequently, the concern about the proliferation of slums across the globe by policy makers, practitioners, and scholars is a pertinent development issue. The concern is informed by the deprivation of slum settlements, which in most cases lack security of tenure with households being prone to eviction at the will of authorities or landowners. Their deprivation is further intensified by poor living conditions in overcrowded dwellings with poor sanitation and lack of clean water. In Africa, major interventions and programs addressing the situation in slums date back to the late 1970s, but the problems of slums tend to remain, as new areas develop into slums and intensify the problem. These disappointments can partly be attributed to the failure to conceptualize slums as an urban development challenge of exclusion, which requires broader structural economic intervention. Past interventions used a “basic needs” approach, an approach that identifies a bundle of basic minimum requirements for human life such as food, shelter, clothing, clean water, and sanitation.23 This approach concentrated on the basic survival of the urban poor and did not take into consideration the structural political and economic conditions, which have been highlighted by scholars as being crucial in addressing poverty and slum development.24 In recent years, however, under the UN slogan to “leaving no one behind,” countries have come under pressure (especially by civil society organizations and housing-​rights

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    93 social movements) to adopt a “rights” perspective, embedding the equality and dignity of all urban dwellers. For example, the Pamoja Trust of Kenya, in collaboration with Slum Dwellers International, pursues a rights perspective in supporting the upgrading of slums. Their programs focus on federation building and community-​led upgrading. This involves building the capacity of communities to run daily saving schemes, and to undertake enumeration of slum dwellers, land-​tenure negotiation with the government, house design, and training in the construction of upgraded houses. Many interventions aimed at improving the conditions of those living in informal settlements and slums have thus been made in the Global South. However, there can be minimal positive change while the numbers living in such settlements continue to increase.

Conceptualization of Slums In the preface to his classic book The Politics of Basic Needs, Richard Sandbrook called on readers to “imagine the feasible shifts in political forces and development strategies that might vanquish the squalor, debilitation, and humiliation of poverty.”25 While the imagination he called for continues, with many scholars writing on reform strategies, slums remain a feature of urban development especially in Africa and Asia. The proliferation of slums has often been associated with the working class and the concentration of population near sources of industrial work and related services. Long ago, in 1844, Friedrich Engels had discussed the deteriorating physical conditions of the working class in Manchester, which was then considered the “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution.26 The conditions Engels described were the product of the great Industrial Revolution that pushed people out of cottage industries located in peripheral areas to larger cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Liverpool. The same trend also took place in North America. Although the new urban spaces were ill prepared to receive the increasing populations, the migrants who played such an important role in sustaining the unfolding Industrial Revolution were viewed as an obstacle to orderly urban development. This perception largely informed the negative perception of disadvantaged neighborhoods from the early nineteenth century until the 1970s. Early scholars often portrayed slum settlements in a very negative manner, largely due to the poor sanitary conditions within these communities.27 Slums were viewed as disorganized, the source of all evils and epidemics, and nurseries of pauperism and crime. They were characterized as areas of lost souls, where individuals and families lived due to some unfathomable compulsion and in defiance of normal social behavior. They were communities in the process of disintegration, where the laws of the wider society did not apply. They suffered from social ills and lacked basic social institutions. Gunnar Myrdal, writing in 1944 about American cities, followed the footsteps of these early authors and viewed the black poor as disorganized and as representing an unhealthy form of American community.28

94   WINNIE V. MITULLAH Amid such negative conceptualizations of slums, several scholars stand out in opposition to the prevailing ideas. William Whyte maintained that organization exists in slums and that scholars had to move away from social disorganization theories to identify the positive aspects of slums,29 while Hylan Lewis argued that slum dwellers are what they are due to situational constraints rather than cultural patterns.30 This school of thought argues that slum dwellers are labeled as disorganized because they deviate from the normative pattern of organization and stability. Indeed, William Mangin’s research in Latin America revealed the existence of high levels of community action and political involvement among rural migrants to cities in Peru. Mangin argued that the settlements of the poor should not be viewed as a problem but as a solution to their problems.31 Probably, it was this gradual change in perception from disorganization to organization that influenced John F. C. Turner’s Freedom to Build (1969), which saw strength in organization among slum dwellers.32 Turner argued that housing is best provided and managed by those who are to dwell in them rather than being centrally administered by the state and professionals; the people were experts in their own situations and should be given “freedom to build.” This work triggered a radical new approach to slum development, influencing many self-​help housing programs that were piloted across the developing world from the late 1970s. By the 1980s, scholars such as Lisa Peattie and Jose Aldrete-​Hass observed that slums were filling the gaps left by the state.33 This is reflected in many countries, especially in Africa, where communities in slums and informal housing are providing more housing than the state and formal housing sector. Slum provision is creatively filling a gap, albeit with limited infrastructure and services. This new positive perception of slums was accompanied by voices from many social movements within the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), a global movement focusing on the right to housing, and with the fundamental aim of building just cities. The movement was established as an advocacy social movement during the first UN-​ HABITAT meeting of 1976 in Vancouver. Since then, the movement and many other advocacy groups have advocated for everyone’s right to secure a place to live in peace and dignity: their “right to the city.” The “right to the city” was first articulated by Henri Lefebvre in 1968.34 A key concern for Lefebvre was the advantage given to the property rights of owners, which outweigh the rights of city inhabitants such as slum dwellers. In his writings, the right to the city is understood to be a struggle to augment the rights of urban inhabitants against the property rights of owners, leading eventually to the withering away of the state and to the collective self-​governing of society. He advocated for a city in which city dwellers manage space for themselves beyond the control of the state and capitalism. Since the publication of Lefebvre’s work, scholars and activists have used the idea of a “right to the city” with different conceptualizations, with many taking a less radical approach. Mark Purcell critiques these various conceptualizations of the “right to the city,” noting that they are bloated with so many understandings of rights to the city, and are limited by the horizon of liberal democracy.35 Purcell supports Lefebvre’s original conceptualization, which does not see rights to the city as incremental additions to existing liberal democratic rights. He sees it as an essential element in a wider political struggle

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    95 for revolutionary change: a beginning, an opening, a start toward a possible better urban world. However, the dilemma in pursuing the struggle and the revolution is the fact that slum dwellers, including intermediaries who work on their behalf such as the HIC, still operate within a neoliberal context in which the property rights of economic elites are respected and protected. Furthermore, such intermediaries rely on neoliberal agencies for funding and can only maneuver their way within neoliberal paradigms, which compromises any expectations of fundamental change. UN agencies such as UN-​HABITAT and UNESCO, and many advocacy groups supporting slum dwellers, have taken a rights approach to city governance, but they also work pragmatically with neoliberal regional agencies and states. This undermines their push for a new urban world structured along the lines that Lefebvre had conceptualized. Lefebvre called for urban life that goes beyond the demand for basic needs to include access to the resources of the city for all segments of the population, and the possibility of realizing alternative ways of life. He did not anticipate that this could be achieved within the structural framework of liberal capitalist society. On the other hand, the UN agencies and advocacy groups focusing on the right to the city tend to work within capitalistic structures, with many actors closely collaborating and forming alliances with neoliberalism forces. This includes working with city governors and national governments—​ largely supported by neoliberal actors—​to change the situation of slum dwellers through inclusion policies and strategies. Unfortunately, often the city governors are part of the problem.36 Calls for recognition of the human dignity of slum dwellers have accompanied the campaigns for the right to the city. This overlaps with calls for housing rights: that everyone has the right to access adequate housing and to live in security, peace, and dignity. Dignity of individuals is enshrined in declarations of universal human rights, which recognize inherent dignity and the right to have individual dignity respected and protected. Agencies such as Slum Dwellers International have supported slum dwellers in the Global South to claim their dignity and right to housing through political struggles and movements of the landless and the urban poor. The next section examines some of the efforts on the ground aimed at achieving inclusion, the right to the city, and dignity for slum dwellers.

Slums in Urban Development The lack of social inclusion and the marginalization of slums in the Global South is manifested in the severely restricted space that slums occupy in cities and urban areas. In most cases, the population living in slums is much higher than that living in non-​ slum housing. For example, in Mumbai, with a population of twelve million people, more than six million residents live in slums situated on less than 8.75 percent of the city’s land mass, the largest proportion and absolute number of slum dwellers in any city in the world.37 Government approaches to the housing crisis in India—​through public

96   WINNIE V. MITULLAH housing, site and service schemes, and slum upgrading—​together with self-​help group efforts, have yielded minimal results. The site and service schemes are low-​income housing schemes with varying degrees of services, ranging from mere laying out of sites for houses and spaces for communal facilities to fully developed services.38 The level of service differs in each site and service scheme, depending on what is agreed on by agencies supporting development. This slum situation is not unique to India; it is replicated in many cities in Asia and Africa in which over half of the inhabitants live in slums and informal settlements. In Nairobi in Kenya over 60 percent of the city’s population live in slums and informal settlements, occupying about 5 percent of the city’s residential land.39 The state of such slums has attracted global attention, with UN-​HABITAT and civil society movements such as HIC, Cities Alliance, and Slum Dwellers International supporting governments who partner with slum dwellers. Most of this support has concentrated on enabling shelter strategies coupled with campaigns for secure tenure. This has witnessed the adoption of various global shelter strategies, reinforced by Agenda 21, the MDGs and SDGs. Agenda 21 was a product of a UN Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janerio in June 1992. Agenda 21 addressed the most pressing development problems and aimed at preparing the world for the challenges of the next century. These global processes have pushed most governments to endorse the key principles of the enabling strategies advocated by powerful international agencies.40 However, implementation of these strategies and experiences differ across countries and cities. Dina Nassar and Hanan Elsayed, for example, point out that there have been numerous policies, strategies, and programs devised by Global South governments (including public housing, site and service schemes, redevelopment, and slum and area upgrading) that cannot address environmental quality and housing needs on a sufficiently large scale.41 There is a global shift away from the traditional response of slum clearance through the eviction of slum dwellers and relocation of residents. Instead there is a move toward in situ slum upgrading, and slum prevention through enabling formal and informal renting. This is done by offering incentives to the private sector for low-​income housing as opposed to high-​end housing.42 Paavo Monkkonen argues that housing policies in the Global South ought to focus less on new ways to subsidize housing or to design financing schemes, and more on urban land, planning policies, legal systems, and social movements.43 Neglecting these aspects tends to undermine efforts to improve informal settlements and slums, as well as the development of low-​income housing. Urban land is costly, and most poor residents cannot afford it.

Experiences in Addressing Slums Developing countries have had negative experiences in addressing slum development. Most of the programs have not succeeded, as is demonstrated by the increasing

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    97 number of people living in slums. Several programs have had the unintended outcome of pushing low-​income dwellers out of upgraded schemes, and opening gates for the gentrification of the schemes. In cases where slum communities have remained in the schemes, they have modified the planned units to fit their own needs. In a collaborative Government of Kenya and UN-​HABITAT Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) in Kibera, new one-​bedroom houses were converted into two-​family household units with each family taking a room, sitting room, and bedroom respectively and sharing other utilities. Most of the families could not afford the newly built units with infrastructure and services. They used the innovative approach of either sharing the units or remaining in the slums, contrary to the expectations of policy makers and planners. The sharing of units intended for single households, and the gentrification of upgrading and low-​income housing schemes, has been a common experience. The 1980s and 1990s World Bank upgrading projects, and site and service schemes, totally failed to achieve their goal of housing the urban poor. In Kenya, the schemes have been transformed into investment opportunities for housing development entrepreneurs, who buy off the poor and develop high-​rise flats for profitable rental. There are many reasons that explain the failure of slum upgrading programs, but lack of affordability and the related assumption by governments and funding agencies that the poor should own urban houses stand out. The majority of those living in slums do not have formal jobs. They rely on fragile informal employment, which is unpredictable and cannot guarantee payment of mortgage or market rent. Unless innovative cheap housing programs with state subsidies are designed for the poor, pushing them to own houses in cities is a planning approach that is doomed to fail. Experiences from other jurisdictions also reveal challenges in improving the conditions of slum dwellers. In a study of slum upgrading in Freedom Park in Cape Town, upgrading intervention was shown to have unintended consequences that resulted in an erosion of community cohesion.44 This occurs for example when some households in a slum community must be relocated to make room for infrastructure, and when new households take up some of the upgraded houses due to lack of affordability by the original dwellers. It is in this respect that scholars such as Mercy Brown-​ Luthango and colleagues support in situ slum upgrading approaches that consider social networks and community cohesion within settlements.45 Most slum upgrading programs embed community participation. However, at a practical level community participation has not been very effective, largely because of what the programs must achieve in line with the requirements of neoliberal funding agencies. Paul Jones, in his study of informality in Indonesia, notes the need to question the assumptions and rationale that lie behind local government policies and strategies that purport to be directed toward sustainable upgrading of slums and informal settlements.46 He further observes that in the development settings of the kampung (urban or rural settlements in Indonesia), the residents are viewed as issues to be corrected by the middle and ruling class, and are therefore sidelined from decision-​ making processes. Effective community participation can negate challenges like those faced by the Kenya UN-​HABITAT upgrading program. This program has had mixed

98   WINNIE V. MITULLAH results and has not fully met its objectives. Single-​household units are shared by the poor slum households, while comparatively better-​off households penetrate the project by renting single units without sharing. Debate on slum development revolves mainly around policy, affordability, community participation, and social cohesion. The home ownership policy has been a challenge in many developing countries where there is no effective demand for home ownership. This policy does not effectively consider the economic situation of slum dwellers and their ability to sustain mortgage payments. Furthermore, community participation—​ which is crucial for ensuring sustainability and cohesion of communities—​is never given the attention it deserves. Zafu Teferi and Peter Newman, in reference to a case study of informal settlements in Addis Ababa, propose a shift in policy away from the high-​rise apartment modernist approach, to an organic approach that is more sustainable and preserves the social cohesion of slum communities.47 Eduardo Rojas, reviewing fifty years’ experience of housing policies in Latin America, suggests that rapidly urbanizing countries would do much better by breaking away from previous housing programs—​with their traditional sector focus and preoccupation with individual entitlement—​to closely link production of new homes with the provision of the complementary urban amenities needed by the population.48 The author maintains that cities will benefit more from housing programs that include government block grants to support local efforts to improve housing conditions, rather than from programs that merely support the building of homes. Sandeep Arora and others concur, observing that the government of India has often adopted a top-​down approach in its urban renewal projects.49 This has resulted in policy being devised from the national level, with feedback from the state level, but without much involvement from the operational agencies who are much closer to the users and ground realities. Slum development has been based on many assumptions that often do not work. Many governments, in collaboration with their neoliberal funding agencies, prioritize home ownership when evidence shows that the urban poor cannot afford to own homes. The situation is further undermined by the lack of effective participation by slum dwellers, which results in the support provided not being appropriate. However, in recent years agencies such as Slum Dwellers International have assisted slum communities in building capacity, mobilizing resources, undertaking slum enumeration, and engaging authorities to claim their rights. Urmi Sengupta and colleagues, in their study of housing policies in Brazil and India, point out four misconceptions about slum dwellers in the two countries.50 These are the assumption that slum dwellers require homes as opposed to shelter, the promotion of housing policy in isolation from economic considerations, the establishment of market institutions by governments without consideration for social housing supply, and the undervaluing of participation and enablement at the local level. These observations reveal the complex web of considerations that need to be addressed in order to understand the housing needs of low-​income households. Previous programs made assumptions relating to affordability, the desire to own homes, and community participation, which have all been problematic. In particular, lack of involvement in the decision-​making process has resulted in

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    99 eligibility lists, house designs, specifications, and terms and conditions that are developed without effective participation by local communities. Despite the complexity of housing low-​income households, many governments in the present day, supported by UN agencies, civil society organizations, and social movements, continue to maintain programs that target slums and informal settlements. However, across the developing world only pockets of evidence can be found that attest to progress being made on slum upgrading and affordable housing. This limited progress can be attributed to many factors, including resistance from those who wish to maintain the status quo due to the benefits they draw from the existence of such settlements. There is also the influence of external experts to consider, who regard slums as problematic, whereas those who live in slums see the problems differently and often have other priorities. Nicola Morrison, in a recent study of the Fadama settlement in Accra, West Africa, states that formal rules and institutional structures merge with informal rules and practices to maintain the status quo.51 She argues that elite stakeholders have different motivations from those of the poor residents for maintaining a slum’s informality, and work hard to resist international recommendations for institutional change. While Morrison has a good argument, her analysis does not bring out the varied interests embedded in slum development, which usually combine to exclude the interests of the slum dwellers. In the few cases where attempts have been made to include them, they often lack the formal negotiating power to assert grassroots opinions: hence the continuing failure of global efforts to address the challenges facing slum dwellers. The inadequate response by governments and development agencies to the local needs and realities of slum dwellers often result in housing programs that are motivated by political and administrative objectives, rather than by the realities on the ground and the ability of the urban poor to afford housing. Matthew French et alia, in support of a bottom-​up perspective to housing, assess the effects of participatory slum upgrading in post-​war Afghanistan through community development councils.52 These councils act as a mechanism for citizen engagement in upgrading, achieving tangible improvements in the lives of millions, fostering civic engagement, and strengthening the social contract between citizens and the Afghan state. In a comparative case study between Harare in Zimbabwe and Kampala in Uganda, Davison Muchadenyika and Jeremy Waiswa reveal the importance of policy and leadership in successful in situ slum upgrading.53 Supportive leadership facilitates enabling policies and contributes to the success of programs. Although both cities have national policy frameworks on slum upgrading, the successes in Harare are attributed to effective city leaders. Apart from effective leadership and policies, inter-​governmental relations, the availability of finance, and an active civil society all matter. In cases where the relationship between levels of governments are not well defined in respect to functional assignment, formulating appropriate policies can be problematic. Xuefei Ren highlights policy responses in China, Brazil, and India, noting that they are largely shaped by four intertwining forces: inter-​governmental relations, electoral politics, municipal finance, and the capacity of the civil society.54 Analysis of the three countries brings out the different forces at play in addressing slums. In the city of Guangzhou in China, the fact that

100   WINNIE V. MITULLAH land financing drove the removal-​based private sector shaped the urban-​village policy of redevelopment. In Mumbai, electoral politics and weak municipal revenue gave rise to an invitation to the private sector, notwithstanding protests, to undertake slum rehabilitation and redevelopment. In Rio de Janeiro democratic transition and competitive mayoral elections shaped integration-​based favela upgrading programs. While there are many contending arguments about what should be prioritized in addressing housing for poor urban households, a holistic approach is necessary depending on the context. This entails examining policies, laws, regulations, planning, development actors, and issues relating to land, infrastructure, and services. Most of the poor cannot afford decent housing without subsidies, which have to be leveraged with the support of government and other development actors. Ren notes that although assisted community housing has great potential for housing development, including pro-​ poor housing development, it requires active assistance and support from NGOs on the one hand, and incentives and encouragement from government on the other. Social housing through cooperatives, and community or public schemes, is often designed to enable poor urban households to access housing. However, a significant number of households still find such housing expensive. Halima Begum and others, in their case study of Dhaka, state that assisted community housing has significant potential to contribute to housing development.55 Monkkonen argues for more focus on urban land, planning policies, legal systems, and social movements, and less emphasis on subsidized housing or designed financing schemes.56 He emphasizes that, if the goal is to improve the housing of the worse off, then the focus must be on encouraging innovation in political coalitions and social movements and how to use these to change the situation. There seems to be a consensus in support of Monkkonen’s argument.57 However Brown-​Luthango et alia focus more on in situ slum upgrading, advocating a contextual approach that is participatory, with inclusive leadership that integrates slum dwellers and is supported by both local and national governments.58

Governance Deficits in Addressing Slums The proliferation of slums across the globe is a complex matter and is a product of multiple factors that are largely linked to the level of economic growth and the related efficiency of leadership and governance institutions. Sean Fox argues that slums are a result of “disjointed modernization,” pointing out that 70 percent of cross-​country variations in slum incidence is explained by demographic, economic, and institutional factors.59 Fox contends that status quo interests and an anti-​urbanization bias in development discourse among development actors have inhibited investment and reform in the post-​ colonial era. He further observes that “urban underdevelopment has proven politically and economically beneficial to a wide range of actors in African cities.”60 Fox’s analysis

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    101 brings out the governance deficits in managing slums, which are shrouded in political and economic competition rather than efficient planning, and governance of infrastructure and services. The deficits in infrastructure and services, which make slums unique spatial spaces within cities, are a manifestation of low incomes, which in turn is related to poor and uneven economic growth and institutional failures to address their ramifications through appropriate governance mechanisms. Infrastructure provision—​especially in the areas of energy and connective infrastructure such as roads and rail, together with water supply and health services—​is crucial in orderly urban development. They provide mobility and ensure the health of the population that is needed for productivity and economic growth. This notwithstanding, the availability of these services is skewed in most urban areas of the Global South. Often slums have minimal services or no services at all, resulting in pathetic housing and environmental challenges that undermine the productive capacity of slum dwellers. Taking into consideration that slum dwellers comprise most residents in most cities of the Global South, especially in Africa and Asia, one can argue that infrastructure and service deficits are the major factors contributing to low economic growth and the continuing proliferation of slums. “Slum” is in fact just another word to describe the homes of most urban residents who supply labor to the many industries that produce capital and sustain cities. This fact was ignored for decades as governments eliminated slums with the hope of replacing them with properly planned and serviced housing. This failure to conceptualize slums within a broad urban political economy framework that acknowledges both the limited capacity of slum dwellers to become homeowners, and the connection between slums and the rest of the urban economy, has been deeply problematic. For decades, slums were viewed negatively in urban development. Infrastructure and services were not provided, with many slum communities exposed to harassment and demolition of shelter. This has begun to change, and cities are struggling to provide basic services to slums as programs of upgrading and relocation are put in place. However, few cities have integrated plans that include slum development. Infrastructure development and service delivery in slums are often done under special programs tied to support from development partners. Most countries in the Global South rely on these partners for capital development funds, including funds for developing social housing for low-​income groups. Some of the development partners dictate their terms and conditions, including management structures of projects, which often clash with existing local institutions. In most cases, programs in the Global South are not adequately budgeted for and integrated into overall city, regional, state, and national governance structures. The situation is worse for programs supported by development partners, which are often ignored once the funding period expires. This is largely due to the economic logic of effective demand and supply, which tends to dismiss slum dwellers as lacking effective demand due to their lack of economic resources. This was a key factor during the 1970s and 1980s when the upgrading and site and service schemes were popularized by the World Bank and supporting agencies.61 These programs were largely influenced by John Turner’s

102   WINNIE V. MITULLAH conceptualization of squatter settlements as solutions and not problems. Turner saw the potential of self-​help building as an opportunity for the poor to provide affordable self-​ built housing. Turner’s ideas were later embraced by neoliberal forces such as the World Bank, which saw such opportunities as good returns for investment. Looking back to those times from today, it seems that the key issue was not in fact lack of affordability by poor slum dwellers but rather issues of appropriate policy, planning standards, and tenure. Neoliberal policies promoted market options and could not therefore support subsidized public rental housing, which is more appropriate to slum dwellers. Home ownership was prioritized by neoliberal programs, because it was believed that the poor—​with external support—​could invest in home ownership and thus change their status from insecure renters to stable homeowners. This logic is based on the rights of private property and profit, which surpass all other notions of rights. However, this logic has not worked since slum dwellers have minimal economic opportunities for generating the resources required for home ownership. Formal planning standards and the cost of land are often too high to be afforded by the urban poor. This results in the failure of many of programs, which push most slum dwellers out of their improved living spaces, as new entrants who qualify under market-​ affordability logic take over the new formalized settlements. This situation continues to be exploited by many elite actors, including developers, bureaucrats, and politicians. They perpetuate the development of inadequate housing structures that do not meet basic decent development requirements. In many cities, especially in Africa, slum developers are known by the local administrators. In some cases, administrators and politicians directly invest in slums, building housing units that do not meet the threshold of decent housing. By investing in slums, they become primary stakeholders with conflicts of interest. This compromises their ability to address the governance deficits facing slum dwellers and further promotes the proliferation of slums.

Concluding Remarks Slum development is a political economy issue; it is not only a social issue requiring social interventions using basic-​needs approaches to the provision of basic services. The political economy of slum development has, however, not been adequately grasped. Historically, the World Bank programs of upgrading, together with sites and service schemes that have been implemented in Africa since the late 1970s, have targeted slums and housing for the poor without taking into consideration the underlying urban housing economy. The World Bank programs used the abstract economic logic of affordability, in the absence of any knowledge about local housing needs, resulting in those being targeted not benefiting at all from the programs. Instead, higher income groups ended up occupying the improved housing, either after the right holders gave up

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    103 their rights in return for financial benefits or were pushed out due to lack of affordability. These dynamics operated purely on market economics, without consideration for the institutional and governance issues that play a central role in the development and persistence of slums. Today, slum-​focused urban development thinking is taking a different path, moving away from the basic needs approach to a right to the city and related dignity discourse. The World Bank has reduced its participation in upgrading and site and service schemes, while UN-​HABITAT continues to support countries in upgrading slums and developing housing for the urban poor. Although the developments are still modeled along neoliberal policies, a rights perspective with an emphasis on the dignity of the slum dwellers is now operational. Calls for the right to the city, and related dignity discourse, are key elements in the broader demand for the restructuring of cities to take care of those living in slums. These groups have generally been neglected, and although programs and projects informed by experts have been undertaken on their behalf, they have done so without adequate consultation with the urban poor. This partly explains why there has been such a drastic reduction in the “upgrading” of slums across the globe in recent years, while new approaches that put emphasis more on affordable building materials and designs are becoming popular. However, these shifts are still framed within neoliberal political economy and policies. Consequently, states determined to change the condition of slum dwellers have to maneuver within the market option to access resources for addressing governance deficits in infrastructure and service delivery.

Notes 1. Alex Ezeh, Oyinlola Oyebode, David Satterthwaite, Yen-​Fu Chen, Robert Ndugwa, Jo Sartori, et al., “The History, Geography, and Sociology of Slums and the Health Problems of People Who Live in Slums,” The Lancet 389, no. 10068 (2017): 547–​558. 2. Dolf J. H. Te Lintelo, Jaideep Gupte, J. Allister McGregor, Rajith Lakshman, and F. Jahan, “Wellbeing and Urban Governance: Who Fails, Survives or Thrives in Informal Settlements in Bangladeshi Cities?” Cities 72 (2018): 391–​402. 3. Mercy Brown-​Luthango, Elena Reyes, and Mntungwa Gubevu, “Informal Settlement Upgrading and Safety: Experiences from Cape Town, South Africa,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32, no. 3 (2016): 471–​493. 4. UN-​HABITAT, Informal Settlements, Habitat 111 Issue Papers, no. 22 (New York: United Nations, 2015). UN-​HABITAT, https://​unhabi​tat.org/​habi​tat-​iii-​issue-​pap​ers-​22-​infor​mal-​ sett​leme​nts. 5. Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​1914 (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1993); Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017). Henning Nuissl and Dirk Heinrich, “Slums: Perspectives on the Definition, the Appraisal and Management of an Urban Phenomenon,” Die Erde: Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin 144, no. 2 (2013): 105–​116. 6. Gusti Ayu Made Suartika and Alexander R. Cuthbert, “Urban Slum,” Wiley-​Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2017). https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​978111​8430​873.est0​552

104   WINNIE V. MITULLAH 7. Suzanne Smit, Josephine K. Musango, Zora Kovacic, and Alan C. Brent, “Conceptualising Slum in an Urban African Context,” Cities 62 (2017): 107–​119. 8. UN-​HABITAT, Slum Almanac 2015/​2016: Tracking Improvement in the Lives of Slum Dwellers. Nairobi: UN-​HABITAT, no date. files/​Slum%20Almanac%202015-​2016_​PSUP. pdf. 9. UN-​HABITAT, The State of the World’s Cities 2006/​2007. The Millennium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda (London: Earthscan, 2007). 10. Gijsbert Hoogendoorn and Julia K. Giddy, “Does This Look Like a Slum? Walking Tours in the Johannesburg Inner City,” Urban Forum 28, no. 3 (2017): 315–​328. 11. Heylan Lewis, “Culture, Class and Behaviour of Low Income Families,” paper presented at the Conference on Lower Class Culture, New York City, 1963. 12. See Ranvinder S. Sandhu, The City and Its Slums: A Sociological Study. Amritsar: Guru Nanak Development University Press, 1989. 13. See Erik-​Hans Klijn and Joop Koppenjan, Governance Networks in the Public Sector (London: Routledge, 1990); Walter W. Powell, “Neither Market nor Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization,” Research in Organizational Behavior 12 (1990): 295–​336. 14. UN-​HABITAT, Urban Governance, Habitat 111 Issue Papers, no. 6 (New York: United Nations, 2015). 15. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 11. 16. See United Nations Development Programme, Millennium Development Goals. https://​www.undp.org/​tag/​mil​lenn​ium-​deve​lopm​ent-​goals See also United Nations, Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015). https://​sus​ tain​able​deve​lopm​ent.un.org/​post2​015/​trans​form​ingo​urwo​rld. 17. United Nations, MDGs to Agenda 2063/​ SDGs Transition Report 2016: Towards an Integrated Coherent Approach to Sustainable Development in Africa (Addis Ababa: Economic Commission for Africa, 2016). http://​rep​osit​ory.uneca.org/​han​dle/​10855/​23327. 18. World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018). 19. Mike Davies, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006). 20. Robin King, Mariana Orloff, Terra Virsilas, and Tejas Pande, “Confronting the Urban Housing Crisis in the Global South: Adequate, Secure, and Affordable Housing” (Washington, DC: World Resources Institute working paper, 2017). http://​www.citie​sfor​ all.org. 21. UN-​HABITAT, Tracking Progress Towards Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable Cities and Human Settlements: SDG 11 Synthesis Report (2018). https://​unhabi​tat.org/​sdg-​11-​ synthe​sis-​rep​ort. 22. Halima Begum, Philip R. Heywood, and Connie Susilawati, “Assisted Community Housing Initiative in Dhaka,” Environment and Urbanization Asia 9, no. 2 (2018): 214–​229. 23. See Paul Streeten, “Basic Needs: Premises and Promises,” World Bank reprint series, no. 62 (from Journal of Policy Modeling 1, 1979). http://​docume​nts.worldb​ank.org. Paul Streeten and S. J Burki, “Basic Needs: Some Issues,” World Development 6, no. 3 (1978): 412–​421. 24. Charles Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); Joan Nelson, “The Urban Poor: Disruption or Political Integration in the Third World Cities?” World Politics 22, no. 3 (1970): 393–​414; Richard Sandbrook, The

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    105 Politics of Basic Needs: Urban Aspects of Assaulting Poverty in Africa (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 25. Sandbrook, Politics of Basic Needs, v. 26. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 56. See Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), translated and edited by W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). 27. See, for example, in a US context, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Sagamore Press, [1890] 1957); R. D. Mackenzie, “The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in the City of Colombia, Ohio,” American Journal of Sociology 27, no. 3 (1921): 344–​363; Harvey Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slums (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929); E. F. Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); David R. Hunter, Slums: Challenge and Response (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964). 28. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Bros, 1944). 29. W. Foote Whyte, “Social Organisation in the Slums,” American Sociological Review 8 (1943): 34–​39. See his Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943). 30. Hylan Lewis, “Culture of Poverty? What Does It Matter?” in E. B. Leacock, ed., Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 345–​363. 31. William Mangin, “The Role of Regional Associations in the Adaptation of Rural Migrants to Cities in Peru,” in Contemporary Cultures and Societies of Latin America, ed. Dwight B. Heath and Richard N. Adams (New York: Random House, 1965), 311–​323. 32. John F. C. Turner, Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (London: Marion Boyars, 1976). 33. Lisa Peattie and Jose Aldrete-​Hass, “Marginal Settlements in Developing Countries: Research, Advocacy of Policy, and Evolution of Programs,” Annual Review of Sociology 7 (1981): 157–​175. 34. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 1968). 35. Mark Purcell, “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, No. 1 (2013): 141–​154. 36. See Sean Fox, “The Political Economy of Slums: Theory and Evidence from Sub-​Saharan Africa,” World Development 54 (2014): 191–​203. 37. Sophie L. Power and Thomas K. Wanner, “Improving Sanitation in the Slums of Mumbai: An Analysis of Human Rights-​Based Approaches for NGOs,” Asian Studies Review 41, no. 2 (2017): 209–​226. 38. J. J. Van Straaten, “Site and Service Schemes in Kenya,” Housing Research Development Unit, University of Nairobi, 1977. http://​erep​osit​ory.uonbi.ac.ke/​han​dle/​11295/​98256. 39. Matrix Development Consultants, Nairobi’s Informal Settlements: An Inventory (Nairobi: Matrix Development Consultants, 1993). 40. Urmi Sengupta, Brendan Murtagh, Camila D’Ottaviano, and Suzana Pasternak, “Between Enabling and Provider Approach: Key Shifts in the National Housing Policy in India and Brazil.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 36, no. 5 (2018): 856–​876. 41. Dina M. Nassar and Hanan G. Elsayed, “From Informal Settlements to Sustainable Communities,” Alexandria Engineering Journal (2017). https://​www.resea​rchg​ate.net/​prof​ ile/​Dina_​Nass​ar4/​publ​icat​ion/​320274​804. 42. UN-​HABITAT, Tracking Progress.

106   WINNIE V. MITULLAH 43. Paavo Monkkonen, “Do We Need Innovation in Housing Policy? Mass Production, Community-​Based Upgrading, and the Politics of Urban Land in the Global South,” International Journal of Housing Policy 18, no. 2 (2018): 167–​176. 44. Mercy Brown-​Luthango, Elena Reyes, and Mntungwa Gubevu, “Informal Settlement Upgrading and Safety: Experiences from Cape Town, South Africa,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32, no. 3 (2016): 471–​493. 45. Ibid. 46. Paul Jones, “Formalizing the Informal: Understanding the Position of Informal Settlements and Slums in Sustainable Urbanization Policies and Strategies in Bandung, Indonesia,” Sustainability 9, no. 8 (2017). https://​www.mdpi.com. 47. Zafu A. Teferi and Peter Newman, “Slum Regeneration and Sustainability: Applying the Extended Metabolism Model and the SDGs.” Sustainability 9, no. 12 (2017). https://​doi. org/​10.3390/​su9122​273. 48. Eduardo Rojas, “‘No Time to Waste’ in Applying the Lessons from Latin America’s 50 Years of Housing Policies.” Environment and Urbanization 31, no. 1 (2019): 177–​192. 49. Sandeep Arora, Rachna Khare, and Shweta Saxena, “Housing for Informal Settlers: Challenges and Opportunities.” International Journal of Recent Scientific Research 8, no. 11 (2017): 21337–​21339. 50. Sengupta, Murtagh, D’Ottaviano, and Pasternak, “Between Enabling and Provider Approach,” 856–​876. 51. Niccola Morrison, “Playing by the Rules? New Institutionalism, Path Dependency and Informal Settlements in Sub-​Saharan Africa,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 11 (2017): 2558–​2577. 52. Matthew French, Abdul Popal, Habib Rahimi, Srinivasa Popuri, and Jan Turkstra, “Institutionalizing Participatory Slum Upgrading: A Case Study of Urban Co-​production from Afghanistan, 2002–​2016.” Environment and Urbanization 31, no. 1 (2019): 209–​230. 53. Davison Muchadenyika and Jeremy Waiswa, “Policy, Politics and Leadership in Slum Upgrading: A Comparative Analysis of Harare and Kampala.” Cities 82 (2018): 58–​67. 5 54. Xuefei Ren, “Governing the Informal: Housing Policies over Informal Settlements in China, India, and Brazil.” Housing Policy Debate 28, no. 1 (2018): 79–​93. 55. Begum, Heywood, and Susilawati, “Assisted Community Housing Initiative in Dhaka,” 214–​229. 56. Monkkonen, “Do We Need Innovation in Housing Policy?” 57. See Sengupta, Murtagh, D’Ottaviano, and Pasternak, “Between Enabling and Provider Approach”; Jones, “Formalizing the Informal.” 58. Brown-​Luthango, Reyes, and Gubevu, “Informal Settlement Upgrading and Safety.” 59. Fox, “The Political Economy of Slums.” 60. Ibid., 3. 61. World Bank, Urbanization (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1972).

Bibliography Abrams, Charles. Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Begum, Halima, Philip R. Heywood, and Connie Susilawati. “Assisted Community Housing Initiative in Dhaka.” Environment and Urbanization Asia 9, no. 2 (2018): 214–​229.

Slums: City Spaces of Governance    107 Bolay, Jean-​Claude, Jerome Chenal, and Yves Pedrazzini, eds. Learning from the Slums for the Development of Emerging Cities. Springer International e-​Book, 2016. https://​link.sprin​ger. com/​book. Brown-​ Luthango, Mercy, Elena Reyes, and Mntungwa Gubevu. “Informal Settlement Upgrading and Safety: Experiences from Cape Town, South Africa.” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32, no. 3 (2016): 471–​493. Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2006. Gans, Herbert. The Urban Villagers. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hoogendoorn, Gijsbert, and Julia K. Giddy. “Does this Look Like a Slum? Walking Tours in the Johannesburg Inner City.” Urban Forum 28, no. 3 (2017): 315–​328. Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. King, Robin, Mariana Orloff, Terra Virsilas, and Tejas Pande. Confronting the Urban Housing Crisis in the Global South: Adequate, Secure, and Affordable Housing. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute working paper (2017). http://​www.citie​sfor​all.org. Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 1968. Liebow, Elliott. Tally’s Corner: Study of Negro Street Corner Men. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1967. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Mitra, Shreya, Joe Mulligan, Janpeter Schilling, Jamilla Harper, Janani Vivekananda, and Lisa Krause. “Developing Risk or Resilience? Effects of Slum Upgrading on the Social Contract and Social Cohesion in Kibera, Nairobi.” Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 1 (2017): 103–​122. Monkkonen, Paavo. “Do We Need Innovation in Housing Policy? Mass Production, Community-​Based Upgrading, and the Politics of Urban Land in the Global South.” International Journal of Housing Policy 18, no. 2 (2018): 167–​176. Morrison, Niccola. “Playing by the Rules? New Institutionalism, Path Dependency and Informal Settlements in Sub-​Saharan Africa.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 49, no. 11 (2017): 2558–​2577. Nassar, Dina M., and Hanan G. Elsayed. “From Informal Settlements to Sustainable Communities.” Alexandria Engineering Journal 57, no.4 (2017): 2367–​2376. Nuissl, Henning, and Dirk Heinrichs. “Slums: Perspectives on the Definition, the Appraisal and Management of an Urban Phenomenon.” Die Erde: Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin 144, no. 2 (2013): 105–​116. Pieterse, Edgar. “Rethinking African Urbanism from the Slum.” LSE Cities website, November, 2011. https://​urban​age.lsecit​ies.net/​ess​ays/​ret​hink​ing-​afri​can-​urban​ism-​from-​the-​slum. Purcell, Mark. “Possible Worlds: Henri Lefebvre and the Right to the City.” Journal of Urban Affairs 36, no. 1 (2013): 141–​154. Ren, Xuefei. “Governing the Informal: Housing Policies over Informal Settlements in China, India, and Brazil.” Housing Policy Debate 28, no. 1 (2018): 79–​93. Roberts, Bryan. Cities of Peasants: The Political Economy of Urbanization in the Third World. London: Edward Arnold, 1978. Smit, Suzanne, Josephine K. Musango, Zora Kovacic, and Alan C. Brent. “Conceptualising Slum in an Urban African Context.” Cities 62 (2017): 107–​119. Turner, John F. C. Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. London: Marion Boyars, 1976.

108   WINNIE V. MITULLAH Turok, Ivan, and Jackie Borel-​Saladin. “The Theory and Reality of Urban Slums: Pathways-​out-​ of-​Poverty or Cul-​de-​Sacs?” Urban Studies 55, no. 4 (2018): 767–​789. World Bank. Urbanization. Washington DC: World Bank, 1972. World Bank. Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2018: Piecing Together the Poverty Puzzle. Washington DC: World Bank, 2018.

CHAPTER 6

SLUM STATISTIC S I N I NDIA AMITABH KUNDU

Massive amounts of information are available in India through national data-​ generating agencies, state government departments, para-​state agencies, development authorities, and urban local bodies on slum conditions, quality of housing, and access to amenities, all of this revealing the huge extent of poverty and physical deprivation at the household level. In a sense, it is a case of over-​collection of data. Unfortunately, these have had limited use so far in research and administration, let alone policy making. Much of the information has been placed in cold storage due to its low usability. The apparent reason is that the agencies generating the information do not provide these in a temporally and cross sectionally comparable manner. Furthermore, no attempt has been made to resolve the issues of comparability and to remove the anomalies caused by definitional changes over time. This can be attributed largely to the absence of demand for comparable information from the corridors of decision making. The ambivalent attitude of the policy makers toward slums, therefore, is the real reason for this continuing state of affairs. Strong negativity has been associated with slums by most of the national and international agencies working in the area of urban development. Slums are often defined and described as “dirty settlements” in planning documents and official statistical handbooks.1 They are identified as places having a high congestion factor, low levels of basic amenities, poor environmental quality and, most importantly, a high degree of illegality. As a part of what may be seen as “the poverty and congestion syndrome,” slums are considered to be the breeding ground for prostitution, HIV/​AIDS, drug peddling, and other criminality. A few researchers have condescended to hold that slums are necessary evils, a short-​term phenomenon in the process of capitalistic development and rapid urbanization that should be, and must be, eliminated within a given time frame. Governments in most countries mark them as places that must be brought within the formal planning landscape. Policies and programs are designed and implemented, not for the benefit of the slum population but, mostly, for their removal or relocation. This is often legitimized by referring to the benefits occurring to the entire city population in terms of improvement in livability and the micro-​environment. The slum

110   AMITABH KUNDU dwellers, meanwhile, are regularly shifted to the periphery of the cities. These decisions are rationalized by pronouncing and claiming that the relocation would improve their physical living conditions, without making any reference to the disruption of their livelihoods and economic sustainability. This negative perspective on slums could be the reason for the dearth of financial resources and staffing within the relevant data-​gathering agencies, commensurate with their challenges and responsibilities. These deficiencies help explain the ad hoc methods of collecting slum data, their indifferent quality, and the delays in their release. These inadequacies have, however, helped the planners, politicians, and administrators to generate “convenient” data sets and interpret these in order to confirm their own convictions, often catering to the vested interests of agencies who want to make cities slum free through coercion. Data gathering on slums by different agencies and individual researchers in India has generally been purpose specific and ad hoc in nature. It is often taken up by local governments, funded by a national or international agency, but subcontracted to private firms. It is unfortunate that the funding agencies have gone in for sponsoring independent surveys at micro levels, covering a city, certain categories of settlements, or a part of a state, rather than strengthening the existing information system at the national or state level. The data generated through these surveys, understandably, have serious problems in terms of inter-​city comparability that restrict their usability. These surveys, nonetheless, are used as evidence to support the avowed policy perspectives of the sponsoring agencies, wherein the interest of the slum dweller is, at best, peripheral. Much of the data remain closeted within the local agencies, and the academic communities and planners do not generally have access to, or even knowledge about, these data sets. One must, nonetheless, recognize that the ethical issues regarding the living conditions of slum dwellers, including their access to basic amenities in different states and urban hierarchies, cannot be totally ignored in any democratic country, especially in one as vast and diverse as India. This is due to the magnitude of the slum population, which constitutes a sizable part of the electorate. There have been voices of resentment and protest emerging from the grassroots level, due to extreme deprivation in the slums. Thanks to initiatives by civil society organizations, there has been some acknowledgement of the rampant violation of basic human rights in these settlements. These revelations are picked up, although selectively and sporadically, by the popular media. All these make it difficult for national governments and international agencies to bury the slums into oblivion. Slums have been a central theme for interventions in India’s urban planning and urban poverty reduction initiatives since independence in 1947.2 Many slum clearance and improvement programs were launched in different states and cities at different points of time. Governments have designed housing and sanitation missions, mostly with the priority of relocation and rehabilitation but sometimes with the intention of in situ (on site) upgradation—​improving the physical conditions of living at the existing locations, instead of shifting them elsewhere. Unfortunately, the state has withdrawn in a significant

Slum Statistics in India    111 way from the arena of urban planning in recent years, placing greater reliance on public-​ private partnerships, even for programs involving slum populations who have low affordability thresholds in the marketplace. Doors have, thus, been opened for vested interests and pressure groups to plunge into partnering, designing, and implementing slum missions and programs, resulting in the eviction of slum dwellers or their relocation in distant peripheries. This may be seen as a consequence of the global triumph of neoliberal thinking. Given the dearth of statistics, available from sources other than the project authorities, the outcome of these projects and their impact on the community have not been assessed in any objective manner. The need for having robust data, collected in an objective and transparent manner, thus cannot be exaggerated.

Defining Slums at a Global Level The United Nations established UN-​HABITAT in 1978 with the responsibility to assist member states to monitor and gradually attain the objective of achieving “Cities without Slums.” This became Target 11 under Goal 7 (Ensuring Environmental Sustainability) of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG) that were announced in 2000. The target stipulated that “by 2020, significant improvement is to be achieved in the lives of 100 million slum dwellers.”3 This unfinished agenda has now been subsumed as Goal 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) for 2030.4 In an effort to advance the monitoring of this target, UN-​HABITAT undertook to review and define the relevant indicators, in consultation with activists, practitioners, and policy makers. This was necessary because, although the word “slum” had been in general use for two centuries, there is no internationally recognized operational definition. The MDG’s Target 11 initially had just two indicators—​“security of tenure” and “improvement in sanitation facilities”—​that attempted to encapsulate the basic vulnerability of life in slums. A UN Inter-​Agency Development Group on the MDGs subsequently expressed concern that tenure and sanitation did not adequately constitute a complete response to the target of “improving the lives of 100 million slum dwellers.”5 The UN human settlements program UN-​HABITAT therefore proposed developing a comprehensive definition in order to respond directly to the challenge of reaching this target. It finally came out with five factors, each reflecting an aspect of vulnerability suffered by slum dwellers:

1. Insecure residential status; 2. Inadequate access to safe water; 3. Inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure; 4. Poor structural quality of housing; 5. Overcrowding.6

112   AMITABH KUNDU According to this definition, a neighborhood is classified as a slum if more than half of the households in the area suffer from one or more of the five deprivation indicators. It is important to note that while the UN system has tried to define slums by focusing on aspects of deprivation in physical, social, and economic dimensions, it posits insecurity of tenure as the key defining parameter. The identification of slums in terms of substandard living conditions, overcrowding, inadequate public infrastructure, deficiency in economic assets, and the like were rated as being less important than the legal right to the piece of land that the slum is occupying. The lack of security of tenure is, thus, the most important vulnerability factor in the UN definition of slum.

Slum Definitions and Data from National Agencies in India Information on slums in India has been available from Population Census Reports since 1981. However, this information was accumulated without the Registrar General of India (RGI) providing any specific criteria for the identification of slums. Prior to the census of 2001, slum data were collected not by canvassing questions at the household or neighborhood level but by putting questions to town authorities, enquiring if there were slums in areas of their jurisdiction. Most states and many cities in India define slums according to their own legislation, for the purpose of providing services and undertaking improvement programs. The diverse information provided by these authorities were compiled by the Directorate of Census Operations and put in the Town Directory of the District Census Handbooks. Since this information was based on data provided by the town authorities rather than being generated through field-​level operations by the census, it was not comparable over time and across states, as the census authorities admit in their reports. The 2001 Census was the first in which the RGI was directly involved in the collection and reporting of slum data at national, state, and settlement levels. In addition to the slums “notified” (formally identified) under state and city legislation, there are many areas that are recognized by the state governments as slums that have not been so notified. The 2001 Census, for the first time, tried to formulate a definition that brought both categories of slums within the one definition. However, census officials only collected slum data from urban settlements with populations of 50,000 and above. They stipulated that in these places any settlement cluster of at least three hundred people or about sixty to seventy households, living in a compact area, in poorly built or congested structures, and lacking access to basic amenities, would be identified as a slum because the people there were necessarily living in an unhygienic environment. The census definition was thus based on negativity and did not mention the contribution by slum populations to the economy, nor their vulnerability due to not having title to land or security of tenure. It should be noted that slum data for smaller towns with

Slum Statistics in India    113 populations between 20,000 and 50,000 inhabitants were collected subsequently by the Census in response to a specific request from the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA). The Census of 2011 adopted a definition similar to that of 2001. The only difference in these two censuses relates to coverage. After 2001, the coverage extended to all urban settlements with populations of 20,000 and above. In the 2011 Census, however, slum data was collected only in “statutory towns” (those identified by the state governments in their statues, and that are considered as towns by the census as well), irrespective of their population size. Out of the total number of towns, slum demographic data was reported for 2,613 towns in 2011. Furthermore, nineteen non-​statutory towns from the Delhi region and one from Uttar Pradesh were also included. Importantly, the data available in 2011 are more elaborate than that of 2001. While the Census of 2001 gives only demographic information, the 2011 Census also provides data pertaining to locational characteristics and access to basic amenities. The initial attempts by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) of the Government of India to collect slum statistics were undertaken in 1976–​1977 and 1993. While the 1976–​1977 survey had two categories—​Declared and Undeclared slums—​these were changed in the 1993 survey to Notified and Non-​Notified slums.7 The definitions of declared and notified slums were similar, covering the areas formally identified by the respective municipalities, corporations, local bodies, or development authorities. Undeclared slums were defined in the 1976–​1977 survey as being clusters of at least twenty-​five kutcha (non-​ permanent) structures with inadequate access to sanitation and water. In the 1993 survey, a non-​notified slum was defined as being a cluster of twenty or more households that failed to meet predefined criteria regarding density, access to sanitation and drinking water, and basic hygiene. This definition was carried forward in the subsequent surveys conducted in 2002 and 2012. Both the Census and the NSSO accept the notified and recognized slums as defined by the State Acts within their definitional purview. In addition, the non-​notified and undeclared slums, defined on the basis of unhygienic living conditions, inadequacy of basic amenities, and the like, are also included, albeit with some variations in terms of the threshold number of households. Unfortunately, there were no specific quantitative criteria or cut-​off points specified for slum notification that are standardized across states and cities. As a result, any assessment of livability conditions for the notification of slums in these surveys would be subjective. Slums grow in size by expansion and densification, and many new slum settlements emerge over time. In the absence of a systematic procedure to update slum profiles and detect new informal settlements, official tabulations of India’s slum population remain underestimates. Most importantly, a large number of undeclared slums remain outside the framework of official statistics in a few states, despite the intent to cover these. The varying definitions of “slum” across states and cities, reflected in their respective legislation and administrative orders, create serious distortions in the official data, in the context of inter-​state and inter-​city comparability. The problem gets compounded

114   AMITABH KUNDU when the lack of an effective mechanism for notification and de-​notification of slums is considered. Notifications are done mostly by state and city governments as they launch new subsidized housing and slum improvement programs. Notification facilitates the concerned agencies in implementing these programs because it gives them certain statutory rights over land. Understandably, the implementation of central government programs becomes difficult because of the definitions varying across the states. Furthermore, it makes cross-​ validation of data across cities and states, and the drawing of generalizations at the macro level, almost impossible. Making a reasonable assessment regarding India’s progress in meeting the MDG’s slum targets is thus compromised because of the absence of reliable data on slums, as admitted in a policy document prepared by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in 2010.8 This certainly is a sad commentary on the state of slum statistics in India, and reflects the negativity of the framework for slum research in the country. The MHUPA set up the Pronab Sen Committee in 2010 to address these definitional anomalies and to provide robust estimates of present and projected slum populations. Unfortunately, it failed to achieve these objectives. It defined slum as “a compact settlement of at least 20 households with a collection of poorly built tenements, mostly of temporary nature, crowded together usually with inadequate sanitary and drinking water facilities in unhygienic conditions.”9 This definition has much in common with all the diverse definitions that are used by the different data-​gathering agencies in the country, except that it adopted the threshold number of twenty households, which is below the level defined by the Census and the NSSO. It neither specified the quantitative thresholds for the other characteristics of slums nor tried to provide a rationale for them. It did not draw attention to the positive economic contribution of slum populations and their high efficiency in using land, capital, and other resources. Most importantly, it ignored variables, such as security of tenure and length of residence, that are crucial for successfully launching slum development programs.

Slum Vulnerability Indices for Prioritizing Interventions at State and City Level Governments, both at central and state levels in India, have from time to time recognized the necessity of operationalizing the concepts of slum and slum vulnerability, by building an index that captures degrees of deprivation in its physical, social, and economic dimensions. They recognize that such indices are needed in order to guide funding allocations, determine priority areas, and direct interventions to the most vulnerable states, cities, and localities.

Slum Statistics in India    115 A committee appointed by MHUPA made an attempt in this direction in 2013. It was headed by Amitabh Kundu and entrusted with the task of constructing a slum vulnerability index. A review of the slum definitions used by UN-​HABITAT, the Indian Census, the NSSO, and the Pronab Sen Committee suggests that a large number of vulnerabilities have not been brought into the policy domain because of the limited coverage of these definitions. Given these limitations, and the committee’s mandate to enlarge the perspective of slum vulnerability, it was proposed to assess slum vulnerability using six dimensions: 1. Magnitude of slum population; 2. Availability of basic household amenities; 3. Housing conditions articulated through temporary, semi-​permanent and permanent structures; 4. Possession of household assets; 5. Access to banking services; 6. Social dimensions: Percentage of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) population (defined as historically backward in social and educational dimensions in the Constitution), literacy rate, and access to health facilities. The indicators under each of these dimensions were constructed using data available from national sources, the robustness of which is reasonably well established (Table 6.1). In the case of a few other potential indicators considered by the committee, information was either not available or not adequately robust and hence were dropped. The idea was to present the status of slum vulnerability at two points of time. The committee prepared the indices for 2001 and 2011 for all States and Union Territories. Additionally, city-​level indices were worked out for forty-​six cities that had a population above one million in 2011, and twenty-​two such cities in 2001. The differences between the composite indices for 2001 and 2011 reflect the improvement or deterioration in the slum situation over time. Table 6.1 can be taken as illustrative for any current analysis that feeds into policy. It may be taken as a starting point to demonstrate that such indices can easily be developed, using largely secondary sources. It should be possible to organize the data on all the identified indicators and even more, by streamlining the statistical system in the country and by increasing the sample size of data collection. It is, in fact, possible and necessary to include a few more indicators and expand the database, given the concerns and priorities of current slum improvement programs. Such indices can be released at regular intervals and for all urban centers. Also, when the concerned agencies are approached, they should be able to provide the data in the required format for the purposes of planning and strategic intervention. The indices can be used by administrators and policy makers, besides academics and local community organizations, enabling them to design better schemes, monitor their implementation and take corrective actions, as and when required, in an efficient and transparent manner.

116   AMITABH KUNDU Table 6.1 Dimensions of Vulnerability and Constituent Indicators 1.

Magnitude of the slum population

(i)

Percentage slum households to total urban households (from Census)

(ii)

Percentage of slum households to total urban households (from NSSO Housing Condition Survey)

(iii)

Percentage of non-​notified slum enumeration blocks to total number of slums (from Census 2011)

2.

Availability of basic household amenities

(i)

Percentage of households having improved drinking water facilities

(ii)

Percentage of households having toilets

(iii)

Percentage of households having electricity

3.

Housing conditions

(i)

Percentage of households living in kutcha and semi pucca (temporary and semi-​ permanent) houses +​Percentage of households reporting the condition of their houses to be bad (NSSO) +​Percentage of households living in dilapidated houses (Census)

(ii)

Percentage of households having one or more married couple without exclusive dwelling room

(iii)

Average number of persons living in a room (room density)

4.

Assets in slum households

(i)

Percentage of households with no television

(ii)

Percentage of households with no bicycle

(iii)

Percentage of households with no scooter /​motorcycle /​moped

(iv)

Percentage of households with no mobile phone

(v)

Percentage of households with no asset

5.

Access to banking services by slum households

(i)

Percentage of households not using banking services

6.

Social dimensions

(i)

Percentage of scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population per locality

(ii)

Percentage of illiterate persons per locality

(iii)

Percentage of illiterate females per locality

Source: MHUPA Committee (2015)

Slum Statistics in India    117 Currently, there are serious difficulties in preparing these indices at the level of states and also large cities. The NSSO provides data on slums and slum households generally at five-​year intervals through its regular sample surveys. At present the state is the lowest-​ level unit for which data is published. City-​level estimates are not published by the NSSO due to its small sample size, except in case of a few metropolitan cities. However, unit-​level data are available, based on which it is possible to generate estimates for some large and medium cities. Problematically, though, the standard errors of these estimates in many cases will work out to be too high to be useful in making policy decisions. This problem can be addressed by increasing the sample size for the identified cities.

Tenability: A Missing Dimension in the Analysis of Slum Vulnerability The criterion of legality of tenure, which constitutes the basis of the UN-​HABITAT definition of “slum,” has unfortunately not been brought within the definitional framework in India. There has been no empirical investigation or political questioning of the land title issue when designing slum development programs and missions at the macro level. The issue is kept under the carpet and brought out only at the final stage of these programs to justify knocking down slums because they do not have tenurial security. This has resulted in the selection of only a few slums for development programs and the exclusion of others with high socioeconomic vulnerability. The negative framework used by slum studies in India is responsible for restricting the focus of research to certain aspects of only physical and social deprivation. This has been reinforced by postulates such as that keeping the slums at their present location poses a threat to the health of not only the slum dwellers but the entire population in the city. This has led to programs to evict and relocate slum dwellers outside the city limits. Such measures are justified also by arguments that livelihoods and community structures in slums can be better developed in the urban periphery. The World Health Organization contends that slum dwellers mostly comprise displaced rural populations and that they would find the city peripheries to be more congenial for their economic pursuits and style of living. The myth that slum populations prefer locations outside the city limits for their livelihoods has been contradicted by their strong and often violent resistance to relocation. This is because they face humongous problems when separated from their social networks and sources of livelihood. Understandably, on-​site upgradation versus relocation of slums has become a central question in urban interventions. Given grassroots resistance, many of the Union Government programs (including Rajiv Awas Yojana, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, and Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana) have been forced to stipulate that upgradation will take place at the site of the slum itself and not through eviction and displacement.

118   AMITABH KUNDU The agencies that own the slum land—​ not only private bodies but government agencies at the central, state, and municipal levels—​strongly resent and resist surrendering their land for slum development. They make the plea that the slums on their land are not suited for residential use. Such claims require empirical examination. Nonetheless, local authorities have been unable to resolve this issue and undertake on-​ site slum development, as envisioned under several key upgrading schemes.10 Given the urgent need for policy intervention in slums (recognized both at the global and the national level), and the current unsatisfactory usage of tenability criteria (which are applied selectively, and in an ad hoc manner), a formal vulnerability index with a built-​in component of slum tenability was proposed by Kundu’s MHUPA Committee with the aim of increasing the scope and effectiveness of such intervention. The committee had proposed that the tenability factor needs to be considered along with the other six dimensions, so as to construct an aggregative index of slum vulnerability. This would mean that the cities and regions having a high value in the index would have priority in intervention, as they are likely to have high socioeconomic vulnerability and problems due to non-​tenability. Nonetheless, it also makes sense to keep socioeconomic vulnerability separate from tenability in the policy domain so as to consider the two factors in relation to each other while making decisions. What is extremely important, however, is that the tenability index is built along with other vulnerability indices within the macro framework of policy analysis in a mission, rather than bringing it in belatedly, and inevitably for vetoing, at the stage of final selection. It is important to realize that the criteria of tenability, used under different programs and missions at the field level, have been highly restrictive. Consequently, large segments of India’s slum population could not be brought under their purview. The localized upgradation of slums, the key component under the Prime Minister’s 2015 Awas Yojana (PMAY), can be cited as a major casualty of this process.11 As opposed to the vision of constructing 80 percent of dwelling units under PMAY through slum upgradation, houses are being built though beneficiary-​led financing (backed up by subsidized loans) and engagement with the private sector. To respond to this recurring problem of knocking out a large number of slums by the project implementation agencies at the grassroots level on grounds of non-​tenability, it will be necessary to design a more inclusive definition of tenability, backed by an appropriate system of data generation and analysis. This would help in determining the magnitude of the slum population to be covered under a program/​policy at the macro level in advance, and then checking whether that matches with what the project implementation agencies have worked out at the grassroots level. Given that the slum population actually covered at the project level is turning out to be a small fraction of the envisaged number, it is important that national policy makers design a more inclusive definition of tenability and ensure that this is implemented at the micro level by project implementing agencies. This would rescue the definition of slums from its current negativist framework by mandating that tenure security be defined in a positive and more inclusive manner.

Slum Statistics in India    119

Exploring the Possibility of Constructing a Tenability Index Based on the National Data System Tenability refers to the possibility of maintaining and upgrading the physical conditions of a settlement at a particular site. However, neither the Census of India nor the NSSO classify slums as tenable or non-​tenable, and they instead merely provide disaggregated information, separating out "Notified" and "Non-​Notified" slums. Hence, these data are not helpful in providing a base for a robust tenability index. Unfortunately, at the programmatic level, tenability is often confused with notification and many of the official documents stipulate that notified sites are to be considered as “tenable” and vice-​versa. The NSSO provides information on the location of slums, as to whether they are near rivers, drains, railway lines, and so on. This information is not based on responses from the slum households covered in the survey but is obtained from key informants, such as municipal employees, teachers, and political leaders in the area. Slums on land near a drain, railway track, or river have generally been considered as “non-​tenable” and, therefore, are not taken up for upgradation. However (as in Table 6.2), there is no appreciable difference between non-​notified and notified slums in this regard. This underlines the fallacy of associating non-​notified slums with non-​tenability. Furthermore, most of the neighborhoods in non-​notified slums are as approachable by roads as those in notified slums. In the context of other amenities, too, Table 6.3 shows that many non-​notified slums have reasonable access to services (indeed, even better than many notified slums). It is, nonetheless, true that notified slums have a greater likelihood of receiving government support for basic amenities, such as garbage collection, street lighting, and drinking water from public taps. Notification is also believed to encourage households to invest in their dwellings, as can be seen by the higher proportion of pucca (solid and permanent) houses and in-​house latrines in notified slums. The latest data from NSSO, however, do not bring out a sharp differentiation between the two classifications of slums, either in terms of their housing quality or access to toilet facilities. Analysis of the social characteristics of slum populations further reinforces the above conclusions (see Table 6.4). Minorities and SC/​ST households are over-​represented in slums, but there is not much difference between the notified and non-​notified areas in this regard. The proportions of households with freehold land or having written contracts permitting residence, are comparable in the two categories of slums, though the proportion has decreased appreciably in non-​notified slums over time. A large majority of persons in both types of slums report residing in their neighborhood for over a decade and claim to have documentary evidence to that effect. Data on latrines further reinforce the conclusions regarding the absence of significant differences between the

120   AMITABH KUNDU Table 6.2 Location of Notified and Non-​Notified Slums Indicator

Notified Slums Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Percentage, NSSO 65th round

Non-​Notified Slums Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Percentage, NSSO 65th round

Owned by railway

3

3

9

6

Owned privately

48

38

42

44

7

6

11

10

Near drain, railway, or river

40

42

38

47

Access by road/​path

83

75

75

69

Waterlogging of the approach road

35

36

29

45

Surrounded by industrial area

No drainage Number of slums in sample

11

10

45

23

(441)

(365)

(440)

(365)

Source: MHUPA Committee, analysis based on NSSO (69th round) survey on “Key Indicators of Urban Slum 2012,” and NSSO (65th round) survey on “Some Characteristics of Urban Slum 2008–​09.”

two categories of slums. Finally, the occurrence of flooding, one of the unambiguous indicators of non-​tenability, is similar across notified and non-​notified slums. A positive approach to slum development would be to consider that if a site is amenable to human habitation, the default mode of development should be in situ upgradation. After examining the available data sets, an indicator proposed by the MHUPA Committee for identifying tenable slums was a certain threshold percentage of households living there with some kind of tenure rights, for example, patta (occupancy right), or a possession certificate. The underlying rationale is that if a slum has been declared fit for habitation by the concerned authorities for a certain percentage of the people, it cannot be declared unsafe and hazardous for others. This would be consistent with indicator 32 for MDG Target 7. Accepting this framework, a slum can be defined as tenable if it is notified, regardless of location; or if it is not notified but is located in an area classified as “Others (Non-​ Hazardous/​Non-​Objectionable)” or if at least 10 percent of its households report having a patta or possession certificate. The rationale for introducing the third criterion is that a substantial number of households in many non-​notified slums report having some kind of land title. In such a situation, all other households residing there should have a prima facie claim to such rights. Consequently, slums in which the number of households with recognized tenure rights is over a certain percentage of the total non-​rental slum households, can be considered as tenable. The threshold is taken as 10 percent since a lower figure could be due to reporting errors, random factors, or misclassifications in the field. Unfortunately, the NSSO data are not sufficiently amenable to examining

Slum Statistics in India    121 Table 6.3 Access to Basic Services: Notified and Non-​Notified Slums Indicator

Notified Slums Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Pucca houses

Non-​Notified Slums Percentage, NSSO 65th round

Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Percentage, NSSO 65th round

85

64

42

50

Semi-​Pucca houses

11

30

34

29

Drinking water from tap

82

79

64

77

Most residents have no latrine

16

10

42

20

Waterlogging

37

33

43

44

Electricity in both street and houses

86

76

55

53

Garbage collection by municipality

80

75

49

55

Garbage collected at least once a week

90

77

89

59

Residents’ association present

26

28

13

20

(441)

(365)

(440)

(365)

Number of slums in sample

Source: MHUPA Committee, analysis based on NSSO (69th round) survey on “Key Indicators of Urban Slum 2012,” and NSSO (65th round) survey on “Some Characteristics of Urban Slum 2008–​09.”

tenability since the survey does not provide information on households by the type or tenure of their settlement. The above overview of the physical conditions in the two categories of slums, based on NSSO data, nonetheless leads to the immediate rejection of the idea of equating notification with tenability. In order to address the aspect of tenability at the household level, the MHUPA Committee used data collected under the Urban Statistics for Human Resource and Assessment (USHA) scheme, administered by the National Buildings Organization under a central scheme of the Ministry. The survey was carried out between 2008–​2009 and 2011–​2012, wherein 988 towns and cities having a population of more than 40,000 (per the 2001 census) throughout the country were covered. Under USHA, information about slums regarding their notification and location—​establishing whether the safety of the neighborhoods is compromised by major transport routes, drains, railway lines, rivers, or other water bodies, storm water drains, or other potentially hazardous or objectionable factors—​are collected. Applying the threefold criteria mentioned above to these data, it can be calculated that 95.9 percent of slum households live in conditions that can be considered tenable and hence appropriate for on-​site upgradation.

122   AMITABH KUNDU Table 6.4 Household Characteristics of Notified and Non-​Notified Slums (.. =​Data not collected) Indicator

Notified Slums

Non-​Notified Slums

Other Urban

Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Percentage, NSSO 69th round

Percentage, Percentage, NSSO 69th NSSO 65th round round

Percentage, NSSO 65th round

Percentage, NSSO 65th round

Religious minority

25

26

26

22

19

19

Scheduled caste and scheduled tribe population

30

34

33

33

16

16

Freehold and written contract

62

63

54

62

67

65

Access to drivable, lighted road

53

47

37

35

66

58

Household has exclusive latrine

43

30

27

23

67

62

No latrine access

13

16

26

24

8

10

Resident 10 years and more

71

..

67

..

59

..

Insufficient water supply

12

..

11

..

10

..

Flooding during the last 5 years

10

..

12

..

5

..

Stomach problem in last month

14

..

12

..

13

..

Documentation of residence in the area

88

..

85

..

..

3,176

3,957

2,142

3,553

36,633

Number of households in sample

..

48,085

Source: MHUPA Committee, analysis, based on NSSO (69th round) survey on “Key Indicators of Drinking Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Housing Condition in India 2012,” and NSSO (65th round) survey on “Housing Condition and Amenities in India, 2008–​09.”

Slum Statistics in India    123

The Way Forward The slum population in India was projected to increase from 63 million in 2001 to 93 million in 2011. The 2011 Census, however, reported the figure to be only 65 million. Negative perspectives on slums, in the domains of data collection and urban planning, have been responsible for a process of exclusionary urbanization, whereby residents are evicted from slums and relocated to the peripheries and outside the city limits. Because urban planners and politicians have not had a sharp focus on tenurial security and the tenability of slums, and have defined these in an extremely restrictive manner, only a small percentage of the targeted populations have been brought under the development missions of government. The absence of an equity consideration in planning, based on an inclusive definition of tenability, is responsible for the large-​scale exclusion of potential slum populations, the segmentation of cities and degenerated peripheralization.12 The Census and NSSO regularly provide information on housing conditions, access to amenities, and other aspects of slum life that help in analysis of inter-​state and inter-​ city variations in the conditions in urban slums, and changes over time. The problem with the census data, however, is its coverage of only a limited set of items and its temporal non-​comparability. The NSSO, on the other hand, has the problem of small sample size, inadequate for generating robust estimates at city level. These problems need to be addressed by restructuring the system of data generation, adding a few new items in the questionnaires, and increasing the sample size in selected cities. In addition, the creation of a system to collect and collate information generated through regular administrative work during the implementation of development schemes (exemplified by USHA) in a temporally and cross-​sectionally comparable manner, is required urgently. The strengths and weaknesses of such datasets, generated by the concerned ministries of the Government of India, need be identified and their problems addressed. Cleaning up these data, making them cross-​sectionally and temporally comparable, and bringing them into the public domain will help in better designing and implementing a comprehensive slum development strategy in India. Also, this would help in monitoring the key indicators of the SDG 11 that envisage access to adequate, safe, and affordable housing and basic services to all, thereby promoting inclusive and sustainable urbanization. The number of slums in India that can be identified using government notification and legal sanctions as being tenable under various government missions, are much less than that recognized at the general policy level. The indices of slum vulnerability and tenability constructed by MHUPA’s Kundu Committee in 2013, which applied an inclusive reading of slum development data, shows that potential slum beneficiaries are several times the population that is currently being targeted for on-​site redevelopment. A positive perspective on slums, built on an index of tenability and defined in an inclusive manner, would greatly enhance the scope of state intervention and address the needs of a much larger segment of India’s deprived population.

124   AMITABH KUNDU

Notes 1. Agencies under the National Statistical System in India often use the term “Dirty Settlement” to describe a slum. 2. See National Institute of Urban Affairs, Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums: An Evaluative Study Research Study (New Delhi: Government of India, 1997); Harold Carter, “From Slums to Slums in Three Generations: Housing Policy and Political Economy of the British Welfare State, 1945–​2005,” Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers (Department of Economics, University of Oxford, 2012); Saumitra Jha, Vijayendra Rao, and Michael Woolcock, “Governance in the Gullies: Democratic Responsiveness and Leadership in Delhi’s Slums,” World Development 35, no. 2 (2007): 230–​246; and Indranil De, “Slum Improvement in India: Determinants and Approaches,” Housing Studies 32, no. 7 (2017): 990–​1013. 3. See UN-​HABITAT, Guide to Monitoring Target 11: Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum Dwellers. Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals (Nairobi: UN-​ HABITAT, 2003). 4. United Nations, Sustainable Development Goals https://​www.un.org/​sus​tain​able​deve​lopm​ ent/​sust​aina​ble-​deve​lopm​ent-​goals. 5. Inter-​Agency and Expert Group on MDG Indicators, “United Nations Millennium Development Goals Data and Trends, 2002” (New York, April 2002). 6. UN-​HABITAT, State of the World’s Cities 2012–​2013: Prosperity of Cities (Nairobi: UN-​ HABITAT, 2012). 7. The terms “Notified” and “Non-​Notified,” in the context of this chapter, refer to a specific bureaucratic process in which municipalities, corporations, local bodies, or development authorities formally identify (“notify”) a particular area as a “slum”; this process gives the authority making that identification specific statuatory powers. The NSSO’s 58th round provides slum household data conducted during July–​December 2002 with an all-​ India coverage, published in Housing Condition in India: Household Amenities and Other Characteristics (New Delhi: Government of India, 2005). http://​mospi.nic.in/​publ​icat​ion/​ hous​ing-​condit​ion-​india-​househ​old-​amenit​ies-​other-​char​acte​rist​ics. The 69th round of NSSO slum household data, covering the same period during 2012, is available in their report Drinking Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Housing Condition (New Delhi: Government of India, 2016). http://​microd​ata.gov.in/​nad​a43/​index.php/​cata​log/​129/​data​_​dic​tion​ary. 8. Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, Millennium Development Goals: India Country Report (New Delhi: Government of India, 2010). 9. Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Report of the Committee on Slum Statistics/​Census (New Delhi: Government of India, 2010). 10. Dyna Mitlin and Sheela Patel, “Working for Rights from the Grassroots,” Alliance 10, no. 3 (2005): 27–​28 11. Amitabh Kundu and Arjun Kumar, “Housing for the Urban Poor? Changes in Credit-​ Linked Subsidy,” Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 52 (December 2017): 105–​110. 12. Amitabh Kundu, Basanta K. Pradhan, and A. Subramanian, “Dichotomy or Continuum: Analysis of Impact of Urban Centres on their Periphery,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 50 (2002): 5039–​5046; Eric Denis, Partha Mukhopadhyay, and Marie-​Helene Zerah, “Subaltern Urbanisation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 30 (2012): 52–​62; Amitabh Kundu, “Dynamics of Growth and Process of Degenerated Peripheralisation in Delhi: An Analysis of Socioeconomic, Segmentation and Differentiation in Micro

Slum Statistics in India    125 Environment,” in Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back, ed. Peter J. Marcotullio and Gordon McGranahan (London: Earthscan Publications, 2012), 156–​179.

Bibliography Carter, Harold. “From Slums to Slums in Three Generations: Housing Policy and Political Economy of the British Welfare State, 1945–​2005.” Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers 98. Department of Economics, University of Oxford, 2012. https://​www. nuff.ox.ac.uk/​econom​ics/​hist​ory/​Pape​r98/​carte​r98.pdf. De, Indranil. “Slum Improvement in India: Determinants and Approaches.” Housing Studies 32, no. 7 (2017): 990–​1013. Denis, Eric, Partha Mukhopadhyay, and Marie-​Helene Zerah. “Subaltern Urbanisation in India.” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 30 (2012): 52–​62. Jha, Saumitra, Vijayendra Rao, and Michael Woolcock. “Governance in the Gullies: Democratic Responsiveness and Leadership in Delhi’s Slums.” World Development 35, no. 2 (2007): 230–​246. Kundu, Amitabh. “Dynamics of Growth and Process of Degenerated Peripheralisation in Delhi: An Analysis of Socioeconomic, Segmentation and Differentiation in Micro Environment.” In Scaling Urban Environmental Challenges: From Local to Global and Back, edited by Peter J. Marcotullio and Gordon McGranahan, 156–​179. London: Earthscan Publications, 2012. Kundu, Amitabh, Basanta K. Pradhan, and A. Subramanian. “Dichotomy or Continuum: Analysis of Impact of Urban Centres on their Periphery.” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 50 (2002): 5039–​5046. Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. Report of the Committee on Slum Statistics/​ Census (Pronab Sen Committee Report). New Delhi: Government of India, 2010. Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation. Report of the Committee on Slum Index (Amitabh Kundu Committee Report). New Delhi, Government of India, 2015. Mitlin, Dyna and Sheela Patel. “Working for Rights from the Grassroots.” Alliance 10, no. 3 (2005): 27–​28. National Institute of Urban Affairs. Environmental Improvement of Urban Slums: An Evaluative Study Research Study. New Delhi: Government of India, 1997. Swerts, Elfie, Denise Pumain, and Eric Denis. “Subaltern Urbanisation in India,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 30 (July 2012): 52–​62. UN-​HABITAT. Guide to Monitoring Target 11: Improving the Lives of 100 Million Slum Dwellers. Progress Towards the Millennium Development Goals. Nairobi: UN-​HABITAT, 2003. UN-​HABITAT. State of the World’s Cities, 2012–​2013: Prosperity of Cities. Nairobi: UN-​ HABITAT, 2012.

CHAPTER 7

PRIDE AND SHA ME The History of the Slums in Recife, Brazil FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA

The evocative word “favela” has, since the late twentieth century, become increasingly interchangeable with “slum” as a label with which to characterize low-​income neighborhoods in Latin American cities. The word can be traced back through Portuguese dictionaries of the nineteenth century, in which it describes a bush found in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia. In Brazilian folklore, it is also linked to an atrocity: the stamping out by the army of the new Brazilian republic of a separatist settler community in Bahia (many of its residents former slaves) during the Canudos War of 1885–​1897, which ended when republican troops sacked Canudos and massacred its remaining fifteen thousand residents. The soldiers then marched to Rio de Janeiro to claim a reward, and when this was not forthcoming they settled there at Morro da Providência, possibly named by the troops as Morro da Favela (hill of the favela) because of the favela bushes they had brought with them from Bahia.1 This folk tale is linked to another: Morro da Favela was located behind a cortiço (a poor district or “slum”) known as Cabeça de Porco (Pig’s Head), which was being demolished at this time at the order of Rio’s mayor, and its residents moved to the Morro da Favela where they rebuilt their shacks with whatever materials they managed to salvage from the demolished cortiço.2 Interesting though these folk tales are, their prominence in accounts of the favela’s origins is not appropriate. Its rise is better explained by examining the urban history of poverty and housing in Brazil.3 “Favela” is in fact only one of many words used in Latin America to describe the wide variety of disadvantaged areas in which the urban poor live: Argentina –​ Assentamiento, comuna, villas miseria, villas de emergencia; Bolívia –​ ciudadela, assentamiento urbano; Brazil –​Favela, mocambo, vilas, invasão, ocupação, assentamento subnormal, assentamento, comunidade; Chile –​Callampa, campamento, población; Colômbia –​Barrios bajos, tugurio, barrio de invasión, barrio marginal, comuna; Costa Rica –​Tugurio; Cuba –​Llega y pon; Equador –​Guasmo

Pride and Shame    127 (Guayaquil), suburbio, invasión, barrio marginal; El Salvador –​Champerío, tugurio, zona marginal; Guatemala –​Arrabales, asentamientos, champas; Honduras –​Barrio; México –​ Cinturón de miséria, zona marginal, ciudad perdida, cartolandia, bariada, arrabaldes, colonia, baja precarios; Nicarágua –​Barrio, asentamiento espontâneo; Peru –​ Pueblo joven, asentamiento humano, invasión, barracón, conos; Puerto Rico –​ Arrabal; República Dominicana –​Barrio malo; Uruguai –​Cantegril, cante, tugurio; Venezuela –​ Rancho, barrio, cerros. These terms are similar in meaning: they all relate the unwanted poor to the grossest elements in the physical structure of cities. I use these derogatory terms on purpose. It was the shame (and denial) of cohabiting with the urban poor that historically created these terms, and there is no pride today in still using them. There is a broader pattern here, for favela and these other Latin American terms operate in much the same way as Alan Mayne describes “slum” usage in English-​speaking societies: “The word ‘slum’ distorts reality. That is its essence. We perpetuate this distortion through our own guiding principles and actions whenever we use the word to describe poor neighbourhoods and attempt to ‘improve’ them.”4 “Favela” resonates today because of the enormity of the massive population growth in Brazil, and the stark social unevenness of its results. Rationalization is needed to explain this away, and terms such as “favela” and “slum” fit the bill. In this respect Brazil epitomizes Latin America as a whole. The population of Brazil, according to the 2010 census, was almost 191 million, which is twenty times the population as first officially measured in 1872. It is currently estimated to exceed 211 million. Some 86 percent live in urban areas. It was estimated in 2010 that almost 11.5 million people lived in favelas: over one million of them in Rio de Janeiro, almost as many in São Paulo, another 880,000 in Salvador, 760,000 in Belém, 396,000 in Fortaleza, and 350,000 in Recife. In these and other big Brazilian cities, rapid and sustained population growth has led to inadequate access to housing, low-​quality infrastructure, and insecure land tenure. Many people do not receive a steady income and are unable to afford regular monthly rents or long-​term mortgages. Several historical factors in particular have influenced these outcomes. First, the colonial Portuguese economy (inherited by an independent Brazil in 1825) was overwhelmingly based on sugar production (from the sixteenth century), plus coffee growing and gold and diamond mining (all from the eighteenth century), which entrenched elite control and worker subordination. Second, and as a result of the social consequences of these key drivers, very little is known about why people were poor, how they numbered, and where they lived. The colonial authorities (and, after the war of 1822–​1824, those of an independent Brazil) neglected the interrelated problems of urban poverty and housing. They disdained the urban poor, and their inaction allowed social disadvantage to accumulate and intensify. Third, there was the problem of land tenure and the “right to the city.”5 Historically, all land had been owned by the Portuguese Crown, which could grant occupancy to land through letters of sesmarias (a practice dating back to the Law of Sesmarias in 1375). These land concessions were restricted to the elite and

128    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA collapsed as colonial rule imploded during the early 1820s. However, the first Brazilian constitution, promulgated in 1824, did little to solve the chaos over post-​colonial land ownership. In fact, it arguably exacerbated it by guaranteeing on the one hand full rights to ownership, while on the other hand failing to create the mechanisms to exercise this constitutional right.6

Historical Background The Brazilian constitutional monarchy, established in 1825, oversaw the development of a modern market economy in place of the old colonial sugar cane monoculture.7 A quest for order and progress underpinned the efforts to build a modern state, and these preoccupations intensified after Brazil became a republic in 1889. In this process, and as a consequence of parallel social developments such as increasing rural to urban migration, mass immigration from Europe, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century, urbanization proceeded apace. Perhaps one of the key elements in the state’s pursuit of order and progress during these changing circumstances was the establishment of institutions to guarantee property claims. The Land Law of September 18, 1850, established purchase and sale as the only form of access to land and definitively abolished the colonial regime of sesmarias, thus instituting land property rights. In practice, the Land Law favored the consolidation of rural landlords and thus stimulated increasing migration to urban areas.8 From this date onward, landless people were forced to work for lower wages, competing for a place to live in the ever more crowded cities. In addition to the small shacks that the poor had already built along the flood-​prone riverbanks, a new form of housing became increasingly prevalent: cortiços (inner-​city buildings in which several families shared subdivided apartments). Cortiços were considered to be the locus of poverty in the nineteenth century: places where some workers lived, but mainly places for vagrants and criminals, a space for the contagion of diseases and chemical addiction, constituting a threat to moral and social order. Cortiços, seemingly, were the antithesis of the modern Brazilian state. The housing conditions of the poor were thus first acted upon in the context of the proclamation of the Brazilian Republic on November 15, 1889, with its intertwined political concerns for modernization and the social well-​being of Brazilian society.9 Sanitarians, spearheaded by engineers and physicians, denounced the poor living conditions of urban workers. The policies that derived from this period are known as “hygienist,” and they resulted in schemes for the removal of the old crowded shacks along the river banks and the demolition of the new massed cortiços. However, the new state did not replace the demolished dwellings. Demolition was not followed by relocation of the population to new areas with established infrastructure and services. The evicted residents therefore gradually returned to the areas where they used to live, or occupied new settlements under similar conditions. Until the

Pride and Shame    129 early twentieth century, the state was generally regarded as being responsible only for regulating housing construction.10 After the First World War, state intervention in the housing market did expand with rent control and direct subsidies for construction. This was because the state was under pressure to mobilize workers and because the private sector was unable to meet the growing demand for housing. Meanwhile those among the urban poor who could not afford to rent or buy continued to build their own homes. However, as they failed to meet the minimum standards that had been set by regulators, they were denounced by engineers and doctors who had a “hygienist” concern for public health. The 1930s saw the creation of public institutions to address the growing demands for housing, thus placing housing among the basic rights of workers. These institutions were the Retirement and Pension Institutes (IAPs) from 1930 to 1964, the Foundation of Popular Housing (FCP) from 1946 to 1964, and the National Housing Bank (BNH) from 1964 to 1985. Paradoxically, the most accessible financing programs to be undertaken by these institutions were established during the authoritarian regime from 1964 to 1985. These institutions financed the production of a considerable housing stock, but it hardly met the needs of low-​income Brazilians. In the important state of Pernambuco, the agendas of the new IAPs overlapped with a campaign created by the Agamenon Magalhães government in 1939: the Social League Against the Mocambo (the word mocambo originally referred to the hiding places of escaped slaves and was subsequently used more broadly to characterize housing units in squatter settlements). The league was originally intended to promote the extinction of this type of “slum” dwelling, but IAP proposals also encouraged the construction of hygienic and affordable housing. In Pernambuco, the destruction of the mocambos therefore became interlinked with the relocation of many householders to new housing estates on the urban periphery.11 In Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, these estates were mainly built to the north and northwest of the city, expanding it considerably beyond its historical center. They attracted and intensified irregular land occupations. Most families from the demolished mocambos could not wait for homes in the new formal estates, since rebuilding lagged behind the demolitions. The same was true throughout Brazil under later programs, and especially from the 1960s to the 1980s (even as the formal housing market boomed) there was a proliferation of irregular occupations. The effects of Brazilian housing policies and practices from the 1930s to the 1980s were thus to push the lower-​income working population out of the central city areas, exacerbating the housing problem, while increasing their living costs through transportation and sanitation expenses as well as property taxes. This situation did not change during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–​1985). While centralized housing policies were efficient in terms of housing construction, these programs largely targeted middle-​class citizens, disregarding lower-​income groups. Moreover, the peripheral location of public housing schemes, combined with the process of peripheral industrial development, reinforced the exclusion of the poor from the urban mainstream. Indeed, the poor suffered not only in terms of housing assistance but also as victims of slum clearance policies. However, it was not feasible to clear away

130    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA all the favelas. The state could neither mobilize sufficient resources to build enough new houses nor resist the relentless pressure of rural-​to-​urban migration. Land invasion and self-​help housing were the only conceivable responses by the poor when faced with a serious deficiency of affordable public-​sector dwelling provision. After 1985, decentralization and more participatory forms of governance became the dominant response of the state. This change, essentially a withdrawal of the state from social policy fields such as housing, was consistent with the simultaneous neoliberal global agenda of restructuring the role of governments and decentralizing state interests in response to global fiscal crises, increasing unemployment, and poverty.12 After the closure of the BNH, financial reforms and unregulated interest levels, together with a remarkable process of political and economic reform measures during the early 1990s, stimulated market policies and practices in Brazil.13 Democratic structures, the social welfare policies of the state, and market operations reveal a singularly incongruent relationship in Brazil. Nowhere is this more evident than in urban affairs and especially land and housing provision. While a combination of these three elements would appear to be crucial for empowering the urban poor, no such attempts have yet been successful. Even today the combination of democratic reform and market enablement have not succeeded in tackling the conditions of the urban poor. Land tenure regimes promoted during the time of the authoritarian welfare state were unjust; and yet, paradoxically, the deficiency of land tenure security in the present climate recalls previous eras and regimes in significant ways. Both the state and the market appear to neglect the demands of the poor for a more equitable quality of life. Sharing roles and responsibilities according to the new neoliberal models of local governance may be theoretically desirable ways to achieve better and more responsive living environments, but they have been insufficient to improve the present state of affairs in Brazil. Partnerships, flexibility, effectiveness, and good governance are all buzzwords that currently attract attention from most sectors of society (especially those in power and those under their command). Thus housing financiers, providers, and developers (such as governments, private developers, and international funding agencies) have attempted to help the poor to house themselves by allocating resources to improve the supply of informal housing. However, whenever formal housing providers intervene, low-​income groups become ever more economically, politically, and technologically dependent upon external housing bodies. In consequence, the informal housing networks collapse. The poor, out of necessity rather than choice, thus continue their struggle to acquire housing through both legal and illegal self-​help mechanisms. The election of social democrat President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the stabilization of the economy raised expectations that housing policies could again become social in emphasis. However, during both periods of his presidency (1995–​1998 and 1999–​2002), no improvement could be discerned. Social policies existed, but their focus was public health and education, not the urban housing sector. Where improvement in the housing sector existed, this was limited to the few municipalities that adopted

Pride and Shame    131 individual initiatives based on a willingness to tackle social housing needs; they were not part of a systematic national policy. With the election of leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office for his first term (2003–​2006) in January 2003, a change in social policy was again expected, especially with the creation of the Ministry of Cities in 2003 and the formation of four national secretariats (housing, sanitation, urban mobility, and urban programs) in order to address and coordinate urban issues. In the following year a National Housing Council was established, which approved a National Policy for Social Housing.14 However, it was during Lula’s second administration (2007–​2010) that housing policy had its greatest stimulus in terms of direct actions for the construction of housing units. The creation of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), launched in 2007 with the aim of implementing large infrastructure works designed to reduce the precariousness of disadvantaged communities, resulted in a significant increase in investment in the formal housing sector. In 2008 the Social Housing Program, Support Action for the Social Production of Housing, was created, preparing an institutional path for the introduction of a program that promised to tackle Brazil’s enormous housing deficit (estimated in that year to be over six million units). The National Housing Plan (PlanHab), announced in 2009 and designed to realize the principles of the National Social Plan, sought to meet the housing needs of the country within fifteen years.15 As a result of PlanHab, the My House My Life Program (MCMV) was launched in March 2009 by the federal government in order to encourage the production and acquisition of new housing units for low-​income families. The MCMV, although criticized for not being as focused on the poorest people as the former BNH, delivered approximately 1.2 million housing units from 2009 to 2016. However, this achievement was tarnished by the inefficiency and corruption of public managers and entrepreneurs who diverted funds, over-​invoiced works, produced poor quality results, or simply failed to carry out their contracts. Therefore, what is officially called Social Interest Housing can in practice be called Electoral Interest Housing. The main priorities were the visibility of the work and its potential to generate votes in the next election. Similarly, some of the leaders of organized social movements channeled the popular mobilizations of homeless families to gain fame, prestige, and political power for themselves.16 President Dilma Rousseff was in power from 2011 to 2014 and was re-​elected in 2015. She was impeached in August 2016 and replaced by President Michel Temer. Although PAC and MCMV were continued during this period, they did not receive the necessary support to boost housing policies targeting the very poor. President Jair Bolsonaro began his term in January 2019 being widely known as a populist and clientelist, with conservative and neoliberal ideas. His social policies are unclear, and are almost absent from the government’s agenda. The PAC was ended in 2019, and the MCMV was replaced by another program in 2021. A bill approved by the House and Senate in 2020 to prohibit evictions from urban real estate during the covid-​19 pandemic was vetoed by Bolsonaro.

132    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA

The Slums of Recife Recife is the capital of Pernambuco state, located on the northeastern coast of Brazil. The city has a total population of approximately 1.6 million inhabitants (and almost four million in the broader metropolitan region), more than half of whom live in low-​ income areas (favelas), which occupy 14 percent of the total city area. High population densities have multiplied living pressures. Recife has the sixth highest living density (8,000 inhabitants per square kilometer) of Latin American cities. High densities in squatter settlements have generated lease contracts in which rents are often beyond the reach of the very poor. This appears to be the main factor in further land invasions. The main reason given by favela residents for occupying their land was their inability to afford the rents in the settlements they came from.17 Recording of mocambos officially started in Recife in 1908.18 In 1913, the census found 16,347 mocambos, which represented 43 percent of the total housing units in the city; in 1923 they totaled 19,947 (51 percent); in 1938, there were 45,581 mocambos (70 percent). Some of these land occupations started without open conflict between occupants and landowners, aided by payments of a foro (similar to “lease” in English, whereby the occupier pays a fee to the landlord in return for land use rights). Householders paying foro were called foreiros and after a certain agreed time theoretically became the landowners. However, the practice of foro payments shows that in most cases households instead “signed” new lease contracts requiring them to continue to pay the foro. In 1940, 73 percent of households living in mocambos in Recife paid foro to landlords. Typically, the monthly payments under new lease contracts would be higher than in previous ones, and if households did not agree to the new terms they were evicted, thus losing their investments in the place over time. New foreiros would replace them, and a new lease contract would be signed at a still higher price. In order to avoid the monthly foros households invaded new lands, intensifying tenure disputes and evictions. Thus, the “right” to use land was gained by force. Invasões—​ groups of households occupying land without paying the landlord—​date back to the 1970s in Recife. These land disputes intensified after catastrophic flooding in 1975 because the majority of informal settlements were in swampy areas beside rivers. Dislocated families started to build new shacks “side by side with already existing mocambos, whose inhabitants were paying foro. In some cases, newcomers were forced by police action to abandon the site, but in other cases they remained undisturbed.”19 In addition, landowners started to prevent further invasions because they received no foro payments from these new households. Further conflict resulted from the municipality’s plans to regulate and redevelop the riverbanks. Nevertheless, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s Recife’s poor had, through land occupations, fought for their right to live and to build their houses in opposition to landowners and the state, and in defiance of the protectionist laws of indissoluble and

Pride and Shame    133 permanent property (Civil Code of 1916). Many of the settlements that arose spontaneously and unofficially during this period were therefore illegal (contrary to the right to property) and irregular (contrary to architectural and urbanistic standards) and bore the brunt of attempts to remove them. Through political and collective action their inhabitants resisted, and little by little they gained access to some basic services such as garbage collection, water supply, drainage, sewerage, public transport, education, and health, thereby becoming more connected to the legal and regular city. It was a fragile basis, though, on which to base a lasting claim to their full right to the city.

The Rise of Pro-​Poor Policies in Recife In 1979 the city of Recife witnessed a sequence of well-​publicized events that were sparked by the reactions of those excluded from property rights and their attempt to counter the inertia of state law in their disputes with real estate speculators and state officials. They sought guarantees of their right to housing and the city. These events centered around the emblematic cases of Brasilia Teimosa, Mangueira, and Mustardinha.20 The actors involved in this drama comprised, on the one hand, the residents in alliance with militant lawyers, social workers, and the Peace and Justice Commission of the Catholic Church; and, on the other hand, politicians, municipal and state government officials, and landowners. This tense conflict culminated in the recognition of the partial or total right of the invasões to live on occupied land and to build and improve their homes. This was, without a doubt, a watershed for Brazilian social policy. In 1983, new municipal laws enabled informal settlements to be legally recognized as Special Zones of Social Interest (ZEIS), empowering the municipality of Recife to provide infrastructure and urban services and to legalize the possession of the land, thus inserting these settlements into the formal urban fabric. Under this law, the municipality declared ZEIS areas in twenty-​seven localities up to 1987.21 The ZEIS initiative took place alongside continuing land invasions and disputes. In 1983, city authorities acknowledged that there were seventy-​two low-​income settlements, but in 1985 this number was revised to 193, to 350 in 1990, and to over six hundred in 1996. In partial response, the state in 1987 launched the Programa de Habitação Popular (Popular Housing Program), with finance from the Sistema Financeiro da Habitação (Housing Finance System) and the World Bank.22 Approximately 400 hectares were purchased by the state for a slum upgrading program and the legalization of land tenure in the largest of Recife’s squatter settlements, Morros de Casa Amarela. Also in 1987, the largest invasions in that year (accounting for over 200 hectares of illegally occupied land) were purchased by the state in order to legalize land tenure. Finance for the legalization process came from an international agreement between the World Bank and the state government of Pernambuco.

134    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA However, the most important state action in 1987 was the legislative consolidation of the ZEIS reform process. That year saw the enactment of the Law of the PREZEIS (Regularization Plan of the Special Zones of Social Interest), which expressed the decisions made by representatives of the twenty-​seven ZEIS areas under the guidance of technical staff from the Commission of Peace and Justice of the Catholic Church in Recife. Under this law, fully effective action could be taken by the municipality to develop infrastructure programs and services, accompanied by judicial actions to formalize the land regularization of the settlements. Popularly this law was known as “Lei das Favelas” (The Law of the Favelas). Parallel movements developed in other cities (for example, Belo Horizonte and São Paulo).In total, sixty-​six areas have been declared ZEIS in Recife. The last one, Coqueiral, was declared in 1998, but there are only five where the process of land regularization has been concluded or is in its final stages: Coronel Fabriciano, João de Barros, Greve Geral, Vila Vintém, and Vila União. The other ZEIS areas face ongoing delays due to legal processes and the interference of political interests.23 Despite land regularization programs being promoted as a means of including people through the right to housing, regularization programs of illegal settlements can also serve the purpose of demobilizing urban popular movements that threaten the dominant social order.24 This consideration has certainly influenced the ZEIS process in Recife, since urban social movements there were regarded as a possible threat to capitalism, and it was feared that Recife could become a new Cuba.25 The organization of communities under ZEIS paradoxically seems to jeopardize their effectiveness. This is because over time the formalization of community leadership excludes other residents from the decision-​making processes. At the outset of the ZEIS process, residents do elect local leaders, but thereafter these representatives enjoy a formal status that did not previously exist. Thus the destructuring of the original social movements emerges from the very structuring of new organizational entities, opening the way for community operations to become corrupted.26 Meanwhile, outside these few regularized ZEIS communities, the problems faced by poor families in accessing land, housing and services continue much as before. Their hardships are illustrated by the following anecdotes: I used to pay rent and could no longer afford it . . . I had to fill the land, it was a very tough job. We brought it using a wheelbarrow. My brother and my mother helped me. Everyone in this street has filled their land. This is a place for crabs not for people to live. I marked the plot and filled it. We spoke with Cristina [the leader] asking for her permission to invade this area. We were the first dwellers in this street. My mother bought the wood for me. It was what was left from a former shack from somebody who had improved their housing conditions. I collected a lot of materials nearby . . . , cardboard boxes, wooden planks. When my mother invaded this area there was nobody here, it was all mangrove (mangue). I didn’t want to come in the beginning, but when I was hard-​up, I didn’t have any more means to pay my rent, I came here. My mother told me about this

Pride and Shame    135 area, I came here to have a look. I came before my husband and I had to pay somebody to fill in the land.27 In the inner part of this place there were only woods. People used to be killed and were buried over there. Here, where our house is built and its surroundings, there used to be just an area of sand. People were building their houses using plastic sheets or wood. We built our house with plastic sheets. We slept one night only, but we were scared and rebuilt our house with wood. People used to come from outside and from this area too; they cut the plastic sheets to steal our belongings. We didn’t have any security.28

These anecdotes illustrate that personal safety is at risk in the early stages of a land invasion. The invasions do not necessarily lead to the construction and incremental improvement of homes. Households address land tenure disputes by resisting ongoing threats of eviction, and these disputes usually lead to physical violence. On the other hand, the quasi-​permanence of households in these areas is, to a degree, also tolerated by landowners, partly because the alternative is for them to fight with householders to repossess land. With the advent of more families, the invaders feel that their tenure may be solidifying. Support from local politicians, coupled with the presence of the media, can similarly promote a feeling of greater security. At this early stage of land invasion, families may be already trading their perceived use rights, and shacks may be bought and sold. Evictions, if these take place, are usually the result of court decisions, but these can be long delayed. Public protests are sometimes successful in keeping households in the area. As a result of this “apparent” security, householders in subsequent invasion areas may perceive that their own tenure security is also implicitly granted. The factors underlying land invasions vary significantly between individuals, as may be seen in the following statement by residents of illegal settlements: I don’t have anywhere else to live. The favelas are worse than here. If I had a better place I would leave, since I can’t sell my sweets; there are too many small corner shops here . . . but if I continue selling things and earn some money I will improve my housing conditions. I’ll buy cement, then bricks, and then sand, then I’ll store everything and build my house.29 I have never invaded any land before. I had many opportunities since I often was invited to invade land, but I never had the courage to do it. But I was in such a situation I didn’t have any other choice. I lost my job, and the owner of the house [I used to rent] wanted to sell her house. The owner of this school next door suggested I should landfill here. I sold my furniture, TV set, almost everything I owned and built here. I had no choice.30

Individuals are seldom proud of being favela residents or of having invaded land to house their families. They often cite lack of choice as the reason that made them take part in such a risky venture, when family members may die or suffer injuries, and personal belongings may be stolen.

136    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA There are moments when households, desperate for their own safety and comfort, manage to gain access to housing resources such as building materials, credit, and building skills, which enable them to upgrade their houses: My house was made of wood, but with some brick walls. There were also front and lateral brick walls. Then came the government [policemen sent by the government] and destroyed all my work. I wasn’t at home, just my sister and my children were there. She told me my house was being destroyed. When I arrived there were clothes, the cooker, bricks, cement, photographs, everything together on the truck, even my children were there. They were put there by the police officers. I didn’t know what to do at that time. I wondered what to do, but I then decided I wouldn’t allow them to destroy the rest of my house. I stayed in front of the truck and shouted: “Now I have arrived, nobody will destroy my house even further!” I told them I had built my house with a lot of struggle, and that, arriving back from my government job at a public hospital to find them destroying my house, I didn’t know where I could go.31 We couldn’t survive in Limoeiro [an inland town]. Living here, we can find clothes to wash, cleaning jobs, go fishing, but in Limoeiro we couldn’t find anything to make money. I lived there for a long time and I know there are no job opportunities there. My daughter died and left her house to me.32

More than two decades have passed since the creation of the last ZEIS area in Recife (ZEIS Coqueiral). Although many other poor areas have not yet been institutionalized as ZEIS areas, their residents have continued to improve their homes and to consolidate their neighborhoods.33The process of ZEIS settlement regularization has proved to be slow and expensive, and it faces resistance from the Brazilian judiciary. Its effectiveness in stabilizing land tenure and entitling residents is, as we have seen, very limited.34 This process epitomizes, in part, a series of contradictions between, on the one hand, progressive discourse about recognition of rights to the city and property, and the social practices that could legitimize them; and, on the other hand, neoliberal discourse about integrating the informal and formal cities. Ironically, it could be said that the integrative mechanisms of the ZEIS both meet social inclusion objectives and satisfy the global economic interests of a gradual insertion of the favelas into the formal land markets.

The Right to the City and its Disappointments Once the democratic socialist Workers Party (PT) gained municipal executive power in Recife in 2001, there was a strong movement of institutional support for a new Participatory Budget (PB) program, whereby the municipality allows large groups of people—​meeting as a commission—​to decide the priorities and goals of future municipal investments. The introduction of this new policy framework was much more

Pride and Shame    137 aligned with the agenda of neoliberal reform propagated by the World Bank than the PT formally acknowledges, and so the PB has perversely intensified the competition arena within which the urban poor has to confront the marketplace.35 The PT was in power in Recife from 2001 to 2012, and much was carried out to advance their progressive social agenda. However, the priorities of the PB have in fact compromised the goals and priorities of the PREZEIS forum in establishing and monitoring ZEIS areas. Housing improvement programs in the ZEIS areas are no longer as active as in the 1980s and early 1990s. The PB procedures have effectively replaced the deliberative processes for defining priorities and claiming the rights of the participants as instituted by the PREZEIS forum. Moreover, although neither the PB nor the PREZEIS forum were intended to strengthen market mechanisms, they have contributed to the fragmentation of social welfare policies by the state, inviting powerful vested interests to intervene in framing social policies for the destitute and powerless. Civic participation has been manipulated and co-​opted by the ruling elites, thus winning the acceptance of the poor whilst promoting cities as marketplaces. In 2013 a new non-​PT mayor initiated a clearer agenda with pro-​market policies, at a time of booming economic activity. This mayor was re-​elected in 2017, with the result that pro-​market policies are currently still entrenched. In this climate, it is unsurprising that the increasing demand for social housing in Recife has not influenced local government to fulfill the principles of the social function of property, which would guarantee access to housing as a human right. It is also unsurprising that the widely recorded, and generally positive, experiences of ZEIS in Recife have not been taken into consideration. Of course, real estate markets do not follow the general law of supply and demand, since in this sector prices increase with the offer of newly developed areas, and accelerating property values in redevelopment areas increase the value of hitherto unattractive properties close to new ventures. By contrast, in places where there is no investment, real estate values fall and these areas are seen as degraded. However viable the communities may be, there are no private initiatives available to address market imperfections. New municipal laws recognizing the rights of residents in informal settlements did, however, create instruments of popular participation in the management of the city, including the Councils and the Conferences of the Cities, which began in 2003, adopting the slogan: “A city for all.” Among the guidelines approved by the National Council of Cities in 2004, its policy for financing programs relating to land use, housing, and sanitation should be highlighted. Through it, the Federal Savings Bank offered resources for urban infrastructure and housing improvements, with the states and municipalities having responsibility for executing these projects. Very little is yet clear about the real ways in which goals, priorities, and decisions were determined by the City Conferences at the municipal, state, and national levels. They had wide terms of reference but operated within very tight deadlines. Issues that might normally take months were resolved in a few days. However, after the fifth National City

138    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA Conference (held in Brasilia in 2015), the subsequent 2017 conference was indefinitely postponed. Thus this approach to urban social issues may have come to an end. There are many who advocate the city conferences as having a democratic priority-​ setting potential, but this may not necessarily be the best way to establish public policy, because the most influential groups may disregard the demands of the needy. This corresponds to neoliberal paradigms on the relationship between competitiveness and legitimacy in a market-​friendly environment.

The Markets, The Poor, and The Favelas The argument by many economists that property rights are a determining factor for housing investments does not hold up.36 According to this thesis of institutional economics, property rights operate to increase the efficiency of markets and the economy,37and the market only works efficiently if the freedom of individuals to maximize their private interests and to manage the values of their properties (which can be converted into cash, i.e., exchange rights) is guaranteed by individual property rights. Therefore, property security increases the efficiency of the formal land market.38 This argument is opposed by those who understand the right to housing as a guarantor of human rights, and as a guarantor of human rights, and of the right to the city for all.39 There is here an apparent dispute between the right of exchange and the right of use. According to orthodox understanding, the former is related to economic law while the latter is associated with human rights. However, detailed analysis indicates that the right of use confers on its holder the right to the economic exploitation of the object.40 The role of institutions in this process is essential since they represent a set of established rules and systems that structure social interactions in particular ways.41 However, there are aspects of social interactions that determine institutions since all sets of rules and norms are socially determined. The actions of particular groups affect the preferences of individuals, and these preferences are not necessarily stable. The rules change over time, just as the values that defined them also evolve. However, our treatment of the poor and the slums (or favelas) has remained almost static. Slum clearance is not restricted to the past but continues into the present. In June 2006, for example, approximately three hundred families were evicted from the Pantanal favela in Recife. They lived under a flyover near ZEIS Coque and were expecting official recognition of tenure security or at least a relocation program for the families needing to be rehoused. In June 2015, the community 21 de Abril saw the destruction of around seventy houses in this community of 378 families. In 2012, the eviction of twenty families was recorded in Vila Oliveira (also known as Favela do Perúcio) in the Pina neighborhood. They had been living in the area for over fifty years and were granted tenure security in 2009 after a long court battle initiated in

Pride and Shame    139 1993. The area had been expropriated by the government of Pernambuco state by the then-​governor Miguel Arraes in 1988, the year that the Brazilian Federal Constitution was enacted, and a process of land titling was initiated to provide residents with definite entitlements. However, in 2011 the Court of Justice of Pernambuco reversed the decision and upheld the landowners’ appeal. Without adequate legal assistance, the families missed the deadline to appeal, the decision became final, and they were evicted during the night of November 6, 2012. Their eviction coincided with construction of a luxurious shopping center (Riomar) nearby, which increased land values and turned the neighborhood into a potentially valuable area for higher-​income investments. Riomar was opened in October 2012, and a new road system was established alongside the shopping center, known as Via Mangue. Another example of the misleading actions taken by the government to deal with the housing of the poor can be illustrated by the example of the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil. In a similarly calculated action the twelve Brazilian host cities for the World Cup were chosen in May 2009, and in June a Basic Project containing an initial architectural study was presented by the government of Pernambuco state. Then, the Responsibility Matrix presented to FIFA was signed in January 2010, and in May the government of Pernambuco state initiated a process of land expropriation in greater Recife.42As a result, 123 families were forcibly removed from Camaragibe (the municipality adjacent to Arena Pernambuco) to free up space for the expansion of an Integrated Bus Terminal, and in Olinda, thirty-​eight expropriations were officially recorded; whilst another eight hundred expropriations were recorded in Carpina. In Recife, 298 land expropriations took place in relation to mobility issues (BRT East/​West, and East-​West-​Branch World Cup city), and another 1,460 expropriations for the construction of Via Mangue. Evictions have continued. On July 19, 2018, for example, eight hundred families were expelled from their homes on Mangue Seco Beach in Igarassú, Metropolitan Region of Recife. They had lived in the area for ten months, but a hotel owner claimed the right to repossess the land. On June 28, 2018, another four hundred families had lost their homes after a court decision to return the land to the original landowner. This land was situated on Avenida Recife, in an area belonging to a supermarket chain. Similarly on August 31, 2018, twenty families were evicted from the Comunidade Pocotó in Boa Viagem and their houses were demolished. In some cases communities have resisted the evictions. For example, the community of Caranguejo Tabaires in Recife was scheduled for the removal of seventy families, but after the eviction of about thirty households in July 2019, residents were successful in suspending the eviction process. Repossession and demolition of homes occupied before March 2020 were suspended in May 2020 until the end of the covid-​19 pandemic. However, about two hundred families were violently expelled and had their homes demolished in a rural community in Amaraji, near Recife. A repossession order to evict two hundred families from the Comunidade da Linha, in the Ibura neighborhood of Recife, was temporarily suspended in May 2021after the removal of thirty families. The insensitivities and inconsistencies on the part of a state that proclaims a right to the city for its citizens, can best be understood in terms of the evolving urbanization of

140    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA Brazil, where powerful economic interests compete with the grassroots dynamics of social interest in the housing sector and the principles of social rights to property and the city. The state’s market-​oriented policies and processes have not reduced inequality or improved housing conditions in favelas but have resulted instead in the continuing insecurity and marginalization of the urban poor.43 Further studies in this area are much needed. In Brazil, housing policies for the urban poor have ranged between stark negatives (either ignoring the poor or expelling them from their settlements) and aspirational positives (recognizing their right to the city, and land regularization in an attempt to recognize the social function of urban property). This variation reflects a structural issue that results from the very singular forms of the formation of our society and our state.

Conclusions The history of favelas in Brazil is claimed to result from disputes over slavery and the freedom to live in cities, as often documented in relation to the massacres of the Canudos War in the nineteenth century and the ongoing marginalization of the inhabitants of mocambos, cortiços and favelas. Gilberto Freyre, in Casa Grande e Senzala (1933) and Sobrados e Mocambos (1936), and Josué de Castro in Homem e Caranguejos (1970), among others, have illustrated the long-​running and unhappy relationships between Brazil’s elites and its former slaves. It is inappropriate to diminish the slavery period of Brazilian history and its subsequent effects on society, or to blame the slaves for the ongoing pathologies of Brazilian society regarding the poor and destitute. However, a different perspective is needed on the origins of favelas and on the efforts to reform them. Although housing policies aimed at improving housing and guaranteeing social rights have been formulated and refined, with a principled emphasis on reducing inequalities, the policies have failed because social practices have diverged from the driving principles and have widened the gap between the powerful and the disempowered. The Brazilian government must therefore refine its tools for recognizing housing rights since, despite numerous attempts, it has not been able to guarantee access to urban land for the poor, nor has it been able to regularize land tenure for the residents of these settlements. Brazil’s future urban agenda thus hangs in the balance. Notwithstanding many different housing policies over time, the Brazilian housing sector continues to face the main obstacle of meeting the growing demand for housing without instruments to provide housing units at prices that the urban poor can afford. Although society as a whole has reacted to urban inequality by fighting against social injustices, there is mounting evidence that markets alone cannot satisfy social interest housing demands. The paths found through social mobilization mechanisms to expand access to decent housing should facilitate the supply and demand process, but the difficulties inherent in

Pride and Shame    141 this process have been compounded by corruption, neglect, interruptions in innovative policy programs, and discontinuities among the public officials and party alignments responsible for their implementation. The case of ZEIS and PREZEIS in Recife demonstrates the capacity for social articulation at the local level, but they are not immune from the interference of local, regional, or national elites. Of all the instruments of democratic political administration, the Participatory Budget program has, despite drawbacks, worked best to link urban democratic governance with public policies that prioritize the collective rights of vulnerable people living in cities. Brazil suffered twenty-​one years of dictatorship (1964–​1985), which produced enormous urban inequalities and wound back recognition of the human rights of the majority of its population to access housing. However, in the three decades since the promulgation of the Brazilian constitution in 1988, neither the market nor the state has been able to overcome the insolvency of poor Brazilians or to guarantee their rights to the city and to secure housing. The rhetoric of access to housing as a right remains an illusion. Perhaps, unconsciously or otherwise, Brazilian cities are seen not only as growth machines but as cash machines whose operation leaves little left over for the poor. By thus summarizing the history of housing in Brazil I hope to stimulate new research in this area. My own views about Brazilian “slums” are based on fieldwork notes in the favelas made over the last two decades. During this time I have been repeatedly exposed to the stark realities of poor housing conditions, and in highlighting the poverty, struggles, and suffering of the people whom I met I express to them my gratitude with a mixture of pride and sorrow.

Notes 1. Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2. Sidney Chalhoub, Cidade febril: cortiços e epidemias na Corte imperial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). 3. See Maria Angela de Almeida Souza, “Posturas do Recife Imperial,” (PhD diss., Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2002) for a comprehensive discussion of housing, the state, and the poor in Brazil and in Recife. See also Willem Assies, To Get Out of the Mud: Neighbourhood Associativism in Recife, 1964–​1988 (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1991); Martijn Koster, In Fear of Abandonment: Slum Life, Community Leaders and Politics in Recife, Brazil (Wageningen: Wageningen University Press, 2009); Flávio A. M. de Souza, “Perceived Security of Land Tenure and Low-​Income Housing Markets: the Case of Recife, Brazil” (PhD diss., School of Planning, Oxford Brookes University, 1998). Additional readings on favelas and cortiços can be found inAlba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito, “Introdução,” in Um Século de Favela, ed. Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1998); Lícia Valladares, A invenção da favela: do mito de origem a favela.com (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2005); Rafael Gonçalves, Favelas do Rio de Janeiro: história e direito (Rio de Janeiro: Pallas: Editoria PUC, 2013); Nabil Bonduki, As origens da habitação social no Brasil (São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2004); Marcus A. da Silva Mello et al., Favelas cariocas: ontem e hoje (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2012).

142    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA 4. Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion, 2017), 284. 5. The assertion of palpable human priorities (and especially those of the underprivileged) in ordering urban space, as opposed to those of the capitalist marketplace, was powerfully articulated by Henri Lefebvre in his seminal Le Doit à la Ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968). Lefebvre’s “right to the city” is a central theme throughout this chapter. 6. Ibraim Rocha, Girolomo Treccani, José Benatti, Lilian Haber, Rogério Chaves, Manual de Direito Agrário Constitucional: lições de direito agroambiental (Belo Horizonte: Forúm, 2010). 7. See Celso Furtado, Raízes do subdesenvolvimento (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização brasileira, 2003). 8. James Holston, Cidadania Insurgente: Disjunções da democracia e da modernidade no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2013). 9. Lícia Valladares, A invenção da favela: do mito de origem a favela.com (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2005). 10. Marta Farah, “Público e privado na provisão de habitações nos países centrais,” Espaço e Debates 12, no. 31 (1990): 10–​20. 11. José Lira, “A construção discursiva da casa popular no Recife (década de 30),” Análise Social 29, no. 127 (1994): 733–​753; Virgínia Pontual, “Tempos do Recife: representações culturais e configurações urbanas,” Revista Brasileira de História 21, no. 42 (2001): 417–​434. 12. Maria Helena de Castro, “Descentralização e Política Social no Brasil: as Perspectivas dos Anos 90,” Espaços & Debates 11, no 32 (1991): 80–​87. 13. Márcio Valença, “The Lost Decade and the Brazilian Government’s Response in the 1990s,” The Journal of Development Areas 33 (1999): 1–​52; Márcio Valença, “The Closure of the Brazilian Housing Bank and Beyond,” Urban Studies 36, no. 10 (1991): 1747–​1768. 14. Caroline dos Santos, “De cima para baixo e de baixo para cima. Intervenção estatal e investimentos habitacionais” (Masters diss., Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2011). 15. Nabil Bonduki, “Do Projeto Moradia ao Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida,” Teoria e Debate 82 (2009): 8–​14. 16. Flávio de Souza, Luis de la Mora, and Ana Cavalcanti, “Discursos y prácticas em La producción social del hábitat en Recife, Brasil. Políticas de mejora de vivenda, garantia de derechos y ampliación de diferencias,” in Producción social del hábitat. Abordages conceptuales, prácticas de investigación y experiências em lãs principales ciudades del Cono Sur, ed. Mercedes di Virgilio and Carla Rodríguez (Buenos Aires: Café de lãs Ciudades, 2013), 91–​116. 17. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Law, State and Urban Struggles in Recife, Brazil,” Social & Legal Studies 1 (1992): 237. 18. Lira, A construção. 19. Ibid., 123. 20. Alexandrina Moura, “Brasília Teimosa: The Organisation of a Low-​Income Settlement in Recife, Brazil,” Development Dialogue 1 (1987): 152–​169. 21. Maria Angela de Almeida Souza, “Avanço e arrefecimento do processo de regularização fundiária dos assentamentos populares do Recife.” In ANAIS 3º Congresso Brasileiro de Direito Urbanístico, Recife, 2004 http://​www.ibdu.org.br/​imag​ens/​AVA​NCOE​ARRE​ FECI​MENT​ODPB​ROCE​SSO.pdf. 22. Maria Angela de Almeida Souza, “Habitação: bem ou direito: As condições de acesso à habitação popular analisadas à luz da atuação da COHAB-​PE na RMR.” M.Sc. diss., Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1990.

Pride and Shame    143 23. Tiago Silva, “A mediação dos direitos na utilização do contrato de Concessão de Direito Real de Uso: A regularização das ZEIS do Recife” (MSc diss., Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2009). 24. Ann Varley, “A New Model of Urban Land Regularization in Mexico? The Role of Opposition Government," European Journal of Development Research, 11:2, 1999: 235-​261. 25. De Souza, “Perceived Security of Land Tenure.” 26. Flávio de Souza, “Inclusão disputada: acesso a moradias em assentamentos informais em Recife,” in Globalização e desigualdade, ed. Márcio Valença and Rita de Cássia Gomes (Natal: A. S. Editores, 2002), 259–​268.Flávio de Souza and Roger Zetter, “Urban Land Tenure in Brazil: From Centralized State to Market Processes of Housing Land Delivery,” in Market Economy and Urban Change: Impacts in the Developing World, ed. Roger Zetter and Mohamed Hamza (London: Earthscan, 2004), 163–​184. 27. Extract of an interview with Luciana, resident of ZEIS Sítio Grande. Translated by the author, July 2, 1996. 28. Extract of an interview with Selma, resident of ZEIS Coronel Fabriciano. Translated by the author, June 25, 1996. 29. Extract from an interview with Maria, resident of ZEIS Coronel Fabriciano. Translated by the author, July 22, 1996. 30. Extract from an interview with Agricio, resident of Mauricéia. Translated by the author, August 7, 1996. 31. Extract from an interview held with Azemazete, resident of ZEIS Sítio Grande. Translated by the author, July 3, 1996. 32. Extract from an interview held with Maria, resident of ZEIS EntraApulso. Translated by the author, July 18, 1996. 33. De Souza, “Perceived Security of Land Tenure”; Flávio de Souza, “The Future of Informal Settlements: Lessons in the Legalization of Disputed Urban Land in Recife, Brazil,” Geoforum 32, no. 4 (2001): 483–​492. 34. Flávio de Souza, “Security of Land Tenure Revised: The Case of CRRU in Recife and Porto Alegre, Brazil,” Habitat International 28 (2004): 231–​244. 35. De Souza and Zetter, “Urban Land Tenure in Brazil”. 36. De Souza, “Perceived Security of Land Tenure.” See Daniel Bromley, Economic Interests and Institutions: The Conceptual Foundations of Public Policy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost,” Journal of Law & Economics 3 (1960): 1–​44; Harold Demsetz, “Towards a Theory of Property Rights,” American Economic Review 57, no. 2 (1967): 347–​359. 37. David North and Robert Thomas, “The First Economic Revolution,” Economic History Review 30 (1977): 229–​241; Richard Posner, Economic Analysis of Law (Boston: Little, Brown & Company. 38. David Dowall and Giles Clarke, “A Framework for Reforming Urban Land Policies in Developing Countries,” Urban Management Program Policy Paper 7 (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1996). 39. Manuel Castells, The Urban Question (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la Ville (Paris: Anthropos, 1968); Peter Saunders, Social Theory and the Urban Question (London: Century Hutchinson, 1986). 40. De Souza, “Perceived Security of Land Tenure.” 41. Geoffrey Hodgson, “What Are Institutions?” Journal of Economic Issues 40, no. 1 (2006): 1–​25.

144    FLÁVIO A. M. DE SOUZA 42. Flávio de Souza, “Recife: Much To Do about Nothing,” in Sport Mega-​Events and Urban Legacies: The 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil, ed. Eduardo Nobre (London: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 97–​116. 43. De Souza and Zetter, “Urban Land Tenure in Brazil”;Flávio de Souza, “O futuro dos assentamentos informais: lições a partir da legalização de terras urbanas em Recife,” in Brasil Urbano, ed. Márcio Valença and Edésio Fernandes, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X, 2011), 131–​145.

Bibliography Assies, Willem. To Get Out of the Mud: Neighbourhood Associativism in Recife, 1964–​1988. Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1991. Bromley, Daniel. Economic Interests and Institutions: The Conceptual Foundations of Public Policy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Castells, Manuel. The Urban Question. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Coase, Ronald. “The Problem of Social Cost.” Journal of Law & Economics 3 (1960): 1–​44. De Souza, Flávio A. M. “Perceived Security of Land Tenure and Low-​Income Housing Markets: The Case of Recife, Brazil.” PhD diss., School of Planning, Oxford Brookes University, 1998. De Souza, Flávio A. M. “Perceived Security of Land Tenure in Recife, Brazil.” Habitat International 25, no. 2 (2001): 175–​190. Demsetz, Harold. “Towards a Theory of Property Rights.” American Economic Review 57, no. 2 (1967): 347–​359. Dowall, David, and Giles Clarke. “A Framework for Reforming Urban Land Policies in Developing Countries.” Urban Management Program Policy Paper 7. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1996. Fortin, C. J. “The Politics of Public Land in Recife, Brazil: The Case of Brasilia Teimosa, 1934–​ 1984.” PhD diss., Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, 1987. Koster, Martin. In Fear of Abandonment: Slum Life, Community Leaders and Politics in Recife, Brazil. Wageningen: Wageningen University Press, 2009. Lefebvre, Henri. Le Droit à la Ville. Paris: Anthropos, 1968. Maia, Maria L. “Land Use Regulations and Rights to the City: Squatter Settlements in Recife, Brazil.” Land Use Policy 12, no. 2 (1995): 177–​180. Moura, Alexandrina. “Brasília Teimosa: The Organisation of a Low-​Income Settlement in Recife, Brazil.” Development Dialogue 1 (1987): 152–​169. North, David, and Robert Thomas. “The First Economic Revolution.” Economic History Review 30 (1977): 229–​241. Perlman, Janice. Favela: Four decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Posner, Richard. Economic Analysis of Law. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1977. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Law, State and Urban Struggles in Recife, Brazil.” Social & Legal Studies 1 (1992): 235–​255. Saunders, Peter. Social Theory and the Urban Question. London: Century Hutchinson, 1986. Simonsen, Roberto. História Econômica do Brasil, 1500–​1820. Brasília: Senado Federal, 2004. Smith, Joseph, and Francisco Vinhosa. History of Brazil (1500–​2000): Politics, Economy, Society, Diplomacy. London: Routledge, 2013.

Pride and Shame    145 Souza, Maria Angela de Almeida. “Posturas do Recife Imperial.” PhD diss., Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 2002. Valença, Márcio. “The Closure of the Brazilian Housing Bank and Beyond,” Urban Studies 36, no.10 (1999): 1747–​1768. Valença, Márcio. “The Lost Decade and the Brazilian Government’s Response in the 1990s.” Journal of Development Areas 33 (1999): 1–​52.

CHAPTER 8

THE SPATIAL P OL I T I C S OF U S HOM ELES SNE S S The Evolution of Boston’s “Skid Row” ELLA HOWARD

The term “slum” has fallen out of fashion in discussions of contemporary American cities. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, discussions of poverty, morality, and relief programs often invoked descriptions of “slums.” The term appears more than forty times in Jacob Riis’s pioneering 1890 work of photojournalism, How the Other Half Lives, alone.1 In the mid-​twentieth century, advocates of urban renewal used the notion of “slums” to justify elaborate plans to demolish and rebuild broad sections of American cities. In many cases, impoverished people were relocated to public housing projects, their poverty persistent. Throughout the twentieth century, homeless people were often congregated on “skid rows,” which were seen as quintessentially “slum” areas. Urban renewal flattened some such districts, prompting homeless individuals to move to different areas of the city. In the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries, income disparity between wealthy and poor Americans continued to widen, creating complex geographies defined by stark contrasts. Boston provides a case study to explore these themes, in particular the spaces occupied by the city’s most destitute residents. In 1985, the Boston Globe published an article exploring the city’s economic disparities. Staff writer Charles Kenney profiled two households, each representing a distinct socioeconomic class. A couple known as Colin and Laurie earned more than $80,000 per year and enjoyed dinners out, use of their two cars, and regular vacations. They lived less than a mile away from Cynthia, a single mother who received just over $5,000 per year through Aid to Families with Dependent Children and food stamps. Kenney contrasted the two households’ budgets, citing them as emblematic of Boston’s widening division between its wealthy and its poor. Although affluence and real estate values were rising in the city, the poverty rate had also increased, to 20 percent.2 Amid this climate of extreme wealth and poverty, the homeless struggled to survive. The poorest of the city’s poor, the city’s homeless population, grew dramatically due to

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    147 policy shifts that cut social services during the 1970s and 1980s. These individuals and families joined those displaced by mid-​century urban renewal programs, some moving from one neighborhood to another. Agency reports and media coverage of Boston’s homeless crisis during this period reveal a city negotiating new boundaries for its poor and homeless population. By the turn of the twenty-​first century, Boston’s rising real estate values would force additional individuals and families into the shelter system and onto the streets. Homelessness has been a defining issue for American cities since the rise of industrialization. Some nineteenth-​century cities had addressed chronic vagrancy by establishing almshouses, in keeping with the era’s trend of institution building. Massachusetts had lodged many of its poor in a Tewksbury almshouse, which had been established in 1854.3 Other migrant homeless individuals, commonly referred to as vagrants, traveled the country by train. Single men in search of adventure or work composed part of this population; the rise of industrialization and urbanization had displaced many individuals. As the century ended, many of those homeless men began to settle in cities, often near transit systems and employment opportunities, forming “skid rows.” Originally named for a logging road, the term came to refer to anyone in severe poverty who was “on the skids.” In Boston, a skid row area formed near Scollay Square, which also served as a working-​class entertainment district. Massachusetts officials reported more than 1.3 million cases of vagrancy in 1904. The following year, the state law was amended to require the administration of a work test to every individual provided with relief services.4 Similar policies were enacted in other cities, for example New York, where applicants for relief were sent to the Charity Organization Society (COS). Such societies were private groups established in the nineteenth century to supervise and regulate relief distribution. In New York City, the COS ran a woodyard in which homeless men were required to labor in exchange for food and shelter. These labor requirements reflected persistent concern on the part of charity administrators and the public that homeless individuals were receiving overly generous aid. To test this theory, Edwin Brown, described as a philanthropist, went undercover at the Boston Wayfarers’ Lodge in 1909. He provided the Boston Globe with a detailed description of the facility: “A bed with a blanket to lie on was given me, and as I sank down on the springs it became a string under me. I was given a bath but no supper. There was no medical attendance nor any segregation of the sick from the well. My pillow was of excelsior and hard as a board.” He went on to chastise readers who did not take action against these miserly conditions, calling them “harsh,” and “cruel and wicked.”5 Such exposés reassured a nervous public that homeless people were receiving only minimal provisions. Lodging houses provided flexible housing options in Boston for both homeless individuals and others in need of temporary accommodations. The South End lodging-​house district had been established by 1885 in the area between Dover and Harrison Streets, Massachusetts Avenue and modern Back Bay Station.6 Many of the area’s rooming houses were run by women owners and charged working and

148   ELLA HOWARD middle-​class residents weekly or monthly, rather than nightly rates. Other, inexpensive lodging houses catered to homeless men, often with rates of less than 25 or 50 cents per night.7 Largely unregulated, such facilities offered cramped quarters for low prices. In December 1913, a fire broke out at the lodging house at Washington and Laconia Streets. That night, 155 men had been staying there, in 15-​cent bunks or 20-​cent private rooms. Twenty-​eight men died from smoke, fire, or leaping from windows.8 By 1915, Boston’s public homeless assistance network had expanded and was centered on the Wayfarers’ Lodge intake center, home to the woodyard program. City facilities at the lodge housed more than two hundred men, while the Blossom Street Municipal Building lodged a thousand men and the Way Street School on Harrison Avenue housed more than one hundred. Private shelters also provided important services for approximately one hundred men and fifty women each night.9 These homeless shelters were concentrated in the West End and South End neighborhoods. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 ushered in a decade of poverty on a scale so massive that all existing services and networks were overwhelmed. In Boston, the arriving throngs of migrant individuals and families led to calls in 1931 to open the city’s armories to lodge the homeless.10 Mayor Curley banned breadlines on Boston Common, but they were started in other locations, first at a restaurant on Washington Street.11 To meet the rising community need, Boston also established a Bureau for Homeless Men to coordinate relief networks and offer referrals. The Depression-​era network of lodgings in Boston topped 1,500 beds, including the city’s Wayfarers Lodge (which housed 172), the Dawes Hotel (500 bunk beds) and the Salvation Army (400 beds total in three facilities).12 In the postwar era, urban renewal would dramatically alter several areas of Boston, prompting many homeless individuals as well as social service agencies to relocate.

Urban Renewal Many American cities embraced postwar urban renewal programs in order to revitalize their urban centers. In so doing, they often dislocated poor and minority populations who were, in many cities, situated in districts that were geographically desirable. Although urban renewal initiatives originated in New Deal poverty and housing legislation, they ultimately served the purposes of real estate developers and urban elites.13 The Housing Act of 1949, along with later acts, enabled cities to use federal funds to level slum areas. Urban renewal projects would fill the remaining spaces with luxury housing and mixed-​use developments. Dislocated area residents were often placed in public housing developments in less desirable areas. One of the first targets for urban renewal in Boston was Scollay Square and the surrounding West End district. Since the mid-​nineteenth century, Scollay Square had housed burlesque theatres, vaudeville, and then motion-​picture entertainment. The area also drew many homeless individuals, who stayed in lodging houses or slept out,

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    149 and some of whom panhandled.14 The Boston Public Welfare Department’s Homeless Men’s Services Department operated nearby on Chardon Street.15 The urban renewal plans for the West End were dramatic.16 The working-​class, mostly white neighborhood was slated for demolition, to be replaced with Government Center and other mixed-​use developments. In order to gain approval for the project, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) included Scollay Square in their survey, bringing down the percentage of housing units in acceptable condition. Scollay Square would be leveled, along with the rest of the West End neighborhood.17 The plan to renew the neighborhood was announced in 1953; the destruction of the area was carried out in 1958.18 Before its destruction, the West End was carefully studied by sociologist Herbert Gans, who published The Urban Villagers in 1962. Gans described a working-​class neighborhood whose residents enjoyed strong social ties. While most of the housing units were in poor condition, most were not dangerously substandard.19 The West End was destroyed because its location was desirable for redevelopment. The South End underwent less dramatic urban renewal, largely due to its less desirable location.20 The announcement of urban renewal plans for the West End accelerated the migration of homeless individuals from the area to other areas of the city, sparking worries about a population that might be difficult to control. In 1959, a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe described men sleeping on the stairs of the Park Street subway station. The author asked if skid row was moving to Boston Common.21 A detailed 1961 report reflected on the changes that urban renewal was bringing to the city, surveying homeless services and community needs. The report’s authors described the homeless district: “Boston’s primary Skid Row is located in the South End district.” They defined the boundaries of skid row as “Northampton Street on the South, Broadway on the North, Tremont on the West and Harrison Avenue on the East.”22 The report surveyed daily census averages at area institutions serving alcoholic homeless men, finding approximately 1,500 homeless alcoholic men, with five hundred of those men housed in prison, and another five hundred lodged in hospitals.23 The survey noted that the homeless were continuing to move from Scollay Square to the South End. By 1961, the South End had the highest rate of police arrests for male drunkenness. With urban renewal underway, the report noted, homeless men had left the Scollay Square area.24 By this time, they estimated that Boston’s homeless male alcoholics numbered between five and eight thousand.25 Private religious missions continued to provide vital services in the postwar era, but their idiosyncratic policies could cross the line into blatant discrimination. The Boston Industrial Home at the Rufus Dawes Hotel at Warrenton and Washington Streets in the South End, for instance, housed nearly two hundred men each night, many with funds from the Department of Welfare. The shelter’s administrators admitted to those conducting the survey that they routinely discriminated against Native American and African American applicants for services: “They try to keep the number of these Indians down at any one time at the institution because they tend to be an in-​group and have potential for causing trouble. Also, each night they have from 12 to 15 negro people. Like

150   ELLA HOWARD the Mic-​Mac Indians, they too tend to stick together.”26 Such multiple layers of discrimination and oppression shaped the way that minorities experienced poverty, posing additional barriers to assistance for some of Boston’s most vulnerable citizens. The Salvation Army also maintained a significant presence in Boston. Men were initially sent to a facility in the Blackstone Square area of the South End to “dry out” before they were sent to the main building on Brookline Avenue, across from Fenway Park. Nearly 150 men could stay there for months, assisting with the organization’s salvage work, until they were ready to live on their own.27 Goodwill Industries did not provide housing, but the Shawmut Avenue facility in the South End employed 350 people with disabilities, half of whom were also alcoholics. Clients worked for Goodwill for up to one year, in exchange for meals, a lodging ticket, and a small cash payment.28 The 1961 report described a “bottle trail” of homeless men: “This bottle trail leads us to the Blackstone Square Area and Blackstone Square Park, where one can find during the day men sleeping on the grass, strolling in the area, and siting on the park benches.”29 These gatherings of homeless men drew negative attention from area residents, who complained about their presence.30 By the mid-​1960s, several Boston neighborhoods were referred to as “slums.” Most often, the term was applied to Roxbury, the South End, South Boston, and Jamaica Plain.31 In the context of ongoing urban renewal, the term carried considerable cultural and political weight. In 1966, Daniel Finn, commissioner of the Boston Housing Inspection Department, observed, “In any community, a slum area is an open wound. Unattended and untreated it will fester and disease, producing agony for the people who live there and ever-​increasing costs to the community that must support that slum.” He urged readers to explore neighborhoods categorized as slums, describing dilapidated lodging houses and homes surrounded by debris. He cautioned, “It is here that we will grow the welfare recipient of the next generation. This is the great tragedy of the slum.”32 Finn connected the physical condition of the built environment to the psychological and emotional state of its residents. This framing of a “slum” area as both structurally and socially unsound characterized American urban reform dialogue from the late nineteenth century world of photojournalist Jacob Riis, through the slum clearance and urban renewal programs of the mid-​twentieth century, to the debate over gentrification that dominated headlines late in the century. By 1964, one such “slum” area, the South End, was solidly defined as a homeless service area. When the Salvation Army applied to open an alcoholic treatment center on Shawmut Avenue, the BRA refused, opting to add low-​or moderate-​income housing instead. The BRA also rejected a proposed halfway house for former prisoners on Chandler Street in the South End. The director of BRA, Edward J. Logue, supported residents who had objected, saying that he “shared the feeling of the South End people that they have quite enough agencies in the area and who now want to get it back to a normal residential one.”33 The assumption that a “normal” neighborhood should not devote many resources to housing the homeless often influenced policy development in postwar American cities.

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    151 After 1967, homelessness would no longer be a crime in Massachusetts. While being “idle and disorderly” would remain grounds for arrest, being a “vagrant,” “transient,” or “suspicious person” would not. Massachusetts would not become a right-​to-​shelter state, in which temporary lodgings were guaranteed for all families who request them, until 1983. This gap left many homeless people on the streets.34 By 1969, the South End’s reputation as the home of alcoholic men had strengthened further. That year, the former Boston Industrial Home on Pine Street became the Pine Street Home, to aid homeless men, run by the Association of Boston Urban Priests.35 Applicants for the home registered at the State Welfare Office on Berkeley Street inside Police Station 4. They were issued tickets for a bed and for a 45-​cent breakfast at an area diner. The Boston Globe reported on this process in 1970, depicting clients as men whose addiction to alcoholism was their major problem: “One guy stands there in an old and dirty white raincoat, and says, ‘Booze that’s what got to me, that’s what got to all these guys. Booze.’ ” While the man had attended Boston University for three years and had worked in public relations in New York City, alcohol had derailed his life. The article went on to describe the daily schedule for the shelter: “The routine is always the same at the Pine Street Inn. The men are checked in at 6:30, and directed downstairs, where their clothes are washed, fumigated and dried. The men take showers, put on johnnies and wooden sandals while awaiting their clothes. They are in bed shortly after 8 p.m. because the doors are locked at 8:30 p.m.”36 This process would change little as the decades passed. By the early 1970s, officials estimated that Boston was home to three thousand to four thousand homeless men, 40 percent of whom lived in the South End.37 By the mid-​ 1970s, another, stronger backlash was developing among South End residents against homeless service providers. When the Pine Street Inn’s facility was to be moved by the BRA to Bristol Street (in the South End), some area residents protested the move. The Boston Globe quoted a couple who would sell their home if Pine Street came there: “We’re not against Pine Street. We’re against the tuberculosis and the other diseases these guys carry. Those guys . . . they don’t care.” Mayor White received protest letters and calls from South End residents complaining that the neighborhood had become a dumping ground for low-​income housing. The director of Pine Street Inn, Paul Sullivan, argued that the large number of homeless men in the South End necessitated a shelter: These men are here in the South End. If they weren’t, they would be in the streets. I know where rehabilitation services are. But what do you say to a guy who can’t stand it at this time? Do you just let him die? My purpose is to keep him alive, so that tomorrow, when the time comes, he can accept rehabilitation. I’m damned tired of looking at bodies in the mortuary that froze to death in the cold.38

A series of letters to the editor were published addressing the controversy. A member of the Order of Saint Francis wrote: “While writers heap praise upon a Mother Theresa who reaches out to the dying in the streets of Calcutta—​or an army of young Peace Corp workers who address themselves to the needs of the starving children of Biafra,

152   ELLA HOWARD we Bostonians turn our collective back on the needs of the ‘untouchables’ among us.”39 The letter highlights the contrast between attitudes toward local social workers and the accolades afforded to Mother Theresa, who worked among the poor in an area where “slums” were acknowledged to remain. In the United States, however, poverty was less recognized, and those fighting it less respected. Another area resident, Jeanette Hajjan, who was involved with the Citizens Task Force on the proposed move, asked, “How do you draw the line between humanitarianism and the health of a community?” She went on to note that Pine Street Inn, with a planned five hundred guests per night, would be the fourth shelter in the South End, while none were located in Back Bay, Beacon Hill, the Waterfront, Jamaica Plain, or Forest Hills. She asked why the South End was being designated as the city’s poverty zone: The South End is a wonderful place to live, and we have much to offer—​not just to our own residents, but to the whole city. What do we have to do to achieve that level of consideration given other residential areas of the city? Is it because we are gerrymandered into three different legislative districts and, therefore, have no “political clout”?40

By the 1970s, the term “slum” was rarely used to describe American neighborhoods, but areas of concentrated poverty, such as that found in the South End, remained. Area residents opposed to the move formed an organization, the Coalition Against the Pine Street Inn Moving Into the South End. The group’s president, Alice Kalil, protested, “Urban renewal was supposed to upgrade us, not degrade us.” Yet Mayor Kevin White sided with the BRA, supporting the Pine Street Inn’s move. The mayor’s office reported receiving over 1,200 letters related to the move. While 80 percent of the letters supported the move, only 40 percent of those from South End residents were in favor. White acknowledged the feelings of concerned residents of the South End but noted that each area of the city bore responsibility for contributing to the common good: “While everyone recognizes the importance of many public institutions, no one wants to see them placed in his neighborhood. East Boston has Logan Airport, West Roxbury has the city dump.” He argued that the shelter would house just three hundred men and fifty women, and pledged that the police would remove alcoholics from the streets to the Pine Street Inn.41 At this announcement Hajjan resigned from the Citizens’ Task Force in disgust to join the opposition coalition, writing to the paper, “The South End is the easiest place to put it (politically) and also, in most people’s eyes, the South End is Skid Row.”42

Rosie’s Place Prior to the 1970s, few homeless women had appeared on the streets of American cities. The skid rows that defined American urban homelessness from approximately 1890 through the 1960s were overwhelmingly male and were commonly structured by

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    153 masculine social norms and activities. Women rarely appeared among the publicly visible unsheltered population. Exceptions to this trend occurred during the Great Depression, when unprecedented programs for women and children appeared to meet the dramatic need. By 1932, Roy Cushon, secretary of the Boston Council of Social Agencies, speculated that family members and generous landladies were helping the thousands of unemployed women in the city, enabling them to stay out of breadlines and shelters. He observed, “The case of the white collar unemployed girl is one of the hardest to meet. She hasn’t the same chance to appeal to the passerby as the homeless man.” The city operated a temporary home for twenty-​one women on Chardon Street during the Depression. Other women continued to work for low wages in the region’s mills, barely avoiding being without shelter.43 Such programs were short lived, however, as the recovering wartime and postwar economy lessened homelessness overall, and the residual homeless population in many cities was composed primarily of men, many of whom struggled with substance use and addiction. Beginning in the 1970s, however, cities across the country witnessed new trends in poverty and homelessness. As overall poverty rates started to rise, more homeless women began to appear. This “new homelessness” resulted from a complex matrix of related factors, but average observers struggled to understand the trend. Media outlets shared panicked and sordid accounts of “bag ladies,” connoting an alien culture.44 Homeless women began to appear in New York City in large numbers in the 1970s, reflecting cuts to social services, rising rates of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, and shifting housing costs. The numbers of homeless women in Boston would rise to two thousand by the mid-​1980s. In 1974, the nation’s first homeless shelter for women opened in the South End. Rosie’s Place was founded by community activist Kip Tiernan. Tiernan was born in Connecticut and studied at the Boston Conservatory until her drinking led to her expulsion. Tiernan found sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous and went on to a successful career in public relations. In 1968, she felt a calling to leave her career and work instead with Warwick House, a Catholic social service outreach arm of St. Philip’s Parish in Roxbury. Through her church, Tiernan supported the grape workers’ strike, the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, and protests against the Vietnam draft. As she became more politically aware, she was increasingly troubled by the poverty she saw in the South End. Working with Warwick House, she saw homeless women disguising themselves as men in order to receive services from area facilities that were closed to women. Tiernan proposed launching a drop-​in center and shelter for women and received support from her colleagues.45 On Easter Sunday in 1974, Tiernan and a few others opened the shelter in the former site of Rozen’s supermarket on Columbus Avenue, leased for a dollar per year from the BRA. The name was chosen to stand out as a secular institution.46 In its first year, the organization had an operating budget of $15,000, drawn from private contributions and funding from foundations. The shelter would continue to grow as time went by; by 1979, it was located on Washington Street, with an operating budget of $63,000.47 In its early years, the demographics of Rosie’s Place guests reflected those

154   ELLA HOWARD of the neighborhood’s residents. Tiernan described the guests as predominantly white women with an average age of 50. Approximately 10 percent were African American. In Tiernan’s words, the group contained “very few alcoholics, mostly crazies . . . and more and more of them . . . some young—​some terribly old.” She noted that the guests included “ex school teachers, college students [and] three who had had lobotomies during the fifties.”48 The mission of the organization was straightforward, but not always easy to implement. Rosie’s Place was, and remains, free from government funding, in order to avoid the accompanying regulations. While the city did not officially fund Rosie’s Place, BRA not only leased the organization its initial building, it also made Rosie’s the developer on the Harrison Street facility that it occupies today. Rosie’s Place serves a vital public function by taking up the slack from official, public social service institutions, a fact that Tiernan mentioned frequently. Guests are not to be judged or encouraged to change their behavior. Even if they are addicted to drugs and alcohol, they should not be scolded or corrected. Resources are made available, though, if the guests choose to take advantage of them. Fundamentally, Tiernan envisioned a space where poor and homeless women were treated with “style and dignity”—​a phrase she often used. In her words, “It’s the best damn place for poor women anywhere—​good food, good clothes, warm beds, but best of all, no trips, no expectations. We have managed to help create an environment for socialization for poor women and that is virtually non-​existent in similar settings.”49 Tiernan’s philosophy was radically egalitarian. Influenced by the Catholic Worker movement and the work carried out in New York City by Dorothy Day starting in the 1930s, Tiernan called for less emphasis on charitable structures and systems of relief. Instead, she advocated a justice-​based approach to social problems. Rosie’s Place differed from the Catholic Worker model of living among the poor, however, as Tiernan insisted from the organization’s inception on paying a staff member. She argued that the poverty model was ineffective, saying, “You put yourself in the same position, the abject—​and what does that do for the poor?”50 Tiernan spoke with brash conviction, speaking truth to power on behalf of the poor. At a hearing about the role of the church in Boston, attended by Governor Michael Dukakis and other prominent leaders, Tiernan asked provocatively, “What would Jesus do? Do you think He’d form a committee? Why is it so hard to live the gospels? Jesus was a passionate man. He took sides with life.”51 The BRA received the brunt of Tiernan’s ire. “If we continue to allow the city and the BRA and the urban chic to walk all over us,” she wrote, “all there will be left in the South End are middle class attractive folks, and that is the ultimate aim of a minority of class stake people who keep screaming about proliferation. THEY are the proliferation, not us.”52 She went on, “The glittering and tarnished marriage of the BRA and the ‘beautiful people’ is an unholy and sinful liaison, designed to further oppress the already oppressed, and we will not tolerate it anymore.”53 She blamed the BRA directly for the suffering of the poor: “You assisted the beautiful people in their new zoning privileges, which have created havoc among the poor you’ve made homeless.”54

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    155 During the Reagan era of the 1980s, Tiernan was outspoken in her criticisms of the administration’s cuts to social programs and ridicule of the homeless. She blamed the suffering she witnessed on the streets on federal indifference: “We at places like Rosie’s Place live with the folks on death row . . . the poor, courtesy of a brutal administration with a lust for world power that defies description in the civilized world. An administration that has completely abdicated its responsibility to its most vulnerable citizens.”55 As the 1980s continued, homelessness became a visible crisis in cities across the nation. In Boston, existing resources were expanded to meet the influx of new clients, many of whom represented more diverse backgrounds than had previous generations of homeless city residents. In 1984, Boston Globe reporter Daniel Golden went undercover, posing as a homeless man for four days to experience the city’s largest shelters, Pine Street Inn, Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, and Long Island Hospital. This approach was a continuation of the long-​enduring practice of “slumming,” wherein an outside observer spends time amid the underclass. At a time when common estimates categorized two thousand Boston residents as homeless, with 1,200 sheltered and eight hundred outdoors, Golden described the people he met in the shelters: With me were veterans who never settled down after Vietnam, teenagers who prefer public shelter to broken homes, middle-​aged alcoholics from South End rooming houses demolished in the name of urban renewal. Families evicted from apartments and unwanted by relatives, mothers separated from their children in foster homes. Born-​again Christians, unpublished writers, stranded foreign students and experts on everything from Beethoven’s symphonies to John Kennedy’s assassination.56

By the mid-​1980s, the homeless population of Boston was growing dramatically. Systems of counting homeless individuals vary, with the largest estimates coming from advocates like the National Coalition for the Homeless, who estimated the Boston homeless in 1987 at five to seven thousand persons. This expansion of the homeless population led to increased need in the shelter system, which had approximately 2,351 beds at the time of the report.57 In his memoir of life working among Boston’s homeless, Nick Flynn described Fort Point: A mountain of shoes reaching nearly to the ceiling. In another corner a mountain of t-​shirts beside a mountain of sweaters. Mountains of pants, suits and underwear rise up one floor above. Tectonic fashion plates colliding. These new mountains loom above where the men sleep. This is the “overflow” shelter, Fort Point, a warehouse just across the highway from Pine Street. The deal to transform it into an “overflow” shelter, to get the men off the floors of Pine Street, was negotiated with the city in 1987. Other shelters have opened as well—​the Laundry Room at Boston City Hospital, where you sleep to the sound of dryers tumbling sheets through the night; the Round Church, where you are offered a stiff-​backed chair, and if you doze and fall from the chair you are asked to leave; the Armory, where you sleep beside a locked room filled with machine guns and dynamite.58

156   ELLA HOWARD Flynn captured eloquently Boston’s earnest, ineffective efforts to meet the needs of its homeless population. The piles of donated clothing he described, much of which could not be used, waited to be routed instead to the rag merchant. During the 1990s, while the national and regional economy were strong, vulnerable populations continued to struggle with homelessness in Boston. As the decade began, mentally ill homeless people in need of care posed a crisis in the city. Mayor Flynn filed a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, calling for more support for homeless individuals with severe mental health problems.59 By the mid-​1990s, Boston’s homeless population had swelled again, this time as a result of Governor William Weld’s administration’s cuts to social programs including general relief, mental health, and family shelters.60 Advocates estimated the number of homeless people in Boston again at five thousand.61 Boston’s experience with late twentieth-​century homelessness was not unique, as similar trends occurred in cities across the nation.62 The way that each city addressed the crisis varied though, revealing aspects of the political and cultural landscape of the city. In Boston, homeless individuals who had congregated in large numbers in the Scollay Square area were dislocated by urban renewal in the late 1950s. The West End project swept them into the South End instead, where they joined that area’s own homeless population. Public and private shelters and social service agencies followed suit, moving into the South End, against the wishes of many area residents. Kip Tiernan argued that Rosie’s Place guests were entitled to a place in the South End. She saw the neighborhood not as a dumping ground, but as the home of many impoverished women. She described their origins: The Rosie’s bottom line community is made up of—​for the most part—​women from the South End—​many of whom have been released by Boston State Hospital and sent back home to a new hostile and threatening neighborhood. Most of them are homeless transients in that they have not been prepared in any way to deal with the violent realities of living in today’s world—​a world dedicated—​consecrated to violence, subtle or systemic . . . and these women have come home to the South End where their roots, however tangled, began.63

Tiernan saw her guests as being entitled to remain in the neighborhood, regardless of the changing nature of the local real estate market. She frequently cited British sociologist Peter Townsend’s work on class, arguing that poverty was created not by chance, but by the wealthy. Drawing on Townsend, she described poverty as “a kind of shoring up of the status quo to help perpetuate a brutal two class system in which the poor and most noticeably women in this country, have no chance of survival at all.”64 Much of the South End thus became a poverty zone following the fall of Scollay Square in the late 1950s. A disproportionate number of Boston’s poorest residents were consolidated into a single district, creating a diffused skid row. More compact skid rows were prominent in many US cities for nearly all of the twentieth century. Such arrangements were desirable for many city constituents, as the homeless received

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    157 services but also were not visible nuisances to other city residents or business owners. In the South End, the concentration of shelters led to the neighborhood being categorized as a skid row district. To alleviate the pressure on homeless facilities in the South End and elsewhere in Boston, the city also utilized Long Island Hospital. Part of the City Hospital Department, the facility housed a chronic hospital section and a three-​story dormitory for up to 450 homeless men.65 Potential clients were referred by the court, by their probation officers, or from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Admission was voluntary and was available for men who were 65 or younger and living in Boston. Intake was handled in Boston on weekday mornings. Upon arrival at the hospital, men were examined and routed. Some were sent to the alcohol withdrawal area for a week. They could then apply to join the main program. In the early 1960s, the average client stay was five months. While living in the facility, men worked at jobs in the community.66 In 2015, the Long Island Bridge was shut down permanently due to safety concerns regarding its construction, ending access to the shelter. Mayor Martin Walsh initially pledged to restore the shelter facilities but has since moved away from that plan. Instead, other Boston facilities have expanded to accommodate the rapidly increasing need.67

Conclusion The primary spatial approaches taken in Boston since the nineteenth century to the situation of the homeless have involved concentration of the poor in a single district and their isolation in a concentrated zone outside the main city area. This parallels the pattern seen in major cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.68 Neither approach was designed to help homeless individuals to re-​assimilate into mainstream society. Living largely apart from other city residents, Boston’s homeless were treated as if their poverty necessitated their stark segregation. Since the profile of Colin, Laurie, and Cynthia was published in 1984, Boston’s socioeconomic divisions have dramatically deepened. Neighborhoods undergoing rapid gentrification are witnessing extreme poverty alongside massive wealth. In twenty-​ first-​century Boston, condominiums in the Millennium Tower sell for over ten million dollars.69 Those luxury residences are less than two blocks from a spot in Downtown Crossing where homeless people frequently congregate. The downtown area bordering the Theatre District and Chinatown remains home to homeless day shelters such as St. Francis House, which provides breakfast, lunch, a clothing exchange, laundry facilities, a mailing address, and vocational assistance programs. Boston’s South End remains a neighborhood similarly in tension. In 2007, according to the Boston Globe, “Once a gritty slum of townhouses and brownstones, the South End has been transformed over the last quarter of a century into one of Boston’s most coveted neighborhoods, with condominiums that routinely sell for more than $1 million.”70 The term “slum” continues to be used, connoting images of rundown properties

158   ELLA HOWARD and individuals facing desperate poverty, here contrasting with the vision of the modern, gentrified South End. Despite these changes, the Pine Street Inn continues to assist nearly two thousand homeless individuals per day and Rosie’s Place offers homeless and poor women services including meals, a food pantry, legal advocacy, and English as a Second Language classes. A length of Massachusetts Avenue starting from Boston Medical Center is regularly referred to as “Methodone Mile.”71 Home to many drug treatment facilities and social service programs, the area was especially devastated during the covid-​19 pandemic, as public health officials struggled to address the needs of the swelling population.72 The “slums” and “skid rows” of the twentieth century have acquired new names and contexts in the twenty-​first, while continuing to reflect the city’s structural economic inequalities.

Notes 1. Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890). 2. Charles Kenney, “The Poor Get Poorer,” Boston Globe, December 15, 1985. 3. Action for Boston Community Development, The Unattached and Socially Isolated Residents of Skid Row (Boston, 1961), 34. 4. Edwin Brown et al., “Is Massachusetts Too Harsh in its Treatment of Wayfarers?” Boston Globe, July 18, 1909. 5. Ibid. 6. Jacob Schaffer and Joyce Seko, Lodging Houses in Boston—​A Different Approach (Boston Redevelopment Authority Research Department, February 1986). 7. Albert Benedict Wolfe, The Lodging House Problem in Boston (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906). 8. “Arcadia Horror Costs 28 Lives,” Boston Globe, December 4, 1913. 9. “Boston’s Aid to the Unemployed,” Boston Globe, January 13, 1915. 10. “Ely Urged to Open Armories to the Idle,” Boston Globe, October 28, 1931. 11. “Home for Homeless is Opened by Noyes,” Boston Globe, October 29, 1931. 12. Louis Lyons, “Boston is Tackling Problem of Single [Unemployed Men],” Boston Globe, February 25, 1932. 13. Ella Howard, “Urban Renewal and the Challenge of Homelessness,” in Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 116–​137. 14. Daniel A. Gilbert, “‘Why Dwell on a Lurid Memory?’: Deviance and Redevelopment in Boston’s Scollay Square,” Massachusetts Historical Review 9 (2007): 107. Thomas O’Connor, Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal, 1950 to 1970 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 140–​142. 15. Action for Boston Community Development, The Unattached, 54. 16. The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston’s West End (Boston: The Bostonian Society, 1992). 17. Kevin Lynch, The Image of a City (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1960). 18. Thomas O’Connor, “The Urban Renewal Chronicle: The Politics of Urban Renewal in Boston,” in The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston’s West End (Boston: The Bostonian Society, 1992).

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    159 19. Herbert. J. Gans, The Urban Villagers (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1962). 20. Peter Anderson, “West End Story: It Is a Classic Urban Drama,” Boston Globe, May 24, 1987. 21. “What People Talk About,” Boston Globe, October 28, 1960. 22. Action for Boston Community Development, The Unattached, 1. 23. Ibid., 14. 24. Ibid., 15. 25. Ibid., 15. 26. Ibid., 39. 27. Ibid., 46–​48. 28. Ibid., 49. 29. Ibid., 58. 30. Ibid., 59. 31. Jeremiah Murphy, “It’s War on Slums in Boston Now,” Boston Globe, April 24, 1966; Anthony Yudis, “What Makes a Slum?” Boston Globe, October 22, 1967. 32. Daniel J. Finn, “To Know a Slum, Walk—​Don’t Ride—​Through One,” Boston Globe, July 18, 1966. 33. Anthony Yudis, “What’s New in Renewal: South End Plan Backed by BRA,” Boston Globe, September 26, 1965. 34. “Vagrancy Arrest Laws Ruled Unconstitutional,” Boston Globe, November 18, 1967. 35. Jean Dietz, “From Flophouse to Aid House,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1969. 36. Jeremiah Murphy, “Bed and Breakfast for the ‘Lost Men,’” Boston Globe, May 20, 1970. 37. Richard Ray, “Skid Row Derelicts Find Friends, Hope at 11 Pine,” Boston Globe, November 21, 1971. 38. Ron Hutson, “Neighborhood Opposes a New Pine Street Inn,” Boston Globe, March 10, 1975. 39. James Curran, “Can the Community Turn Its Back?” Boston Globe, March 24, 1975. 40. Jeanette Hajjan, “Can the South End Community ‘Afford’ New Pine Street Inn?” Boston Globe, March 24, 1975. See also “Home for Homeless,” Boston Globe, April 13, 1975. 41. Ron Hutson, “White Picks S. End for Pine Street Inn; Foes Promise Battle,” Boston Globe, June 9, 1975. 42. Anne Kirchheimer, “Pine St. Task Force Chairman Resigns,” Boston Globe, June 19, 1975. 43. Louis Lyons, “Lone Woman Out of Work Worst Problem of Relief Workers,” Boston Globe, December 18, 1932. 44. Howard, Homeless. 45. Kip Tiernan speech, Center for a Just Society, July 27, 1970, 5–​9. Box 7, Folder: 18. All Tiernan speeches from the Kip Tiernan Papers, MC 639, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University. 46. Kip Tiernan speech, Catholic Worker First Fridays Series, Paulist Center, April 7, 1978, 4. Box 7, Folder: 23. 47. By then Pine Street Inn had been added, sleeping 50 women, while other shelters slept 25. 48. Kip Tiernan speech, Catholic Worker First Friday Series, Paulist Center, April 7, 1978, 10. Box 7, Folder: 23. 49. Ibid., 1–​2. 50. Ibid., 3. 51. Ian Menzies, “Are Churches Failing the City and Its Residents?” Boston Globe, November 6, 1978.

160   ELLA HOWARD 52. Kip Tiernan speech given at Area Board Meeting, 6 March 1978, reprinted in Fuller News 6, 3 (March 22, 1978). Box 7, Folder: 22. 53. Kip Tiernan speech, Environmental Impact Hearing BRA Closeout Meeting—​Mackey School, April 27, 1979. Box 8, Folder: 4. 54. Ibid. 55. Kip Tiernan speech, Poverty and Homelessness—​Charity or Justice Issue, May 20, 1984, 5. Box 9, Folder: 26. 56. Daniel Golden, “Life on the Edge with City’s Homeless,” Boston Globe, March 25, 1984. 57. National Coalition for the Homeless, “Pushed Out: America’s Homeless—​Thanksgiving 1987,” 9–​10. 58. Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (New York: Norton, 2004), 254. 59. Michael Rezendes, “Flynn Sues State on Care of Homeless Mentally Ill,” Boston Globe, December 4, 1990. 60. Matt Bai, “Shelters Feel the Strain Homeless Populations Growing and Search is on for Permanent Solutions,” Boston Globe, February 12, 1996. 61. Michael Grunwald, “Homeless Shelters Face Crisis Despite Improving Economy, Mass. Facilities Overwhelmed,” Boston Globe, December 2, 1996. 62. Ralph da Costa Nunez and Ethan G. Sribnick, The Poor Among Us: A History of Family Poverty and Homelessness in New York City (New York: White Tiger Press, 2013); Daniel R. Kerr, Derelict Paradise: Homelessness and Urban Development in Cleveland, Ohio (Boston: University of Massachusetts, 2011); Thomas J. Main, Homelessness in New York City: Policymaking from Koch to de Blasio (New York: New York University Press, 2016). 63. Kip Tiernan speech, Community Church of Boston, May 21, 1978, 9. Box 7, Folder: 24. 64. Kip Tiernan speech, CCPAX, May 17, 1985, 1. Box 10, Folder: 5. 65. Action for Boston Community Development, The Unattached, 28. 66. Ibid., 29–​31. 67. Jack Sullivan, “Boston Abandons Long Island Bridge: Unclear What the City Will Do with the Island and Buildings,” CommonWealth, April 27, 2017, https://​commo​nwea​lthm​agaz​ ine.org/​polit​ics/​bos​ton-​aband​ons-​long-​isl​and-​bri​dge. 68. Howard, Homeless; Jürgen von Mahs, Down and Out in Los Angeles and Berlin: The Sociospatial Exclusion of Homeless People (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013); Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton, New Homeless and Old: Community and the Skid Row Hotel (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 69. David Harris, “Millennium Tower Boston just sold its last penthouse condo for $10.6M,” Biz Journals, December 9, 2017, https://​www.bizj​ourn​als.com/​bos​ton/​news/​2017/​12/​09/​ mil​lenn​ium-​tower-​bos​ton-​just-​sold-​its-​last.html. 70. Anna Badkhen, “Say Goodbye, or Good Riddance, to Old Pub,” Boston Globe, September 15, 2007. 71. Susan Zalkind, “The Infrastructure of the Opioid Epidemic,” CITYLAB, September 14, 2017, https://​www.city​lab.com/​equ​ity/​2017/​09/​methad​one-​mile/​539​742/​. 72. Craig F. Walker, “Life on Boston’s Streets during the Pandemic,” Boston Globe, September 12, 2020.

Spatial Politics of US Homelessness    161

Bibliography Depastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Fisher, Sean M., and Carolyn Hughes. The Last Tenement: Confronting Community and Urban Renewal in Boston’s West End. Boston: Bostonian Society, 1992. Howard, Ella. Homeless: Poverty and Place in Urban America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Kusmer, Kenneth. Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. O’Connor, Thomas H. Building a New Boston: Politics and Urban Renewal 1950 to 1970. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Puleo, Stephen. A City So Grand: The Rise of an American Metropolis, Boston 1850–​1900. Boston: Beacon Press, 2010. Teaford, Jon C. Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–​1985. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 9

THE RISE AND DE C L I NE OF T HE EUROPEA N ST RU G G L E AGAINST SO CIA L E XC LU SI ON ROB ATKINSON

To many scholars, social exclusion is a key element of what is known as the “social dimension” of the European Union (EU). During the 1990s and early 2000s, addressing social exclusion and achieving greater social inclusion, at least at the level of rhetoric, figured prominently in the “social policy” discourse of the EU and of many national governments within the Union, subsuming discussions of poverty and associated notions such as the “slum.” Despite its apparent prominence, social exclusion was always subordinate, to a greater or lesser degree, to another imperative—​enhancing economic competitiveness through the pursuit of a neoliberal policy agenda. This agenda assigned priority to the role of markets, competitiveness, and individual freedom and regarded the state sector, including local government, as both a hindrance to economic growth and an inefficient and ineffective way of delivering services. Moreover, since the global financial crash of 2007–​2008 and the prolonged subsequent period of austerity and welfare state restructuring/​retrenchment, addressing social exclusion has been further downgraded in pursuit of the “holy grail” of economic competitiveness. The implications are that across Europe in many countries there has been an intensification of social and spatial inequalities and segregation, precariousness and informality, leading to a decline in the living conditions and life chances of large sections of the population. However, these developments should not be seen as a simple return to the previous situation of poverty and slum housing that typified the interwar period, but a reflection of changes in the organization of the global economy, the increasingly precarious nature of work for many employed people, a restructuring of the welfare state, and the emergence of new forms of social and spatial inequalities associated with these wider changes and their manifestation, mediated by local conditions, in particular places (for example, local housing and labor markets).

Rise and Decline    163

The Rise of Social Exclusion The context within which social exclusion emerged was strongly conditioned by a recognition that from the 1970s onward fundamental changes occurred in the global economy, which had far-​ reaching implications for European societies. Thus the European Commission (EC) noted that during the 1970s in many member states it was assumed poverty had been reduced to a “residual state of affairs which would disappear with progress and growth,”1 and notions such as “slum” ceased to have any local meaning. However, the commission went on to state that Towards the end of the seventies this image changed with the appearance of new forms of poverty and marginalization; firstly those resulting from the economic crisis, particularly rising unemployment and insecurity in respect of labour conditions; then others persisting or developing as a result of the profound economic, technological and social changes which characterise the evolution of industrial society.2

Given the structural nature of what became known as the “new poverty,” a new notion was required that could encompass the full range of outcomes produced by structural change. Social exclusion was already well established within sections of the EC and appeared to offer a more comprehensive understanding of these changes. As the commission pointed out, The concept of social exclusion is a dynamic one, referring both to processes and consequent situations . . . More clearly than the concept of poverty, understood far too often as referring exclusively to income, it also states out the multidimensional nature of the mechanisms whereby individuals and groups are excluded from taking part in social exchanges, from the component practices and rights of social integration and of identity . . . [I]‌t even goes beyond participation in working life: it is felt and shown in the fields of housing, education, health and access to services.3

These developments were most clearly illustrated by the high levels of poverty and unemployment in all European states that emerged in the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The EC estimated that in the then fifteen member states making up the European Community in 1985, fifty million people were living in poverty.4 In terms of unemployment, by May 1995 almost eighteen million people were unemployed within the fifteen EU states, almost 11 percent of the working population.5 Of even greater concern was that 48 percent were long-​term unemployed in 1994 (in other words, unemployed for one year or more), and half had been out of work for two years or more. Nor was there any expectation this situation would improve significantly in the short or medium term, creating the specter of “jobless growth.”

164   ROB ATKINSON Moreover, these issues figured prominently in the perceptions of citizens in member states, and many European politicians acknowledged the need to address them so as to establish the “social credentials” of the European integration project, which had largely been dominated by economic considerations (such as the development of the Single Market). Social exclusion thus emerged as part of the “social dimension” that was to go alongside the development of the Single European Market. As a result, during what might be termed the “activist” phase (1985–​1992/​3) of Jacques Delors’s presidency of the EC between 1985 and 1994, there was a push to develop a more independent “European social policy.” This reflected an aspiration that the Single Market be accompanied by greater social integration and cohesion. However, problems surrounding the Treaty on European Union (known as the Maastricht Treaty), agreed upon in February 1992 and which furthered the process of European integration, led many member states to oppose the activist stance adopted by Delors on social policy issues, reflecting a view that the Commission had gone too far in the social policy arena and was encroaching on policy areas that were the preserve of member states. One other issue is worthy of note. At the time the influence of French thinking on social policy within the EC significantly shaped the emerging social exclusion agenda.6 French social and political thought stressed the importance of social solidarity/​cohesion and the need to integrate the excluded into the wider society, one that shared key societal values. Thus, there was a focus on relational and dynamic processes rather than on the Anglo-​Saxon notion of poverty, which was thought to be too concerned with static distributional outcomes, most notably income distribution and associated inequalities such as limitations on access to adequate housing. At the same time, European policy makers recognized that social exclusion needed to encompass a range of different national perspectives; thus, as part of the wider European project, it was articulated with the notion of citizenship and the need to develop the idea of European citizenship as something specifically associated with the EU.7 By the early 2000s social exclusion had become firmly established within the social policy discourse of the EU, although its meaning remained relatively ill-​defined.8

Social Exclusion as a Concept There is no theoretical consensus regarding social exclusion; it is a contested concept. One of the most influential constructions of social exclusion in the EU derives from the “French approach.” While recognizing that the notion of a “national approach” is an oversimplification, by the 1990s the notion of social exclusion was prominent in French social and political approaches although no consensus existed about how to define it.9 Nevertheless, French debates were premised on two shared ideas: a rejection of the significance that Anglo-​ Saxon researchers accorded poverty and associated conditions such as poor housing, although not a rejection of the concept in toto; and the principle that a common moral

Rise and Decline    165 and social order exists that transcends individual, class, ethnic, and regional interests—​ related to notions of social cohesion and social solidarity. Both sets of ideas conceive social exclusion as an outcome resulting from structural processes that have their origins in the social and economic restructuring of contemporary capitalism as a result of globalization. It is these processes that create mass long-​term unemployment and isolated and dangerous spaces that are socially and spatially segregated from the rest of society. During the 1990s Serge Paugam arguably developed the most interesting and analytically relevant concept of social exclusion. He suggested that those characterized as poor were not defined by their own internal relationships; rather they were defined by the collective attitude society adopted toward them: the “social orientation to poverty.”10 On this basis he developed three ideal types: integrated poverty, marginal poverty, and disabling poverty. Integrated poverty occurs where poverty is the norm for considerable numbers of people; these societies are referred to as semi-​industrial or traditional (for example, Mediterranean societies such as Portugal, Greece, or southern Italy). Here poverty is not stigmatized, and the poor are not socially excluded. Marginal poverty is found in advanced industrial societies; here the poor are a stigmatized minority—​a residuum—​that has not adjusted to modern life. The poor are not part of traditional working-​class institutions (such as trade unions); however, they are not perceived as a threat to social order and are disciplined by the welfare state (as in Germany). In societies characterized by disabling poverty social exclusion is the central focus rather than poverty; here we find rapid increases in the numbers of people who simultaneously exist outside the labor market while experiencing inadequate housing, poor health, and high levels of welfare dependency. Thus, they experience cumulative disadvantage. The excluded are considered to pose a threat to social cohesion and social order due to their increasing estrangement and isolation from society. This occurs in societies experiencing high unemployment and unstable labor markets (such as France and Britain). The value of Paugam’s analysis is that it retains the notion of poverty while situating it in the wider problem of exclusion; poverty is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the creation of exclusion. Moreover, and this represents a step change from Anglo-​Saxon notions of poverty, he argues the poor are not a homogeneous category and that poverty itself is a multidimensional phenomenon, a dynamic process that changes over time and place. The reason he rejects traditional definitions and analyses of poverty is that they aggregate different groups and thus render unintelligible the multiple processes that, over time, create social exclusion. Moreover, the aggregation of the poor into a single grouping has the effect of disguising which groups are most at risk. Given this he proposes that we need to identify “indicators of economic and social precariousness (precarious employment, marital instability, economic poverty, inadequate social and family life, inadequate support networks and low levels of participation in social activities).”11 What is the key here is the extent to which individuals and groups are entrenched within various societal institutional systems, and the nature, resilience, and adaptability of these systems in conditions of rapid economic and social change. Furthermore, Paugam contends that precariousness in one area (for example, social life)

166   ROB ATKINSON will not in and of itself necessarily produce social exclusion; this will tend to occur where precariousness occurs simultaneously in multiple areas that interact to produce cumulative effects, and then a vicious downward spiral may be created leading to exclusion. Parallel to the “French approach” there emerged another version of social exclusion within the institutions of the EU during the 1990s. It sought to combine elements of the French and Anglo-​Saxon traditions by drawing on the concept of citizenship rights. This approach was most clearly articulated by researchers based in the Observatory on National Policies to Combat Social Exclusion. Here T. H. Marshall’s theory of citizenship was the foundation for an attempt to identify social exclusion.12 As Graham Room noted, this approach sought to investigate social exclusion in both relational and distributional terms. To evaluate, on the one hand, the extent to which some groups of the population are denied access to the principal social and occupation milieux and to the welfare institutions that embody modern notions of social citizenship; to examine on the other hand, the patterns of multidimensional disadvantage to which these groups are vulnerable, especially insofar as these persist over time.13

Thus, according to Jos Berghman, social exclusion can be conceived “in terms of the denial—​or non-​realisation—​of citizenship rights.”14 While superficially attractive, a social citizenship approach to exclusion is not without problems. Citizenship itself is a contested concept, and there are a variety of interpretations in both academic thought and among member states. The meaning of social rights (or entitlements) is subject to a range of interpretations and across Europe major differences exist over the meaning of citizenship and associated social rights. Nevertheless Berghman developed a possible method of combining the insights of the French approach and the citizenship and poverty approach to social exclusion, suggesting that we acknowledge poverty is unidimensional, although noting that, while a static phenomenon, it too was the outcome of a dynamic process—​impoverishment. Moreover, he contends that social exclusion was an outcome of a process and therefore logically was also a static phenomenon. His “solution” was to develop a theorization that focused on the interaction of poverty, deprivation, social exclusion, and social institutions. He argued for the need to relate citizenship rights to the societal institutions in which those rights were embedded and materialized, namely:

1. 2. 3. 4.

the democratic and legal system, which promotes civic integration; the labor market, which promotes economic integration; the welfare system, which promotes what may be called social integration; the family and community system, which promotes interpersonal integration.15

A situation of social exclusion is created when one or more of the systems ceases to function in the usual manner, thereby providing the basis for the identification of a comprehensive, multidimensional, and dynamic process. Berghman draws

Rise and Decline    167 attention not simply to inadequate levels of income but to a multiplicity of conditions related to housing, health, education, community, and so on, embedded in the societal institutions identified above. Thus, when the relationship of an individual or group to the labor market is fragile and breaks down, this produces impoverishment and then poverty (a form of social exclusion). However, social exclusion per se occurs when, for individuals or groups, several systems break down simultaneously. This approach strongly resembles arguments developed by Paugam,16 and the key issue is the degree to which individuals and groups are “embedded” within these institutional systems. Much of the research on social exclusion has recognized there is a spatial dimension to exclusion. Berghman pointed to spatial exclusion and “poor spaces” in which a significant part of the population experiences multiple forms of deprivation, which he termed “concentration effects” (i.e., cumulative disadvantage).17 Here analytically distinct forms of disadvantage interact and intensify problems limiting the life chances of inhabitants. These spaces are distinctive, being socially and spatially segregated from the rest of society. They are also likely to be stigmatized as places where only those with no alternative live (as in some local authority housing estates in Britain and banlieue in France). However, one should not assume that the majority of people experiencing social exclusion are to be found in these “excluded spaces.” While there is, or was, some broad agreement on what a concept of social exclusion might be, there is an almost complete lack of reliable data that could be used to empirically identify and investigate it. To a large extent governments and researchers have continued to utilize well-​established indicators such as those associated with income (e.g., poverty and inequality in the distribution of income), unemployment (particularly extent and length), health (e.g., mortality rates), housing (e.g., indicators of substandard accommodation), and spatial concentration of these factors. The problem is that they are all proxy indicators designed for purposes other than identifying and measuring social exclusion. A variety of combinations and methods have been used to operationalize these indicators and create composite indicators of “multiple deprivation.” All these attempts have their problems, and it is doubtful if they measure social exclusion, or at least the cultural and relational dimensions of exclusion. The EC funded research into non-​monetary indicators of poverty and social exclusion in order to develop indicators of the material, relational, individual, and spatial aspects of exclusion.18 This work was exploratory, and it does not appear that an approach based on this work has yet been operationalized. Moreover, even if appropriate indicators were to be developed there may well be problems concerning the collection of data and comparison over time and space. The intervening years have seen some progress made in developing more sophisticated non-​monetary measures of poverty and social exclusions, and these do give a more rounded picture of social exclusion. However, as Brian Nolan and Christopher Whelan note: Conceptual and measurement issues remain to be addressed in teasing out how best to implement such multidimensional measures . . . , and this is likely to be a fruitful area for future development. However, there will continue to be a tension

168   ROB ATKINSON between the power of sophisticated methods in summarizing and analyzing the range of indicators available and the transparency required to serve the needs of policymakers and inform public debate.19

The EU Response: Action to Combat Social Exclusion Despite the uncertainties surrounding social exclusion, the EU launched actions to combat social exclusion and foster social inclusion as part of the Lisbon Strategy (2000) in the early 2000s.20 An initial example was the National Action Plans on Social Inclusion; all member states were asked to prepare these and implement two-​year rolling action plans to combat poverty and social exclusion. The key set objectives were: policy measures for employment; access to resources, rights, goods, and services; prevention of the risks of exclusion; actions to help the most vulnerable; and mobilization of all relevant actors. The members eventually agreed upon a common set of indicators to measure progress in achieving these objectives. However, the major focus was on the poverty indicator, perhaps because it was easiest to measure, and in overarching terms the focus was on employment/​unemployment and the multidimensional element of social exclusion was largely neglected. The response across the EU varied widely, given that under the principle of “subsidiarity” social policy issues remained the preserve of member states.21 The operational mechanism of the approach was the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). The OMC process does not operate under a traditional top-​down regulatory framework, but rather by attempting to create a “common discursive framework” for thinking and action through a process of benchmarking, the sharing of best practice and knowledge. The aim is not merely to produce policy outcomes, but also to act as a process for improving policy formation. However, integral to this process is that member states can choose how to respond and decide to what extent they incorporate methods, actions, and targets into their national (social) policies. Needless to say, there was considerable variation across the EU in how member states responded in terms of their preparation of action plans and interpretation of the overarching goals. For instance, in the first round of action plans the use of direct outcome targets was rare and often not linked to indicators.22 While things did improve in subsequent rounds the improvement was by no means dramatic; Martina Dieckhoff and Duncan Gallie pointed out that in terms of reducing the risk of social exclusion and poverty the first rounds of action plans “provide no evidence of progress in achieving this.”23 In 2005 the Lisbon Strategy was relaunched with an intensified focus on employment and economic growth. From 2006 the action plans were merged into the National Reports on Strategies for Social Protection and Social Inclusion. Under the new approach objectives were less specific and more general:

Rise and Decline    169 1. Access for all to the resources, rights, and services needed for participation in society, preventing and addressing exclusion, and fighting all forms of discrimination leading to exclusion. 2. The active inclusion of all, both by promoting participation in the labor market and by fighting poverty and exclusion. 3. That social inclusion policies are well coordinated and involve all levels of government and relevant actors, including people experiencing poverty, that they are efficient and effective and mainstreamed into all relevant public policies, including economic, budgetary, education, and training policies and structural fund (notably European Social Fund) programs.24 Most notably, action to address the situation of vulnerable groups (on minorities and social inclusion) was missing, and the request to mobilize all relevant actors was replaced by an emphasis on coordination and integration of policies. Thus, rather than seeking to engage with and activate those either experiencing or being most at risk of social exclusion the emphasis switched to a “technical and managerial fix.” Within member states much of what took place under both the action plans and the new national strategies was aimed at labor market activation (i.e., using employment as the principle means of social inclusion) and “obligations.” Moreover, they tended to reflect and be incorporated into the prevailing welfare regime. Thus, what was achieved depended upon the existing social protection system in member states and how seriously social exclusion was taken. Another factor that influenced conformity with the objectives, at least on paper, was the extent to which a member state was in receipt of significant levels of money from the structural funds, particularly the European Social Fund. The social inclusion process was then incorporated into the Europe 2020 Strategy published in 2010.25 The strategy included an ambition to reduce the number of people experiencing, or at risk of, poverty and social exclusion by at least twenty million by 2020. The document emphasizes smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth, and overall is framed by the impacts of the financial crash and the need to regain competitiveness in order to avoid continued relative decline. The overwhelming emphasis is on economic growth and job creation and it is assumed this will “automatically” lead to social inclusion. Within the document there is an undeniable tension between the competitiveness and cohesion dimensions of EU policies, with the former being dominant. Some progress on social inclusion appears to have be made before the 2007–​2008 global financial crisis, but in the following period the combination of austerity measures and an overwhelming emphasis on economic growth meant that: whereas the increase in social progress and social cohesion in the EU was more outspoken in the pre-​crisis period, the results for the post-​crisis period were more mixed with some EU member States having realized a (slight) increase and other countries having experienced a deterioration in social inclusion. This result largely confirms . . . that the overall situation in the EU with regards to social inclusion and

170   ROB ATKINSON poverty reduction has improved very little, and in fact has been deteriorating in several countries.26

The Economic Competitiveness Dimension Within the EU and the EC, despite the increased prominence accorded to the social dimension during the 1990s as the impacts and long-​term implications of globalization began to emerge, there was a growing emphasis on the primacy of economic issues that crystallized around the notion of competitiveness.27 The way in which globalization and competitiveness were constructed had much in common with neoliberal arguments about the role of the state, levels of public expenditure that were “too high,” and the primacy of the free market. This was articulated with an increasing stress on the relationship between “rights” and “obligations” in terms of citizenship and access to social protection, with “obligations” becoming more prominent. Moreover, there was an assertion that welfare benefits were “too generous” and were deterring people from working. This was constructed as an attack on “welfare dependency” and was accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the need for those in receipt of welfare benefits to search for work.28 As part of this discursive restructuring of the role of social protection, active labor market policies (or labor market activation) were essential to get those in receipt of welfare benefits, particularly the long-​term unemployed, back into work. The EC’s 1993 White Paper Growth, Competitiveness, Employment expressed these arguments in the following terms: The macro economic framework in the Community is being affected by certain fundamental imbalances which have caused a vicious circle to be created. The current levels of public expenditure, particularly in the social field, have become unsustainable and have used up resources which could have been channelled into productive investment. They have pushed up the taxation of labour and increased the cost of money. At the same time, the constant rise in labour costs—​affecting both its wage and non-​wage components and caused, at least in part, by excessively rigid regulation—​has hindered job creation.29

This view was further developed in the EU’s Lisbon Strategy, launched in 2000, and updated in its Europe 2020 strategy, launched in 2010. Both strategies aim to make the European economy the most competitive in the world by moving it toward a knowledge-​based economy and society, and this is further articulated through notions of “smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.” Both sought to create a framework within which economic competitiveness and social cohesion can be reconciled with a reformed/​restructured and reoriented social protection playing a crucial role. Christoph Hermann argues “the European integration process was used to adopt mainstream

Rise and Decline    171 neoliberal policies and thereby circumvent and erode those state traditions and national compromises that, in the past, gave Europe its distinctiveness compared to other countries, notably the United States.”30 Mary Daly suggests this approach has increasingly “focused primarily on jobs and economic growth as a means of addressing poverty and social exclusion.”31 Thus, the relational and multidimensional approach to social exclusion has tended to be marginalized in the period since the early 2000s. Moreover, while not suggesting that there is a single neoliberal model within Europe, Hermann contends that across Europe following the 2007–​2008 crash and the implementation of continuous austerity measures, “crisis-​induced convergence may not end institutional diversity in Europe—​not least because of continuous resistance to neoliberal restructuring—​but it certainly makes the European varieties of capitalism more look like varieties of neoliberalism.”32 Furthermore, while addressing poverty and social exclusion remains an element of the Europe 2020 strategy, Copeland and Daly consider this to be based on an incoherent and unenforceable approach that is subsumed within and subordinated to the dominant approaches to social policy by individual member states.33 Within the EU there is a dominant assumption that by deregulating labor markets to support firms to create jobs, regardless of the quality of those jobs, the benefits of growth will “trickle down” to those in poverty and marginalized groups, thereby leading to inclusion. The problem is that the “trickle down” approach was disproved a century and more ago in Britain as regulators sought to tackle the “slum” problem, and contemporary research has shown that “social transfers” have a greater impact on poverty and inequality than mere participation in the labor market.34 What is clear, then, is that from the mid-​1970s the costs of social protection, and public expenditure in general, began to be discursively defined as “unproductive” and a drain on the “productive” sector of the economy (i.e., the private sector). This argument achieved the status of a conventional wisdom that structured thinking about how notions such as social exclusion, social cohesion, and social solidarity were incorporated in the European approach to these issues. Within this context, from the early 1980s onward there was a strong emphasis on the need to create a more “flexible” labor market: flexible in terms of wages, working practices, and periods of employment. Additionally, there was a clear implication that not only were wages too high but also that employers were bearing too much of the cost of social protection. Thus reform/​restructuring of both social protection systems and labor markets was deemed essential to respond to the demands of globalization and competitiveness. The precise nature of these reforms was hotly debated, but what began to emerge during the late 1990s and early 2000s were a variety of approaches that went under the term “flexicurity.”35 Essentially flexicurity sought to resolve the tension between labor market flexibility and social protection; this was to be achieved by workers agreeing to be flexible both in terms of working practices and security of employment (in other words, making it easier for employers to dismiss workers), in return for a high-​quality social protection system. This protection system would provide generous out-​of-​work benefits to flexible workers, who would be offered “high quality” retraining packages

172   ROB ATKINSON (constituting what is known as an active labor market policy) that would allow them to re-​enter the labor market and take well-​paid high-​quality jobs in the “new economy.” This was part of a wider process of economic restructuring designed to allow the economy in general and firms specifically to be more dynamic and adapt quickly to the changing dictates of the “global economy,” to enhance competitiveness, and to focus on high-​value-​added sectors (thereby increasing GVA or Gross Value Added), while still providing a high level of social protection. Politically it also appeared to distance the EU and particularly northwestern European states (such as Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands) from the Anglo-​Saxon neoliberal model. Flexicurity, while fashionable for a while, never firmly established itself outside a few northwestern European states that already had strong welfare regimes. Moreover, it appeared to reinforce existing divisions between “core workers” (insiders) in sectors of the economy with strong trade unions, and marginal workers outside this core who found themselves in even more precarious positions and subject to ever more “flexible” working practices. It was also strongly criticized for a failure to deliver on the social protection and retraining side of the equation by seeking to make social protection more and more subordinate to the “demands” of the market. Bastiaan Van Apeldoorna and Brian Hager argue that the logic of this approach is that while labour market flexibility can and should be combined with social protection, the latter is made dependent on and subordinated to the former. What this boils down to is the notion that work is the best way to prevent social exclusion and to maintain social cohesion, and that a re-​commodification strategy is the best way to get people back to work.36

The onset of the global economic crash in 2007–​2008 and the ensuing implementation of austerity policies appeared to “kill off ” this approach. However, rather than being abandoned it has been absorbed by an approach that has to a certain extent developed in parallel, known as the Social Investment Strategy.37 This emphasizes public investment in human capital and the role of social policy in delivering economic growth. It seeks to recast welfare expenditures in such a manner that they are not considered as cost burdens but as “investments” producing positive economic returns in the long run as well as more social justice, provided they increase human capital and the capacity of individuals and families to self-​protect from risks and uncertainty. Since the mid-​ 2000s these strategies took on different regional forms, being primarily developed in the Nordic countries, although southern and continental European countries have also embraced these strategies to a greater or lesser extent. Since the onset of the crash Europe has experienced a decade of economic crisis and austerity measures, resulting in publicly funded programs being drastically reduced or terminated in many countries (for example, Greece, Spain, and Portugal) so as to cut public expenditure. Moreover, low growth rates and ongoing pressure to reduce public spending have reduced the willingness of governments to maintain and develop expenditure in social investment approaches. Combined with the apparently ever-​expanding

Rise and Decline    173 numbers of people in forms of flexible employment, this does not provide confidence that there will be adequate investment in either restructured social protection systems or active labor market policies. Based on research in the Netherlands, van Berkel and van der Aa suggest that the type of reforms implemented in pursuit of flexicurity and the social investment strategy “may increase rather than reduce the vulnerability and unemployment risks of the people most in need of new forms of security because they are (voluntarily or involuntarily) most flexible in the labour market and most frequently confronted with labour-​market transitions.”38 Since the early 2000s there has been a questioning of the role and scope of social protection/​welfare state systems, and demands for reductions in associated expenditure, which have much in common with arguments and policies developed under neoliberal regimes by the Reagan and Thatcher governments during the 1980s, and by subsequent administrations, producing a move toward what Bob Jessop termed a “Schumpeterian Workfare State.”39 Essentially what had taken place was a restructuring and refocusing of the welfare state and the moral, political, and social ethos underlying it. While not all European states moved toward a neoliberal welfare regime there was, within different political traditions and path dependencies, a common move toward the elements outlined a common move tin this direction and a restructuring of welfare regimes that, to varying extents, emphasized the factors discussed above. Consequently, policies seeking to address social exclusion became almost exclusively focused on a mix of reductions in welfare payments, entitlements, and labor market inclusion, to the detriment of the wider multidimensional notion that had previously informed thinking on policy. Ironically in countries such as Britain this has led to the massive growth of in-​work poverty. This is by no means a phenomenon restricted to Britain; the ways in which it is manifested and the groups most at risk vary between European societies depending upon their welfare regime, labor market structures, and approaches to gender and families. At the same time, even in “affluent” western societies, there has been a growth, particularly in urban areas, of what Frank Gaffikin and David Perry describe as “informality,” which is intimately linked to the “formal,” whether in terms of the economy, labor markets, housing, or political institutions/​processes.40 They point out that this has resulted in cityscapes [that] comprise multispaces, whose intersection provides the dialectic encounter between the formal and informal—​between official and unofficial, orthodox and tacit knowledge, modernity and tradition, discernible and oblique power, inclusion and exclusion—​that can engender conflict but can also convert, often unintentionally, into the assorted hybridities that recurrently invent everyday routine of city life.41

Ryan Devlin also points to the growth of and variety of forms that informality is taking in cities in the Global North and the need to draw on research carried out in cities in the Global South, which has moved away from the old “slum paradigm” and recognizes that

174   ROB ATKINSON the people who live in what were known as “slum areas” are integral to the working of the formal economy, produce their own services, and contribute to the life of the city in general.42 Such an approach can help us to understand the variety of forms informality takes and how relevant populations develop a range of situational survival strategies and forms of resistance to their exclusion. Interestingly in Europe for some time a tradition of research developed by Enzo Mingione has pointed to the continuing significance of reciprocity within community networks and families.43 This approach examines the ways in which market exchange, redistribution, and reciprocity interact to allocate resources in European societies and their associated welfare regimes. This is significant in a context where large numbers of people experience either long-​term unemployment or insecure/​flexible employment. According to this approach, resources of a non-​commodified nature, produced within the household or in the community, are a crucial aspect of survival strategies. This may be seen as representing part of a growing “informality,” in part exacerbated by increased labor market insecurity and welfare austerity, in which people are forced to combine resources gained from market exchange, redistribution, and reciprocity to survive. Housing is one dimension of this growing informality, particularly in some Mediterranean cities, east-​central Europe (particularly regarding Roma populations), but also in the so-​called affluent Northern Cities. In some places (for example, Spain) there is a long history of informal housing (squatter settlements often dating back to the Franco era) which has been intensified by the post-​2007 financial crisis and the resulting austerity measures. Since 2007, these developments have affected a range of “new groups” who were previously considered “insiders” (home owners in precarious financial positions, for instance, whose homes have been repossessed by banks) but now found themselves experiencing forms of “informality” for the first time. They responded by organizing to resist the impacts of austerity through movements such as the indignados (the anti-​austerity movement, beginning in 2011) in Spain. Thus, since 2007, marginal populations have grown, and their position has become increasingly precarious. Collectively these groups and individuals find themselves occupying the interstices of society and places, excluded from, or only loosely linked to, the conventional institutions of society on which social inclusion is based and in situations to which traditional social protection/​welfare policies are unable (or unwilling) to respond effectively.

Conclusion: Where Does This Leave Us? Undoubtedly since the 1980s there has been progress in developing a coherent concept of social exclusion, but this has not translated into a comprehensive policy approach at the European level or in member states. The EU has launched a variety of initiatives to address social exclusion and support social inclusion, but these have largely relied on the willingness of member states to pick up the baton and run with it. Other, more

Rise and Decline    175 overarching, initiatives promoted by the EU and some member states, such as flexicurity and the social investment strategy, have been framed by economic assumptions largely compatible with a “soft version” of a neoliberal agenda, emphasizing the primacy of economic growth and labor market participation as the “royal road” to social inclusion. The success of such initiatives have, to a large extent, depended on the prevailing welfare regime in each country, and even where social exclusion is seen as a significant issue social inclusion through participation in the labor market has remained the primary objective. If anything, the overwhelming emphasis within the EU and national states on inclusion in the labor market as a “cure all” for social exclusion has produced a downgrading/​ neglect of the relational aspect of social exclusion, which has been exacerbated by post-​ 2007 austerity measures. Although limited progress has been made in measuring social exclusion, there remains the problem that exclusion is difficult to quantify and cannot be traced as easily as income. To construct a consensus around an agreed measure of social exclusion requires agreement on which social relations are significant and how they can be combined to create a composite measure, which is, arguably, an unrealistic aspiration. Additionally, there is the issue of deciding the scale at which social relations should be measured; do we focus on the community, region, nation-​state, or even the European level? This is important because the scale at which social exclusion functions has important implications for the scale at which policies should aim. There has been a tendency in Europe for the focus to oscillate between the neighborhood and national level, although more recently at the European level there has been an argument that regional differences need to be addressed, particularly in what are termed “peripheral regions.” At the same time there has been a focus on the need for relevant policies to be coordinated between and across levels (i.e., vertical, horizontal, and territorial coordination) if social exclusion is to be addressed and social inclusion achieved at a societal level and across Europe. This last point is related to the notion of economic, social, and territorial cohesion of the European territory that lies at the heart of the European Union project. However, this runs the risk of reducing the “solution” to social exclusion to a technical/​managerial “fix” that ignores wider structural and political issues, as well as deeply embedded conflicts around power and distributional questions. What remains constant is the overwhelming focus on the elusive search for economic competitiveness and economic growth; all else remains subordinate to this “imperative.”

Notes 1. Commission of the European Communities (CEC), Towards a Europe of Solidarity: Intensifying the Fight Against Social Exclusion, Fostering Integration (Brussels: Commission of the European Communities, 1992), 7. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 8. See also Commission of the European Communities, Green Paper. European Social Policy: Options for the Union (Luxembourg: European Commission, 1993): 20–​21. 4. CEC, Towards a Europe of Solidarity, 3.

176   ROB ATKINSON 5. Eurostat, Employment in Europe 1995 (Luxembourg: Eurostat, 1995), 7. 6. See Hilary Silver, “Social Exclusion and Social Solidarity: Three Paradigms,” International Labour Review 133, no. 5 (1994): 531–​577. 7. Rob Atkinson, “Citizenship and the Struggle Against Social Exclusion in the Context of Welfare State Transition,” in Citizenship and Welfare State Reform in Europe, ed. M. Bussemaker (London: Routledge, 1999), 149–​166. 8. See Rob Atkinson, “Combating Social Exclusion in Europe: The New Urban Policy Challenge,” Urban Studies 37, no. 5/​6 (2000): 1037–​1055; and Rob Atkinson and Simin Davoudi, “The Concept of Social Exclusion in the European Union: Context, Development and Possibilities,” Journal of Common Market Studies 38, no. 3 (2000): 427–​448. 9. Silver, “Social Exclusion and Social Solidarity”; Daniel Béland, “The Social Exclusion Discourse: Ideas and Policy Change,” Politics and Policy 35, no. 1 (2007): 123–​139. 10. Serge Paugam, “Elements of a Comparative Research Perspective on Poverty in European Societies,” paper presented at European Science Foundation Conference on “Social Exclusion and Social Integration in Europe,” Blarney, March 1996. 11. Serge Paugam, “The Spiral of Precariousness: A Multidimensional Approach to the Process of Social Disqualification in France,” in Beyond the Threshold, ed. Graham Room (Bristol: Policy Press, 1995), 50. 12. T. H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (New York: Anchor, 1965). 13. Graham Room, “Poverty and Social Exclusion: The New European Agenda for Policy and Research,” in Room, Beyond the Threshold, 1–​9. 14. Jos Berghman, “Social Exclusion in Europe: Policy Context and Analytical Framework,” in Room, Beyond the Threshold, 10–​28. 15. Jos Berghman, “Conceptualising Social Exclusion,” paper presented at European Science Foundation Conference on “Social Exclusion and Social Integration in Europe,” Blarney, March 1996. 16. Paugam, “Elements of a Comparative Research Perspective.” 17. Berghman, “Social Exclusion in Europe.” 18. CEC, Non-​Monetary Indicators of Poverty and Social Exclusion: Final Report (Brussels: European Commission, 1998). 19. Brian Nolan and Christopher T. Whelan, “Using Non-​Monetary Deprivation Indicators to Analyze Poverty and Social Exclusion: Lessons from Europe?,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 29, no. 2 (2011): 305–​325. 20. For overviews see: Mary Daly, “EU Social Policy after Lisbon,” Journal of Common Market Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 461–​481; Nicky Rogge and Emilia Konttinen, “Social Inclusion in the EU since the Enlargement: Progress or Regress?,” Social Indicators Research 135, no.2 (2018): 563–​584. 21. The principle of subsidiarity is defined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. It aims to ensure that decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen and that constant checks are made to verify that action at EU level is justified in light of the possibilities available at national, regional, or local level. 22. Martina Dieckhoff and Duncan Gallie, “The Renewed Lisbon Strategy and Social Exclusion Policy,” Industrial Relations Journal 38, no. 6 (2007): 494. 23. Ibid., 490. 24. Ibid., 492. 25. CEC, Europe 2020. A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2010).

Rise and Decline    177 26. Rogge and Konttinen, “Social Inclusion in the EU since the Enlargement,” 582. 27. See Paul Krugman, “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession,” Foreign Affairs 78, no. 2 (1994): 28–​44. 28. Hartly Dean and Peter Taylor-​Goodby, Dependency Culture: The Explosion of a Myth (London: Routledge, 2013). 29. CEC, White Paper on Growth, Competitiveness, Employment: The Challenges and Ways Forward into the 21st Century (Brussels: European Commission, 1993), 40. 30. Christoph Hermann, “Structural Adjustment and Neoliberal Convergence in Labour Markets and Welfare: The Impact of the Crisis and Austerity Measures on European Economic and Social Models,” Competition and Change 18, no. 2 (2014): 127. 31. Mary Daly, “Paradigms in EU Social Policy: A Critical Account of Europe 2020,” Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 18, no. 3 (2012): 280. 32. Christoph Hermann, “Crisis, Structural Reform and the Dismantling of the European Social Model(s),” Economic and Industrial Democracy 38, no. 1 (2017): 61. 33. Paul Copeland and Mary Daly, “Poverty and Social Policy in Europe 2020: Ungovernable and Ungoverned,” Policy and Politics 42, no. 3 (2014): 351–​366. 34. Social transfers refer to social assistance provided by public and civic bodies to those living in poverty or in danger of falling into poverty. This can take a variety of forms such as income support or access to affordable housing, health services, or education. They are financed through general taxation. 35. For an overview see Elke Heins and Jochen Clasen, “Flexicurity and Welfare Reform: A Review,” Socio-​Economic Review 7, no. 2 (2009): 305–​331. 36. Bastiaan van Apeldoorna and Sandy Brian Hager, “The Social Purpose of New Governance: Lisbon and the Limits to Legitimacy,” Journal of International Relations and Development 13, no. 3 (2010): 226. 37. On this strategy see: CEC, Towards Social Investment for Growth and Cohesion –​ Including Implementing the European Social Fund 2014–​2020. Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions (Brussels: European Commission, 2013); Bea Cantillon and Wim van Lancker, “Three Shortcomings of the Social Investment Perspective,” Social Policy and Society 12, no. 4 (2013): 553–​564. 38. Rik Van Berkel and Paul Van der Aa, “New Welfare, New Policies: Towards Preventive Worker-​Directed Active Labour-​Market Policies,” Journal of Social Policy 44, no. 3 (2015): 439. 39. Bob Jessop, “Towards a Schumpeterian Welfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-​ Fordist Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy 40 (1993): 7–​39. 40. Frank Gaffikin and David C. Perry, “The Contemporary Urban Condition: Understanding the Globalizing City as Informal, Contested, and Anchored,” Urban Affairs Review 48, no. 5 (2012): 701–​730. 41. Ibid., 722. 42. Ryan Thomas Devlin, “Asking ‘Third World Questions’ of First World Informality: Using Southern Theory to Parse Needs from Desires in an Analysis of Informal Urbanism of the Global North,” Planning Theory 17, no. 4 (2018): 568–​587. 43. See Enzo Mingione, Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life beyond the Market Paradigm (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Enzo Mingione, “Life Strategies and Social Economies in the Postfordist Age,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 18, no. 1 (1994): 24–​45; Enzo Mingione, “New Aspects of Marginality in Europe,” in Europe

178   ROB ATKINSON at the Margins. New Mosaics of Inequality, ed. C. Hadjimichalis and D. Sadler (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 15–​32.

Bibliography Room, Graham, ed. Beyond the Threshold. Bristol: Policy Press, 1995. Commission of the European Communities. Non-​Monetary Indicators of Poverty and Social Exclusion: Final Report. Brussels: European Commission, 1998. Commission of the European Communities. Towards Common Principles of Flexicurity: More and Better Jobs through Flexibility and Security. Brussels: European Commission, 2007. Commission of the European Communities. Europe 2020. A Strategy for Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive Growth. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2010. Dean, Hartley, and Peter Taylor-​Goodby. Dependency Culture: The Explosion of a Myth. London: Routledge, 2013. Marshall, Thomas. H. Class, Citizenship and Social Development. New York: Anchor, 1965. Mingione, Enzo. Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life beyond the Market Paradigm. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Mingione, Enzo. “New Aspects of Marginality in Europe.” In Europe at the Margins. New Mosaics of Inequality, edited by C. Hadjimichalis and D. Sadler, 15–​32. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. Silver, Hilary. “Social Exclusion and Social Solidarity: Three Paradigms.” International Labour Review 133, no. 5 (1994): 531–​577. Van Berkel, Rik, and Paul Van der Aa. “New Welfare, New Policies: Towards Preventive Worker-​Directed Active Labour-​Market Policies.” Journal of Social Policy 44, no. 3 (2015): 425–​442.

Pa rt I i i

P E R SP E C T I V E S AC RO S S T I M E : F ROM T H E OU T SI DE

CHAPTER 10

THE DISC OVERY OF “ SLUMS ” IN MID-​N INET E E NT H -​ CE NTURY CINCINNAT I , OH I O HENRY C. BINFORD

The word “slum,” which originated as London slang in the early years of the nineteenth century, was not widely used in the United States until after the American Civil War.1 The New York Times commented on it as a novelty in 1855, and it was included in an 1859 appendix to Webster’s American Dictionary, among other new coinages such as “rolling stock” for railway cars. The dictionary defined “slum” as “a term used to describe the back-​streets of a city, especially those filled with a poor, dirty, and vicious population.”2 Beginning with the 1840s writings of Charles Dickens on London and Friedrich Engels on Manchester, it has been common for observers to associate the places labeled “slums” with big-​city commercial/​industrial growth. Frequently mentioned as factors creating such places have been the concentration of low-​wage workers in areas near their work, landlord exploitation of these concentrated workers and their families (who were often immigrants or other minority residents), and the negligent failure of local authorities to attend to public health or building regulation. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that middle-​class Americans in the mid-​ nineteenth century would adopt the “slum” label for places such as New York City’s already notorious Five Points District. In 1860 New York, considered as Manhattan plus Brooklyn, was an industrial as well as commercial center and a world-​class big city. It had a population of over a million, about the same size as Manchester and half the size of London itself. From at least the 1840s, visitors to New York who were familiar with the great English and European cities were making excursions into the Five Points area and comparing it explicitly to the older deprived districts of London.3 Slightly more curious is the fact that, by the 1870s, “slum” was increasingly being used in many US cities, including even the much smaller and newer cities of the continental interior, such as Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis, none of which contained more than four hundred thousand people in 1870. It is true that all of these places were

182   HENRY C. BINFORD undergoing rapid industrial and commercial growth and were producing highly visible neighborhoods of poor and working-​class settlement that prosperous citizens deemed disreputable. Clearly, urban industrialization even in small cities had something to do with the creation of the deprived areas that middle-​class people called “slums.” As many scholars have shown, that label was loaded with bourgeois imaginings. No wonder bourgeois people fastened it upon areas that seemed to them to represent the worst aspects of economic change, areas inhabited by “poor, dirty, and vicious” residents. Upon closer consideration, however, the simple story of the mid-​nineteenth-​century discovery of “slums” in the industrializing cities of the United States raises several questions. First, in every major American city, there were thousands of propertyless, often struggling workers, and they lived in many neighborhoods. Many of these areas were crowded, dirty, and poorly serviced. Why were only a few of those neighborhoods labeled as “slums,” while others that were equally disadvantaged did not bear that label? Second, prosperous Americans already had a rich vocabulary of derogatory terms to use in describing disreputable urban structures and spaces, including “den,” “rookery,” “sink,” “fever-​nest,” and others imported from England years earlier. Why did usage of “slum” and “slums” (and “tenement house”)4 become more common in American English in the 1860s, and then accelerate rapidly in the 1870s and 1880s (see Figure 10.1)? Third, with the exception of New York City and Boston, American cities had few if any locales that matched the size, density, and diversity of the Five Points. Why, in the mid-​nineteenth century, did residents and journalists of numerous cities decide that there existed a “Five Points of Cincinnati,” or of Chicago, or of other cities? All of these questions have to do not only with industrial conditions and spatial differentiation, but also with the spatial labeling process. Influential urban residents in the early to mid-​nineteenth century faced dramatic changes in their

0.0000700% 0.0000650% 0.0000600% slums 0.0000550% 0.0000500% 0.0000450% 0.0000400% 0.0000350% 0.0000300% slum 0.0000250% 0.0000200% 0.0000150% tenement house 0.0000100% 0.0000050% 0.0000000% 1860 1862 1864 1866 1868 1870 1872 1874 1876 1878 1880 1882 1884 1886 1888 1890 (click on line/label focus)

Figure 10.1  Usage of “tenement house,” “slum,” and “slums,” 1860–​1890. Graph made using Google Ngram viewer, available at https://​books.goo​gle.com/​ngr​ams/​, March 26, 2020

Discovery of “Slums”    183 environs and struggled to understand and assign value to the spaces around them. The central question, therefore, is what changed after 1840, and especially after 1860, to make American city dwellers find new terms such as “slum” and “tenement house” useful? In thus complicating the industrialization-​based explanatory framework for the “invention” of slums, it is useful to explores material and intellectual developments in one rapidly growing and nationally significant city: Cincinnati, Ohio. This city, established on the Ohio River in the late eighteenth century by settlers from the east coast, became within fifty years the sixth largest city in the United States, surpassed only by the well-​ established Atlantic Ocean ports. Widely known as the “Queen City of the West,” it remained until the 1850s the largest urban center in the country’s interior, and until the 1880s one of the three largest cities west of the Appalachian Mountains (with Chicago and St. Louis). Contemporaries—​especially those who lived in Cincinnati—​noted that it was the first truly “American” large city, lacking any Spanish, French, Dutch, or British colonial past. Its economy boomed on the basis of Ohio River commerce, steamboat building, and the processing of agricultural output from the hinterland. As the city attracted tens of thousands of migrants from both the northern and southern United States as well as from Europe, its residents and some eastern observers praised its ability to meld diverse cultures and to offer advancement for artisans and working people. It was a city invested with great hopes. The Queen City is therefore a good place in which to examine the relationships between urban growth processes and spatial labeling in the nineteenth century United States. Like the older cities of the Atlantic seacoast, it began as a port, a mercantile center whose leaders focused on access to deep water via the Ohio-​Mississippi system to New Orleans. They also focused on developing canal and road connections from their city into the Middle Western hinterland. Like older eastern cities and its rising competitors in the middle west, Cincinnati dramatically expanded its manufacturing sector from the mid-​1830s on, becoming the third largest manufacturing center in the United States by the time of the Civil War. Because its development so clearly reflected the large processes at work in most big cities, and because, by the 1850s, Cincinnati was one major focus of national conversations about the prospects and defects of cities, the study of change in this particular setting offers insight into the evolution of US urban spatial evaluation in the first two-​thirds of the nineteenth century.5 This is thus an exploration of what might be called the prehistory of the American “slum.” Middle-​class Americans’ embrace of the word and all of its putative meanings in the middle of the nineteenth century, and their fixation on certain spaces as targets for that label, arose from a convergence of changes in the experience of urban living. Some of these changes were integral parts of the industrializing process. Some arose from circumstances only loosely connected to economic activity. Cincinnatians grappled with all of them by adapting ideas and tools for managing space that they had inherited from the mercantile era. In particular, in the 1840s and 1850s, these converging changes prompted influential citizens to reappraise the value of spaces around them. In the 1860s, the experience of war and cholera produced a sense of urgency and boldness

184   HENRY C. BINFORD concerning that reappraisal. In Cincinnati, at least, this reappraisal involved the application to space of ideas drawn from business, religion, medicine, and engineering.

Geography and Experience in the Mercantile-​Industrial Transition In considering Cincinnati’s growth before 1860, we need to examine the forces that shaped land use and property value, and the stresses imposed by growth and industrialization. We also need to explore how influential citizens—​businesspeople, professionals, journalists—​experienced and perceived “value” more broadly defined, including how positive and negative characteristics of particular spaces reflected thinking about behavior, class, race, and ethnicity. Finally, we must assess the capabilities of leading citizens to govern and shape urban space, and how their growing sense of the “mysteries” of cities caused anxiety. In the first half of the nineteenth century, topography and perceived utility of property played a large role in determining the reputed worth of space in all US cities. The talents of the few trained civil engineers were largely devoted to improving travel by water or road. The most valuable properties were those with water frontage, although that value might be reduced if they were also exposed to flooding. All of these criteria were especially evident in early land development in Cincinnati. Cincinnati was established in the late 1780s by one of several groups of white US citizens who violently expelled the Native American inhabitants and secured possession of what is now southern Ohio by 1815. The earliest white settlers gave to the geographical features of this place names that have been used down to the present (see Figure 10.2). It lay on a bend on the north side of the Ohio River, where there was a natural U-​shaped amphitheater (which they called the “Basin”) of relatively flat land surrounded by steep hills. On the river there was a natural levee sloping gradually upward from the water for many yards in an area called the “Bottom” or “Bottoms,” ending in a sharp rise of forty to fifty feet. At the top of this bluff was a new level, consisting of a series of wide, flat “Terraces” stretching to the foot of the hills. This flat area would eventually become the Central Business District of the city. The surrounding heights were pierced on the west side by Mill Creek and on the east side by Deer Creek. These creek valleys gave access to the interior country of Ohio. On the other side of the Ohio River, the Licking River Valley offered a route into the interior of Kentucky.6 Because of these valleys, this crossing point on the Ohio River was a link in what some of Cincinnati’s early residents called the “old trail” connecting Kentucky to Detroit. Many traders and warriors, both Native American and white, used this route frequently, and had done so for centuries.7 This crossroads of north–​south land travel and east–​west river travel was the basis for Cincinnati’s surging growth in the early nineteenth century. Farmers and drovers brought agricultural products, especially grain and pork, to be processed and shipped

Discovery of “Slums”    185

Figure 10.2  Topography of the Cincinnati area. The base map is from USGS Maps of 1912, with elevation contour lines for 500′, 600′, and 700′ highlighted. Although the area had been extensively graded by 1912, the areas of the Bottoms, the Terraces, and the surrounding hills are clearly visible. Chicago CartoGraphics

out on the river. The two creek valleys were the main routes by which farm goods arrived from the Ohio hinterland, but because the lower Mill Creek Valley was a floodplain and relatively far from the early downtown area, Deer Creek Valley became a funnel for agricultural supply. The other major center of this early economy was the riverfront, which contained not only the levee but also warehouses, brokerage offices, and facilities for boat building and repair. These two areas—​Deer Creek Valley and the waterfront—​ became vital nodes of productive activity and profit, and also magnets for thousands of workers, from the “hands” who loaded river vessels to the skilled artisans who staffed engine shops, built steamboats, and processed pork in slaughterhouses that by the 1830s were among the most technologically and organizationally sophisticated in the nation. In the 1830s the newly opened Miami and Erie Canal, extending northward up the Mill Creek Valley, expanded and accelerated Cincinnati’s trade with the Ohio interior. Cincinnati businessmen were key promoters of that canal, and they determined its route through the city to the Ohio River. Instead of following the shortest route, south through the Mill Creek Valley on the west side of town, they arranged for the canal to bend sharply to the east along the northern edge of the then-​developed area, and to run down the Deer Creek Valley to the river (see Figure 10.3). The hundred-​foot drop through the valley required a series of ten locks, but offered not only navigation for canal boats but the potential for water power to drive mills and manufacturing.

186   HENRY C. BINFORD These measures made Deer Creek Valley and the riverfront vital to the city’s prosperity but also disorderly: noisy, smoky, smelly, often rowdy, and full of the piles of raw materials and flows of waste—​blood, entrails, oil and chemicals, scrap lumber, and metal shavings—​that characterized early nineteenth-​century industry. In addition, the waterfront and Deer Creek were the primary areas of residence for poor white laborers and free African Americans. Prosperous Cincinnatians already regarded these two areas as vital but unpleasant by the 1820s. The growth of the city from a place with about 25,000 residents in 1830 to more than 150,000 by 1860 exacerbated this tension between economic value and noisome disorder in elite Cincinnatians’ descriptions of the valley. After 1840, rail-​based business and the arrival of larger numbers of Irish, German, and African American workers further changed the city’s landscape, creating more spatial differentiation and more population diversity both in the two previously disreputable areas and others elsewhere. As the Basin area grew more crowded, Cincinnati became the third densest city in the United States by the Civil War. Railroads and omnibuses encouraged an influential minority of wealthy citizens to move to spacious homes on the hilltops during the 1850s. Some of Cincinnati’s most influential leaders were able to enjoy green lawns and fresh air in their new residences. At the other end of the density gradient, in and around the

Figure 10.3  Cincinnati in 1838. Base map by Joseph Gest, with added line showing approximate location of the bluff between the Bottoms and the first Terrace. The Miami and Erie Canal enters at top center, turns 90 degrees to the east through the northern part of the settled area, and then turns again southeastward down the Deer Creek Valley to the Ohio River. Chicago Cartographics

Discovery of “Slums”    187 edges of the old city in the Basin, entrepreneurial landowners carved terraces into the steep hillsides and built cheap housing for industrial workers. Some created multifamily tenement structures in the Bottoms, in Deer Creek Valley, and in the north side German settlement called “Over-​the-​Rhine.” By 1860, industrialization had given Cincinnati numerous impoverished and disreputable areas that advantaged citizens might reasonably have called “slums.” The most overcrowded dwellings were in Over-​the-​Rhine. That neighborhood and a desperately poor area near the gas works at the west end of the Bottoms were the first hit by the cholera epidemic of 1849. But by the late 1860s, when Cincinnati journalists first used the “slum” label in talking about their own city, it did not fall on these districts, but on two small communities, one adjacent to the levee, and one in Deer Creek Valley. The prominence of these two areas, above all the other deprived spaces generated by rapid growth, can only be explained by taking into account Cincinnati leaders’ frames of reference and their tools of governance.

Knowing and Managing Urban Space Understanding why Cincinnatians chose only certain areas as their first “slums” requires considering the intellectual resources they brought to bear in understanding their surroundings—​the perceptual filters through which Cincinnati leaders saw their city, and the ways they tried to regulate its spaces. These filters included then-​contemporary ideas about human psychology, disease, governance, and race. From the 1820s on, Cincinnatians appraised their surroundings using not only ideas about economic value, but also a roster of ideas concerning the effects of environment on character. The challenges of doing business over great distances fostered some ideas. The wave of Protestant religious thinking known as the Second Great Awakening stoked others. Central to both commercial and religious modes of acting in and managing space were then-​prevalent ideas about individual psychology and social interaction, especially the concepts of “character” and “influence.” These two concepts figured heavily in the ways early nineteenth-​century Americans thought about interpersonal relations, and relations between an individual and his or her surroundings. These ideas became commonplace notions, suffusing the prose of journalists; of businessmen writing about training, credit, and credentials; of politicians seeking office; of women and men forming schools and associations; and of clergy writing sermons and essays.8 Influence could also be a social phenomenon, often called “moral influence,” in which the combined power of like-​minded people was almost certain to stamp the character of an individual who lived or worked among them. These conceptions clearly embodied assumptions about spatial relations: a person’s surroundings could determine what kind of person he or she would be. Among merchants and other businesspeople, this bundle of ideas amplified an already-​existing obsession with character, reputation, and

188   HENRY C. BINFORD deportment as essential to success. Among Protestant Christians, it fueled an eagerness for redeeming character, one’s own and those of others. Mercantile concerns about character dovetailed nicely with evangelical concerns about salvation. Protecting one’s character, and helping one’s neighbors and associates to protect theirs, was both essential to salvation and good for business. In the urban environment, where many were young, newly arrived, and strangers, multiple bad influences might mold one’s character in damaging ways. Not only con men, but deprived and depraved areas were dangerous. City dwellers had to be careful in their interactions, Christians believed, and should strive to exert “moral power” in their own social sphere. In Cincinnati, whose population was mostly Protestant Christian until the 1850s, a variety of religious outreach groups generated concern about poor communities in the Bottoms and in Deer Creek Valley from the 1820s onward. Major river floods in 1832 and 1847 devastated these areas, as did cholera in 1832 and 1849. Middle-​class reformers were worried not only about the material poverty of these areas but also about their dearth of positive influences. In 1849 an energetic minister organized the Cincinnati Relief Union (CRU), a group of businessmen modeled on New York’s Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and dedicated to systematic visitation of impoverished areas. The CRU, eventually headed by newspaper publisher Calvin Starbuck, became a powerful agency in designating and characterizing dangerous areas from 1849 into the 1870s. Intertwined with the mercantile-​evangelical-​charitable apparatus of spatial evaluation was another mode of perception and diagnosis associated with sanitary reform. In a period when many doctors believed that diseases were spread by vaporous “miasmas” emanating from decaying waste, stagnant or poorly drained wet places, and impure air, spaces or structures associated with these dangers were suspect. During the 1840s, Dr. John Griscom in New York City and statistician Lemuel Shattuck in Boston, both influenced by Edwin Chadwick in England, promoted the collection of data to demonstrate connections between unsanitary living conditions and disease. Physicians in Cincinnati followed their work and collected data on the 1849 cholera epidemic, which they used to prepare a map tracing the progress of the disease. Their report, published by the American Medical Association, combined with 1850s efforts to compile health-​ related information by wards, further focused attention on the Bottoms and Deer Creek. By the late 1850s, in Cincinnati and elsewhere, certain areas, especially those containing crowded “tenement” housing, were presumed to be a health danger to the city at large. For a growing number of city residents, health dangers required more vigorous governance. In the early nineteenth century, Cincinnatians tolerated an irregular, largely unplanned, loosely regulated landscape as long as there was no obvious threat. In the words of one of Cincinnati’s most gifted historians, “government itself was only incidental to the primary business of making a living.”9 Yet in Cincinnati and other cities, a controversy about ideas that would in the long run become fundamental to the emerging city planning movement simmered beneath the surface of limited formal government. Challenges of size and diversity prompted some citizens to think beyond

Discovery of “Slums”    189 what government was doing to what government might do. As Elizabeth Blackmar demonstrated for New York City years ago, and other scholars have shown for other cities since, early nineteenth-​century discussions about the emerging spectrum of spatial values encouraged some who wanted to raise or preserve the value of properties to propose use of public power to get rid of low-​value spaces. Such proposals, few and often unsuccessful in this period, involved novel applications of existing police powers and the Anglo-​American legal principle of eminent domain.10 On paper, city corporations had extensive police powers to regulate public space, abate nuisances, maintain order, and protect public health. William Novak has shown how cities, especially in their efforts to prevent fire, expanded and detailed the idea of nuisance regulation. Court decisions after 1830 upheld the establishment of “fire limits” within which wooden buildings were prohibited as nuisances. Courts also supported the abatement of such nuisances through robust measures such as “summary destruction,” in which municipal authorities or even private citizens could “pull down” offending structures without appeal to courts.11 In addition to municipal police powers, governments could change the landscape through the power of eminent domain. State courts in the 1830s were refining the concept of eminent domain by considering what public purposes justified the taking of private land, what rules governed the required compensation, and whether the ability to engage in such takings could be delegated to private corporations (such as railroads). In New York City, often in the vanguard of efforts to stretch municipal legal power, citizens hostile to the Five Points neighborhood in 1829 portrayed that vicinity as a “nuisance” and petitioned the city to use eminent domain powers to acquire and demolish offending structures. Landowners and businesses in that area, however, mounted vigorous opposition. Five Points was not razed (at least, not then), but the city did demolish a few buildings and widen some streets with the goal of driving out poor residents and offensive activities. The phrase “slum clearance” would not be used in America for decades, but these New Yorkers were promoting and debating a very early version of that strategy.12 Cincinnati’s public officials, like those of other cities, rarely employed such spatial management tools in their most powerful versions, but citizens of the Queen City were familiar with the possibilities, up to and including summary destruction. Proposals for public action added one more layer to the process by which only certain areas became labeled as dangerous. In Cincinnati, one of the key factors in so designating parts of the waterfront and Deer Creek Valley was race. Although slavery was banned in the Northwest Territory, from which Ohio was carved in 1803, white Ohioans were determined that African Americans would be legally subordinate and restricted in their rights. The first Ohio legislature passed Black Laws that excluded African Americans from citizenship, and from the 1810s into the 1860s there were concerted attempts by some white Cincinnatians to expel blacks from the city through law or violence. Nevertheless, the Queen City was a magnet for Black workers as well as white, and small Black communities grew near the levee and on the western side of Deer Creek Valley.

190   HENRY C. BINFORD In the 1820s, an anti-​Black campaign grew bolder. In 1826 some of the city’s leading white men formed the Cincinnati Colonization Society, with the goal of “forwarding to Africa the free blacks of Cincinnati.”13 In 1827 white residents of Ward 1 (which had the largest concentration of Black residents) complained to the city council about fire danger from “small shanties” on the east side. They wanted the city to pull down the structures in this area using well-​established nuisance and fire protection powers, and perhaps to exercise summary destruction.14 A city council committee visited and reported on this “neighborhood tenanted by negroes [sic].” Committee members noted many “little tenements” built on land leased for only a few years. The council declined to tear down or otherwise act against these structures, recognizing that the tenants were poor and stating that “We cannot drive the black population from the city in the summary way of pulling down the houses over their heads.”15 Cincinnati thus refused to follow the path of clearance that New Yorkers were beginning to agitate with regard to the Five Points, but the language of the city council minutes suggests that perhaps their quarrel was with the means, not the end of removing African Americans. And the targeted area, which became known among whites as “Bucktown,” remained for decades a focus of spatial denigration and attack. Moral, health, housing, racial, and geographic considerations combined to devalue the Deer Creek Valley more thoroughly than other neighborhoods. For example, Cincinnatians had long taken for granted the disreputable qualities of the waterfront, and many prosperous citizens had less and less reason to go there. They worked on the Terraces, some forty feet above the Bottoms, and they came and went to and from their homes to the north. On the other hand, by the 1850s many of them had to pass through the Deer Creek Valley in their daily journeys to the suburbs, and the developments sketched above sharpened various conceptual boundaries between the valley and the rest of the city, as well as within the valley itself. Changes in the way the valley was evaluated, in turn, made it more visible and more vulnerable to the surging ideas for improvement. In the early 1840s, Deer Creek Valley was in many ways still the centerpiece of the city’s regional and local economy. It was the focal point of “Porkopolis,” the place that gave value to what boosters called “our great staple, the Hog,” as well as being the center of agricultural processing in general. Since the beginning of the century, Cincinnati had prospered from the flow of agricultural goods down the creek valleys from the north (and since the 1820s along the canal). Slaughterhouses, packing houses, soap making, tanning, milling, oil and paint manufacture, and a host of other activities linked to agriculture concentrated in Deer Creek Valley. Into the 1840s this area was something to boast of. Outsiders might complain, but Cincinnatians had taken the smells and the bloody water of Deer Creek as concomitants of success. As a journalist put it in 1845: “[H]‌owever undesirable is the brink of this murmuring stream . . . , the vale through which it runs is nevertheless a fountain of wealth.”16 In the 1850s much of this older economy persisted. But gradually these parts of an older city moved from being objects of pride toward being nuisances. Rail-​based

Discovery of “Slums”    191 industries were the new marvels. Commuters passing up and down the foul-​smelling Deer Creek Valley began to talk more about odors, pollution, and health hazards associated with the area. In addition, the branch of the Miami and Erie Canal that descended the valley to the Ohio River was used less and less by boats, was falling into disrepair, and frequently leaked. There were calls to shut it down. This process of re-​valuing what had been central parts of the economy encouraged more Cincinnatians to consider alleviating perceived spatial problems by removing their sources. The lower part of the valley contained the notorious and stigmatized “Bucktown,” and the tightly packed tiers of speculative housing on the opposite slope. With large numbers of struggling Irish and African American workers, and the saloons and brothels that catered to some in this population, this region was vulnerable to vicious caricature. In the eyes of white Cincinnatians, interracial mingling and sexual relations made this part of the valley comparable to the most notorious area of New York City. In April 1860, the Daily Press ran an article about an interracial wedding “in that delectable locality known as Bucktown—​the Five Points of the Queen City.”17 Slightly higher in the valley was the concentration of agricultural processing establishments that had once been valued and now were increasingly despised as “noxious.” In the 1830s, Cincinnati’s innovative technology for and organization of the slaughtering and butchering process had been a national wonder, but in the 1850s it was no longer so remarkable. This sub-​area’s decline in repute was also clearly associated with both intellectual and demographic changes. The proliferation of miasmatic theories of disease fostered a presumed connection between activities that smelled bad and activities that were dangerous to health, while growing medical knowledge fostered a more useful connection between polluted water and epidemics. On both counts, the Deer Creek businesses were vulnerable. Changing urban demography hurt them as well, as greatly increased numbers of influential and vocal people now routinely traversed the valley between downtown and the suburban hilltops, immersed in the odors of animal disassembly. During the 1850s the whole valley became a focus of remedial thinking centered on the growing need to build an adequate city-​wide sewer system. Engineers demonstrated that a main sewer down the valley, accompanied by a great deal of landfill to provide proper drainage, was the best way to provide for the waste of the east side. Deer Creek Valley seemed to call out for action by those charged with governance. Beginning with public health and safety concerns in the early 1850s, and stretching through the Civil War, reform-​minded Cincinnatians would engage in spatial management experiments that centered on a growing desire to reshape the physical space of the city, and to accomplish social goals through that reshaping. In the late 1850s advocates of city-​led redevelopment tried a new tack in their effort to build sewers, abate noxious industry nuisances, build boulevards, and displace both undesirable activities and undesirable people by filling the valley. This new initiative was largely the work of merchant Benjamin Eggleston. His strategy was to get the state to transfer the aging section of the Miami and Erie canal in the lower Deer Creek Valley from state to city control, for the purpose of building a large sewer with a road on top,

192   HENRY C. BINFORD and incidentally of changing the surrounding area. An 1858 Enquirer editorial endorsed the project: As the [canal] work stands, it is not only useless but a fearful nuisance. . . . With the canal as it is property holders find it impossible to improve Deercreek Valley. It is given up to the vilest class of a negro population, save where it is redeemed, if we may use the word, for manufacturing purposes—​or slaughterhouses. . . . It is proposed to secure from the State all of the canal from Court street to the river. . . . Then an avenue, as wide as Broadway, will be laid out of a gradual grade from the Ohio to Walnut Hills.18

This editorial identified two perceived spatial defects in the lower valley—​noxious industries and poor Black people—​and highlighted access to the hills as a desired goal. The combined sewer-​and-​avenue project was a lever for wider change. The movement gained other endorsements, but when the Civil War broke out, the energies of promoters, including Eggleston, were temporarily redirected. Still, beginning in 1863, several of these ideas for reshaping Cincinnati gained much greater purchase when infused with the energies of wartime activism.

War and Cholera: Emergency Activism and Local Labeling In early 1863, Radical Republican seizure of power in both the state of Ohio and the city of Cincinnati opened a period in which reformers set in motion long-​term physical changes in the landscape and expanded the scope of public governance, highlighting issues of who should speak and act for the “public,” and what constituted the public good with regard to space. The combined and prolonged crisis of war and then cholera in 1866 gave leverage to activists, each of which already had ideas about how to make the city better in the long-​term future. It was in this period of activism that those concerned with spatial management in the city raised the terms “tenement house” and “slum” into common and sometimes official usage as labels for spaces that were threatening and problematic. First the demands of war, then the enlarged idea of public and private action that was generated by meeting those demands, left a residue of ideas and procedures that permanently changed governance by the late 1860s. Under the pressures of war, the Cincinnati Relief Union became a new and more potent vehicle for the spatial discussion of poverty. By the end of 1863 CRU ward managers were responsible for distributing not only the funds collected by the organization, but also the money gathered through public taxation for soldiers’ relief.19 These local volunteers, sharing and publicizing their experiences through the city-​wide organization, not only gave new life to the kind of moral policing begun in the 1850s, but also

Discovery of “Slums”    193 strengthened the gathering and dissemination of both statistical and anecdotal information about neglected areas.20 Between 1862 and 1866, a number of war-​spawned developments in New York City and in Cincinnati focused the attention of CRU members and other reform-​oriented Cincinnatians on class segregation, especially the medical and moral dangers of tenement housing. Already alarmed by racial violence between Irish and African Americans in Deer Creek Valley during 1861 and 1862, Queen City reformers were horrified by news of the New York Draft Riots in midsummer 1863. They were also aware that a number of elite New Yorkers quickly responded to those riots by forming a “Citizens’ Association” to publicize the connections between violence, poverty, disease, and tenement neighborhoods. This Citizens’ Association sponsored a comprehensive street-​by-​street survey of sanitary conditions in New York City during 1864. During the winter of 1865–​1866, New York reformers succeeded in getting the state to create an independent and powerful Metropolitan Board of Health.21 Cincinnati reformers mounted their own campaign in imitation. Calvin Starbuck, editor of the Times, had been a CRU volunteer and an advocate for stronger health and sanitary measures since before the war.22 In November 1864, only a few months after New Yorkers conducted their survey, Starbuck produced a long report on tenement houses, stressing their connection with disease. On the public front, Benjamin Eggleston finally persuaded the state legislature to give the Deer Creek Valley segment of the canal to the city in 1863. In 1864–​1865 the city council adopted a comprehensive plan for water supply and sewerage for the whole city, which included a new main sewer in the valley and a boulevard on top of the fill. In 1866 Cincinnati representatives got the state to create a new Board of Health, modeled on New York’s but with fewer powers. This last success, just after the war, came because of news that cholera had once again appeared in New York at the end of 1865. It came to Cincinnati the following year. At its peak, the 1866 cholera outbreak carried away dozens of Cincinnati residents daily, producing grim lists in the newspapers and leaving a final total of 2,033 dead. In the face of this calamity, public officials stretched the powers of the Board of Health and broadened the agenda for active and systematic public improvement. Facing the cholera threat, Radicals made a new departure in 1866 in their willingness to use public power in a spatially targeted way: to disrupt poor families’ living conditions, to remove people from tenements, and to raze structures deemed dangerous to health and morals. At the end of 1865, the attention of all the various public actors and voices turned rapidly to specifics of city geography, identifying the places that, according to prevailing medical and sanitary ideas, would become “hotbeds” of the disease. What had been a generalized discussion of sanitation and tenement evils quickly became centered on certain wards, streets, and even particular structures. With the Civil War barely over when the first indications of the new threat came from abroad, citizens were prone to think in military terms and to use military language to describe cholera’s “line of march,” and to urge authorities to “throw up our defenses.”

194   HENRY C. BINFORD The Gazette praised the effectiveness of “military cleanliness” as evidenced in the reduction of yellow fever during Union army occupation of New Orleans.23 Despite the absence of cholera anywhere near Cincinnati in early 1866, the Gazette carried enthusiasm for wartime modes of governance to new heights. Insisting that the Board of Health had to act against tenements, it addressed a question that would be asked and re-​asked in cities down through the twentieth century, as slum clearance became a tool of urban planning: how to accommodate the poor people who would be displaced: They cannot be turned out of doors; of course not. But it is certain that they cannot be permitted to live as they are living now, unless we desire to preserve food for the approaching epidemic. . . . [I]‌f the houses are found to be overcrowded, and room cannot be found elsewhere for the surplus inhabitants, the city should take possession of vacant lots and erect temporary accommodations. . . . The evil of overcrowded and filthy tenement houses is admitted on all hands; but if we would remove it, sufficient remedies must be applied; and by applying these in advance, lives and money may be saved. The first question to be decided therefore is: what is necessary in view of the emergency? Whatever shall be considered necessary to put the whole city in order, must be accepted as right, without regard to cost, precedent or law.24

The Gazette was at one extreme of opinion concerning cholera preparation, but the public discussions during the spring of 1866 set up an ongoing argument about the respective claims of public health and private property. On one side were businessmen and landlords, who resented any public meddling with the noxious industries and tenement rentals that were part of their income stream. On the other side were the views of militant Radicals, expressed through the editorials in the Gazette, calling for forcible removal of “surplus population” from tenements, and possible destruction of the buildings themselves—​measures that New York’s Metropolitan Board of Health began to take in April. When cholera arrived and grew more deadly in the summer, Cincinnati’s leaders moved cautiously to a new peak of activism. By August 17, the Board of Health and the police were removing some people from tenements and other “filthy dens.” They requisitioned tents from the army for the sick and appropriated some schoolhouses as temporary quarters for the healthy.25 In many ways, these emergency actions against tenements represented the peak of Radical expansion of governance with regard to space. They were ambitious and unprecedented, but they were temporary. Despite the hopes of Starbuck and the example of New York City’s tenement destruction, Cincinnati authorities did not go beyond evacuation and cleaning to destruction of tenements. In the late 1860s spatial management was both more extensive and more selective than it had been. There was broad agreement on the use of technology and tax receipts to change the landscape for public health reasons. There was also broad agreement that certain areas and structures (and people) were dangerous and of negative value to the public. The labels “tenement house” and “slum” were coming into common usage.

Discovery of “Slums”    195 The option of deliberate action to remove tenements—​using government power for clearance—​had been placed upon the Cincinnati public table in 1866 but pushed aside because of municipal caution about uncertain legal footing, and reformers’ inability to devise a satisfactory public solution for relocating poor residents. This distillation of spatial management experiments had a great deal of influence on the way the old core of Cincinnati—​the downtown, the waterfront, and the east side—​was governed in the late nineteenth century. The basic framework of governance set by 1867, with its distribution of public/​private responsibilities and its underlying ideas, persisted for decades, and determined how the city would and would not be planned. Like the periodic Ohio River floods, the wave of enthusiasm for aggressive urban reconfiguration in the mid-​1860s receded, but it left lasting high-​water marks in the realm of governance. The outcome of mid-​nineteenth-​century events was a new kind of public-​private local governing apparatus, deeply rooted in long-​standing public law and practice, but now incorporating new technology and new, long-​term persistence. The envelope of public responsibility had expanded to include persistent, expensive, creative, and comprehensive management of some kinds of space, including areas used for utilities, parks, and public recreation. The eventual creation of a full system of sewers and a more reliable water supply, along with the administrative apparatus to maintain them, was a tremendous public accomplishment. The expansion of nuisance powers, though very gradual, was another such accomplishment. Both of these were controversial ideas in the 1840s, but they were taken for granted as public government responsibilities by 1870. Reformers failed, however, to make the public a good justification for immediate large-​scale seizures of private property for other purposes, such as purging smelly industries or demolishing tenements.26 Perhaps the most extensive changes since the early nineteenth century concerned the reworked intellectual infrastructure concerning space, particularly the language of spatial devaluation and denigration. These were national changes, usually appearing first in New York City, then spreading relatively quickly to Cincinnati and other cities of the West. Webster’s Dictionary first included “slum” in 1859, and “tenement” in a pejorative sense by 1864. Even in New York City, “slum” was apparently a recent adoption in the 1850s. In 1855, the New York Times responded to a correspondent who thought “that the word ‘Slums,’ which cannot be found in Webster’s Dictionary, is a very proper and forcible word, as applied to the streets of a city in which the poor and vicious part of the population reside. . . . and we see no objection to its use, as we have no word which expresses its meaning.”27 In the same period, “tenement” and “tenement house” were acquiring negative connotations, as evidenced in newspapers.28 These linguistic developments crawled westward in the early 1860s. In the 1840s and 1850s, Cincinnati journalists commonly used words such as “rookery” or “den” to describe the dwellings of the poor.29 “Slum” made its first appearance in the Cincinnati press through the reprinting of articles from New York and London newspapers, then by the mid-​1860s with regard to the Queen City itself. In 1867, for example, the Enquirer published an account of a police “Descent upon a Negro Den” on the waterfront, describing a “scene . . . to cast in the shade the deviltries of Bucktown,” and urging

196   HENRY C. BINFORD Cincinnati philanthropists “to abandon the niggers of Borrioboola Gha for the more prolific back slums of Cincinnati.”30 By 1870 the everyday vocabulary of spatial discussion in Cincinnati and other big cities included these and other terms that were either new or had significantly changed their meaning. Through the 1870s and 1880s, Cincinnati’s newspapers, the CRU, and other organizations continued to highlight the existence of particular areas characterized by what they considered to be dangerous concentrated poverty. Discussion of these areas perpetuated the sensational and often derogatory “sketches” and “scenes” of families and situations, reinforcing the marginalization of such places and people. The trope of the vicarious “tour,” taking prosperous readers into benighted regions that were implicitly and explicitly compared with “jungles,” became commonplace. In Cincinnati and other large US cities, “slums” were now taken for granted, and repeated public discussion of slums and tenements was now a settled feature of urban life. Ideas, policies, and arguments developed in the early nineteenth century and refined in the middle decades persisted through the century. The discovery of slums in mid-​century urban America set the stage for the Progressive movement of the 1890s and after.31

Notes 1. On the etymology of the word, see H. J. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 11 (1967): 5–​40. 2. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, revised and enlarged by Chauncey A. Goodrich (Springfield, MA, 1859), 1344; New York Times, November 2, 1855. 3. See, for example, Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842; repr., Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), 127–​128. 4. “Tenement,” as a neutral term meaning simply a dwelling, had long been part of American English. “Tenement house,” appearing in the 1850s as a label for exploitative multifamily structures, had negative connotations from the start. 5. This chapter draws heavily on research for my book, From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade (Philadelphia: Temple University Pres, 2021). More extensive and fully documented accounts of the events and areas mentioned below may be found in that book. 6. The nineteenth-​century description of topography was popularized by Daniel Drake, in his Notices Concerning Cincinnati (1810), reprinted in Quarterly Publication of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 3 (1908): 5–​6; and in his Natural and Statistical View, or Picture of Cincinnati and the Miami Country (Cincinnati, 1815), 62. See also Jacob Burnet, Notes on the Early Settlement of the North-​Western Territory (New York, 1847), 31–​32. 7. On usage of this “old trail,” see Joseph Wilby, “Early Cincinnati,” Ohio Archeological and Historical Quarterly 14 (1905): 451. 8. For the social psychology underlying these ideas, see Richard Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-​ Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989); and Daniel Walker

Discovery of “Slums”    197 Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 9. Daniel Aaron, Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1818–​1838 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992),106. Robin L. Einhorn portrays a similar landscape and a similar pattern of governing in Chicago in this period in Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–​1872 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), chs. 1 and 2. 10. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–​1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 172–​176; Bruce Clouette, “Antebellum Urban Renewal: Hartford’s Bushnell Park,” Connecticut History 18 (1976): 1–​21. 11. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-​Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 59–​7 1. 12. On state consideration of eminent domain, see Harry N. Scheiber, “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 329–​402; Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 176–​179. 13. Quoted in Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-​Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 34. See also Aaron, Cincinnati, 303–​304; Nikki Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati’s Black Community, 1802–​1868 (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005), 55–​57. 14. Cincinnati City Council Minutes (hereafter CCM), vol. 4, 68 (August 8, 1827). 15. Taylor, Frontiers of Freedom, 54–​55; CCM, vol. 4, 72–​73 (August 29, 1827). 16. Excerpt from Cincinnati Chronicle, reprinted in Cleveland Herald, April 19, 1845. 17. Cincinnati Daily Press, April 24, 1860. 18. Cincinnati Daily Enquirer (hereafter CDE), November 16, 1858. The reference is to Cincinnati’s own “Broadway,” not the one in New York City. 19. This delegation of authority for relief in an emergency anticipated the similar arrangement made with Chicago’s Relief and Aid Society after the 1871 fire. See Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–​74 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), esp. chap. 2. See also the discussion of the general phenomenon of delegation of public authority in Susan J. Pearson, The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), especially chap. 4. 20. Seventeenth Annual Report of the Cincinnati Relief Union (1866), 12, 46–​48. 21. On the New York developments, see John Duffy, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 118–​120, and Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625–​1866, vol. 1 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968), 550–​563. 22. Alan I. Marcus, Plague of Strangers: Social Groups and the Origins of City Services in Cincinnati (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), 170. 23. On sanitary measures in New Orleans, see Duffy, Sanitarians, 113–​114. 24. Cincinnati Daily Gazette (CDG), April 13, 1866. 25. CDG, August 16, 17, 1866; CDE, August 18, 19, 1866; Marcus, Plague 206-​08. 26. Carl J. Smith, City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), demonstrates how the idea of “the public good” became attached to water supply. He also notes that the public good was seen as a sum of separate, specific “goods.” In the present context, clearance had not become one of those goods.

198   HENRY C. BINFORD 27. New York Times, November 2, 1855. 28. The diffusion of the new terms to Chicago and Detroit also occurred in the early-​to-​mid-​ 1860s. See Chicago Daily Tribune, March 15, 1861; September 5, 1865; October 31, 1866; Detroit Free Press, October 26, 1865; February 6, 1870. 29. CDE, July 24, 1853. “Rookery” was also used as a name for the jail. 30. “Descent” article, CDE, July 24, 1867. See also CDE, March 23, 1865; July 12, 1865. “Borrioboola-​Gha” is a reference to the fictional African nation that was the object of Mrs. Jellyby’s philanthropy in Dickens’ Bleak House (1853). 31. On the rise of Progressive Concern about housing, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 5; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), esp. chap. 7.

Bibliography Aaron, Daniel. Cincinnati: Queen City of the West, 1818–​1838. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992. Blackmar, Elizabeth. Manhattan for Rent, 1785–​1850. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Clouette, Bruce. “Antebellum Urban Renewal: Hartford’s Bushnell Park.” Connecticut History 18 (1976): 1–​21. Duffy, John. A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625–​1866, volume 1. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968. Duffy, John. The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990. Dyos, H. J. “The Slums of Victorian London.” Victorian Studies 11 (1967): 5–​40. Einhorn, Robin L. Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833–​1872. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Howe, Daniel Walker. Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Marcus, Alan I. Plague of Strangers: Social Groups and the Origins of City Services in Cincinnati. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991. Novak, William J. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-​Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pearson, Susan J. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Rabinowitz, Richard. The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-​Century New England. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Richards, Leonard L. Gentlemen of Property and Standing: Anti-​Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998. Sawislak, Karen. Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871–​74. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Discovery of “Slums”    199 Scheiber, Harry N. “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts.” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 329–​402 Smith, Carl. City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Wright, Gwendolyn. Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America. New York: Pantheon, 1981.

CHAPTER 11

SO CIAL GEO G RA PH I E S OF P OVERT Y IN VI C TORIA N A ND EDWARDIAN L OND ON RICHARD DENNIS

Among representations of “slums” by outsiders in Victorian and Edwardian London we can differentiate between, at the very least, social surveys undertaken by bodies of concerned citizens, such as the Statistical Society of London; accounts by social reformers, church leaders, and journalists, intended to shock government or the general public into taking action; novels and short stories, some written purely as “realist” or “naturalist” fiction, but some also intended to raise awareness and stimulate reform; and in a category of its own, Charles Booth’s massive survey of Life and Labour of the People in London, published in seventeen volumes between 1889 and 1903. There is a substantial literature on slums, slumming, and slum clearance in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century London. Major works include Anthony Wohl’s The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London; Gareth Stedman Jones’s Outcast London; Seth Koven’s Slumming, and Jim Yelling’s Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London.1 There are also accounts of specific localities, of which the most scholarly and readable is Sarah Wise’s The Blackest Streets.2 Charles Booth’s survey features prominently in these and countless less specific, London-​wide, and local histories, but often the “truth” of his maps and statistics is simply assumed. This chapter sets Booth’s social geography in the context of earlier accounts from which he sought to distance his study, and questions how, on his Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889, Booth colored particular streets “black” and “dark blue,” assumed by today’s users of his map to signify “slums.”3 Writing in mid-​century, Thomas Beames had claimed that “Alsatias”—​effectively, sanctuaries for evil tolerated by government—​offered breeding grounds for future

Social Geographies of Poverty    201 revolution.4 Thirty years later, Andrew Mearns, in The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, emphasized how overcrowding led to incest and moral depravity. Meanwhile, the radical socialist, Henry Hyndman, asserted that 25 percent of Londoners were living in poverty.5 Booth began his study expecting to disprove such sensational claims about moral degeneration, the fecklessness of the poor, the propensity for revolution, and the extent of poverty. The “headline” that Booth calculated not 25 percent (or less) of Londoners to be in poverty but more than 30 percent tends to obscure his more optimistic finding that the percentage who could be classed as “degenerate”—​in his terminology, Class A, “the lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers and semi-​ criminals”—​constituted less than one percent of the population. On the other hand, his apparently “progressive” emphasis on low wages, insecure employment, and old age as the principal causes of poverty, rather than idleness, drunkenness, or thriftlessness, was countered by the frequency of references to those “questions of habit” in the notebooks from which his statistics were derived. Posterity has also afforded more attention to the “poverty map” than to the countless tables of statistics in the printed volumes; but the map, by generalizing to the scale of the street and assigning each street to one of seven categories—​from “black” denoting “Lowest class. Vicious, semi-​criminal” through to “yellow”: “Upper-​middle and Upper classes. Wealthy”—​ exaggerates the geographical segregation of different classes.6 In practice, as Booth noted frequently, “every street is more or less mixed in character”; yet only one map category, that of “purple” streets, was designated as “Mixed. Some comfortable others poor.”7 Booth sought to distance his survey from all the different types of literature that preceded it, but, in practice, there was not so much to differentiate Booth’s survey from other types of slum representation; indeed, and if only for commercial reasons, every piece of slum-​writing through the middle decades of the nineteenth century necessarily claimed to be different from its predecessors. What Booth certainly had in common with earlier writers was his reluctance to label neighborhoods as “slums.” In the first volume of his study, he employed the word to deny the existence of “the hordes of barbarians of whom we have heard, who, issuing from their slums, will one day overwhelm modern civilization.” He also implied that slums had been eradicated by railway construction and slum clearance schemes: “Meanwhile the inhabitants of the slums have been scattered, and though they must carry contamination with them wherever they go, it seems certain that such hotbeds of vice, misery and disease as those from which they have been ousted are not again created.” There were also passing references to the “slum work” and “slum officers” of the Salvation Army; to model dwellings on the site of “pestilential rookeries”; and a tendency to associate “slums” with minority ethnic groups.8 Overall, from Booth’s perspective, slums were places of the past, and there was little room for the language of “slum” in his social scientific world of classification into “poverty classes” and color-​ coded mapping.

202   RICHARD DENNIS

Early Social Surveys of Particular Localities A first wave of social surveys in the 1830s and 1840s had been initiated by the Statistical Society of London, which undertook numerous surveys, for example in Westminster, St George’s-​in-​the-​East, and Church Lane, St Giles’. Some of these surveys covered entire parishes, within which housing and social conditions varied, but in St Giles’ the Society examined a mere twelve houses in one street. This set a precedent for a kind of slum literature that highlighted areas already assumed to be in need of improvement or clearance, but ignored other, possibly equally poor, localities—​a form of self-​fulfilling prophecy that only served to reinforce current perceptions. The report on Church Lane gave “a picture in detail of human wretchedness, filth, and brutal degradation.” All ages and genders, relatives and strangers, healthy and sick, dying and dead were “herded together,” making it “physically impossible to preserve the ordinary decencies of life.”9 Condemning “the system of sub-​letting in almost universal operation in the houses inspected,” the survey established the parameters for subsequent social investigations of particular localities. The statistics collected by the society enumerated the size (cubic capacity) of each dwelling, the number, sex, and age of occupants, their occupations, the quantity and quality of their furniture, and the cleanliness (or not) of the living environment; yet the conclusions also drew inferences about morality that were unsupported by the quantitative evidence. The report alluded to “persons calling themselves dealers, who are probably thieves” and “young men and lads, of ages varying from 11 to 30, known as pickpockets and thieves of various degrees.”10

Social Reformers and Explorers Importantly, “slums” were not confined to the East End, where Booth was to concentrate his original study. Of the “rookeries” discussed in detail by Thomas Beames, only Ratcliffe Highway was in the East End. Jacob’s Island was in south-​east London, and Saffron Hill in Holborn, but St Giles’, Berwick Street (Soho) and Pye Street (Westminster) were all West End localities.11 John Hollingshead’s locations of gross overcrowding in his Ragged London in 1861 were still more widespread, implying that poverty, overcrowding, and insanitary living conditions existed everywhere. Chapter titles included “Clerkenwell and the City Borders,” “The Back of Whitechapel,” “St George’s in the East,” “Behind Shoreditch,” “Near Westminster Abbey,” “Near Regent Street,” “Near King’s Cross,” “Marylebone and the Outskirts,” and “Over the Water” (Bermondsey and Waterloo). Hollingshead

Social Geographies of Poverty    203 complained that “we have been too much accustomed of late years to look upon certain notorious localities as representing the only plague spots in London. . . . We have heard enough of Saffron Hill.” He purposely omitted St Giles’ and Saffron Hill from his survey “because they no longer represent the worst parts of London.”12 He alluded to “black kitchens and sewer-​like courts and alleys,” “black holes,” “ill-​constructed, ill-​ventilated lurking nests of dwellings,” “colonies” of Irish, Dutch Jews, and English. “Black” was his favorite adjective—​we encounter “black courts and alleys,” “low, black houses,” and “black windows,” all in one paragraph on “the Finsbury side” of Shoreditch13—​preparing us for Charles Booth’s use of “black” to denote the “lowest class” on his Descriptive Map nearly thirty years later. But, until he reached the vicinity of Westminster Abbey, where he used the word four times in three pages, always in the plural and on the first occasion qualified by quotation marks, Hollingshead eschewed use of the word “slum.” It was, he noted, a “slang word” popularized by Cardinal Wiseman, Catholic archbishop of Westminster, who in 1850 described the “congealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums” in the vicinity of the abbey. Hollingshead reinforced the iconography of blackness by noting “nearly seventy” streets and alleys in the vicinity of Victoria Street (a new street cut through the “Devil’s Acre” in the early 1850s) “that may be marked with a black cross.” He also devoted sections of his text to peripheral areas—​Agar Town in King’s Cross and the Potteries in Kensington—​which were more like twentieth-​century shantytowns: huts “built of old rubbish.” But he was reluctant to use the shorthand “slum.”14 Even by the 1880s, “slum” was rarely used to describe a specific locality. In How the Poor Live (1883), George Sims employed the term “slum” as the place “where Lazarus lays his head . . . at the very gates of the mighty millionaire [Dives, in Jesus’s parable of Dives and Lazarus].” Slums were where “gin-​palaces flourish,” but also where “honest workers are forced to live.” In Sims’s eyes, responsibility for the slums lay with rich landlords who exploited their tenants and unscrupulous employers who underpaid their employees. He acknowledged that “if you gave some of the slumites Buckingham Palace they would make it a pigsty in a fortnight,” but he regarded their degenerate behavior as a consequence of the dehumanizing effects of living in poverty, and he placed enormous faith in the prospective effects of compulsory education on future generations of slum-​dwellers. As a popular journalist and playwright (a common combination of activities among social explorers), he favored incident, anecdote, and quirkiness as ways of conveying the awfulness of the slums to his middle-​class readers; and he insisted on the literal monotony—​“all is a monotone—​a sombre gray deepening into the blackness of night”—​of slums. For Sims, as for novelists such as Arthur Morrison, his assertion that “the story of one slum is the story of another” was contradicted by the individual stories that populated his text.15 Sims’s entrée to slum dwellings was facilitated by accompanying School Board Visitors on their daily business. Charles Booth was to use the same assistants more systematically and comprehensively a few years later.

204   RICHARD DENNIS

Slum Novels Charles Dickens’s magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round, made frequent reference to “back slums” and to slums worldwide, but nearly always in an airy, impressionistic way. In his novels, Dickens preferred phrases and associations that defined the “slum” without ever calling it by name. Saffron Hill and Jacob’s Island in Oliver Twist (1838) were real, mappable places; “Tom-​All-​Alone’s” in Bleak House (1853) was a construct of Dickens’s imagination; but in each case readers were offered a guide to lead them safely through the labyrinth. Oliver is led by the Artful Dodger “from the Angel into St. John’s Road,” then “down the small street which terminates at Sadler’s Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-​in-​the-​ Hole; thence into Little Saffron Hill; and so into Saffron Hill the Great.” Dickens himself acts as authoritative guide to Jacob’s Island. But, as with Saffron Hill, we approach from what would have been familiar to his readers(“the church at Rotherhithe”) to what he assumed they knew nothing about—​“beyond Dockhead.”16 The geography is precise, but hardly one we are encouraged to investigate for ourselves. The same is true of “Tom-​All-​Alone’s,” “a black, dilapidated street, avoided by all decent people.” Here our guide is the proto-​detective, Inspector Bucket, who, with the aid of the local police constable, and armed with “a lighted bull’s-​eye,” leads Mr Snagsby “along the middle of a villainous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water—​though the roads are dry elsewhere—​and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses.”17 The slum is indubitably “other”—​somewhere we should know and worry about but avoid like the plague. On the other hand, each slum is unique in its location, function, and inhabitants. Saffron Hill has “a good many small shops” and “heaps of children,” while its offshoot, Field Lane, is “a commercial colony of itself,” replete with “clothesman,” “shoe-​vamper,” “rag-​merchant,” and its own service economy: “its barber, its coffee-​shop, its beer-​shop, and its fried-​fish warehouse.” By contrast, Jacob’s Island is defined by its waterside location, home to “ballast-​heavers, coal-​whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the raff and refuse of the river.”18 What Jacob’s Island and “Tom-​All-​Alone’s” share is that they are both “in chancery”—​left to decay while lawyers squabble interminably over who owns or has rights to exploit them. Dickens’s successor as novelist of London life, George Gissing, also emphasizes both his readers’ need of a guide—​his first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880) begins with the injunction to “walk with me, reader, into Whitecross Street”—​and the theatricality of slum life, although he, too, rarely uses the word “slum.” Most uses are associated with characters’ thoughts and opinions, or with the slum as a type of neighborhood, rarely with the narrator’s description of particular places, indicating how careful Gissing was not to label areas. The radical printer, Mr Tollady, rails against the “men in England

Social Geographies of Poverty    205 whose private wealth would suffice to buy up every one of the vile slums we have just been traversing, and build fresh, healthy streets in their place, and the men still remain wealthy.” In contrast, the West End society artist, Gresham, warns his ward, Helen, against visiting “these pestilence-​breeding slums.”19 In his next published novel, The Unclassed (1884), Gissing constructs an imaginary slum, “Litany Lane,” but places it so precisely, close to Westminster Abbey, that it is hard to dispute the inference that it was based on the real St Ann’s Lane, fictionalized so that its ownership could be transferred to “Mr Woodstock,” an unforgiving landlord who repents too late and dies of typhus, contracted on a visit to his property.20 Despite “Litany Lane” playing a prominent role in the novel, the word “slums” (always in the plural) appears only four times. Even in The Nether World (1889), Gissing’s most famous “slum novel,” there are only three references to “slum,” one of which alludes to another imaginary location, “Shooter’s Gardens,” where Gissing employs a shorthand description which perfectly illustrates the difference between outsiders’ and insiders’ views of “slums”: Needless to burden description with further detail; the slum was like any other slum; filth, rottenness, evil odors, possessed these dens of superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination. The inhabitants of course felt nothing of the sort; a room in Shooter’s Gardens was the only kind of home that most of them knew or desired.21

A final reference in The Nether World reminds us that slums were not confined to inner cities. It describes the new home, in Crouch End, even today more suburb than inner city, of characters who seek to escape the worst of Clerkenwell: for the present, Crouch End is still able to remind one that it was in the country a very short time ago. The streets have a smell of newness, of dampness; the bricks retain their complexion, the stucco has not rotted more than one expects in a year or two; poverty tries to hide itself with venetian blinds, until the time when an advanced guard of houses shall justify the existence of the slum.22

In Arthur Morrison’s Tales of Mean Streets (1894), the word “slum” appears only to describe places that are not slums. The “Introduction: A Street” describes a typical East End street, noting that “many such turnings, of as many grades of decency, are set between this and the nearest slum.” “On the Stairs” begins with a house that “had been ‘genteel,’ ” was now occupied by eight families, smelt “of many things, none of them pleasant,” and fronted on a street that was “always muddy:” “but for all that, it was not a slum.”23 And in A Child of the Jago (1896), despite the story’s focus on a loosely disguised version of what others called “the blackest slum,” the only use of the word is where Morrison parodies supporters of “the Elevation Mission” who believed “that the whole East End was a wilderness of slums; slums packed with starving human organisms, without minds and without morals.”24

206   RICHARD DENNIS The point does not need belaboring. In the hands of writers of sensitivity, “slums” are located in political and moral discourse, not in geographical space. “Slum” is other people’s shorthand; “slum” is the vocabulary of light entertainment, not serious analysis.

And so to Booth Novelists and social explorers tended to focus on specific localities that already had a reputation for moral or physical degradation. By contrast, Booth’s survey claimed to investigate everywhere (or, at least, everywhere the School Board Visitors, who were his principal source of topographically organized information, had knowledge of local people). There have been careful evaluations of the School Board Visitors (SBVs) by Bales and by Englander and O’Day.25 Acknowledging the shortcoming that the SBVs knew only about families with children, Bales demonstrates the range of checks that both Booth at the time and critical researchers more recently have undertaken to confirm the reliability of findings derived from the information they supplied. Previous evaluations of Booth’s poverty statistics and mapping have mostly concentrated on the East End, where Booth and his colleagues interviewed the SBVs about each dwelling in turn, compiling notebooks that, in effect, reproduced the SBVs’ own annual house-​to-​house visitations. Each household was recorded with its street address, weekly rent, number of rooms occupied, occupation of household head, number of children of school age (and of pre-​and post-​school age, where known), weekly wages, other information considered relevant (such as the employment of spouses and youths), and its assignment to one of eight classes, labelled from A (poorest) to H (least poor). Bales reported that among a random sample of 1,576 households taken from the notebooks, income was recorded in only 16.8 percent of cases, but rent in 94 percent and an exact occupation (from which it was possible to estimate income) in 87 percent of cases. Bales also made comparisons between Booth’s data, collected in the winter of 1886–​1887 and the census conducted in 1881, finding a high degree of correspondence between the two, despite the frequency of residential mobility among short-​term tenants. Deficiencies in the data related to transiency and to the fear of violence and infection that SBVs experienced in some areas.26 Using this household data, Booth could calculate the percentage of the population in each of the eight poverty classes in each street, school board block, and school board division. Each street was also assigned to one of seven color-​classes, but allowance was made for streets where there was a disorderly element among a mainly very poor but essentially honest population, by adding a black stripe to otherwise “dark blue” streets. The fact that there were eight classes of household—​A to H (Table 11.1)—​but only seven classes of street—​Black to Yellow (Table 11.2)—​should alert us that poverty classes cannot be directly related to colors on the map. Black streets were rarely composed entirely of Class A inhabitants, and Class A inhabitants were not entirely confined to black streets. All streets were to some degree “mixed.” Indeed, this was the anxiety of many moral and social reformers—​that the “deserving poor” (in Booth’s classes C and D)

Social Geographies of Poverty    207 Table 11.1 Booth’s Classification of Households A

The lowest class of occasional laborers, loafers, and semi-​criminals

B

Casual earnings –​“very poor”

C

Intermittent earnings –​together with Class D, the “poor”

D

Small regular earnings –​together with Class C, the “poor”

E

Regular standard earnings –​above the line of poverty

F

Higher class labor

G

Lower middle class

H

Upper middle class

Table 11.2 Booth’s Classification of Streets Black

Lowest class. Vicious, semi-​criminal

Dark Blue

Very poor, casual. Chronic want

Light Blue

Poor. 18s. to 21s. a week for a moderate family

Purple

Mixed. Some comfortable, others poor

Pink

Fairly comfortable. Good ordinary earnings

Red

Middle-​class. Well-​to-​do

Yellow

Upper-​middle and upper classes. Wealthy

might be corrupted or “de-​moralised” by living among the undeserving or inadequate (Classes A and B). Topalov has argued that the eightfold classification was underscored by “a series of binary oppositions” that Booth wanted to make clear—​differentiating between the “poor” (Classes A–​D) and the “working-​class but comfortable” (Classes E–​F); between “disorder” (Class A) and “the true problem of poverty” (Classes B–​D); and between irregular or “intermittent” work (Class C) and low-​paid but regular employment (Class D) as causes of poverty.27 Despite this ambiguity, there has been a worrying tendency, especially among geographers and planners using Booth’s maps uncritically to make comparisons with present-​day geographies of poverty, to conflate the classifications of households and streets. Part of the problem is attributable to Booth himself, who oversimplified in explaining that “Black” streets corresponded to Class A, “Dark Blue” to Class B, “Light Blue” to a mixture of Classes C and D, “Purple” to a mix of C and D with E and F, and even some of Class B, “Pink” to E and F with some G, but with no servants, “Red” to middle-​class families with one or two servants, “Yellow” to wealthy families with three or more servants, and whose houses were rated at £100 or more.28 Yet even in “St Hubert Street,” the anonymized example used in the opening volume of Booth’s survey to illustrate a “black” street, of fifty-​nine families with children, only

208   RICHARD DENNIS thirteen were assigned to Class A, thirty-​nine to Class B, and the remaining seven to Classes C–​F. Perhaps the forty-​four households who had no children and could not be classified by the SBVs were all deserving of Class A, but this seems unlikely. It seems, rather, that it was the impression of the street that assigned it to blackness: An awful place: the worst street in the district. The inhabitants are mostly of the lowest class [sic], and seem to lack all idea of cleanliness or decency. . . The property is all very old, and it has been patched up and altered until it is difficult to distinguish one house from another. . . . The property throughout is in a very bad condition, unsanitary and overcrowded. . . . A number of the rooms are occupied by prostitutes of the most pronounced order.29

In Volume II, “Streets and Population Classified,” Booth provided copious details of many more “sample streets.” Some “black” streets were identified by their real names, but most of the sample streets were anonymized. O’Day and Englander have de-​ anonymized these streets, demonstrating that they were drawn from all over London, not just from the East End. This reveals that, even outside the areas of East London, Central London, and Battersea, the three parts of London where all households were enumerated separately, there were household-​by-​household enumerations, at least of the “sample streets.” O’Day and Englander note that this information was derived from a more diverse set of sources than just the SBVs’ notebooks, especially including house-​ to-​house reports by clergy and missionaries. Apart from four black streets (all in Covent Garden), Booth’s published sample comprised five streets painted “dark blue with black line,” seventeen “dark blue,” twenty “light blue,” twenty “purple,” and four “pink.”30 Booth penned a brief addendum on another “black” street—​Little Clarendon Street in Somers Town (north of Euston Road). This was in an area beyond the house-​to-​ house enumeration where the notebooks simply recorded the number of scheduled dwellings, and the total number of children aged 3 to 13 in each poverty class. In Little Clarendon Street, there were 105 children of school age, distributed across fifty-​three dwellings, twenty assigned to Class A, and eighty-​five to Class B.31 How this assignment was reached is unclear. In the East End we can assume that the allocation was made by Booth or one of his colleagues as they interviewed the SBVs about each family; but farther west, where all that is recorded statistically is a single line of aggregate scores for each street, it is unclear whether it was the SBVs who made the decisions and returned their aggregate scores or whether it was still one of Booth’s team, who kept a running total of their decisions without bothering to record the details of each household. Many of the totals, as in Little Clarendon Street, are suspiciously round numbers.

Booth’s “Slums” Poverty in the West End and suburbs tends not to be apparent at any but the most local scales. In Booth’s Appendix to Volume II, classifying the population in 503 school-​board blocks, in only fourteen blocks were more than 5 percent allocated to Class A, and in

Social Geographies of Poverty    209 only fifty-​six blocks were more than 20 percent in Classes A and B. Intriguingly, most of these blocks were in Finsbury and Southwark School Board Districts. Very few were in East London (Figure 11.1). The reason is in part a statistical quirk: the average population of school-​board blocks in Southwark was only 5,550 and in Finsbury 8,235, compared to 11,792 in Tower Hamlets. In particular, “From Whitechapel to Bethnal Green” comprised one enormous “block” with a population of nearly 34,000. Few concentrations of extreme poverty were sufficiently extensive to add up to even a quarter of the total population in such large districts; concentrations were more likely to register statistically where blocks were small, as around Goswell Road in Finsbury, and in parts of Southwark, Bermondsey, and Rotherhithe. Suburban poverty also struggled for visibility at the block scale, submerged in some very large blocks, but genuinely absent from blocks with very small populations. Booth himself noted that “in the West End there are six separate districts, each containing much poverty, partly lost in the figures given in our tables, because well-​to-​do or wealthy streets lying contiguous and so included in the same School Board block, reduce the poverty shown.” He named the areas as Westminster, Lisson Grove,

Figure 11.1  The percentage of inhabitants in Classes A and B in each school board block in London in 1889. “Appendix. Table I. Classification and Description of the Population of London, 1887–​1889, by School Board Blocks and Divisions,” in Charles Booth, ed., Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume II: Streets and Population Classified [London: Macmillan, 1892]

210   RICHARD DENNIS The Lock Bridge (Westbourne Park), Kensal New Town, St Clement’s Road (Notting Dale), and Wandsworth Bridge Road.32 The Descriptive Map indicated clusters of “black” and “dark blue” streets in inner urban areas (Figure 11.2), but it did not extend to all suburban areas or to all of the blocks for which statistics were compiled. Of the 503 blocks, 161 lay partly or entirely beyond the limits of the map, and streets within the City of London, which comprised two large blocks, each with more than 20,000 inhabitants, were also left uncolored on the map. If we wish to identify potential “slums,” we must necessarily have recourse to the manuscript notebooks in the Booth Archive. Extreme poverty was usually confined to a few back streets, courts, and former mews, hidden from public gaze, or to similarly limited clusters of suburban streets that had been jerry-​built, located next to a noxious facility such as a gasworks, situated in an unhealthy, ill-​drained area, or simply built at the wrong time so that landlords had subdivided dwellings to accommodate several families, each paying a modest rent. Once a district acquired an unsavory reputation it was difficult to redeem it. Indeed, unless swift action was taken, its influence might “infect” neighboring streets.33

Figure 11.2  Streets colored “black,” “dark (occasionally light) blue with a black bar,” and “dark blue” on Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889. For the meaning of “black” and “dark blue,” see Table 11.2. Reeder, David, Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889 [London: London Topographical Society, 1984]

Social Geographies of Poverty    211 In the East End, there were numerous “black” or “dark blue barred [with a blackline]” streets, but they were not so different from their neighbors. There were no “yellow” (wealthy) streets on Booth’s maps of east London, and the only “red” (middle-​class) streets were associated with trade or commerce where proprietors lived over or behind their business premises (as along Whitechapel and Commercial Roads). Despite the horror stories associated with the Old Nichol (Shoreditch) or with Dorset Street (Spitalfields),34 these areas were not so different from nearby “dark blue” streets. It was hard for local authorities or philanthropic developers to know where to begin slum clearance, especially given that the worst streets morally or economically might not correspond exactly with those in the worst physical condition. In the West End, there were more obvious “black spots,” feared by respectable neighbors, “cancers” that needed to be eradicated before they “infected” the rest of the body. Moreover, the West End poor were hardly unaware of their neighbors’ relative prosperity. It was easier to feel the injustice of inequality. There was a symbiotic relationship between poor and wealthy neighbors that worked both positively and negatively: more jobs for slum-​dwellers, especially women, as charwomen, laundresses, and office-​cleaners in nearby premises; more opportunities for hawking and flower-​selling on the streets of nearby neighborhoods; plentiful charitable activity, especially directed at poor children, widows, and the elderly; but also more opportunities for petty crime and begging, and more conscious-​stricken and possibly gullible middle-​class passers-​ by. In many ways, “slums,” as products of the middle-​class imagination, were easier to identify in the West End than the East End. Yet Booth did not routinely collect household data in West End and suburban localities. For streets that lay in parts of London surveyed street-​by-​street rather than house-​by-​house, how did Booth differentiate between “black,” “dark blue with a black line” (also known as “dark blue barred”) and “dark blue” streets? Were these streets subject to redevelopment, in official “slum clearance” schemes or other forms of demolition and reconstruction, or to improvement or rehabilitation in the decades following his survey? Between 1897 and 1900, Booth’s investigators and especially his personal secretary, George H. Duckworth, revised the street-​by-​street survey, accompanying local police officers around their neighborhoods and amending the colors of streets as they went, for example “was d.b. now l.b.” or “add a black line to d.b. of map.” This was clearly an impressionistic and summary kind of revision. But both surveys (in the late 1880s and late 1890s) also contain brief descriptions of the social and physical conditions, and often comments on changes that were occurring. The revised maps, using Stanford’s 1:10560 series as a base, were published in 1902–​1903, though dated as referring to the situation in 1898–​1899. This is the edition that is freely accessible online via the London School of Economics’ Charles Booth website.35 Booth’s team summarily assumed that many streets in west London were all of one class. For example, in North Marylebone, Devonshire Street, Manning Place, Suffolk Place, Charles Street, and George Street were returned in 1889 as inhabited by 605 children aged 3–​13, all of whom were assigned to Class B (Table 11.3). And all five streets

7

80

10

46

50

George Street

Devonshire Place

Orcus Street

Nightingale Street

20

15

15

7

4

Bulls Head Court

Great Peter Street

St Anne’s Street

St Anne’s Court

3

11

Anne’s Place

St Anne’s Lane

9

68

10

Blue Anchor Court

Chadwick Street

40

122

Charles Street

Westminster

123

Suffolk Place

10

80

Manning Place

B

273

A

Devonshire Street

North Marylebone

Street

5

9

10

20

C

15

10

D

25

40

E

F

No. of children aged 3–​13 G

3

4

7

50

25

11

9

108

109

116

90

7

122

123

80

273

Total 3-​13

Dark Blue

Black

Black

DB with Bl.

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Black

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

Dark Blue with Bl.

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Color in 1889

DB and LB

DEMOLISHED

Black/​Light Blue

Dark Blue

DEMOLISHED

DEMOLISHED

Dark Blue

Black

Black

Dark Blue

Dark Blue with Bl.

Pink

Pink

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Light Blue

Color in 1899

“e. side d.b. as map, w. side l.b. as map;" w. side inc. Westminster Building “a worse block than any of the others round here”

Replaced by Peabody estate (opened 1922)

Replaced by Peabody estate (opened 1922)

Replaced by Peabody estate (opened 1922)

“worst street in the subdivision”; demolished c.1903

South side demolished by Great Central Railway

“as bad as Nightingale St”

Also rebuilding

Now Ranston St, rebuilt with model cottages

Still Dark Blue in 1899 at northwestend

Comments

Table 11.3 Selected Streets as Recorded in Booth Notebooks (1889), Police Notebooks (1899) and “Descriptive Maps” (1889, 1899)

15

Johnson Street

70

Sultan St District

30

40

20

Rock Avenue

Walham Avenue

Lodge Avenue

35

40

Bulow Road

Victoria Road

“Slopers Island”

30

Grove Avenue

Walham Green

100

Bangor Street

Suburban “Slums”

20

Little Clarendon St

Somers Town

Romney Place

100

78

17

84

47

62

249

23

40

85

16

30

Holland Street

10

13

St Anne’s Buildings

104

35

40

40

20

30

552

20

20

360

20

155

40

21

40

3

244

148

77

164

97

122

1410

123

175

105

36

40

13

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

Black

DB with Bl.

Black

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

Dark Blue

LB with DB

Dark Blue

Light Blue

LB and DB

LB and Purple

DB with Bl.

DB with Bl.

Black

Light Blue

DB with Bl.

DEMOLISHED

DEMOLISHED

“the worst part of the subdivision”

“perhaps the most notorious street [in the neighbourhood]”

west end DB, east end Purple

“the worst spot in the immediate neighbourhood”, known locally as “Little Hell”

Replaced by Westminster Vestry Depot

Described in 1889 as “like Peabody” (but worse, given d.b. notation), NOT scheduled for clearance, but no longer marked on 1895 OS map

214   RICHARD DENNIS were entered in the notebook as unambiguously “Dark Blue.” We might speculate that, for this succession of undoubtedly poor streets, it was first determined that they were “dark blue” and then, for the sake of brevity, their entire populations were condemned to the class closest to “dark blue,” that is, Class B. Yet, among this run of “dark blue” streets, Williams Street, marked “purple” and described as “mixed with small shopkeepers & very poor laborers,” had a correspondingly mixed allocation of children, B31, D20, E30, and F10, implying at least a more nuanced form of estimate. Charles Street had acquired notoriety a few years prior to Booth’s survey in W. T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” exposure in the Pall Mall Gazette (1885) and this did not go unmentioned in the notebook: “Noted street. Armstrong family live here. Father of girl Eliza is now in lunatic asylum. Wretchedly poor.” This is hardly evidence of Booth or his team seeking to counter or ignore sensationalist accounts of slum life.36 Another nearby street, Devonshire Place, was home to ninety children, ten in Class A and eighty in Class B. Devonshire Place was first entered as “Black,” subsequently altered by the addition of “Dark Blue and,” which was how it appeared on the map. Additional information was provided in December 1890 by a local Anglican curate: a careful, and immaculately transcribed, report on the circumstances of each family, noting, for example, who were Roman Catholics, what jobs were followed (and sometimes where, for example at Callard & Bowser’s in Duke’s Place, Euston Road, “specially noted for their butterscotch,” or at Smithfield Market, or on the Great Western Railway), and who was “decent,” teetotal, “drank,” or gambled; but unlike the East End notebooks there was no information on rents or earnings. Nevertheless, each household was assigned a letter grade, and the report on Devonshire Place ended with an estimated distribution of households: A21, B35, C11, D2, totaling sixty-​nine. This is very different from the distribution of children, cited above, and also different from the distribution for “Little Tarlton Street,” identified by O’Day and Englander as Devonshire Place, one of the “Sample Streets” for which statistics were printed in Volume II. There, the figures (for the total population) appear as A58, B137, C41, D30, E8, totaling 274.37 North Marylebone was subject to slum clearance or improvement by private initiative rather than designation under the Cross Act (1875) or the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890), the legislation that facilitated intervention by local authorities including, in London, the Metropolitan Board of Works and its successor, the London County Council (LCC). By 1898, Orcus Street, which had been dark blue with a black bar in 1889, had been partially demolished by the Great Central Railway to make way for a coal depot outside its new Marylebone terminus. The remaining north side of the street, one continuous two-​story terrace, “fair character, but some of the houses are squalid,” was rated “light to dark blue in character” but marked on the revised map with a thick band of dark blue. Orcus Street was eventually demolished and redeveloped by St Marylebone Borough Council as the Fisherton Street Estate in 1924, sufficiently attractive to be designated a conservation area in 1990. Nightingale Street, a few blocks south, remained in 1898 as it had been earlier: “dark blue with a black line,” yet the revised map showed it thickly black, matching its description as “the worst street in the sub-​division.” But by 1904, it had been replaced by Nightingale Street Buildings (now Morris House),

Social Geographies of Poverty    215 under the auspices of the Marylebone Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes.38 Devonshire Place’s “small & dilapidated houses,” to which the word “condemned” had been attached in the 1889 notebook, were still intact a decade later, still “dark blue lined with black,” described as “nearly all one roomed people: costers’ barrows and filth about; hateful women at the windows: very rough and drunken: as bad as Nightingale St and even viler in appearance.” Yet it was not until the early 1930s that Devonshire Place was replaced by flats erected by the St Marylebone Housing Association. Meanwhile, Charles Street had benefitted from Stead’s “Maiden Tribute” publicity, renamed Ranston Street, and “improved” by the erection of model cottages by Octavia Hill. It was regraded “pink.”39 This story, of partial demolition and selective improvement, was repeated in the streets south of Victoria Street and west of Westminster Abbey, the partially displaced residue of the “Devil’s Acre,” a “rookery” featured in an essay by Alexander Mackay in Dickens’s Household Words.40 By the time Booth arrived, the area closest to Victoria Street had been cleared under the Cross Act and was being added to an already extensive Peabody Trust (philanthropic housing) presence along Old Pye Street. This did not stop Booth from designating the (non-​Peabody) parts of the street “dark blue,” although the only four children living there were all assigned to Class E (“above the line of poverty”). The justification was that the street was “orig. notorious for every kind of vice, had common lodging houses.”41 Two truly “black spots” survived: New Peter Street (better known as Chadwick Street) housed 108 school-​age children, forty Class A and sixty-​eight Class B. Its population comprised “prostitutes, thieves, general dealers, hawkers, etc.” In 1899 it was still “black,” literally so in Ernest Aves’ description: “2 and 3 st. houses; black and grimy; open doors dirty children and bad-​faced women; all the normal signs of physical neglect and moral degradation.” Of three small courts between Chadwick Street and Great Peter Street, all “dark blue” in 1889, one was “down” by 1899, but it was not until after the First World War that the complex was replaced by a Peabody Trust estate.42 As ever, this raises the question: where did the displaced slum-​dwellers go? There was also “black” in 1889 in St Ann’s Court, off St Ann’s Street, where the small number of children were all assigned to Class A, and the population summarized as “Beggars & loafers –​wouldn’t wk.” By 1899, only one house in the court remained, most having been replaced by a billiard-​table works. Nearby St Ann’s Lane (“dark blue” in Booth’s survey) matched “Litany Lane” in Gissing’s The Unclassed (1884). In 1861 Hollingshead had described “a narrow street called St Anne’s Lane” and “a fearful side-​ court called St Anne’s Place.” He wondered “whether such filth and squalor can ever be exceeded.” St Anne’s Place “had every feature of a sewer, and . . . a long puddle of sewage soaking in the hollow centre.”43 Gissing’s fictional account seems to elaborate on Hollingshead: “Two posts set up at the entrance to the Lane showed that it was no thoroughfare for vehicles.” Most of the buildings were “ordinary lodging-​houses, the front-​ doors standing wide open as a matter of course, exhibiting a dusky passage, filthy stairs, with generally a glimpse right through into the yard in the rear.” In Gissing’s Jubilee

216   RICHARD DENNIS Court, equivalent to St Anne’s Place, “the paving was in evil repair, forming here and there considerable pools of water, the stench and the colour whereof led to the supposition that the inhabitants facilitated domestic operations by emptying casual vessels out of the windows. . . . The Court was a cul de sac, and at the far end stood a receptacle for ashes, the odour from which was intolerable.” Gissing’s observation that “almost all the window-​sills displayed flower-​pots, and, despite the wretched weather, several little bird-​cages hung out from the upper storeys” is so contrary to the rest of the account that it must surely be true of the real court.44 Interviewed by Booth’s assistant in November 1890, the Rev. H. E. Simpson, curate of St Matthew’s, Great Peter Street, explained that St Anne’s Court was “now nearly all pulled down”: “Every house in this place inhabited by prostitutes of the lowest and most degraded type, with one exception, that of a family who earned an honest though precarious living by making paper flowers, while the two boys worked in a neighbouring cabyard.” In St Anne’s Lane, most families attempted to find work. Simpson enumerated a few habitual drunkards, several (very) casual laborers, one with a prostitute partner, and a variety of folk working the streets, as organ grinders or selling flowers, oranges, pocket-​knives, cooking skewers, matches, or firewood. In the district as a whole, he recognized a “lowest class” who never took to “regular honest labour.” He portrayed the inhabitants as “very jealous of each other,” resentful when another of their number received charity ahead of them.45 In different ways, both Gissing and Simpson sought to humanize and even empathize with the people they described. When The Unclassed was reissued in 1895 in a cheaper one-​volume format, Gissing relocated Litany Lane to an unspecified part of the East End. In the popular imagination, slum clearance had eradicated the slums of Westminster and the East End was now a much more credible location for a fictional slum.46 Nevertheless, as Booth demonstrated, poverty and bad housing were still commonplace in the West End, but also migrating into suburbia. Bangor Street in Notting Dale and Sultan Street in Camberwell were well-​publicized suburban slums.47 Other examples are less familiar. In Walham Green, four adjacent avenues, all recently built, had become known as the “Rabbit Warren,” comprising six-​ to eight-​roomed “tenements,” most occupied by three families. Collectively accommodating 120 children of Class A, 210 of Class B, and 130 of Class C, they were all colored “Dark Blue to Black.” Ten years on most of the area was now “light blue,” although at the east end of the estate, there were still elements of “dark blue.” Duckworth recorded houses that were “jerry built, cracking” but “great many now being done up, tenants evicted; they [the landlords] want to raise the rents to 17/​-​& get another class in.” In new houses, “there have been 3 different sets of tenants in these since they were built which was only 12 months ago.” On Walham Avenue, there was the customary litany: “windows broken, patched, doors open, women and girls in frayed skirts & hatless, fetid smell of dirt, costers barrows, vile place.” Yet all these courts were well paved and cleaned by a conscientious local authority.48 The description complements Gissing’s discussion of Crouch End at the end of The Nether World, confirming that in moving out to the suburbs many poor households

Social Geographies of Poverty    217 simply exchanged an old, central slum for a new, peripheral one. The connections are made explicit in another cluster of “dark blue to black” streets, just east of Wandsworth Bridge Road in Fulham, nicknamed “Slopers Island,” where there was an obvious nearby “negative externality” in the shape of Sand’s End Gas Works. Between them Bulow and Victoria Roads, both “dark blue to black” in 1889, accommodated 75 children in Class A, 178 in Class B and 139 in Class C. Neighboring Langford Road, “dark blue,” was let out in “qr. flats” at 3/​-​per week. A decade later, the area was still labeled “poor criminal patch” but the relative standing of streets had shifted. Bulow Road was still “worse than Victoria Road,” which was “Irish, noisy, poor.” Bulow Road’s grading seems to have been based on the number of children “playing on mudheaps & pits,” well-​fed but ill-​dressed (hatless!), “the girls rougher than the boys.” This was a “casual class,” not regularly employed gasworkers. Police Sergeant Stroud, who had previously worked in Holborn, claimed that many of the inhabitants had come “from the courts of central London, round Drury Lane.” Langford Road was now deemed the “worst of the lot” and was colored black on the map. Stroud thought the inhabitants were “drunken, lazy, vicious, rough, ‘as bad as anything round Cromer St or the Drury Lane courts when I was on duty there 11 years ago.’ ”49

Conclusions For all the claims that Booth’s survey represented a more objective and statistically informed approach to poverty, it should be evident that the investigation’s notebooks reproduced many of the tropes of previous social investigators, reflecting the attitudes of his coworkers and informants. It is unsurprising that police officers emphasized the association of poverty with crime and fecklessness, or that they displayed an obvious misogynistic streak, so frequently representing women as drunk, fighting, slovenly, or menacing. These were the people and activities who would stay in their memory, while they took everyday community policing for granted. Equally predictably, clergy sought to excuse the failings of their flock and commended their efforts to find work. They probably had most contact with those willing to accept help, not those who dealt with poverty by taking the law into their own hands. Most of the evidence is observational: open doors, cracked windows, hatless children, loiterers, and discarded bread on the streets, are all interpreted as signs of dysfunctional neighborhoods. Focusing on the raw material in notebooks rather than the published volumes underplays Booth’s structural analysis of poverty. That the statistics are probably estimates and approximations should not concern us unduly; after all, the population being surveyed was highly mobile so, in detail, the class composition would vary from day to day. What the statistics indicate is that a street qualified to be “black” if around 30 percent of its inhabitants/​schoolchildren were assigned to Class A and few, if any, were in Class C or better. “Dark blue” streets rarely had any Class A, but might have a minority in Class C or even D. But even in my limited sample of streets there were exceptions where

218   RICHARD DENNIS context and observation trumped statistics: in Sandilands Road, Fulham, only 21 percent were in Class B, 53 percent in Class C, and nearly 11 percent outside poverty in Class E, but it was colored the same as Cromer Street, King’s Cross, where 58 percent were in Class B, 24 percent Class C, and 18 percent Class D. Holland Street, Westminster, 25 percent Class A and 75 percent Class B, was “dark blue”; it did not even qualify for a black bar like Devonshire Place, Marylebone, which was 11 percent A and 89 percent B. The statistics also indicate that, even with the temptation to assign all the residents to one class, corresponding to the color that had already been judged appropriate, there were residential streets that housed a range of classes across the poverty divide: all classes from A to F lived on Johnson Street, Somers Town; Orcus Street and Nightingale Street accommodated larger numbers in Class A but also substantial minorities in the “relative comfort” of Class E.50 Booth’s concerns were more for the socioeconomic and moral state of the population than for the physical state of the built environment. His interests were closer to those of the moralists and investigative journalists with whom he has often been contrasted than to those of sanitary engineers, medical officers of health, or municipal officials who focused on the built environment and its quantifiable consequences. For Booth and his colleagues, dilapidated houses, broken windows, and raw sewage in the streets were symptoms of neglect, demoralization, and mismanagement rather than proof of the need for “slum clearance.” Some streets were evidently well paved and drained, and yet deserved to be painted black on the map. Many were improvable under the management of a good landlord. Christian Topalov, in rhetorically claiming that “when the LCC began work, in 1889, Booth’s map was in its in-​tray,” implies too close a relationship between Booth’s survey and the practice of slum clearance. Jim Yelling, in his meticulous account of slum clearance by local government in late Victorian and Edwardian London, includes maps on successive pages, first of “Slum clearance schemes and projects, 1875–​1907” and second of “Poverty Streets” (streets marked black or dark blue on Booth’s map).51 The juxtaposition again suggests too close a relationship between Booth and slum clearance. In fact, what Booth’s maps and statistics demonstrate is the degree of social mixing and the intricate interweaving of “black” and “blue” streets with those of higher grades and with non-​residential uses, reasons why slum clearance defined by physical parameters of density, circulation, and dilapidation proved so difficult and so expensive to implement in late Victorian London. Moreover, few responsible social investigators used the term “slum” as a label for specific neighborhoods. “Slum” was the language of sensational journalism or, in the plural, of political and reformist rhetoric. For most of the twentieth century, in the official discourse of social housing programs and urban renewal, slums were defined as inadequate built environments, “unfit for human habitation.” Today, we have few neighborhoods that are physically inadequate, except where they have been made so by lack of maintenance by underfunded local authorities or the greed and neglect of rapacious landlords; but there are numerous districts where overcrowding is associated with multi-​occupancy by low-​income households unable to afford anything better. Booth’s methodology, informally gathering information on a range of social indicators to map

Social Geographies of Poverty    219 the spatial distribution of poverty, foreshadows today’s focus on more systematically calculated indices of multiple deprivation. Both are more appropriate than a resort to the language of “slums.” Booth’s mapping and tabulation of street-​by-​street and block-​by-​block distributions of different “poverty classes” drew attention to concentrations of poverty not only in expected places in the East End and in back courts of Covent Garden, Holborn, and Westminster, but also in suburban districts, often composed of populations displaced by slum clearance and rising property prices in central London. So, today, the suburbanization of poverty merits increasing concern. A report produced by the Smith Institute in March 2019 noted that 60 percent of Londoners living in poverty now live in outer London. In 2004 outer London had 32 percent of London’s wards that were in the “most deprived” decile according to the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government Index of Multiple Deprivation. By 2015 this figure had grown to 47 percent.52 Despite their shortcomings, Booth’s notebooks indicate the range of possible trajectories for areas of extreme poverty. Whether or not a street was redeveloped, improved, or allowed to decay was often due to local and accidental circumstances. New roads and railways might be targeted at “slums”; but, once the routes of lines into St Pancras and Marylebone had been agreed, further clearances in Somers Town and North Marylebone for goods depots and coal yards were mostly determined by the geometry of feasible track layouts, not by identifying particular black spots. Charles Street happened to be where W. T. Stead’s collaborators had procured a “child prostitute,” so it attracted attention from housing reformers ahead of other equally miserable streets. But Devonshire Place, proposed for redevelopment by Marylebone Council in 1898, fell foul of the LCC’s change in housing policy, away from clearance and in favor of cottages on greenfield suburban sites, and it was another thirty years before it was swept away. The LCC had been discouraged by the rehousing obligations and displacement effects of slum clearance schemes: “black spots” were repainted “purple” or even “pink” following redevelopment, but the “black” reappeared, either on adjacent streets or in what had been intended as working-​class or lower middle-​class suburbs. The poor could be displaced to, or rehoused in, physically improved environments, but often their relocation reinforced their poverty, now disadvantaged by remoteness from long-​established support networks, sources of casual employment, and local knowledge. Booth’s prescriptions of higher wages, unemployment insurance, and old age pensions were important, but they failed to cancel out the social costs of displacement, or the labeling of new “slums,” perpetuated today in the language of social exclusion and postcode discrimination.

Notes 1. Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Edward Arnold, 1977); Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the

220   RICHARD DENNIS Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); J. A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986). 2. Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Bodley Head, 2008). 3. For a modern reprint, see David Reeder, Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty 1889 (London: London Topographical Society, 1984). 4. Thomas Beames, The Rookeries of London (London: Bosworth, 1852). 5. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (London: Clarke, 1883); H. M. Hyndman, The Record of an Adventurous Life (London: Macmillan, 1911), 303–​305. 6. Among numerous commentaries and excerpts from Booth’s study, see A. Fried and R. M. Elman, eds., Charles Booth’s London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971); H. W. Pfautz, ed., Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). For a lavish presentation of Booth’s maps and notebooks, drawn from the London School of Economics and Political Science Archive, see Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019); no editor is credited but there are substantial essays by Mary S. Morgan, Anne Power, Katie Garner, Aileen Reid, Jacob F. Field, Sarah Wise, and Inderbir Bhullar, interspersed among reproductions of Booth’s revised maps of 1898–​1899. 7. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume II: Streets and Population Classified (London: Macmillan, 1892), 43. 8. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London Volume I: East, South and Central London (London: Macmillan, 1892), 39, 69–​70, 125, 521, 569, 575, 583. Booth’s first two volumes were published in 1889 and 1891 as Labour and Life of the People. They were reissued in 1892 as the first two volumes of Life and Labour of the People in London, which comprised the whole of what became known as the “Poverty Series.” Further volumes on Industry and Religious Influences followed through the 1890s, and the whole series was republished with a concluding volume (making a 17-​volume set) in 1902–​03. 9. “Report of a Committee of the Statistical Society of London to Investigate the State of the Inhabitants and their Dwellings in Church Lane, St Giles,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 11 (1848): 17. 10. Ibid., 16. 11. Beames, Rookeries; see also George Godwin, London Shadows: A Glance at the “Homes” of the Thousands (London: Routledge, 1854). 12. John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861 (London: Dent, 1986), 8–​10. 13. Ibid., 6–​7, 25, 44. 14. Ibid., 53–​54, 67–​72, 79–​81; Wohl, Eternal Slum, 5. 15. George R. Sims, How the Poor Live (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 6, 15, 17, 28, 29. 16. Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (London: Dent, 1966), 57 (chap. 8), 387–​388 (chap. 50). 17. Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 235 (chap. 16), 330–​ 331 (chap. 22). 18. Dickens, Oliver Twist, 57 (chap. 8), 187 (chap. 26), 388 (chap. 50). 19. George Gissing, Workers in the Dawn (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), 3 (Pt I, chap. 1), 166 (Pt I, chap. 11), 257 (Pt II, chap. 1). 20. George Gissing, The Unclassed: The 1884 Text (Victoria, BC: ELS, 2010). 21. George Gissing, The Nether World (London: Dent, 1973), 74 (chap. 8).

Social Geographies of Poverty    221 22. 23. 24. 25.

Ibid., 364 (chap. 39). Arthur Morrison, Tales of Mean Streets (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1983), 20, 119. Arthur Morrison, A Child of the Jago (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1982), 53–​54 (chap. 2). Rosemary O’Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry (London: Hambledon Press, 1993); David Englander and Rosemary O’Day, eds., Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840–​1914 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995); Kevin Bales, “Charles Booth’s Survey of Life and Labour of the People in London 1889–​1903,” in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–​1940, ed. Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales and K. K. Sklar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 66–​110. 26. Kevin Bales, “Reclaiming Ancient Data: Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey,” Urban History Yearbook (1986): 75–​80. 27. Christian Topalov, “The City as Terra Incognita: Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey and the People of London, 1886–​1891,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993): 395–​425. 28. Booth, Volume II, 40-​1. 29. Booth, Volume I, 7–​11. 30. O’Day and Englander, Inquiry, Appendix I. 31. The description is from Booth, Volume II, 82; the statistics are from LSE: BOOTH/​B/​73, 14. 32. Booth, Volume II, 33. For a wide-​ranging discussion of Notting Dale, see Jerry White’s chapter in this volume. 33. H. J. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 11, no. 1 (1967): 5–​40. 34. Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets; Fiona Rule, The Worst Street in London (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2008). See also Richard Dennis, “Common Lodgings and ‘Furnished Rooms’: Housing in 1880s Whitechapel,” in Jack the Ripper and the East End, ed. Alex Werner (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 141–​179. 35. See “Charles Booth’s London,” https://​booth.lse.ac.uk/​. The website now includes links to scanned copies of all of the Booth Notebooks: the Poverty Notebooks, compiled between 1886 and 1890; the Police Notebooks (1898-​99); and specialist Notebooks dealing with Industry, Religion and the Jewish community. At the time the research reported in this chapter was undertaken, only the Police Notebooks (BOOTH/​B/​346-BOOTH/​B/​376) were available online; all references to the Poverty Notebooks (BOOTH/​B/​8-BOOTH/​B/​ 77) were derived from personal visits to the archive in LSE Library. The complete Booth Archive comprises six sections, classified A-F, in which all the original notebooks are in section B. In the notes following this one, a reference such as BOOTH/B/73, 3a, 161–174 indicates Section B, Notebook 73, pages 3a, 161–174. The page numbers are as penciled in by Booth or his associates, and may differ slightly from the page and image numbers which appear along the top of the pages as reproduced online, e.g. because the cover of a book may appear online as page 1 before the real page 1, or because of mistakes in the original pagination, such as the page 3a noted above. 36. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​73, 3a; Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 37. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​73, 3a, 161-​74; Booth, Volume II, 84-​85, 226; O’Day and Englander, Inquiry, 199. 38. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​73, 30; BOOTH/​B/​357, 245, 249; Fisherton Street Estate Conservation Area Audit (2004), http://​trans​act.west​mins​ter.gov.uk/​docsto​res/​pub​lica​tion​s_​st​ore/​Fisher​ ton%20Str​eet%20Est​ate%20CAA%20SPG.pdf; City of Westminster Archives: MAI/​0732/​16. 39. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​358, 9-​15; Louis de Soissons, “Tenements, Wilcove Place, St. Marylebone, N.W.1,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 41 (1934): 1016–​1020.

222   RICHARD DENNIS 40. Alexander Mackay, “The Devil’s Acre,” Household Words 1 (1850): 297–​301. 41. LSE: BOOTH/​ B/​ 67, 27; see also Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 137–​141. 42. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​67, 23; BOOTH/​B/​360, 248-​50; Christine Wagg and James McHugh, Homes for London: The Peabody Story (London: Peabody, 2017), 27–​28. 43. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​67, 26–​7; BOOTH/​B/​360, 251; Hollingshead, Ragged London, 56. 44. Gissing, The Unclassed, 115–​116. 45. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​67, 117-​23. 46. Richard Dennis, “George Gissing and the ‘Other’ East End,” in Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination, ed. Christine Huguet (Haren, NL: Equilibris, 2010), 35–​48. 47. Joseph Bullman, Neil Hegarty, and Brian Hill, The Secret History of Our Streets (London: BBC Books, 2013), 237–​289; H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1961), 109–​113; Dyos, “Slums,” 29–​33. See also Jerry White’s chapter in this volume. 48. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​66, 88; BOOTH/​B/​361, 171-​5. 49. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​66, 93; BOOTH/​B/​361, 219-​23. 50. LSE: BOOTH/​B/​66, 93; BOOTH/​B/​67, 23; BOOTH/​B/​73, 14, 30, 46. 51. Topalov, “The City,” 412; Yelling, Slums, 53–​56. 52. Paul Hunter, The Unspoken Decline of Outer London. Why is Poverty and Inequality Increasing in Outer London and What Needs to Change? (London: The Smith Institute, 2019), www.smith-​instit​ute.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​03/​The-​unspo​ken-​decl​ine-​ of-​outer-​Lon​don.pdf.

Bibliography Bales, Kevin. “Charles Booth’s Survey of Life and Labour of the People in London, 1889–​1903.” In The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–​1940, edited by Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and K. K. Sklar, 66–​110. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bales, Kevin. “Reclaiming Ancient Data: Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey.” Urban History Yearbook (1986): 75–​80. Beames, Thomas. The Rookeries of London. London: Bosworth, 1852. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London Volume I: East, Central and South London. London: Macmillan, 1892. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London, Volume II: Streets and Population Classified. London: Macmillan, 1892. Booth, Charles. Charles Booth’s London Poverty Maps. London: Thames & Hudson, 2019. Bullman, Joseph, Neil Hegarty, and Brian Hill. The Secret History of Our Streets. London: BBC Books, 2013. Dennis, Richard. “Common Lodgings and ‘Furnished Rooms’: Housing in 1880s Whitechapel.” In Jack the Ripper and the East End, edited by Alex Werner, 141–​179. London: Chatto & Windus, 2008. Dennis, Richard. “George Gissing and the ‘Other’ East End.” In Writing Otherness: The Pathways of George Gissing’s Imagination, edited by Christine Huguet, 35–​48. Haren, NL: Equilibris, 2010. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist (1838). Reprint, London: Dent, 1966.

Social Geographies of Poverty    223 Dickens, Charles. Bleak House (1853). Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Dyos, H. J. “The Slums of Victorian London.” Victorian Studies 11, no. 1 (1967): 5–​40. Dyos, H. J. Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1961. Englander, David, and Rosemary O’Day, eds. Retrieved Riches: Social Investigation in Britain, 1840–​1914. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995. Fried, A., and R. M. Elman, eds. Charles Booth’s London. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Gissing, George. The Nether World (1889). Reprint, London: Dent, 1973. Gissing, George. The Unclassed: The 1884 Text. Victoria BC: ELS, 2010. Gissing, George. Workers in the Dawn (1880). Reprint, Brighton: Harvester, 1985. Godwin, George. London Shadows: A Glance at the “Homes” of the Thousands. London: Routledge, 1854. Hollingshead, John. Ragged London in 1861. London: Dent, 1986. Hunter, Paul. The Unspoken Decline of Outer London. Why is Poverty and Inequality Increasing in Outer London and What Needs to Change? London: The Smith Institute, 2019. www.smith-​ instit​ute.org.uk/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2019/​03/​The-​unspo​ken-​decl​ine-​of-​outer-​Lon​don.pdf Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Mearns, Andrew. The Bitter Cry of Outcast London. London: Clarke, 1883. Morrison, Arthur. A Child of the Jago (1896). Reprint, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1982. Morrison, Arthur. Tales of Mean Streets (1894). Reprint, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1983. O’Day, Rosemary, and David Englander. Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry. London: Hambledon Press, 1993. Pfautz, H. W., ed. Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Reeder, David. Charles Booth’s Descriptive Map of London Poverty, 1889. London: London Topographical Society, 1984. “Report of a Committee of the Statistical Society of London to Investigate the State of the Inhabitants and their Dwellings in Church Lane, St Giles,” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 11 (1848): 1–​18. Rule, Fiona. The Worst Street in London. Hersham: Ian Allan, 2008. Stedman Jones, Gareth. Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. Topalov, Christian. “The City as Terra Incognita: Charles Booth’s Poverty Survey and the People of London, 1886–​1891,” Planning Perspectives 8 (1993): 395–​425. Walkowitz, Judith. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-​Victorian London. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992. Wise, Sarah. The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. London: Bodley Head, 2008. Wohl, Anthony S. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. London: Edward Arnold, 1977. Yelling, J. A. Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London. London: Allen & Unwin, 1986.

CHAPTER 12

HOW SLUMM I NG MA KE S THE SLUM FABIAN FRENZEL

How does a slum come into existence? Many scholars address the material conditions that explain the emergence and existence of slums. But how do slums become visible in society, a “matter of concern,” something that matters not only to those who live in slums, but also those who see them from the outside? This “discursive” slum-​making functions through words, images, thought, and argument. It led to the “discovery” of urban poverty as a (curious) phenomenon, as a social problem, and eventually as part and parcel of the burning “social question” in the nineteenth century. And all of this is anchored in the social practice of “slumming.” Slumming can be interpreted in different ways. The term refers in part to forms of urban tourism in slums, face-​to-​face and direct-​experience driven. These forms are commonly believed to originate in Victorian London, where it was a popular pastime of the London bourgeoisie, driven by thrill and curiosity. Slumming consisted of temporal visits and tours of the London East End, sometimes protected by police, often undertaken in groups and increasingly organized. Over the last two decades, a number of studies have appeared that historically interrogate slumming not only in Victorian London but also in many other cities. This research has uncovered the widespread nature of slumming in North American and European cities around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.1 Beyond this historical slumming, more contemporary forms of slumming—​in Asia, Latin America, and Africa—​have emerged since the 1990s and are now also being interrogated in interdisciplinary perspectives, from geography and anthropology to cultural studies, sociology, and urban studies, under umbrella terms such as slum tourism, poverty tourism, or developmental tourism.2 Since the end of apartheid, for example, township tourism has become an established feature of South African tourism, with estimates suggesting that up to a quarter of all international tourists visit a township during their stay in South Africa.3 In Rio de Janeiro, at least 100,000 visits to the city’s favelas are conducted in tours each year, notwithstanding intensified security concerns

How Slumming Makes the Slum    225 since 2014.4 The literature reflecting on the various aspects of contemporary slumming is vast.5 Beyond corporal travel, involving visits to slums, slumming can also be understood as a literary practice, an imaginary journey into slums, enabled by the consumption of novels and newspapers, governmental reports and research papers, photographs and films, poetry, music, political propaganda, nightclub themes, artistic displays, and video games. Slums are being made and experienced through diverse representational practices.6 Defined in this wider sense, slumming is an extensive phenomenon, which has been traced back to “penny novels” of the sixteenth century,7 in which London’s “dark” and “dangerous” streets became the setting for widely consumed tales, although much of this happened prior to the use of the term “slum.” Literary, historical, and contemporary slumming have all contributed to the making of the concept of “slum,” albeit arguably in different forms. As with any concept, “slum” is to some extent a construct, an imaginary, made up to represent certain aspects of urban poverty but, as representation, always also limited, biased, fraught, and problematic. It stems from a very specific historic setting, in Victorian England, although similar phenomena and practices akin to slumming have been observed in other sociolinguistic contexts, and the word “slum” has colonized terms in other languages for poor neighborhoods. Representations and imaginaries of the slum matter because they inform the ideas, measures, practices, and even the institutions developed in response to slums. Slumming practices in turn inform the construction of slum imaginaries and representations, and different slumming practices will do so in different ways. Different ways of slumming lead to different imagined slums, and different resulting politics. Accordingly, slumming can be understood as a material social practice, creating the slum in a number of different ways, changing over time, geographical contexts, and in a variety of other ways. Histories of slumming thus provide, to some extent, an indicator for changes in the way slums are represented and understood. Seth Koven’s comprehensive study of Victorian slumming has shown how slumming played a crucial role in the development of a variety of new practices, institutions, and political ideas aiming to address the urban social question, but he demonstrated as well how slumming was fraught with desires to manage, control, and contain the slums.8 Contemporary visits to slums in the Global South by travelers from the Global North amounts to a comparable expression of a novel “global social question.”9 But are the differences between these distinct historical forms of slumming simply a matter of scale; is Victorian history repeating itself, albeit on a global level? In answering these questions it is helpful to compare slumming during two distinct periods. The first period, that of “early slumming,” ranges from the 1850s to the 1940s. The second one, named “contemporary slumming,” ranges from the early 1990s to today. This separation prompts the question about what happened in between. The simple answer is: not much. There is a distinctive gap in observable slumming practices in the period from the 1940s to the 1990s. While by no means completely absent, slumming in this period seems marginal and largely unnoticed. By interrogating the common aspects

226   FABIAN FRENZEL of early and contemporary slumming practices, what differences are evident, and what different kinds of ideas about “slums,” slum imaginaries, and resulting politics can be identified?

Being Reflective About Slumming Before embarking on a story about these different forms of slumming, it is essential to clarify its core meaning. In his study of Victorian slumming, Koven gives a crucial and wide-​ranging definition of slumming that embeds reflectivity: “I have made mobility, not fixity, central to my definition of slumming, I use slumming to refer to activities undertaken by people of wealth, social standing or education in urban spaces inhabited by the poor.”10 The interesting element of this definition is the equivalence, from a conceptual perspective, between different forms and subjectivities in which slumming is pursued. Why does Koven construct this equivalence, when arguably different forms of slumming are formative of specific representations of the slum? Koven answers this himself, pointing to the attempts by people to differentiate their own travel practices from those of others: “Because the desire to go slumming was bound up with the need to disavow it, my history of slumming includes the activities of men and women who used any word except slumming—​charity, sociological research, Christian rescue, social work, investigative journalism—​to explain why they entered the slum.”11 In critical reflections on slumming there is often an assumed distinction between serious, scientific inquiry and merely leisurely forms of engagement with slums. Objective, materialist, or critical-​realist inspired understanding of urban poverty are thus juxtaposed with merely imaginary, or joyous and leisurely slum representations.12 Slumming itself is often viciously critiqued not so much by people living in slums, but by other slum visitors, for example researchers or journalists who do not see their own “serious” practices as slumming. Understandable as it may be, such distinctions often also mark a certain snobbish disdain for popular culture and serve not so much to sharpen analytical understanding as to position certain slumming practices as superior, while contributing little to a better understanding of slumming. Koven’s definition of slumming addresses this issue. No allowance for categorical difference is made for the various self-​descriptions: researchers, journalists, religious, or political commentators. They all share a certain level of idiocy, vulnerability, and curiosity. What unites their practices is “downward” mobility: “My definition of slumming depends upon a movement, figured as some sort of descent across urban spatial and class, gender and sexual boundaries.”13 It is important to discount the self-​serving attempts by some of those involved in slumming to disavow it. There are little grounds to claim exemption from the class-​ based nature of slumming for any better-​off visitors to slums. This however highlights

How Slumming Makes the Slum    227 even further the centrality of asking, how to understand the differences in which slumming is conducted and what effects they have. Ellen Ross has highlighted how women went slumming in distinctively different ways from men, leading to different forms of representing and engaging with urban poverty in the resulting literature.14 Malte Steinbrink, Fabian Frenzel, and Ko Koens have pointed to the difference and similarities between professional and leisured slumming.15 Koven has also highlighted the important difference between public forms of slumming and more private or hidden ones, pursued for the purposes of illicit consumption.16 And evidently slumming practices also differ over time and geographical space.17

Early Slumming The emergence of slums in public debate is linked to the growth of urban poverty as an observable phenomenon in England, underpinned by the rapid growth of cities and by rural to urban migration. Urban poverty had existed before and so had measures and institutions to address it. The context in which slums are “discovered” is the absence or lack of sufficient action by both state and church in addressing the increased and more concentrated urban poverty. In the early nineteenth century, the church was still the major provider of charity and poor relief on the parish level. But as small villages close to larger cities transformed into neighborhoods and metropolitan boroughs, the parish churches increasingly struggled to accommodate the new demands on their services. Those tasked with the provision of social and spiritual welfare professionally first sounded the alarm. A well-​known example is Nicholas Wiseman, Westminster’s Catholic archbishop. Wiseman observed in 1850 qua his clerical role in the city, the social transformation of inner London: Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, 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.18

Wiseman’s statement shows how the observation of slum conditions translated into forming the concept “slum.” This description contains key representational modes of what featured most in Victorian slumming: the equivalence of social and moral concerns in what Steinbrink describes as “moral slumming.”19 In the dominant representational practices for slums in this period, dismal housing conditions were semantically combined with assumptions about the character traits of those who lived in such conditions. Vice and crime seemed to come naturally with squalor, wretchedness, and disease. In Wiseman’s perspective the absence of institutionalized morality, namely the

228   FABIAN FRENZEL church, was a likely contributing cause for the depravity he encountered. He saw poverty as a moral issue as well as a social problem. Reference to health issues, particularly typhus, was equally central. It betrayed a certain selfish bourgeois concern with slums. In the early nineteenth century there had been regular outbreaks of cholera and other “filth” diseases in London, affecting not just the working class but also better-​off Londoners.20 Wiseman’s text also makes a short reference to the absence of policy responses to the housing crisis he witnesses, mentioning municipal sewage committees and lighting boards. The failure of these institutions to tackle the unfolding crisis was increasingly noticed as urbanization proceeded apace and formed the nucleus of demands for more comprehensive policy responses to the emerging slums. Alongside the professional slum discoveries of clergymen like Wiseman, as well as health officers and doctors, the nineteenth century saw an increasing frequency of journalistic accounts of urban poverty. These accounts often used language akin to travel, fieldwork, and urban exploration. This may be reflective of an increasing spatial separation of social classes within industrializing cities and the emergence of distinct “arrival cities,”21 urban zones where new urbanites first settled. Some decades of expansion in London since 1840 had brought a separation of new slum areas from the city’s wealthier parts. This development was to some extent a spatial fix to hygiene concerns, but it also involved an increasing invisibility of poverty as part of the urban reality for the better-​ offs. Designating poor areas meant that richer Londoners did not need to deal with poverty on a perceptive level. The formation of distinct slum zones thus also constituted a political solution to the challenge of urban poverty. Slum zones being more spatially distinct rendered them less visible, too, for distinct slum zones could be easier avoided as a matter of concern, hidden behind the main thoroughfares and forgotten. Thus, slums became an “unknown territory,” paradoxically also causing increasing curiosity and presenting opportunities for adventurous sojourns. Slumming, as a practice of mobility, was a journey of exploration out into the “unknown,” the invisible and the dark. Emergent journalistic accounts solidified the notion of what a “slum” was at the time. A whole genre of journalism emerged that sometimes straddled between realistic descriptions of slum conditions and fiction. London’s “low” lands had been an established subject of stories of gore and deprivation for at least three centuries, linking social and moral deprivation. Alan Mayne has shown that this was not restricted to London but also occurred in other British cities and beyond.22 In addition, rather than reducing the newly established spatial distance between “normal” city and slum in representational practices, reports from the slums consolidated the physical distancing in writing and imagination, too. Imaginary constructions of the slum as a place of moral deprivation thus helped the construction of bourgeois identity, by excluding what is “marked out as ‘low’—​as dirty, repulsive, noisy, contaminating.”23 It created an “Other” and confirmed the places of the Other, namely slums. Slumming practices were also influenced by travel tropes specific to the colonial project. Thus, the London East End, dominated by docklands and manufacturing,24 became a distant and unknown territory akin to the Far East of the East India Company or the

How Slumming Makes the Slum    229 unexplored zone of Inner Africa. Jens Wietschorke describes the construction of the East in the late nineteenth century in London and other European cities as functioning as the antithesis to civilization, the shadow side of the city and its “darkest place.”25 According to Wietschorke, the East was the “inner Orient” of the city, and like the Orient it invited colonial exploration. Such racist imaginaries of slums were visible in a number of slumming touring practices, such as in San Francisco’s and Melbourne’s Chinatowns.26 In this context, the social exploration of poor city neighborhoods marked the popular ethnographic imaginary of the emergent slumming culture. If Othering describes, at the very minimum, an ignorance toward the voice of those Othered, it is important to note the emergent nuances in early slumming. One the most prominent Victorian journalists and writers addressing slums was Henry Mayhew.27 Mayhew is generally praised for being the first author who actually based his works on interviews, and for giving voice to those he represented. Such ability to give voice is, according to Ross, also a distinct feature of women journalists and activists who increasingly took part in the slum discoveries.28 As some women (mainly aristocratic and bourgeois) emancipated throughout the Victorian period, they increasingly also engaged in male-​dominated forms of slum representation, namely journalism, charitable work, and political engagement, among others. Their perspectives and slum narratives were different, according to Ross, in their preference for listening to slum residents rather than gazing at the slum. Contrasting aural from visual slumming, Ross argues that “urban poverty when ‘heard’ appears less exotic and dangerous than when ‘seen,’ more human, familiar and pathetic.”29 With this different form of slumming came an often explicit critique of the male gaze, an early consciousness of the Othering practices connected to it. But not all women escaped the temptations of the genre. Swiss journalist Else Spiller was born into a working-​class family in the 1880s. She grew up to become a prominent journalist, known, read, and listened to across Europe for her social reporting of slum conditions. As an active member of the Salvation Army, she used the European network of the organization to compare and contrast several European cities and their poor neighborhoods, published first as dispatches in her newspaper and in 1911 as a book.30 Spiller’s narrative is close to those of male explorers at the time, as she adapted in her narrative the language of explorers and referred to her visits as journeys and sojourns.31 She established herself as a travel writer not unlike the bourgeois women of her time, who increasingly conquered male professional domains.32 The slum discoveries of journalists and other professional slummers stand in close connection to the development of leisured forms of slumming. From the 1880s onward slumming became truly “fashionable” in London and several US cities, attracting not just richer urbanites but also increasingly out-​of-​town visitors, too. Organized tours of slums emerged and guidebooks recommended institutions and points of interest.33 Often organized by charitable organizations who had set themselves up in slum areas to provide social care, the tours enabled visitors to come into slum areas, but also constituted a source of revenue for the organizations. Leisured slumming was built into models of more long-​term slum involvement.

230   FABIAN FRENZEL The development of such forms of leisured slumming in the last decades of the nineteenth century must be seen in close relation to the wider discovery of slums as a curious phenomenon and matter of concern. The process of discovery here described, from early notification by professionals tasked with addressing poverty to journalists and writers, on to political agitators and social entrepreneurs, paved the way for a more leisured slumming practice. In parallel we can observe the process of slum discovery turning toward a more critical notion of slum scoping, an attempt to scientifically base the understanding of slums on observable data and move away from merely journalistic accounts. Rolf Lindner has shown that slumming is the starting point of new empirical social sciences, a methodological innovation that forms early urban research.34 Some of this work predates the popular slumming practices of the late 1800s. Initial works were concerned with infrastructural requirements of growing cities with regard to, chiefly, hygiene needs. Mayhew, too, was prompted in his research effort by an outbreak of cholera in 1849. He significantly innovated research. Lindner sees him as an early ethnographer and oral historian, someone who pioneered interview methods and gave voice to those he researched. The rather qualitative nature of his approach stands in contrast to waves of statistical social research, as well as mapping, as pursued by Charles Booth a few decades later.35 Booth approached research with an empirical precision he derived from his experiences as a businessman. For Booth, understanding poverty required attention to detail in order to reach an objective analysis of the conditions in place. Even though statistics are abstract, the research to gather data needed to be conducted in life conditions, prompting new slumming excursions.36 The forms of new research targeting the unknown dimensions of emergent urbanity also mirrored the geographical research of unknown realms that was emerging as a result of colonialism. Ever more sophisticated methods of research on the urban poor developed in response to the criticism of the more casual journalistic or literary reports that characterize much of the earlier slumming practices.

New Institutions Yet popular slumming and more serious, professional, scientific, or charitable slumming remained connected, and perhaps most evidently so in the development of distinctive new institutional responses to urban poverty. Beyond mere curiosity and the generation of knowledge, slumming practices increasingly aimed at creating long-​ term structures able to cope with the newly discovered problem. In this vane, religious slummers of the early 1850s modeled a ground-​breaking institutional approach in their calls for Mission Halls. As the Reverend Andrew Mearns stated, “Mission Halls must be erected in each district and services of all kinds must be arranged.”37 Mission Halls served as outposts for religiously inspired volunteers, were erected in the slum districts, and were tasked with practical and spiritual support work. Much of the initial spirit

How Slumming Makes the Slum    231 of these new institutions was deeply wedded to the spreading of religious beliefs. The poor were believed to be deprived of sufficient exposure to the specific blessing of the church, “shut out from faith, hope and love” as the Reverend Brooke Lambert, the vicar of Greenwich, lamented.38 Mission Halls transformed into the wider settlement movement, which displayed an increasingly non-​religious, secular character.39 Proselyting seemed increasingly inappropriate in face of the pressing material needs of poor urban neighborhoods, as well as their cultural diversity. Toynbee Hall, founded as a study center for Oxford University in Whitechapel in 1888, marks the beginning of a whole series of new more-​secular-​oriented settlements. University students who lived at Toynbee Hall studied the social conditions of the surrounding city and its slums. At the same time, they helped with the direct support services that were offered to local residents, and organized events and activities. Slum residents were intended to be morally and socially uplifted by the close encounters with their educated visitors, which echoed earlier perceptions of the connection between moral and social deprivation. The settlement movement spread to other UK cities and eventually beyond the UK across the industrializing world.40 Similar projects emerged in the United States, Scandinavia, and Germany, inspired by the UK model, but arguably more successful. The settlement movement was also a distinctively feminine form of slumming. Ross estimates that in London alone, during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, bourgeois women entered the slums in their thousands each year, often on regular missions, or with their own projects, such as nurseries or evening schools. The influence of the settlement movement was widespread. Charities such as the Salvation Army were founded in this context. As they internationalized, they not only spread the model, but also created networks in which members could travel between European cities and beyond (as the journalist Else Spiller did). More leisured slummers found in these places points of interest and contact, while contributing to the financial viability of the projects with a regular stream of donations. Perhaps most importantly, the settlements provided spaces of encounter in which the visual dominance of the original male slumming gaze could be challenged. Slumming visitors would encounter those who lived in the slum. With more long-​term exposure, slum living conditions were better understood, and social worlds and classes more thoroughly mixed. Any number of individual encounters, conversations, debates, and challenges occurred that included slum residents as participants. If the structure of the settlement house maintained a particular logic of power relations, inherent in the descending notion of slumming, these were also spaces in which such relations could be questioned, and almost certainly were, not only by reflecting slummers but also by slum residents talking back. Over the years the settlement movement developed in close proximity to the development of political institutions that were to become integral to the emerging working-​class politics of the twentieth century. Charles Booth worked with volunteers and students from Toynbee Hall for his comprehensive study of Life and Labour of the People in London, a crucial and ambitious work of social research, using settlement volunteers as researchers. While Booth was

232   FABIAN FRENZEL far from being a socialist, among his researchers were Beatrix and Simon Webb, later founders of the Fabian society.41 Many privileged individuals involved in the settlements changed their political outlook, sometimes significantly and with lasting effect. The young Clement Attlee was a stern conservative before entering Toynbee Hall. As prime minister after 1945, he was to oversee the introduction of a social welfare state in Britain.

Between Early and Contemporary Slumming The transformation of slum perspectives through slumming is evident, but slumming also changed. Koven shows how male slumming in Victorian London transformed from a hidden and shameful pursuit (often in search of illicit consumption, namely gaming, drugs, and sex) to become a respectable, almost required social practice in which Victorians collected a first-​hand experience of the living conditions of the “other half.” However fraught at the outset, eventually such public slumming led to the development of new policies addressing slum conditions. But as Ross has shown, women were forced into more “private” forms of slumming by the social norms of the time, needing male companions to walk with them into slum areas. Women were more likely to enter the private spheres of houses and flats, rather than operating on the outside, public, street level. Even better-​off women were socially barred from wandering the streets of London, and especially its rougher ends, on their own. Despite this, female slumming was evidently political, by expanding the scope of action for women slummers but also by addressing specifically issues of social reproduction in more coordinated forms. Private forms of slumming during the prohibition years from 1920 to 1932 in the United States equally led to political ends, for example by enabling cross-​class encounters.42 In the twentieth-​century slumming hotspots of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, bourgeois slummers were seeking to escape from the moral and legal boundaries of established bourgeois conduct. According to Robert Dowling and Chad Heap, these practices were political in producing new spaces of encounter, a micro-​politics that transcended race and class boundaries. Slummers also began the development of specific urban tourism and nightlife economies, inducing early forms of gentrification. But perhaps the most important shift of these years after the First World War is the emergence of “slum cool”: slums were no longer simply viewed as desperate places; they began to be widely perceived as having positive elements in their own right, connected not the least to the cultural diversity they provided. The interwar years in the twentieth century saw more organized and policy responses to slums, too, with ambitious public housing programs and new transport infrastructure programs initiated. While various forms of slumming continued in the interwar years, there is diminishing evidence of widespread slumming practices after the Second World War. There is certainly an absence of academic knowledge about slumming in this period.

How Slumming Makes the Slum    233 After the Second World War slums continued to exist, but it seems that their existence was no longer seen as a surprise or as something remarkable, and certainly not remarkable enough to warrant slumming practices on the scale seen in previous decades. Perhaps the social issues connected with slums and urban poverty were now much more comprehensively being addressed by government policy makers. The period in which slumming vanishes as a social practice is the time when the state (in its urban as well as national institutions across the industrialized world) takes serious action to address slum conditions, and not just in the developed world. It has been argued that slumming as a social practice formed the preconditions for the development of welfare state policies, designed to address social inequality. The emerging welfare state in Europe, to a lesser extent in the United States, and to some extent also in the developing world, notwithstanding their varying institutional responses to slum conditions, tended to crowd out private and charitable slumming. Then, in the 1990s, slumming returned.

Contemporary Slumming Contemporary forms of slumming have emerged in two very particular contexts. In the faltering years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, where the democratic transformation process stabilized toward free elections in 1994, large-​scale international tourism returned to the country after years of boycott. The newly arriving tourists were drawn, not the least, by the story of the anti-​apartheid struggle, which had featured prominently in international news throughout the 1980s. Townships became attractions in the new international tourism for a number of interconnected reasons, including their symbolic role in representing the injustices and inequalities of the apartheid regime, but also as places where the struggle against apartheid had taken place. Soweto, a large cluster of townships in Johannesburg, was probably the first area to receive organized township tours, but similar tours were soon offered in townships across the country.43 In Rio de Janeiro favela tourism emerged in 1992 following the Earth Summit, a UN-​ sponsored initiative setting in motion new attempts to coordinate policy areas, from poverty reduction to sustainability, in the new institutional global setting after the end of the Cold War. The Earth Summit location was not accidental. Brazil had embarked on a process of democratization since the 1980s after emerging from a military dictatorship. Democratization enabled an increasingly open conversation about the challenges Brazil was facing. As a result, the wider country, but Rio especially, became known for radical inequalities, with stories about favelas and street children brutalized by security forces making global news on a regular basis. The Earth Summit brought this process to a climax, with 20,000 international attendees and hundreds of journalists facing a highly securitized city in lockdown, with entrances to favelas being blocked off by military police. In this situation, entering the favela became a “must-​do” for visiting journalists, who thus became professional slummers not unlike their Victorian predecessors. And much as it had been with Victorian slumming journalism, the stories of the favelas

234   FABIAN FRENZEL enticed more visitors. Organizations with access to favelas started to act as brokers in exchange for revenue. Eventually, commercial tour operators also appeared and started marketing visits to the infamous favelas of Rio (especially Rocinha) to leisured tourists in the city.

Beyond the Initial Cases Across the world, the 1990s also brought a large increase in international tourism, propelled by lower flight costs, as a consequence of the accelerated globalization that followed the end of the Cold War. In this context slumming has become an increasingly visible international tourist phenomenon. More destinations have emerged in recent years, often inspired by Rio and South Africa’s example, and the form of tourism itself has consolidated in the sense that it is today much more normal, accepted, and widespread to go on slum tours than it was a decade ago.44 Most contemporary forms of leisured slum tourism consist of three-​to four-​hour guided visitations of a slum neighborhood, often by foot, sometimes by car or bicycle. In 2014 it was estimated that about one million of those tours were being sold globally per year.45 But such estimates are likely to be conservative, because many visits are not conducted by formal tour operators. These visits include private tour guides, unguided visits (for example for shopping purposes), and visits to family members, friends, and relatives, which is estimated to represent by far the largest group of visitors to slums in South Africa.46 More than in early slumming, professional forms of slum visits are part of the slumming landscape today, and this extends beyond those slums that see large numbers of leisured visitors. In contemporary forms of slumming, phenomena such as research tourism (in which postgraduate students and researchers travel to visit slums for purposes of research) has increased to significant proportions.47 In the relatively small favela of Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro, for example, research tourists lodging in the neighborhood to study it seem to have caused rent increases and even gentrification.48 Volunteering, as in the Victorian examples discussed earlier, now takes global forms, too. Volunteering is often the sole purpose of a trip, but it is increasingly integrated and packaged into all sorts of tourism. In Africa, it is now possible to volunteer in a slum for a day, for example by helping out in a NGO-​run childcare facility as is the case in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. Next to such packaged and commercialized volunteer tourism, there is what has been described as “developmental tourism,” in which international volunteers join development-​focused NGOs in working on projects in slums for longer periods of time. For some development NGOs, tourism has become a regular source of income, echoing but also upscaling the practices of early slumming.49 Contemporary slumming has also developed new forms of the settlement movement, but unlike its earlier forms these are no longer restricted to professional slummers or researchers. Many slums today also offer hospitality services and guesthouses, or, as in the case of some favelas in Rio, offer homestays and short-​term apartment rentals

How Slumming Makes the Slum    235 via platforms such as Airbnb. Tourism-​related short-​term rentals are now generally regarded as drivers of favela gentrification, as for example in the favelas of Vidigal and Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro. Contemporary forms of slumming feature projects highly comparable to the settlement movement of early slumming. In Vidigal, a project called “Favela Experience” combines the functions of a guest house with that of a community center. The project offers guest beds, provides tours, and organizes social events. As an incubator, it supports local business with technological support, in creating, supporting, or maintaining community gardens, markets, and local breweries. The events organized in this context enable political debate and shared action. It is important to note the power imbalances between those setting up the project, often outsiders, and residents, not unlike the early settlement movement. A pertinent question for such spaces is whether they allow for reflection and challenge to these imbalances. Contemporary slum tourism is also deeply linked to representational practices, such as journalism and photography. But in contrast to Victorian slumming, today’s representational practices have radically diversified, alongside innovation in technologies. Journalistic and fictional accounts of slums include films, music videos, and visual representations of slums in a wide range of displays such as video games and private YouTube channels. Films about urban poverty and struggling slum areas propelled the development of tourism in Rio with the movie City of God, in Mumbai with the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and in Nairobi with the movie Constant Gardener.50 Perhaps most significant is the influence of Internet and Communications Technologies (ICTs) on the ways in which slum tourists can influence the image of slums.51 The ability to directly address “territorial stigma”52 via TripAdvisor ratings has transformed the reputation of neighborhoods in inner-​city Johannesburg.53 While never a slum, urban decline and advanced marginality characterized the central areas of Johannesburg since the mid-​1980s, leading to the perception of Johannesburg’s city center as a no-​go zone. But tourists played a part in the reversal of such views, partly by posting their positive experiences online, and thereby incentivizing other visitors to come. The ICTs have certainly enhanced and enabled such tourist valorization of urban poverty, but it is not likely that they were the cause of this phenomenon.

How Slums Became Cool The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a “slums of hope” discourse in which slums were increasingly represented as places of inspiration, creativity, and dynamism.54 Although frequently criticized,55 the concept of “slums of hope” marks a significant departure from the dominant views of slums since the formation of the term, namely that they were unambiguously places of “despair.” How did such a new perspective emerge? It was a response to the modernist brutality of anti-​slum polices. Active policy responses to slums in the past prioritized slum removals and clearance, from the “Haussmann method” already observed by Engels as he wrote on the “Housing

236   FABIAN FRENZEL Question” during the nineteenth century,56 to the more social democratic modernist housing policies that began during the interwar period. Slum removal in combination with ambitious and often public housing programs succeeded, to a large extent, in ending slum conditions in European and US cities, about a century after the first slums had appeared. This development led, in the first instance, to a reduction of slumming practices. Slumming was crowded out by state policies in housing and social welfare. None of these policies were fully successful in removing slums. In fact, particularly in Britain, slum conditions remained in place in many cities well into the 1960s. This was even more acute in the developing world, where attempts to reduce slum conditions coincided with large-​scale rural to urban migration. Amid limited funding and modernist hubris, a new public concern with urban housing grew in response to anti-​ slumming housing policies by the state. This new concern was first expressed in the cities of the Global North. In the years after the Second World War resistance grew to new modernist housing, often erected in tower blocks, because they were perceived to be suffocating the essence of urbanity itself. Residents and observers started to question slum and lower-​income neighborhood clearance and concurrent transport projects, such as in the paradigmatic case of Jane Jacobs’s struggle against Robert Moses’s urban development plans for New York City.57 A new appreciation and valorization of dense urban neighborhoods was soon applied not only to inner-​city districts in the developed world, but also to still-​newly-​emerging slum neighborhoods in the developing world.58 While many refer to Stroke and to John F. C. Turner as the original expressions of this shift, the origin of ideas about “slums of hope” remains largely unnoted and under researched. Evidently the concept quickly engendered policy adaptation toward slum upgrading and a rejection of slum clearance (particularly when this was opposed by residents) by the World Bank and other international institutions from the 1970s onward. The adoption, so quickly, of “slums of hope” ideas also points to their fit with the emergent neoliberal agenda in which the provision of housing and urban development is understood to be a domain for private actors and privately led urban development.59 “Slums of hope” ideas and the resulting appreciation of “DIY urbanity”60 modified perceptions of slums from the dark and dangerous places of the early slumming imaginaries to the more positive and exiting, outright “cool” urban neighborhoods as they are represented in many contemporary forms of slumming. They relate mostly to the developing world, but they are akin, in a fundamental sense, to processes of DIY urbanity in the Global North, often leading to the transformation of formerly low value neighborhoods into highly valued neighborhoods. In the Global South contemporary forms of slumming echo and incorporate the “slums of hope” paradigm. Not only do they emphasize the resilience and creativity of slum residents; they also often vehemently advocate slums as acceptable and even desirable housing solutions. Problems are not being denied but understood predominantly as being a result of the absence of public investment in specific infrastructures. There is often a celebration of democratic “user-​generated” urbanity.61 In the self-​description of contemporary settlement projects such as “Favela Experience” this new thinking is

How Slumming Makes the Slum    237 clearly visible. The slum visitors arrive here not only to seek out social problems, but also alternative urban forms and ideas. Slums are represented as sustainable solutions to urban development, and even as alternatives to the logic of capitalist modernization. “Slums of hope” thinking does not exist alone in contemporary slumming. Traditional discourses persist, too. Not unlike the early slumming craze, fascination with the dark and dangerous, with dirt and poverty, propels contemporary slumming. In Rio, favela tourists can at times witness the presence of armed gang members during their tours, and this may be part of the attraction of the “spectacular favela.”62 Even less self-​indulgent perspectives on poverty and deprivation may seek “authenticity” and sometimes “happiness” in poverty in ways that echo dominant Orientalist tropes of slumming that have been present since the very beginning of slumming.63 But with its strong footing in ideas about “slums of hope,” contemporary slumming is qualitatively different from its early forms. It constitutes a dialectical reaction to a century of slum discourses and slumming, by building on the limits of the initial policy responses to slums. Urban policy’s reaction to contemporary slumming offers another point of reference for this qualitative change. Policy makers have supported contemporary slumming in South Africa, for example, and encouraged its further development. This is partly because many township tours celebrate the heritage of resistance against apartheid. But township tourism is also seen as a potential avenue for economic development in townships. Other destinations have followed in these steps, often encouraging tourism development in low-​income neighborhoods as a way of generating income opportunities. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, after initial skepticism, urban policy makers realized the value of favelas as urban heritage attractions and encouraged favela tourism since at least 2005, when the city officially declared some of them tourist attractions.64 But policy support is not without frictions. In the developing world, local elites often reject slumming for its highlighting of social inequalities that they would rather keep hidden. Slum tourists are sometimes enrolled to support residents in their struggle against urban policies, for example in resistance to forced removals.

Conclusion Slumming is a practice that makes “the slum.” This is evident both in the early slumming period from the mid-​nineteenth to the mid-​twentieth centuries, and in contemporary forms of slumming since the 1990s. The key questions to ask here are how these two periods relate to one another, and whether differences between them are merely a matter of scale. Slumming almost always entails an inherent Othering dimension. Slums are represented as dark, immoral, and dangerous places, but are also constructed as spaces of intervention, which ostensibly makes it imperative to bring to them light, morality, and civilization, often in the form of redevelopment. Such slumming constructs a particular idea of “slum,” but it equally serves to construct the slum visitor. His or her

238   FABIAN FRENZEL identity results from constructing the poor Other in their ‘local’ place, the slum. In this sense, it is possible to question whether slums exist at all beyond a bourgeois projection. Contemporary slumming began after a long period with relatively few examples of corporeal slumming practices. It has several parallels to early slumming. Some of the obvious changes, such as scale and speed, use of technology, and means of transport are gradual, quantitative changes. They reflect a globalization of the nineteenth-​century preoccupation with the “social question,” the concern with poverty as both a social and political problem. Global knowledge and curiosity over inequality and the challenges of poverty, prompted in part by television coverage of global emergencies such as the 1980s famine in Sub-​Saharan Africa, are evidently shaping opinions and policies today. As was already apparent during the period of early slumming, the contemporary rediscovery of slums on a global scale not only highlights grave social concerns but is accompanied by realization of the absence of effective institutional responses to these concerns. Today the absence of sufficient global public policy responses to pressing social issues enable and prompt the formation of private slumming practices, not unlike in early slumming. The formation of an increasingly global regime of NGOs and charitable organizations (often rooted in Victorian charities), employed to address the old “social question” on a new universal scale, slightly predates the formation of contemporary forms of leisured slumming but has developed in close relationship. NGO workers are crucial in establishing access to slums, creating infrastructures for more-​leisured visitors to use. Very much in parallel to early slumming but also significantly increased in scale, visiting tourists are today used as a resource to finance charities and NGOs. In terms of bringing slums specifically to global attention, a key marker of contemporary slumming is the publication of the 2003 UN report “Global Slums,”65 flanked by journalistic66 and academic accounts such as Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums.67 Arguably contemporary slumming can be seen simply as a spatial and scalar expansion of early slumming, now played out on a global scale. However, there are more complex and more qualitative changes at work. Contemporary slumming reacts to and builds on early slumming and its cumulative effects. Early slumming can be seen as a crucial stepping-​stone toward the formation of new (anti-​) slum policies in which slum clearances were at least sometimes combined with ambitious public housing projects. The extension of state action in urban planning and social housing led to a significant reduction in slum living conditions throughout Europe during the interwar years, a trend that continued into the 1950s. However their limitations were all too visible. In the Global South, modernist urban policies, when attempted, soon capitulated because of limited resources and massive ongoing urban expansion. In the Global North the modernist transformation of cities, conducted with more resources, exemplified a rationalist overreach. The attempt to create rationally planned, highly organized modern cities caused a new appreciation, if not exactly of slums, of the small-​scale and dense urbanity that characterizes premodern cities. This countermovement, cherishing notions of DIY and “user-​generated” urbanism, also enabled an entirely novel perspective on slums. No longer were they seen as merely dark and dangerous places, as sources of crime

How Slumming Makes the Slum    239 and disease. Instead their urbanity was increasingly understood as a grassroots alternative to modernist, centrally planned housing. This countermovement changed contemporary forms of slumming qualitatively, for slumming now sees slums as “cool,” “solutions,” and “sustainable” modes of urbanity. Such newly dominant representations of slums as “places of hope” need questioning, and continued research into the ways they came about.68 Overall, slums then and now continue to exist as a result of capitalist urbanization processes and failed, misguided, or absent social and urban policies. But importantly slums exist and always have existed for those who live in them. In their most positive application, ideas about “slums of hope” posit that working-​class neighborhoods are made and re-​made by their inhabitants. This includes the built environment, representation as well as the imaginary. The self-​organization of slum dwellers as social movements for better housing, in rent strikes and protests, all form part of this (re-​) making of slums. Those who live in the slums produce livable neighborhoods autonomously and fight for access to resources as needed. A broader recognition of this agency is, to a significant degree, the result of new ways of slumming that encourage encounters between “insiders” and “outsiders.” In the early settlement movement and its contemporary forms, participants are not necessarily free from the pitfalls of Orientalizing Othering. But the experiential setting, in particular the extent that it allows encounters, debate, and discussion, will likely result in the transformation of perspectives. This is not to say that contemporary slumming, especially, has found, in its appreciation of slums, a new formula. Rather, that a space for debate has opened in which slum residents and visitors can come together, so much more than was possible during the heyday of the settlement movement. Here in the early twenty-​first century, crucial questions for further urban policy can be addressed: Are slums really more empowering than the mass housing provided in Fordist and Nehru-​esque welfare states? Is the recognition of autonomy, agency, and creativity not simply a strategy to justify persistent inequality with neoliberal tales of self-​improvement and entrepreneurship? And most importantly: how can we best mobilize and utilize the vast resources of the state to make cities more equal while avoiding the modernist top-​down fallacies of the past?

Notes 1. Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017); Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993); Robert M. Dowling, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem (reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); C. Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–​1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ruth Clayton Windscheffel and Seth Koven, “Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London,” The English Historical Review 122, no. 495 (2007): 272–​274. 2. Fabian Frenzel et al., “Slum Tourism State of the Art,” Tourism Review International 18, no. 2 (2015): 237–​252; Rodanthi Tzanelli, “Slum Tourism: A Review of State-​of-​the-​Art

240   FABIAN FRENZEL Scholarship,” Tourism Culture & Communication 18 (April 1, 2018): 149–​155, https://​doi. org/​10.3727/​10983​0418​X152​3035​3469​528. 3. Christian M. Rogerson, “Urban Tourism and Small Tourism Enterprise Development in Johannesburg: The Case of Township Tourism,” GeoJournal 60, no. 1 (2004): 249–​ 257; Manfred Rolfes, “Poverty Tourism: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Findings Regarding an Extraordinary Form of Tourism,” GeoJournal 75, no. 5 (September 2009): 421–​442, https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s10​708-​009-​9311-​8; Manfred Rolfes, Malte Steinbrink, and Christina Uhl, Townships as Attraction: An Empirical Study of Township Tourism in Cape Town (Potsdam: Universitätsverl. Potsdam, 2009). 4. B. Freire-​Medeiros, “The Favela and Its Touristic Transits,” Geoforum 40, no. 4 (2009): 580–​588; B. Freire-​Medeiros, Touring Poverty (New York: Routledge, 2013). 5. Frenzel et al., “Slum Tourism State of the Art”; Tzanelli, “Slum Tourism.” 6. Uli Linke, “Mobile Imaginaries, Portable Signs: The Global Consumption of Iconic Representations of Slum Life,” Tourism Geographies 14, no. 2 (2012). 7. Tony Seaton, “Wanting to Sleep with Common People,” in Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power and Ethics, ed. Fabian Frenzel, Ko Koens, and Malte Steinbrink (London: Routledge, 2012). 8. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9. Fabian Frenzel, Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty (London: Zed Books, 2016). 10. Koven, Slumming, 9. 11. Ibid. 12. Frenzel, Slumming It. 13. Koven, Slumming, 9. 14. Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–​1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 15. Malte Steinbrink, Fabian Frenzel, and Ko Koens, “Development and Globalization of a New Trend in Tourism,” in Slum Tourism Poverty, Power and Ethics., ed. Fabian Frenzel, Ko Koens, and Malte Steinbrink (London: Routledge, 2012), 1–​18. 16. Koven, Slumming. 17. Malte Steinbrink, “We Did the Slum! Reflections on Urban Poverty Tourism from a Historical Perspective,” Tourism Geographies 14, no. 2 (2012): 230–​242. 18. Edward R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 155. 19. Malte Steinbrink, “We Did the Slum! Reflections on Urban Poverty Tourism from a Historical Perspective,” Tourism Geographies 14, no. 2 (2012): 230–​242. 20. Margaret Pelling, Cholera, Fever and English Medicine, 1825–​ 1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); F. B. Smith, The People’s Health, 1830–​1910 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979); Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1983). 21. Doug Saunders, Arrival City (London: Windmill, 2011). 22. Mayne, The Imagined Slum. 23. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 191. 24. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: “A Human Awful Wonder of God” (London: Random House, 2016).

How Slumming Makes the Slum    241 25. Jens Wietschorke, “‘Go Down into the East End’. Zur Symbolischen Topographie des Urbanen Ostens um 1900,” in Das Prinzip »Osten«: Geschichte und Gegenwart eines symbolischen Raums, ed. Gunther Gebhard, Oliver Geisler, and Steffen Schröter (transcript, Verlag, 2014), 77–​102. 26. Mayne, Slums. 27. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (Griffin, Bohn, 1861); Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 28. Ross, Slum Travelers. 29. Ellen Ross, “Slum Journeys: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–​1940,” in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, ed. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 11. 30. Slums: Erlebnisse in den Schlammvierteln moderner Großstädte, ed. Peter Payer, 1st ed. (Wien: Czernin, 2008). 31. “Nachwort zu ‘Slums’ von Else Spiller,” in Slums: Erlebnisse in den Schlammvierteln moderner Großstädte, 1st ed. (Wien: Czernin, 2008), 122–​134. 32. Ulrike Stamm, Der Orient Der Frauen: Reiseberichte deutschsprachiger Autorinnen im Frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2010). 33. Windscheffel and Koven, “Slumming.” 34. Rolf Lindner, Walks on the Wild Side: eine Geschichte der Stadtforschung (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2004). 35. Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London 17 volumes (London: MacMillan & Co, 1902-​1903). 36. Rosemary O'Day and David Englander, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry: Life and Labour of the People in London, Reconsidered (London: Hambledon, 1993). 37. Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums: Settlements and Missions in Late Victorian Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 9. 38. Ibid., 10. 39. Scotland, Squires in the Slums. 40. Wietschorke, “ ‘Go Down into the East End.’ ” 41. O’Day, Mr Charles Booth’s Inquiry. 42. Dowling, Slumming in New York; Heap, Slumming. 43. P. Ramchander, “Township Tourism—​Blessing or Blight? The Case of Soweto in South Africa,” in Cultural Tourism: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Greg Richards (New York: Haworth Press, 2007), 39–​67. 44. Frenzel et al., “Slum Tourism State of the Art.” 45. Ibid. 46. Christian M. Rogerson, “Rethinking Slum Tourism: Tourism in South Africa’s Rural Slumlands,” Bulletin of Geography. Socio-​Economic Series, no. 26 (December 1, 2014): 19–​ 34, https://​apcz.umk.pl/​BGSS/​arti​cle/​view/​bog-​2014-​0042. 47. Frenzel, Slumming It. 48. Lucie Matting, "Die Stadt im Ausnahmezustand.": Mega-​Gentrifizierung in Rio de Janeiro und Raumproduktion im Kontext urbaner Transformationen in der Favela Santa Marta” MA diss., Europa-​Universität Viadrina, 2014. 49. Sarah Becklake, “NGOs and the Making of ‘Development Tourism Destinations,’” Zeitschrift Für Tourismuswissenschaft 6, no. 2 (2014): 223–​243.

242   FABIAN FRENZEL 50. Rodanthi Tzanelli, Mobility, Modernity and the Slum: The Real and Virtual Journeys of “Slumdog Millionaire” (Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015). 51. Fabian Frenzel, “Tourist Agency as Valorisation: Making Dharavi into a Tourist Attraction,” Annals of Tourism Research 66 (September 2017): 159–​169, https://​doi.org/​ 10.1016/​j.ann​als.2017.07.017. 52. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2008). 53. Fabian Frenzel, “Slum Tourism and Urban Regeneration: Touring Inner Johannesburg,” Urban Forum 25, no. 4 (September 19, 2014): 431–​447. 54. Charles J. Stokes, “A Theory of Slums,” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187. 55. H. Nuissl and D. Heinrichs, “Slums: Perspectives on the Definition, the Appraisal and the Management of an Urban Phenomenon,” DIE ERDE –​Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin 144, no. 2 (2013): 105–​116. 56. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2012). 57. Mayne, Slums. 58. John F. C. Turner, Housing by People towards Autonomy in Building Environments (London: M. Boyards, 1976). 59. Andrej Holm and Armin Kuhn, “Squatting and Urban Renewal: The Interaction of Squatter Movements and Strategies of Urban Restructuring in Berlin,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 3 (May 1, 2011): 644–​658 https://​online​libr​ ary.wiley.com/​doi/​abs/​10.1111/​j.1468-​2427.2010.001​009.x. 60. Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava, The Slum Outside: Elusive Dharavi (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014). 61. Ibid. 62. Erika Mary Robb Larkins, The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 63. Melissa Nisbett, “Empowering the Empowered? Slum Tourism and the Depoliticization of Poverty,” Geoforum 85 (October 1, 2017): 37–​45. 64. Freire-​Medeiros, “The Favela and Its Touristic Transits.” 65. UN-​HABITAT, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003 (London: Earthscan, 2003). 66. Robert Neuwirth, Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2004). 67. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London, New York: Verso, 2006). 68. Ananya Roy, “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” IJUR International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, no. 2 (2011): 223–​238.

Bibliography Dowling, Robert M. Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Freire-​Medeiros, Bianca. Touring Poverty. New York: Routledge, 2014. Frenzel, Fabian. Slumming It: The Tourist Valorization of Urban Poverty. London: Zed Books, 2016.

How Slumming Makes the Slum    243 Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Heap, Chad. Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–​1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Larkins, Erika Robb. The Spectacular Favela: Violence in Modern Brazil. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005. Rolfes, Manfred. “Poverty Tourism: Theoretical Reflections and Empirical Findings Regarding an Extraordinary Form of Tourism.” GeoJournal 75, no. 5 (September 2009): 421–​442. Ross, Ellen. Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–​1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Saunders, Doug. Arrival City. London: Windmill, 2011. Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Stokes, Charles J. “A Theory of Slums.” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187–​197. Tzanelli, Rodanthi. “Slum Tourism: A Review of State-​of-​the-​Art Scholarship.” Tourism Culture & Communication 18 (2018): 149–​155.

CHAPTER 13

SLUM S Neglect, Clear, or Improve? RICHARD HARRIS

Governments can deal with slums in three ways. They can ignore them, hoping the problem will go away of its own accord. They can flatten them, hoping they will not reappear elsewhere. Or they can work to make them better. Although any strategy might work, there is no guarantee. Doing nothing, things might get worse; cleared, the slum may be kicked down the road, literally; and improvement may not be on the cards. The problem may exist only in the eye of the beholder. The identification of a slum, as a problem, is the project of outsiders. Indeed, it is they who coin and deploy the slum label, with varying but pejorative associations.1 And they may have ulterior motives, perhaps supporting their own goal of “coercive intervention.”2 No one can define “slum” any way they choose, but this term offers wide scope for interpretation. Such wiggle room creates a challenge for surveys like this, which considers how governments have dealt with slums. There have been times and places where people lived in appalling conditions, but politicians turned a blind eye. Conversely, some governments have been overzealous, wrecking communities that no residents, and no fair-​minded observer, viewed as slum-​like. Should this survey include both types of situations? The answer must be: yes. To make sense of slum policy we must consider times when public action should have been taken but was not. Conversely, the instances and reasons for neglect illuminate the logic of action. That logic is illuminated by the way governments have sometimes overreacted, showing that motives can be mixed. And so this survey is broad, considering action and inaction wherever there was, in the words of the United Nations Human Settlements Program, a “lack of basic services” with “substandard or illegal” housing being present, together with “overcrowding, . . . insecure tenure,” and hence “unhealthy living conditions,” coupled with “poverty and social exclusion.”3 Some things are obviously “substandard” or “unhealthy.” Polluted drinking water is surely both. But the significance of others is debatable, varying historically and geographically. One virtue of a world-​wide survey that reaches back to when “slum” was

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    245 new is that it underlines this contingency. It shows that the meaning is obvious. A second virtue is that it enables us to ask whether and when lessons have been learned from past experience. Three long-​term trends—​the expansion of the state, the irregular diffusion of democracy, and the rise of homeownership—​have nudged policies away from neglect and then clearance so that improvement has become more common, if not the norm. But there have been hiccups and reversals, and governments are bad at learning from past experience. When will we ever learn? Urban slums differ from their rural counterparts. Land prices are much higher and so are building densities, while room crowding is more common. Density creates problems: wells, pit latrines, and even open defecation may be acceptable in a village but unsafe in a city. In response, municipalities pass laws that specify land use, building, fire, and occupancy standards, so that cities are more regulated sorts of places. Because many people cannot or will not conform to such rules, informality—​understood as activity that violates state regulations—​is more common in urban areas. This may in turn encourage evasion and corruption, which are themselves features of urban settings.4 Another feature of urban slums affects how they may be handled. They function in relation to the wider urban setting. Their residents are part of an urban job market and may be indispensable as a source of cheap labor. That was true of Manchester’s Irish in the 1840s as it is today of Dalits in Mumbai. Slums are also part of the urban housing market. As residents prosper they leave; as outsiders fall on hard times or are ostracized they find in the slum a home that is affordable and safe. Whatever is done to an urban slum, then, has wider ramifications.

Defining Slums But what is this thing called “slum?” Those who have written about slums have agreed that physical conditions are a basic criterion and that poor sanitation is key. In Anglo-​ America in the 1800s, observers emphasized poor drainage and ventilation, the presence of human and animal wastes, and the effects on public health. In Britain, where the term “slum” was coined, the first attempts to improve slums involved the installation of piped water and sewers coupled with improved drainage. Although action in the United States came later and has varied more from place to place, the same emphasis was apparent.5 Similar criteria have been prominent more recently in the Global South. In 1967 Elizabeth Wood, a UN consultant, reckoned that, for slum improvement, better sanitation was “the first objective.”6 Sanitary services were the first criterion mentioned in later UN reports. In Britain and North America, the emphasis on such services had always been accompanied by descriptions of poor housing: of damp walls, leaky roofs, poor ventilation, and overcrowding. As Tarn has said, “housing and public health problems were inextricably mixed up during the Victorian age.”7 By comparison, especially in warm regions, better housing has been downplayed. In 1965, for example,

246   RICHARD HARRIS Nigel Oram, an administrator with experience in Africa and New Guinea, argued that although officials often deplored the housing in low-​income areas as “unsightly,” in tropical climates houses themselves were not a key issue.8 In the Global South, the ambiguous legal status of many settlements has also been viewed as a defining element of slums. Some writers have argued that one part of any solution must be the provision of clear legal title.9 However, the basic issue is tenure security. Titles can be overridden. They may count for less than the provision of infrastructure, which, embodying a major capital investment, signals the government’s acceptance of a community’s right to exist.10 Commonly in the past, and sometimes today, outsiders have assumed that social deviance is intrinsic to the slum.11 It may involve crime, socially unacceptable activity such as prostitution, or simply the cultural practices of an ethnic or religious minority. Deviance has sometimes been viewed as environmentally determined, a consequence of poverty and overcrowding, but some have seen it as an independent force, creating and perpetuating the conditions of slum life. A version of this view speaks about a “culture of poverty,” reproduced from generation to generation.12 There have been few occasions when governments have documented this culture when defining or identifying slums. But assumptions about deviance have often motivated their actions. Such assumptions have colored the meaning of “slum.” Given that its associations are so negative, disputed, and often inaccurate, some writers argue we should abandon the term.13 However there is no other concise way of referring to a “low-​income neighbourhood that is somehow generally considered to fall below the standard of comfort and hygiene expected of a human settlement.”14 Another difficulty is that the term has been used to refer to very different environments: there are various types of slums. In Anglo-​America in the twentieth century, one type was seen as being governed by “the natural laws of neighborhood change.”15 The assumption was the houses built for the affluent would deteriorate, decline in value, be subdivided, and fall into the hands of the poor: in a phrase, “filter down.”16 Inevitably, the older neighborhoods where they were concentrated would decline. And so a distinction has been made between “blighted,” “gray,” or “twilight” areas, the latter being preferred in Britain, and slums.17 The former are on a slippery slope but might be redeemed for a while; the latter are beyond hope. The policy implications—​ rehabilitation for one, clearance for the other—​often followed. In modified form, this understanding persists. Since the 1970s, “gentrification” has demonstrated that older homes and neighborhoods can filter up, but there is still an expectation that most areas will decline. A recent American survey distinguished between “distressed” areas and those that are “threatened.” Distress involves poverty, crime, unemployment, depressed property values, political alienation, and physical “blight.”18 Similarly, Dewar and Weber distinguish three types of areas: those that have gentrified; those that programs have stabilized; and those that have experienced serious disinvestment, so that a “recursive process” has led to abandonment.19 They do not use the term “slum,” but it hovers over their discussion. The slum is no longer seen as the inevitable outcome of neighborhood change, but it is still a real possibility.

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    247 In the 1960s, observers of cities in the developing world began to talk about a different type of slum. Latin America was seeing a massive rural-​urban migration. Poor, and lacking options, migrants squatted on the urban periphery and erected modest dwellings that they improved over time. Speaking about Peru, the British architect John Turner distinguished these barriadas from the corralones, older, inner-​city slums that were in decline. Current conditions were not necessarily better in the barriadas but their prospects, and appropriate policy responses, were different. The corralon, he suggested, “has no future . . . [and] sooner or later . . . must be demolished.” In contrast, the barriada might be improved. Elsewhere, Turner talked about the “bridgeheaders” who built such communities.20 The economist Charles Frankenhoff called these “staging areas”; more recently, now that migration on a larger scale has been promoting urbanization across Asia and Africa, the author and journalist Doug Saunders has dubbed these districts “arrival cities.”21 A simple but important distinction, then, separates “open-​end” slums of hope and “dead-​end” slums of despair.22 Two qualifiers are needed. First, although some scholars imply that slums in the Global North have been places of despair while those in the South hold out hope, this is simplistic. Low-​income migrants built boot-​strap suburbs around cities in Canada, Australia, and the United States until at least the early 1950s.23 These suburban slums lacked sanitary services, but most became decent places to live. The second qualification is that hope can turn into despair.24 Some owner-​built communities of migrants prospered, only to fall on hard times. British immigrants built many of Toronto’s suburbs after 1900, but a number lost those homes during the Depression. Rural migrants did the same around Flint, Michigan, in the 1940s and 1950s, but the neighborhoods they made are now pockmarked by abandoned homes and echo with police sirens.25 On a larger scale, many arrival cities around Kinshasa and Kolkata never prospered. “Hope” and “despair” are not immutable categories but signal a continuum of differences in areas that are currently substandard. Faced with whole neighborhoods where conditions are substandard, residents have often taken initiatives. But commonly governments—​and that usually means municipalities—​are expected to act, and indeed to take the lead. That has become increasingly true over the past century as the role of government in the shaping of cities has grown. But what are they to do? Logically, there are three options, two of which have several variations. Although municipalities have often more than one option, at any moment they have leaned in one direction or the other.

Ignoring The Problem Turner claimed that “the most common ‘policy’ in countries where rapid urbanization is taking place . . . is, in effect, laissez faire.”26 He was right. It was true of Peru in the 1950s, as it is today in Sub-​Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. It was true around North American cities in the early twentieth century, as it was in British industrial cities in

248   RICHARD HARRIS the nineteenth century. Appalling conditions in late nineteenth-​century Homestead, Pennsylvania, an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh, reflected the “indifference” of both residents and local officials. Governments everywhere often turn a blind eye to dubious practices in terms of land use and construction methods, which are some of the defining characteristics of slums, although by no means confined to such areas.27 So option one is to do nothing. There are many reasons why governments choose this route. Ignorance is one. Politicians and officials rarely see slums and may have no emotional feel for what life is like there. This has become more of an issue since the 1920s, as cities have grown and automobile sprawl has separated people. Significantly, on occasions when required to visit, they have returned with a determination to act. When members of the Kerner Commission ventured into the slum areas that had seen ghetto riots in 1967 they were shocked, and their forceful report dismayed President Johnson.28 But most reasons come down to money and politics.29 Especially where cities are growing rapidly, municipalities lack the resources to install services or enforce regulations. There is also political calculation. To obtain resources they would need to raise unpopular taxes on those who can afford to pay. The political scientist David Collier has suggested that inaction is especially common in less accountable, authoritarian regimes.30 A political argument is relevant in Anglo-​America, too. In Britain in the nineteenth century, the franchise was limited by property ownership, and/​or occupation, and gender. In North America, tenants only got the right to vote in most municipal elections in the second half of the twentieth century. To have an impact, slum residents often adopted other stratagems, including bribery, petitions, and riots. Accepting their lot has been more common, because they have often assumed that action is a waste of time. To this day, voter turnout in low-​income neighborhoods is below average. A major reason for inaction, then, is the lack of political pressure although, especially in parts of the Global South, even the poorest of people have sometimes mobilized. Even when challenged, politicians and officials offer reasons for inaction. They may claim that the problem will solve itself: bridgeheaders will make good. They may argue that the problem lies with residents, and that to act is a waste of money. This argument in effect blames the victim. Alternatively, politicians may argue that targeting just a few areas is unfair: it does nothing for poor people living elsewhere. Economists speak of this as an issue of horizontal inequity. Then again, helping some people might become the thin end of the wedge, encouraging other people and communities to make demands. And politicians may either believe such claims, or simply invoke them dishonestly, for effect. Social liberals often condemned municipalities for inaction, but some sympathetic observers have defended very modest activity so as to create “more and better slums.”31 The core argument is that poor people cannot afford “standard” housing and that to eliminate substandard units will make matters worse.32 Practical building inspectors and medical officers of health have probably often taken this view. A seminal study of low-​income residents who were displaced and rehoused in Britain in the late 1920s found that, after rents doubled, they cut back so far on food that mortality increased.33

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    249 Worse, if slums are eliminated then those who cannot afford better housing may become homeless. This is one reason why homelessness has recently increased in western nations. Arguably, slums are simply “a necessary and even helpful phase” of city growth.34 Along these lines, many researchers have argued that enforcing unrealistic regulations is counterproductive. The argument applies everywhere, and so Peattie suggests that “informal code enforcement policies” make sense in Anglo-​America.35 But the argument has particular force in the Global South. The original culprits were colonial powers that imported inappropriate laws that, through inertia and pride, postcolonial governments retained.36 As Nigel Oram observed in New Guinea, there was “no way” most locals could be housed to European standards. A plausible argument calls for compromise. Informed observers have called for “minimal land development regulation”; others have advocated hybrid arrangements whereby traditional practices are adapted to relaxed modern standards.37 Some judge the result to be substandard, but defenders argue that the ideal is the enemy of the good. Perhaps more often than we know, compromise has ruled. For example, after a period when the Dutch tried to enforce their own standards in what is now Indonesia, by the late 1920s their kampung improvement program used “traditional methods . . . as a starting point.”38 In such ways, neglect shades into improvement.

Reasons to Act If it is cheaper to ignore the problem, why do many governments act? One answer, political pressure, has been implied. The riots that produced the Kerner Commission reinforced a federal commitment to addressing inner-​city problems. In the early twentieth century, kampung improvement responded to nationalist pressure. Unrest also prompted recent initiatives, for example in Latin America and India.39 Self-​interest also comes into play. Slum conditions do not stay there. The clearest examples involve infectious diseases, especially given that slum residents often work closely with their social betters. Early initiatives to improve working-​class areas in British cities were driven by concerns for the general public health.40 At the same time, Calcutta’s bustee program was prompted by concerns about the spread of cholera to Europeans.41 A similar motive drove kampung improvement in the Dutch Indies in the 1920s.42 As medical knowledge and technology improved, concerns about disease were partially replaced by social issues, notably crime. This is especially true in Latin America, whose drug trade supplies American demand. Although criminal activity and riots are often concentrated in particular areas, they cannot be confined. As I write, in July 2018, Toronto’s media report gun murders because, unusually, these have spread beyond public housing projects into the downtown. Even when such activity is confined, the costs of policing crime and substandard conditions, and depressed property values, affect all taxpayers. The first time the net effects were calculated was in Cleveland, Ohio, in the early 1930s, and it had considerable influence. For example, it helped justify slum

250   RICHARD HARRIS clearance ahead of Canada’s first public housing project.43 Such thinking concerns the “social cost” of slums.44 Hard-​nosed calculation may prod municipalities to act. Helping to tip the financial scales may be funding from beyond city limits. Municipal action in Britain in the nineteenth century was enabled and then driven by national legislation; clearance ramped up later when the government had the resources to pay for a substantial program. Kampung improvement gathered momentum from 1929, after the colonial government defrayed half of the cost. Postwar urban renewal in the United States resulted from federal legislation in 1949, and then 1954, which gave cities money.45 The worldwide surge of slum upgrading activity in the 1970s depended on funding from the World Bank, as well as regional development banks.46 Sometimes, outside money helped municipalities do what they already wanted to do or had begun. Otherwise, especially when coupled with legal requirements, it goaded them into action. Either way, outside money mattered. And then governments sometimes act because it is the right thing to do. Friedman calls this the “welfare” motive: the living conditions of poor people are improved. This consideration has motivated volunteers, activists, and reformers, including those who staffed settlement houses and advocated reform in Britain and North America in the early twentieth century, and many NGOs across the Global South.47 It is impossible to weigh the importance of welfare considerations, but Friedman is probably correct in saying that they are less effective in driving policy as considerations of “social cost.”

Getting Rid Of The Problem Once prompted to act, municipalities have two choices, demolish or improve, although it is possible to combine these in various ways. Clearance is simpler, promising to do away with stigmatized “problem” communities at a stroke, and that is a strong recommendation to politicians. Any program brings challenges, as William Slayton pointed out after many years as head of the US Urban Renewal Administration.48 Clearance raises questions about how slums will be redeveloped, not to mention whether and how residents will be rehoused. But at least, once they have the capacity to act, including the power of expropriation, municipalities need not worry about securing the participation of local residents. Indeed, the less participation the better.49 In principle, clearance has merits. If deteriorated buildings are replaced with new ones, property values and tax revenues rise.50 Adjacent residential and commercial areas get a boost. If displaced residents are rehoused, their living conditions should improve. In practice, things rarely work out that way. Commonly, few if any are rehoused. Even when some are, they are often relocated to inconveniently remote locations, as recently documented in Mumbai.51 Again and again, observers have reported that clearance has devastated communities: this was noted “in every kind of newspaper, periodical, pamphlet, and public utterance” in late nineteenth-​century London; in mid-​twentieth

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    251 century Chicago, “relocation . . . meant the uprooting of families, enforced homelessness, sacrifice of neighborhood values, threats to sources of political power”; a decade later in Boston, the psychological effects were detailed.52 No wonder that studies of places as different as London, England, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, have found that “most slum dwellers like their neighborhoods; most dwellers in public housing dislike theirs.”53 Even the tax advantage is often a chimera because cleared land is left vacant for years before being redeveloped.54 The political advantages of clearance are also mixed. Clearance gives a striking impression of improvement, as deteriorated structures give way to shining replacements. The best-​known examples are the Parisian boulevards created at the behest of Baron Haussmann. Such projects show voters that slums are being taken seriously. They can impress tourists, too. Dick, for example, has commented how new housing projects “gave the city [of Surabaya, Indonesia] a more modern appearance, and impressed foreign visitors.”55 He also notes that they could “generate official and unofficial income for both bureaucrats and contractors.” Construction projects create jobs, and this can be a reason to promote clearance, as happened with the US public housing program during the Depression. Contracts also offer opportunities for patronage and kickbacks, while redevelopment makes it possible to allocate modern, affordable housing to friends and family. Put together, especially in undemocratic societies, these have been powerful incentives for governments to opt for slum clearance. But residents have typically resisted the destruction of homes and communities. When outsiders pay attention, and in democratic societies where votes count, this can be a political problem. One reason why urban renewal programs in Anglo-​America were halted by the early 1970s was because of widespread opposition across multiple sectors of society.56 Even where political considerations dominate, and especially when coupled with social and economic considerations, they can deter clearance.

Fixing Up The Slums The remaining option is slum improvement or upgrading. Its merits must be understood in relation to the other options. In principle, it is more expensive than neglect and cheaper than clearance, which makes it a relatively affordable way of taking, and signaling, action. Politically it arouses less opposition from residents and taxpayers than clearance, though its relative lack of visibility and inability to offer much patronage may be a drawback. Socially, it promises to address a need by engaging with the local community, while being less disruptive than clearance. More than with clearance, however, the devil is in the details. There are many questions and options: How much should conditions be improved? Which ones should be prioritized? Should the input and assistance of residents be solicited, and if so how? Can it be too successful? Are the changes meant as a stopgap, enduring, or a permanent fix?

252   RICHARD HARRIS Temporary measures can address immediate, serious needs. Classic examples arose in Britain and North America in the late 1940s after fifteen years of Depression and war had created serious conditions and a housing shortage. In 1946, a survey in Cincinnati judged that although 19 percent of the housing stock in “badly deteriorated areas” required “complete clearance” another 12 percent could be “reconditioned temporarily.”57 At that time, a subtle policy of “patching” was undertaken by Birmingham, England. Dwellings destined for clearance in under five years were given “minimum weatherproofing” while those expected to last up to twenty years received new roofs, floors, electric lighting, piped water, and sanitary facilities that guaranteed one toilet for every two houses.58 In both cases, the municipality assumed that clearance would eventually be necessary. The problem with this approach is that much money could be spent on physical infrastructure that is soon replaced. For that reason, in an earlier era, Birmingham had undertaken “thorough repair” rather than “slum patching.”59 Similarly, in the Dutch Indies, the kampung improvement concentrated on infrastructure, not dwellings, because the latter might soon be removed by more extensive programs.60 A deliberate policy of patching calls for fine calculations and makes assumptions about the future that may not be realized. At the other extreme, a permanent fix is promised by regulations that mandate minimum standards of construction, maintenance, and occupancy, together with comprehensive land use controls. As US slum clearance expert James Ford argued during the Depression, “prevention is better than cure.”61 Unfortunately, the gap between theory and practice is wide. Higher standards are unaffordable to many; they are rarely realized; and anyway they do not address current circumstances. At most, they are complementary to, not part of, an upgrading program. Such programs address the existing built environment and affect neighborhoods for an indefinite period. What is considered to be appropriate for the longer term depends on the place and time. Public standpipes were installed as a permanent solution in nineteenth-​century Calcutta but today may be seen as a medium-​term solution in the Global South, while in the North they would be considered an emergency stopgap. The scope of improvement is implied in the definition of slums: it embraces physical, social, and often legal aspects of settlement. The basic failing of slums is their threat to health.62 Accordingly, wherever sanitary infrastructure has been lacking, the top priority must be clean water and safe waste disposal. This was first recognized in Britain, the first urban nation, by the 1840s, initially in London. A Metropolitan Commission of Sewers—​a “landmark”—​was established in 1848, “nuisances” were dealt with in the Removal Act (1855) and in 1871 the Metropolitan Water Act was passed.63 Conditions were as bad in parts of other British cities. As late as 1911, half of Manchester’s houses lacked water-​borne sanitation in sewers. Housing legislation was “predominantly about public health,” being “governed by the ‘sanitary idea.’ ”64 Nationally, key legislation included the Public Health Act (1848); the Sanitary Act (1866), “an enormous step forward,” allowing municipalities to compel owners to connect dwellings to public sewers; and the Public Health Act (1875), which required councils to provide sewers and remove

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    253 refuse, while causing future building regulations to be judged by their effects on public health.65 These involved new constraints on property owners. In London from 1855, owners had to “put their houses in order” while officers compelled repairs. Everywhere, owners were pressured to make repairs and sanitary connections.66 Although this legislation was not called “slum improvement” that is in fact what it was. Actions were not confined to, or targeted at, specific areas but they had greater impact in some districts than others. Increasingly, this was recognized in local reports. In Edinburgh in 1865, for example, the city’s first health officer, Henry Littlejohn, produced an influential report that declared water and drainage to be critical for public health. For the city’s Old Town in particular, he recommended that closes be paved and drained, that piped water be provided to tenements, and that wells be eliminated.67 This early emphasis on sanitation has persisted. Driven by health concerns, sanitation was equally a priority in North America in the late nineteenth century. The same was true in cities such as Calcutta in the 1880s and Batavia (now Jakarta) in the 1910s where colonial powers sought to improve urban conditions.68 After urbanization gathered pace globally after 1945, the emphasis has been even more exclusively on sanitation, as noted by the United Nations, by informed observers, and by a myriad of projects from Kenya to Peru.69 Sanitary infrastructure is government’s responsibility, but it is private owners who usually improve dwellings. To do so, they must believe that investments are worthwhile and secure. A distinctive characteristic of many slums in the developing world is their dubious legal status. Accordingly, the provision of tenure security is often seen as a high priority. Stereotypically, this takes the form of “titling,” whereby residents are given legal right to the land they occupy.70 However, where the governments do not evict squatters such assurances may be unnecessary, while some argue that providing infrastructure is the best guarantee of all.71 Areas that are physically deteriorated are typically occupied by people with very low incomes together with poor education, job skills, and employment opportunities. Improvement and upgrading programs, then, may also address these social issues. Historically, in Anglo-​America, slum improvement paid little attention to social issues.72 Lately, however, as poor sanitation and overcrowding have been largely eliminated, and because the prospects of residents and their children now depend more on social capital and formal education, crime and schools have attracted greater attention.73 Typically, by agencies such as Britain’s Social Inclusion Unit, “priority” areas are defined primarily in terms of social criteria. For this reason, and because policy-​makers have a better understanding of neighborhood change, improvement programs work to engage local residents. There is a spectrum of options. A government agency might inform residents of its plans and then try to sell them. More constructively, it may seek local input. This is as common in the Global South as in the North. Indonesia’s Kampung Improvement Program, for example, began as a top-​down program but later sought citizen input over priorities, and in the 1970s its prominence inspired the World Bank’s support for “community-​driven development.”74 The state can now actively encourage residents to do things that in many cases

254   RICHARD HARRIS they already had undertaken: dwelling improvement, neighborhood cleanup, informal policing, and even the construction of infrastructure. More ambitious still, it may treat the community as a partner in program design and implementation.75 The difficulty is that few agencies are willing to give up that much power; even those officials who are flexible often lack the skills to manage a program jointly with empowered residents.76 In a different category altogether, are situations where the lead is taken by local residents. At the extreme, as with squatter settlements, municipalities are not involved at all. More helpfully, they may support community-​based efforts to address specific needs. Beard, for example, describes a grassroots project to build a library in Indonesia while Burra speaks of how local, national, and international agencies in India cooperated to create hundreds of “community-​designed, built and managed toilet blocks.”77 Often, resident-​ led activity has received financial and technical assistance from the World Bank and NGOs. Among the most active have been Slum Dwellers International and Mahila Milan, an Indian association of women pavement-​dwellers. Upgrading may appear to be the best policy option, and often it is. But it can be too successful. Back in 1966, the conservative political scientists James Wilson cautioned that improvement might attract the middle class and end up driving out the people whom it was supposed to help.78 At the time, in the United States this danger seemed theoretical. Since then, gentrification of many inner-​city neighborhoods has shown that it is real, even in low-​income areas in the developing world.79 Improvement, then, but not too much. And there are contexts where it is not the best option. Clearance is better where conditions are so dire that no improvement can make them livable. Examples include coastal settlements subject to flooding, especially as sea levels rise. There, clearance should be combined with sensitive resettlement, making the best of a bad lot. Elsewhere, it may be better for governments to do nothing, especially where state agencies are corrupt, incompetent, and ineffective, or where they would impose inappropriate priorities. If communities are resourceful, they may be better at solving their own problems. Although it is possible to generalize about the pros and cons of each approach, what works best will always vary according to place and time. The state’s preferred strategies and priorities in dealing with slums have changed. Three trends have had a notable impact: the growth of the state, the spread and deepening of democracy, and the rise of homeownership.80 The chronology has differed from place to place and has notably differed between the developed and developing worlds, but overall trends are apparent.

The Growing State Since the mid-​nineteenth century, the role of state—​including municipal government—​ has expanded enormously. Governments do more, and citizen expectations have grown in tandem. Incrementally, it has become more difficult for governments to do nothing

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    255 about slums, more likely that clearance programs would become ambitious, and that improvement programs would address more issues. The legal tools that governments need had to be created, and sometimes fought for. In Britain, early legislation enabled and then compelled municipalities to provide water and sewers, and in turn compelled property owners to act. When Calcutta tried to improve its bustees in the 1870s and 1880s it gave itself new powers. Since its government was dominated by property owners this was not a slam dunk. Across Anglo-​America, municipalities extended and refined building regulations and housing codes. In Britain, a step in this direction was the Torrens Act (1868), under which municipalities could require property owners to meet minimum standards.81 As the fiscal capacity of governments expanded so did their ambitions. Britain’s first national slum clearance program was based on the Cross Act (1875), which allowed municipalities to compel private owners to sell their property at market price (a right known as “expropriation” in North America). It had little initial impact outside London, and even there was only used for small sites. The same power was given to colonial Improvement Trusts, such as Bombay’s.82 Their activities, too, were limited by funds, much more than by residents, who were mostly ignored. Sixty years later, however, when Britain initiated a similar program it had a significant impact on every city of any size; so did the clearance program launched by the United States after 1945.83 What was impossible in 1850 had come to be expected by 1950, and clearance sometimes affected extensive areas. The state’s capacity for good, and ill, had grown. One trend that has raised the profile of improvement programs, while changing their character, has been the expansion of government’s social services. Canada’s experience is typical. In the interwar years, publicly supported social work replaced the volunteers who had staffed settlement houses in immigrant slums.84 Especially after 1945, free public education became more essential, requiring children’s attendance to later ages while providing the literacy and analytical skills that employers increasingly required. Simultaneously, municipal planning departments such as Toronto’s were established and developed comprehensive zoning plans. These framed neighborhood plans that provided for parks, playgrounds, schools, community centers, and libraries—​ all services that voters now expect governments to provide.85 With wide powers over the physical and social environment, governments can now claim to effect wholesale neighborhood improvement. Neglect had ceased to be an option, and simplistic clearance appeared less necessary, and less easily justifiable. A faltering version of the same trend has been apparent in the developing world. It began in the colonial era when European nations introduced regulations into much poorer cities. The trend has gathered momentum since 1945, when the language and expectation of “development” became influential.86 The capacity and legal powers of governments in the Global South has been more limited, both in their ability to reshape the built environment and also to provide educational, health, employment, and recreational services. But their ambitions have been fueled by their desire to emulate the west, a goal which helps explain the popularity of clearance programs after 1945. In some countries, Hong Kong and Singapore being prime examples, and China the largest,

256   RICHARD HARRIS some nations have prospered in ways that enabled them to outdo the west in the extent of clearance.87 Elsewhere, especially since the 1970s, government activity has also been encouraged by international agencies, such as the United Nations and World Bank. These never favored clearance; they have generally promoted improvement in one form or another. But there is a qualification. Since the 1980s, governments have felt pressured to limit activity and promote market solutions, an approach often called neoliberalism. In Anglo-​America and beyond, programs for deteriorated neighborhoods have enlisted private partners by offering tax breaks and other incentives.88 In the developing world, the World Bank’s “enabling” strategy aimed to improve the management of markets to facilitate private development and improvement of housing, even for lower-​income households.89 In 1999, with the United Nations, it created the Cities Alliance, an agency that consolidates policy recommendations. Lately, attempts have been made to make slums “bankable” to private investors, linking shelter provision with job creation.90 In different ways, governments have pulled back. To some extent, NGOs and other international agencies have stepped into the breach, and it is unclear whether this interruption to a long-​run trend will become more permanent. Associated with social cutbacks, and the lowering of personal tax rates, has been the growth of income inequality. This matters because, in psychological, social, and political terms, relative inequality matters.91 In developed nations, few people lack piped water, flush toilets, or electricity, but growing numbers are falling behind the social norm while segregated in areas of concentrated deprivation.92 These are not usually called slums, and they are physically better than nineteenth-​century Edinburgh tenements or the migrant enclaves in Chinese cities, but they foster alienation, ill-​health, and social dysfunction. They demand new types of attention.

The Diffusion of Democracy Although the trend has recently stalled, the past century and a half has also seen a deepening and spread of democracy, changing peoples’ expectations about their role in shaping policy, including programs for slums. A century ago, in most countries women had no vote and tenants were disenfranchised in municipal elections. Local decisions were made by, and for, male property owners. Much of the world was under colonial rule so that indigenous peoples, the overwhelming majority of the poor, had little or no say in the fate of their settlements. In Calcutta or Batavia, even more than in London or Chicago, slums were ignored or, at most, became the target of decisions made by urban elites. Things have changed. Two periods saw accelerations in a longer-​term democratic trend. The first was the wave of decolonization that crested after 1945. Henceforth, poorer residents had to contend only with domestic elites. In Surabaya, Indonesia, for example, the new governors recognized that older, authoritarian methods of kampung

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    257 improvement were now unacceptable; in Jakarta, participation became a watchword, and improvement now included social and economic services.93 The second period of acceleration came in the late 1960s and 1970s, with grassroots pressure for citizen participation. This was felt in most western nations. In Canada as elsewhere, much agitation came from homeowners, but the rights of tenants and poor people were also advanced.94 This citizen movement was also felt in the developing world. To some extent it was promoted by western agencies, notably the Ford Foundation.95 More significantly, it was embodied in squatter settlements, initially in Latin America. These impressed western observers, notably John Turner, and reshaped the urban policies of the United Nations and then the World Bank in the 1970s.96 These placed faith in the capacity of residents to shape their own destinies, which they have done through organizations such as Slum Dwellers International, and in their rights to have a say in government policy. In the process, they undermined one enduring connotation of “slum”: that the problem lay as much with the people as with their living conditions. Moral critiques of slum-​dwellers, and the blaming of victims, were common until the 1960s, and in modified forms persist, notably in racialized societies.97 But in most parts of the world such attitudes are in retreat.

The Rise of Homeownership Although a third trend has had a more limited effect on societies in general, it has shaped the way governments deal with slums. A century ago, only a small minority of urban households owned their own home: 10 percent in Britain and a third in the United States.98 The typical neighborhood consisted mainly of tenants, and notably so in slums. Since then, in many countries homeownership has become the norm, and even in run-​ down areas it is now more common than previously. Although squatter settlements contain more tenants than many suppose, homeowners and resident landlords are the majority. This has changed the dynamics of neighborhoods and how governments handle them.99 Absentee landlords are interested only in the economic aspects of their property; their incentive is to limit maintenance to a minimum, and no higher than the area average. But owner-​occupiers also care about their homes and neighborhoods as places to live, becoming involved in defensive residents’ associations for that reason.100 The rise in homeownership means that the slope of neighborhood decline that leads to “blight” and slums has become less slippery. That is one reason why governments in many countries have promoted homeownership, and why, recently, advisors and international agencies have promoted tenure security in cities globally. In effect, although they don’t use the phrase, they are promoting slums of hope. The rise in homeownership has changed how governments think about slums. As long as absentee landlordism dominated and neighborhoods consisted of mobile tenants, municipalities assumed that coercion or clearance was necessary. But neighborhoods of rooted homeowners resist displacement and can be more readily persuaded to

258   RICHARD HARRIS participate in upgrading, that is, if they do not actually initiate it. In the long run, then, rising home ownership has favored upgrading over clearance.

Conclusion It would be nice to believe that people and governments learn from their mistakes. The history of slum policy indicates that this has been rare. The problems of clearance were extensively discussed in London in the late nineteenth century but ignored half a century later, in Britain and far beyond. The potential of upgrading was demonstrated, locally, in Calcutta in the 1880s; again, using provisions of the Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890) in Birmingham, England, in the early 1900s; and again, under Dutch colonial policy in the Indies in the 1920s and 1930s. But these had little effect on the later actions of other cities, or indeed of those places themselves for most of the middle decades of the twentieth century.101 History does offer lessons, but few sit down and take notes. If there has been a shift in government policy—​and overall there has—​this is because circumstances have changed. The growth of the state, the diffusion of democracy, and the rise in urban homeownership help to explain trends in the way governments have dealt with the sorts of districts that they have called slums. A century or more ago, neglect was the default. Governments had limited capacity to reshape cities, and little inclination. Today, they can do much more, and citizens, together with international agencies, require them to. When governments did act, the tools they used were coercive—​regulation, expropriation, and the like—​and applied mainly to the built environment. Faced with recalcitrant absentee landlords and powerless tenants, clearance presented itself as an apparently simple solution, initially on a small scale but as state resources grew so did the scope of action. By the 1950s across Anglo-​America, and in many other parts of the developed world, governments were expected to act, and their reflexive response, ignoring the lessons of history, was to demolish the slum. But large-​scale clearance was expensive and, by the 1960s, was arousing strong opposition from taxpayers and those it displaced. The irregular rise in democracy made it more difficult for governments to override local residents, making in situ improvement increasingly attractive. With more property owners actually living in target areas, it became easier to secure their cooperation. Meanwhile, the state’s expanded powers, and widening responsibility for social programs, suggested that upgrading programs could have an impact. They might really work! And so we can detect a general long-​term shift, from neglect, through clearance, to improvement. These generalizations have many exceptions. Neglect is still common, especially in the poorer parts of Sub-​Saharan Africa. Municipalities everywhere still turn a blind eye to concentrations of poverty unless viruses, crime, and riots catch their attention. Clearance still happens, and sometimes surges back. Recently, for example, Delhi and Mumbai have been very active in that way, and China has readily cleared much of its

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    259 older courtyard housing even though it was still livable, and indeed attractive.102 And improvement takes many forms, including those where governments pass the buck to local residents, nonprofits, and developers who see market potential. Nurturing grassroots activism can shade into a strategic retreat by the neoliberal state, and so the circle closes. All of this matters because the stakes have never been higher. Including modern urban neighborhoods of relative deprivation, slums are now widespread, and in large numbers. In about 2012, the world became more urban than rural, and since then urbanization has continued. The global incidence of poverty has declined, but the absolute numbers of the urban poor, and of the districts they occupy, have never been larger. Some writers, for example Doug Saunders, see plenty of slums of hope; others, most prominently Mike Davis, paint a global picture of despair.103 In many respects, only time will tell which is the more accurate interpretation. Meanwhile, either way, the scale and significance of the topic is daunting.

Notes 1. David Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity and the American City, 1890–​1925: Changing Conceptions of the Slum and the Ghetto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xiii. 2. Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion, 2017), 10. 3. United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums (London: Earthscan, 2003), 11. 4. Richard Harris, “Modes of Informal Urban Development: A Global Phenomenon,” Journal of Planning Literature 33, no. 3 (2018): 267–​286. 5. Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 6. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Social Aspects of Housing and Urban Development (New York: United Nations, 1967), 24. 7. John N. Tarn, Working-​ Class Housing in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain, Architectural Association Paper No.7 (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), 2. 8. Nigel Oram, “Health, Housing and Urban Development,” Papua and New Guinea Medical Journal 8, no. 2 (1965): 42, 47. 9. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 10. Sumila Gulyani and Ellen M. Bassett, “Retrieving the Baby from the Bathwater: Slum Upgrading in Sub-​Saharan Africa,” Environment and Planning C. Government and Policy 25, no. 4 (2007): 486–​515; Indranil De, “Slum Improvement in India: Determinants and Approaches,” Housing Studies 32, no. 7: 990–​1013. 11. Mayne, Slums. 12. Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Wiley, 1959). 13. Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–​7 13; Mayne, Slums; Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 36–​38.

260   RICHARD HARRIS 14. Reinhard Skinner, John L. Taylor, and Emil Wegelin, Shelter Upgrading for the Urban Poor: Evaluation of a Third World Experience (Manila: Island Publishing, 1987), 8n.4; Vinit Mukhija, “Cities with Slums,” in The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, ed. Randall Crane and Rachel Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 15. Jennifer Light, The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and American Urban Professions, 1920–​1960 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 143; Anthony Downs, Neighborhood and Urban Development (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1981). 16. Richard Harris, “Ragged Urchins Play on Marquetry Floors: The Discourse of Filtering is Reconstructed, 1920s–​1950s,” Housing Policy Debate 22, no. 3 (2012): 463–​482. 17. Michael S. Gibson and Michael J. Langstaff, An Introduction to Urban Renewal (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 55; William L. Slayton, “The Operation and Achievements of the Urban Renewal Program,” in Urban Renewal: The Record and the Controversy, ed. James Q. Wilson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966), 193. 18. Martin Horak, Juliet Musso, Ellen Shiau, Robert P. Stoker, and Clarence N. Stone, “Change Afoot,” in Urban Neighborhoods in a New Era: Revitalization Politics in the Postindustrial City, ed. Clarence Stone and Robert Stoker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 23. 19. Margaret Dewar and Matthew D. Weber, “City Abandonment,” in Crane and Weber, Oxford Handbook. 20. John C. Turner, “Lima’s Barriadas and Corralones: Suburbs versus Slums,” Ekistics 19 (1965): 152–​155; John C. Turner, “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement: Problems and Policies,” in Urbanization. Development, Policies and Planning. International Social Development Review No. 1, ed. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (New York: United Nations, 1968). 21. Charles Frankenhoff, “Elements of an Economic Model for Slums in a Developing Country,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 16 (1967): 27; Doug Saunders, Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World (Toronto: Knopf, 2010). 22. Charles J. Stokes, “A Theory of Slums,” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187–​197; United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Improvement of Slums and Uncontrolled Settlements (New York: United Nations, 1971), 149. 23. Richard Harris, Unplanned Suburbs: Toronto’s American Tragedy, 1900–​1950 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-​Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–​1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Graeme Davison, Tony Dingle, and Seamus O’Hanlon, eds., The Cream Brick Frontier: Histories of Australian Suburbia (Clayton, Vic.: Monash Publications in History, Dept. of History, Monash University, 1995). 24. Mukhija, “Cities with Slums.” 25. Harris, Unplanned Suburbs; Andrew R. Highsmith, Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 26. Turner, “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement,” 122. 27. Richard Harris and Michael Mercier, “How Healthy Were the Suburbs?” Journal of Urban History 31, no. 6 (2005): 785; Harris, “Modes of Informal Urban Development.” 28. Steven M. Gillon, Separate and Unequal: The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 29. Victoria Beard, “Citizen Planners: From Self-​Help to Political Transformation,” in Crane and Weber, Oxford Handbook; Mayne, Slums, 177–​178.

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    261 30. David Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs: Authoritarian Rule and Policy Change in Peru (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 133–​134. 31. Lisa Peattie, “An Argument for Slums,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 13 (1994): 136. 32. Otto A. Davis and Andrew B. Whinston, “The Economics of Urban Renewal,” in Wilson, Urban Renewal, 60n.12. 33. C. G. M. M’Gonigle, “Poverty, Nutrition and the Public Health: An Investigation into Some of the Results of Moving a Slum Population to Modern Dwellings,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 26 (1933): 677–​687. 34. Stokes, “A Theory of Slums,” 188; cf. Mukhija, “Cities with Slums.” 35. Peattie, “An Argument for Slums,” 141. 36. Eran Ben-​Joseph, “Codes and Standards,” in Crane and Weber, Oxford Handbook. 37. Oram, “Health, Housing,” 42; David Dowall, “The Benefits of Minimal Land Development Regulation,” Habitat International 16, no. 4 (1992): 15–​26; Richard Harris, “Development and Hybridity Made Concrete in the Colonies,” Environment and Planning A. Economy and Space 40 (2008): 15–​36. 38. James L. Cobban, “Public Housing in Colonial Indonesia, 1900–​1940,” Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (1993), 889. Kampungs were indigenous villages that had been enveloped by growing cities. Initially they were administered separately. 39. Gillon, Separate and Unequal; Freek Colombijn, Under Construction: The Politics of Urban Space and Housing During the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930–​1960 (Leiden, Netherlands: KITLV Press, 2010), 195; Marie R. A. de Sampaio, “Community Organization, Housing Improvements and Income Generation,” Habitat International 18, no. 4 (1994), 93; Colin McFarlane, “Sanitation in Mumbai’s Informal Settlements: State, ‘Slum’, and Infrastructure,” Environment and Planning A, 40 (2008): 88–​107; Talton Ray, The Politics of the Barrios of Venezuela (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 13, 84–​97; Peter Ward, “The Practice and Potential of Self-​Help Housing in Mexico City,” in Self-​Help Housing. A Critique, ed. Peter Ward (London: Mansell), 203. 40. Tarn, Working-​Class Housing. 41. Richard Harris, “The World’s First Slum Improvement Programme: Calcutta’s Bustees, 1876–​1910,” Planning Perspectives (2020) 35, no. 2: 321–​344. 42. Freek Colombijn, Patches of Padan: The History of an Indonesian Town in the Twentieth Century and the Use of Urban Space (Leiden, Netherlands: CNWS, 1994), 226. 43. R.B. Navin and Associates, An Analysis of a Slum Area in Cleveland (Cleveland: Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority, 1934); Albert Rose, Regent Park: A Study in Slum Clearance (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958), 64–​67. 44. Lawrence Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century of Frustration (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968), 4–​14. 45. James A. Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918–​45 with Particular Reference to London (London: University College London Press, 1992); H. W. Dick, Surabaya, City of Work: A Socioeconomic History, 1900–​2000 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), 183; William L. Slayton, “The Operation and Achievements of the Urban Renewal Program,” in Wilson, Urban Renewal, 189–​229; Alexander von Hoffman, “The Lost History of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urbanism 1, no. 3 (2008): 281–​301. 46. Robert M. Buckley and Jerry Kalarickal, eds., Thirty Years of World Bank Shelter Lending: What Have We Learned? (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2006); Bish Sanyal, “Informal Land Markets: Perspectives for Policy,” in Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work,

262   RICHARD HARRIS ed. Eugenie L. Birch, Shahana Chatteraj and Susan M. Wachter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 177–​193. 47. Friedman, Government and Slum Housing, 4–​14. For example, on the United States see Alice O’Connor, “‘People and Places: Neighborhood as a Strategy of Urban Development from the Progressive Era to Today,” in The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy, ed. Michael Pagano (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 69–​102. 48. Slayton, “The Operation and Achievements.” 49. Langley C. Keyes, The Rehabilitation Planning Game: A Study in the Diversity of Neighborhoods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 5. 50. Rose, Regent Park, 64–​67. 51. Sapam Doshi, “The Politics of Persuasion: Gendered Slum Citizenship in Neoliberal Mumbai,” in Urbanizing Citizenship: Contested Space in Indian Cities, ed. Rem Desai and Romola Sanyal (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), 103. 52. Harold J. Dyos and David A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 366; Jack Meltzer and Cheilah Orloff, “Relocation of Families Displaced in Urban Redevelopment: Experience in Chicago,” in Urban Redevelopment: Problems and Practices, ed. Coleman Woodbury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 451; Edmuncd Ramsden and Matthew Smith, “Remembering the West End: Social Science, Mental Health and the American Urban Environment, 1939–​1968,” Urban History 45, no. 1 (2018): 128–​149. 53. Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 186–​199; A. B. Hollingshead and L. H. Rogler, “Attitudes towards Slums and Public Housing in Puerto Rico,” in The Urban Condition, ed. Leonard J. Duhl (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 243. 54. Martin Anderson, “The Federal Bulldozer,” in Wilson, Urban Renewal, 498–​499. 55. Dick, Surabaya, 243. 56. Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 57. Cincinnati City Planning Commission, Residential Areas: An Analysis of Land Requirements for Residential Development, 1945–​1970 (Cincinnati: The Commission, 1946). 58. Simon Pepper, Housing Improvement: Goals and Strategy (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), 99. 59. J. S. Nettlefold, Practical Housing (Letchworth: Garden City Press, 1908), 37. 60. James L. Cobban, “Uncontrolled Urban Settlements: The Kampong Question in Semarang (1905–​1940),” Bijdragen tot de Taal-​, Land-​en Volkenkunde /​Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania 130, no. 4: 406–​424. 61. James Ford, Slums and Housing (Westport, CT: Harvard University Press, 1936), 508. 62. Ruth Turley, Ruhi Saith, and Nandita Bhan, “Slum Upgrading Strategies involving Physical Environment and Infrastructure Intervention and Their Effects on Health and Socio-​ economic Outcomes,” The Cochrane Library, issue 9 (New York: Wiley, 2012), http://​www. cochr​ane.org/​CD010​067/​PUBH​LTH_​the-​eff​ect-​of-​slum-​upgrad​ing-​on-​slum-​dwell​ers-​ hea​lth-​qual​ity-​of-​life-​and-​soc​ial-​wellbe​ing 63. Henry Jephson, The Sanitary Evolution of London (London: Fisher Unwin, 1907), 17–​20, 41, 138. 64. Stefan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 56; Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 164; Enid Gauldie, Cruel

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    263 Habitations: A History of Working-​Class Housing, 1798–​1918 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 293. 65. Gauldie, Cruel Habitations, 80, 139–​140; Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Arnold, 1977), 81; Jephson, The Sanitary Evolution, 201–​202; Muthesius, English Terraced House, 55–​62. 66. Jephson, The Sanitary Evolution, 137–​138. 67. Paul Laxton and Richard Rodger, Insanitary City: Henry Littlejohn and the Condition of Edinburgh (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2013), 116–​117. 68. Platt, Shock Cities; Christine Furedy, “Whose Responsibility? Dilemmas of Calcutta’s Bustee Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 5 (1982): 24–​46; Richard Harris, “Housing Policy for the Colonial City: The British and Dutch Experience Compared, 1901–​1949,” Urban Geography 30, no. 8 (2009): 815–​837. 69. United Nations, Social Aspects of Housing, 24; United Nations, Improvement of Slums; United Nations, The Challenge of Slums, 130; United Nations Habitat, Urbanization and Development: Emerging Futures (Nairobi: UN Habitat, 2016); Skinner, Taylor, and Wegelin, Shelter Upgrading, 2; Collier, Squatters and Oligarchs, 85; Kenya Ministry of Lands and Settlement, Town Planning Department, Housing in Mombasa (Nairobi: The Department, 1969). 70. De Soto, Mystery of Capital; United Nations, The Challenge of Slums, 130–​132; Skinner, Taylor and Wegelin, Shelter Upgrading, 2–​4. 71. Perlman, Favela, 295–​296; Gulyani and Bassett, “Retrieving the Baby,” 130–​132. 72. Light, Nature of the City, 155–​156; Kenneth Temkin and William Rohe, “Neighborhood Change and Urban Policy,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 15 (1996): 159–​170. 73. Horak et al., “Change Afoot”; Robert Sampson, Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 60; Craig Johnstone, “Crime, Disorder and Urban Renaissance,” in New Horizons in British Urban Policy, ed. Craig Johnstone and Mark Whitehand (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2004), 75–​93; 74. Beard, “Citizen Planners.” For an evaluation of the kampong program of the 1970s see Johan Silas, “The Kampung Improvement of Indonesia: A Comparative Case Study of Jakarta and Surabaya,” in Low-​Income Housing in the Developing World, ed. Geoffrey K. Payne (New York: Wiley, 1984), 69–​87. 75. See, for example, K. A. Jayaratne and M. Sohail, “Regulating Urban Upgrading in Developing Countries,” Municipal Engineer 158 (2005): 53–​62. 76. Reinhard Skinner, “Community Participation: Its Scope and Organization,” in People, Poverty and Shelter: Problems of Self-​Help Housing in the Third World (London: Methuen, 1983), 125–​150. 77. Beard, “Citizen Planners”; Sundar Burra, “Towards a Pro-​poor Framework for Slum Upgrading in Mumbai, India,” Environment and Urbanization 17, no. 1 (2005): 82. 78. Wilson, “Planning and Politics: Citizen Participation in Urban Renewal,” in Urban Renewal. The Record, 407–​421. 79. On Brazil and South Africa see Marie Huchzermeyer, Unlawful Occupation: Informal Settlements and Urban Policy in South Africa and Brazil (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2004), 5–​6. 80. Richard Harris, “Neighbourhood Improvement /​Settlement Upgrading. A Fragmented Global History,” Progress in Planning (2020) 142: 1–​30. 81. Furedy, “Whose Responsibility?”; Ben-​Joseph, “Codes and Standards”; Gauldie, Cruel Habitations, 262–​268.

264   RICHARD HARRIS 82. James A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–​1920 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 16–​17. 83. Gibson and Langstaff, An Introduction to Urban Renewal; Anderson, “The Federal Bulldozer”; Friedman, Government and Slum Housing. 84. James M. Pitsula, “The Emergence of Social Work in Toronto,” Journal of Canadian Studies 14, no. 1 (1979): 35–​42. 85. Richard White, Planning Toronto: The Planners, the Plans, their Legacies, 1940–​1980 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016). 86. Richard Harris and Godwin Arku, “Housing and Economic Development: The Evolution of an Idea since 1945,” Habitat International 30 (2006): 1007–​1017. 87. Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–​ 1963 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 88. Timothy P. R. Weaver, Blazing the Neoliberal Trail: Urban Political Development in the United States and the United Kingdom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 89. Buckley and Kalarickal, Thirty Years; Anna K. Tibaijuka, Building Prosperity: The Centrality of Housing in Economic Development (London: Earthscan, 2009); Bish Sanyal, “Informal Land Markets: Perspectives for Policy,” in Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work, 177–​193. 90. Bronwen G. Jones, “‘Bankable Slums’: The Global Politics of Slum Upgrading,” Third World Quarterly 33, no. 5 (2012): 769–​789; Petronella Kigochie, “Squatter Rehabilitation Projects that Support Home-​Based Enterprises Create Jobs and Housing: The Case of Mathare 4A, Nairobi,” Cities 18, no. 4 (2001): 223–​233. 91. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-​First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014); Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone’s Well-​Being (New York: Allen Lane, 2019). 92. Bruce Katz, Neighborhoods of Choice and Connection: The Evolution of American Neighborhood Policy and What It Means for the United Kingdom. Metropolitan Policy Program Report (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2004). https://​www.brooki​ngs.edu/​resea​ rch/​neighb​orho​ods-​of-​cho​ice-​and-​con​nect​ion-​the-​evolut​ion-​of-​ameri​can-​neigh​borh​ ood-​pol​icy-​and-​what-​it-​means-​for-​the-​uni​ted-​king​dom. 93. Dick, Surabaya, 368; Chris Silver, Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2008), 137. 94. See, for example, Shlomo Hasson and David Ley, Neighbourhood Organizations and the Welfare State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994). 95. Aprodicio Laquian, Slums Are for People (Honolulu: East-​West Center Press, 1971), 43; De, “Slum Improvement in India.” 96. Turner, “Uncontrolled Urban Settlements”; Tibaijuka, Building Prosperity. 97. Ward, Poverty, Ethnicity, 5; Mayne, Slums, 10, 38, 84; Peter Shapely, Deprivation, State Interventions and Urban Communities in Britain, 1968–​1979 (London: Routledge, 2017), 2–​3, 335. 98. Richard Harris and Chris Hamnett, “The Myth of the Promised Land: The Social Diffusion of Home Ownership in Britain and the United States,” Annals, Association of American Geographers 77, no. 2 (1987): 173–​190. 99. Davis and Whinston, “Economics of Urban Renewal.”

Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?    265 100. Kevin Cox, “Housing Tenure and Neighborhood Activism,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1982): 107–​129. 101. Harris, “Neighbourhood Improvement.” 102. Vinit Mukhija, “Rehousing Mumbai: Formalizing Slum Land Markets through Redevelopment,” in Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work, 125–​139; Xuefei Ren, “Governing the Informal: Housing Policies over Informal Settlements in China, India and Brazil,” Housing Policy Debate 28, no. 1 (2018): 79–​93. 103. Saunders, Arrival Cities; Davis, Planet of Slums.

Bibliography Harris, Richard. “A History of Neighbourhood Improvement/​Settlement Upgrading.” Progress in Planning 142 (2020): 1–​30. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion, 2017. Mukhija, Vinit. “Cities with Slums.” In The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, edited by Randall Crane and Rachel Weber, 524–​538. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. O’Connor, Alice. “‘People and Places’: Neighborhood as a Strategy of Urban Development from the Progressive Era to Today.” In The Return of the Neighborhood as an Urban Strategy, edited by Michael Pagano, 69–​102. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Peattie, Lisa. “An Argument for Slums.” Journal of Planning Education and Research 13 (1994): 136. Stokes Charles J. “A Theory of Slums.” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187–​197. Temkin, Kenneth, and William Rohe. “Neighborhood Change and Urban Policy,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 15 (1996): 159–​170 Turley, Ruth, Ruhi Saith, and Nandita Bhan. “Slum Upgrading Strategies involving Physical Environment and Infrastructure Intervention and their Effects on Health and Socio-​ Economic Outcomes.” Cochrane Database of Systemic Reviews issue 1, New York: Wiley, 2013, pp. 1-​ 128 https://​www.coch​rane​libr​ary.com/​cdsr/​doi/​10.1002/​14651​858.CD010​067. pub2/​full. Turner, John C. “Uncontrolled Urban Settlement: Problems and Policies.” In Urbanization, Development, Policies and Planning. International Social Development Review No. 1, edited by United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 107–​128. New York: United Nations, 1968.

CHAPTER 14

HAU SSMANN A ND T H E REBU ILDING OF PA RI S , 1853 –​1 8 7 0 A Reassessment ANTOINE PACCOUD

Much of the Paris of today—​ the wide, tree-​ lined, and monumental boulevards bordered by lines of uniform facades and the perspectives they create—​can be traced back to the work of Baron Haussmann and Emperor Napoleon III during the Second Empire (1853–​1870). Napoleon III appointed Haussmann, who had begun his career in public administration in 1831, as prefect of the Seine Department in 1853. Haussmann had previously served as prefect, the highest central government representative in a department, in Gironde (of which Bordeaux is the capital) and in Yonne. The city’s transformation under his tenure as prefect was profound, ranging from the most monumental (the boulevards, the architecture, and the perspectives) to the most mundane of planning activities (such as street leveling and widening, sewer construction, enforcing building standards). It deeply affected the lives of the almost two million inhabitants in the urban region, who saw their city change before their eyes in less than two decades. In this rapidly changing environment, the planning apparatus and its regulatory power were also being redefined. This episode has been at the center of a historiographical debate on the rationales that pushed forward what is considered to be one of the most ambitious, single-​minded (and heavy-​handed) examples of “city improvement” in the modern world. On the one side are the strong critiques attached to the process of “haussmannization”: proto-​ gentrification,1 the consolidation of urban capitalism,2 or the forceful imposition of order over a city.3 On the other is the reconsideration of certain aspects of Haussmann’s work in Paris carried by studies of urban history in France, most notably François Loyer’s discussion of the surprising balance of the Haussmannian architectural system4

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    267 and Florence Bourillon’s detailed work on Parisian industrial quarters, which tempers the usual association of the public works with worker displacement.5 One facet of these public works that has received scant attention is Haussmann’s planning practice, or in other words the daily decisions taken by Haussmann in his carrying out of planning interventions. While Haussmann oversaw the transformation of Paris between 1853 and 1870, his tenure can be split into two distinct periods: between 1853 and 1859, Haussmann was engaged in a confrontation with property owners over planning power; after 1859, losses in the courts handed back planning power to property owners.6 In this first period, of which little is known since contemporary critiques emerged after the end of his tenure,7 Haussmann adopted a strategic approach to the use of planning law designed to align the public works with the interests of Saint-​Simon’s industrial class over those of idle property owners in a context of extreme wealth inequalities.8 Indeed, in 1847 Paris, the richest 10 percent of decedents held 98.3 percent of total wealth, with 55.8 percent of total wealth being held by the richest one percent; in comparison, these were respectively at 66.9 percent and 23.7 percent in 1994.9 The analysis of Haussmann’s planning practice can usefully contribute to the longstanding discussion on the rationales of his public works. There is evidence that Haussmann was disinterested in matters of security10—​in contrast to interpretations that put this at the center11—​and that, at least in the first years of his public works, Haussmann’s aim was not to extract as much value from the built environment as possible, or to free capital from its feudal straitjacket.12 The other major charge laid at Haussmann’s door is that his public works were designed to rid the center of Paris of its poor (through the destruction of slums) and to refashion it as a place for the bourgeoisie.13 This interpretation of Haussmann and his public works is commonplace in the English-​language social science literature. Indeed, among the 730 articles to date that mention Haussmann and his public works published in geography, planning, history, sociology, and architecture journals, two hundred feature the word “slum” (which appears a total of 1,044 times). There is no equivalent to this in the French-​language literature, especially since the word most commonly used to translate it (bidonville) did not exist in Haussmann’s time and is found in only seven out of the 153 French-​language research articles featuring the word Haussmann. Other related words appear more frequently, but they do not carry the same meaning. This is the case for taudis, which refers to a dilapidated house rather than to a neighborhood as a whole (20 appearances out of 153 French-​language articles), and for the word garni, which refers to a furnished room for rent, the lodging of choice for low-​income populations that had a reputation of being overcrowded (16 appearances). Is it possible that the longstanding preoccupation by many scholars with Haussmann as the exemplar of nineteenth-​century slum clearance is misplaced? There is evidence that slum clearance was not a central concern in Haussmann’s public works, even if they did lead to the destruction of a number of working-​class areas.

268   ANTOINE PACCOUD

Haussmann and the Transformation of Paris: The Facts Haussmann’s public works are mostly known for the cutting of large new boulevards through existing neighborhoods, but this was only one of the many processes that were acting to change the face of the city. Behind the scenes, Haussmann’s administration was also very active in attempting to widen secondary streets and to impose strict building codes. Other changes brought about in Paris concern improvements in sanitation, the creation of parks, and the construction of public buildings. Haussmann built two 200-​ kilometer-​long aqueducts, against the opposition of both the municipal council and the medical community, and initiated large-​scale improvements in the sewer system. Many parks were also created, such as the Bois de Boulogne, the Bois de Vincennes, the Buttes Chaumont as well as a number of smaller green areas. This transformed Paris from a city with very few parks in 1850 into the greenest city in continental Europe by 1870.14 Finally, a number of public buildings were erected, either for monumental effect (the Opera, completed after 1870, being the best example of this) or for public use (the Bibliothèque Nationale, major hospitals, and schools). The new streets created can be placed in three different categories. A first set of boulevards were aimed at facilitating circulation and communication in the central parts of the city at the cost of large destructions—​and especially that of the Island of the Cité, Paris’s medieval core. The most important of these is the Grande Croisée that eased access to the city’s cardinal points. It was created by extending the rue de Rivoli, an east–​west axis whose construction had been started by Napoleon I, and then by cutting the boulevard de Sebastopol to extend the north–​south boulevard de Strasbourg. The Grande Croisée allowed easy access to the train stations, a central concern of Napoleon III.15 In this category also belong the “grands boulevards” that extend to the southern part of the city in order to join them with those on the north bank, and few diagonal streets of lesser importance. In the second category are those streets that aim to unite the center of the city with the peripheral suburbs. These streets were created after the incorporation of the peripheral suburbs into the city’s zone of jurisdiction in 1860.16 The periphery itself was however largely neglected by the public works, Haussmann’s focus being more on providing communication channels between the center and the periphery than on the development of the peripheral road network. The third category comprises those streets that had more of a city-​making purpose. This was mostly achieved by symmetrically joining terminating boulevards at roundabouts. The Place de l’Etoile, as the end point of the Champs Elysées and of seven other streets, is a perfect example of this. These streets were concentrated in the west of the city, but the same monumental effect was used for the Place de la Nation in the east. The creation of new streets fostered an intensive bout of property development: while about twenty thousand houses were demolished between 1852 and 1869, just

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    269 under forty-​four thousand new houses were constructed.17 This is due to the planning regulations Haussmann had at his disposal, and notably the March 26, 1852, decree, passed by Napoleon III (after his 1851 coup) only a year before Haussmann’s tenure as prefect of the Seine. This law made it possible to expropriate not only the land needed for the new streets but also the remaining portions of the plots cut through by the new streets that were deemed too small to build salubrious housing on. The 1852 decree thus reinforced the tools at planners’ disposal by allowing for the expropriation not only of the required buildings themselves but also of strips of land that bordered the future path of the boulevard. This gave the city the opportunity to acquire land that would immensely increase in value after the boulevard was pierced and that could then be sold off at a high margin. The huge expenditures needed to expropriate, demolish, clear, level, pave, and connect the new streets to infrastructural networks could then be recouped by selling the land bordering the new boulevards. The vast areas that were cleared and the building and aesthetic restrictions imposed by Haussmann meant that it was mostly large property developers who supplied the new housing. To ensure that this monumental and aesthetically regulated housing was profitable, these developers targeted the bourgeoisie. This created a process of diffusion of increasing property values that emanated from these boulevards and that put pressure on the city’s low-​income residents, with the public works sowing the seeds for the concentration of this population in the east and north of the city and in its suburbs.

Haussmann and Slum Clearance: Reviewing the Evidence Four major traditions of scholarship on the transformation of Paris can be identified. The first are the historians who have sought to tell the overarching story of the public works, drawing on Haussmann’s own Mémoires, published in 1890, complemented by speeches, meeting records, and reports written by Haussmann and by the memoires of other key players in the public works.18 The second is the Durkheimian school of sociology in France.19 These classic texts, and especially Jeanne Gaillard’s, have been influential in informing English-​speaking scholarship on the public works. In contrast to the great detail of the historical accounts described above, these scholars all attempted to find the larger processes (economic, sociological, or cultural) expressed through the transformation of Paris. The third tradition is that which attempts to situate the public works in the history of planning.20 A central concern of these scholars is to identify the “planning configuration” the public works represent, in other words, whether they are top-​down, technical, comprehensive, linked to the regularization of the urban fabric, and so on. The fourth major tradition is that which follows through on Friedrich Engels’s evaluation of the public works in his 1872 essay The Housing Question.21 What unites

270   ANTOINE PACCOUD these scholars is a focus on the social consequences of Haussmann’s public works and how these can be seen as a catalyst for the Paris Commune in 1871. The interpretation of Haussmann’s work as “slum clearance”—​which is so prevalent in geography and urban studies today—​emerges from an engagement with the last of these traditions. That is not to say that the question of the social changes wrought by the public works is absent from the other three. What is important here is that only the Marxist scholars put this question at the heart of their interpretation. Engels’s assessment is: By “Haussmann” I mean the practice which has now become general of making breaches in the working-​ class quarters of our big towns, and particularly in those which are centrally situated, quite apart from whether this is done from considerations of public health and for beautifying the town, or owing to the demand for big centrally situated business premises, or owing to traffic requirements, such as the laying down of railways, streets, etc.22

This assessment is at the roots of the labeling of “haussmannization” as proto-​ gentrification,23 a process through which the center of the city was reconquered by the upper classes.24 Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, Andy Merrifield summarizes this process thus: Haussmann patented not only what we’d now call the gentrified city, with its commodification of space; he also pioneered a new class practice, bankrolled by the state: the deportation of the working class to the periphery, a divide-​and-​rule policy through the urbanization itself, gutting the city according to a rational economic and political plan.25

The big question as concerns Haussmann’s public works is thus that of its general intent; this is what unites the statements by Engels and Merrifield. It cannot be denied that the transformation of the city was achieved through the destruction of particular neighborhoods. The most notorious of these was the leveling of the city’s medieval core, of which only the cathedral and a small block remain;26 but a number of other neighborhoods were also razed in the realization of the central cross.27 Three facts emerging from the vast literature on the public works come to nuance the conclusion that the clearance of these worker-​dominated areas was the overall aim of the public works. This literature first points out that the public works had a Saint-​Simonian tinge: the working classes were supposed to profit from job creations in construction,28 from better communication channels between different parts of the city, and from an improvement in sanitary conditions (both through the inspection of housing29 and the launch of work on a modern sewer network). The public works were a response to a series of practical concerns that affected all Parisians: the difficulty of navigating between the two banks of the river, the uneven development of the two sides of the river, and the impossibility of

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    271 relying on alignment plans to regularize the urban fabric.30 In the same vein, Francoise Choay describes Haussmann’s actions as “the will to optimise the city’s functioning by the integration of the ends and means put at his disposal by science and technology.”31 This was done through the interconnection of comprehensive and layered systems that fulfilled the twin objectives of circulation and hygiene, what she calls “regularisation.” Second, there is evidence that other factors contributed to the concentration of workers in the suburbs. It has been shown that the general tendency of population loss in the center of the city predated Haussmann’s public works.32 The increase in the worker population in the suburbs seems also to have been partly due to the very large arrival of rural migrants attracted by the employment opportunities opened up by the public works and the development of small industry.33 Third, and most importantly, it has been noted that the destructions were not systematic and had different effects on working-​class areas in the city. This unevenness is first a result of the fact that the public works, while vast and intense, did not destroy all of the city’s medieval fabric. The new streets cut through all kinds of housing, including housing that had been recently completed,34 and were superimposed on the existing fabric. This meant that a large number of medieval streets survived,35 and along with them a quantity of inexpensive lodgings.36 This made it possible for the population pushed out of demolition areas to keep a foothold in the center of the city by moving to neighboring streets37—​even if this strategy was a costly and relatively short-​term solution38 because of the generalized increase in rents during that period, which accelerated the departure of workers to the eastern suburbs.39 The comparative work of Florence Bourillon across different Parisian neighborhoods also shows the existence of different experiences of the public works. In the case of three areas on the right bank (Arts et Métiers, Vivienne et Mail), she found that local industries were bolstered by the opening up of communication channels with the rest of the city, with only the well-​off population exiting the areas.40 In contrast, the Saint-​Victor neighborhood, located on the left bank, underwent a strong de-​industrialization following the clearance of low-​quality housing and its replacement by buildings for the upper classes.41 In addition to the fact that not all worker areas were touched by the public works, her work shows that not all affected areas experienced a destruction of their working-​class character. Although these studies do not question the fact that the public works were linked to the destruction of working-​class areas and the displacement of their inhabitants from the center of the city, they point to a more gradual and spatially uneven process than that portrayed by the concept of “haussmannization.” However, as Ann-​Louise Shapiro has pointed out, it is clear is that “there was no public attempt to rehouse those displaced by demolitions, and private industry failed to take up the task, preferring rather to chase the windfall profits of the luxury housing market.”42 The lack of attention to the plight of the low-​income Parisians pushed out of their neighborhoods by the destructions and the rising rents is a reminder that the public works were pushed through in a historical context in which the working classes, and the areas in which they lived, were very frequently characterized as dysfunctional and morally inferior. However, Haussmann

272   ANTOINE PACCOUD seems not to have adhered to this particular discourse on the working classes, instead characterizing the Parisian population as “nomads.”

Haussmann’s Nomads Characterizations of the working class in nineteenth-​century Paris were intertwined with conceptualizations of the urban problems that affected the city. There was a clear sense that the traditional city was ill-​adapted to the strong population and economic growth it had experienced in the nineteenth century. The focus was on urban dysfunctions: congestion, insalubrity, population loss in the center and anarchic development of the suburbs, disease, decrepit housing, and the overcrowding of industrial and craft workshops.43 These concerns coalesced into the idea that low-​quality and overcrowded housing had a dangerous impact on those who lived in them but also negatively affected their behavior: cold, humid, and damp lodgings were thought to corrupt morals.44 This particular conception of working-​class areas does not seem to be aligned with the way in which Haussmann viewed this population. Instead, he drew on a longstanding trope: a large part of the Parisian population was made up of “nomads.” The term draws on a distinction between the Parisian-​born and those who migrated to Paris. It developed in the eighteenth century, a time in which immigration to the city was low and in which immigrants were spatially and socially homogenous.45 It was articulated by bourgeois commentators46 and the working classes alike;47 in the latter case, it was used to distinguish between those who were sedentary and those who came to Paris seasonally for work. Haussmann’s use of the term in the mid-​nineteenth century occurs in a different context: Paris’s 1801 population (547,000 inhabitants) more than doubled to reach 1,174,000 inhabitants in 1856.48 This sharp population increase was propelled by immigration and signaled the replacement of the old by the new Parisians.49 Haussmann’s use of the term thus occurs at a time in which the “nomads” made up a large proportion of the population. For Haussmann, the term “nomad” seems to stand for the Parisian population as whole. As Brian Chapman notes, “Haussmann had a poor opinion of the Parisians. He saw Paris as an immense market place and workshop, an arena for the ambitious and a rendezvous for the pleasure seeker. Many Parisians, he declared publicly, were nothing more than nomads, absolutely devoid of any civic sentiment.”50 Franz Vossen notes that Haussmann referred to Paris as a “lieu de passage” (a “place of transit”).51 In this conception of a city, it is not the people that compose it that matter but the infrastructure that allows those who pass through it to accomplish their goals. This is a city as a tool and opportunity rather than as a lived place. Haussmann clearly states that Paris, as a city, belongs to France and not to the Parisians, be they Parisians of birth or of choice.52 This conception of the city as a “cross-​roads of individual ambitions” echoes Engels’s description of the capitalist city: “the dissolution of mankind into nomads, of which

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    273 each one has a separate principle and a separate purpose, the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.”53 This seems to be precisely Haussmann’s conception of a “modern” city, one that gives individuals full rein to draw from it what they need, for as long as they need, without asking in return any commitment to place. In a city imagined as being devoid of attachments to place, the destruction of particular areas becomes easier to justify: since the population is constantly in flux, those whose lodgings are destroyed can simply move elsewhere to continue their Parisian adventure. This can explain the brutality with which the city’s historical core—​which Napoleon III himself had not dared to touch54—​was destroyed. Though this interpretation foregrounds Haussmann’s technocratic and unsentimental conception of the modern city and of public works within it, it does also point to the absence of an overall “slum clearance” agenda. Indeed, Haussmann saw the nomadic nature of the Parisian population as a fact, a variable that had to be integrated in his model of the city. Instead of trying to rid the city of its “nomads,” it seems as though he was attempting to improve the functioning of the city for this new, modern, individual. What is clear is that the way in which the renovations were carried out—​destruction of central neighborhoods, reliance on private developers, lack of worker rehousing—​ favored certain types of nomads over others. It is still a matter of debate as to whether this particular outcome was planned from the outset. This is because Haussmann’s planning practice, at least in the first half of his tenure as prefect of the Seine, shows a greater preoccupation with enforcing planning law and building codes on very reticent property owners than with the “re-​conquest” of central Paris by the bourgeoisie. The next section turns to this planning practice.

Haussmann’s Planning Practice: New Insights Haussmann’s confrontation with property owners is detailed in the classic texts on the public works.55 However recent analysis of heretofore unstudied archival resources has provided a different interpretation. The new analysis is based on 115 administrative cases centered on letters or petitions sent to the minister of the interior (Haussmann’s immediate superior) by Parisians over the 1853–​1859 period.56 The majority of these cases were initiated by property owners who wrote to the minister of the interior—​sometimes repeatedly—​to complain about, or bypass, Haussmann’s planning injunctions. Viewed from this archival resource, it emerged that Haussmann, in his first years as prefect of the Seine, was engaged in a conflict over the interpretation of planning law. Haussmann’s planning practice in the 1853–​1859 period can indeed be seen as an attempt to take planning power back from property owners by resuscitating legislation that had become a dead letter or rendered ineffective by property owner influence on the courts, and especially the 1807 planning law. Passed under Napoleon I’s Empire, this law gave

274   ANTOINE PACCOUD the planning authority strong tools to modify the urban fabric through the drawing up of plans that could be used to justify the piercing of new streets and the widening of old ones.57 The 1807 law had however quickly come under attack in the legislature and in the courts and had never received full application. Haussmann sought to bring back the 1807 law by first pushing for the strict application of its street widening clauses. He refused property owners all repairs or renovations to buildings that were not on the proper alignment, regardless of how long the particular alignment invoked had been ignored. For him, this was the only way to guarantee the effectiveness of this gradual approach to street improvement. As concerns street creations, Haussmann was applying, and even strengthening, the 1807 law whose street creation clauses had been severely defeated by property owners. The intervening jurisprudence laid out a series of administrative steps that needed to be taken between the moment when the public became aware of expropriation plans for their neighborhood and the moment at which the expropriation of their particular property would be realized. During this time, Haussmann forbade property owners in the zone to be expropriated from making any changes to their properties that could be seen as adding to their value, even if they were on the proper alignment. This practice—​centered on controlling property-​owner attempts at speculating on the public works—​was short-​lived; his interpretation of planning law was defeated by court cases brought to the Council of State by property owners by the end of 1850s. These defeats had serious implications for the way in which Haussmann conducted the public works in the 1860s and set the frame for the use of this planning law in other French cities that underwent similar transformations.58 Haussmann pushed on with the public works in the 1860s, without the backing of planning law, and these became a source of speculative profit for property owners and developers. Haussmann’s early planning practice was of Saint-​Simonian inspiration.59 Saint-​ Simon was a utopian socialist whose influence permeated French society in the nineteenth century and who called for decision-​making to be in the hands of the productive class, that is, all those working to produce things useful to society: factory owners and workers, those involved in agriculture or trade, as well as artists and scientists. In a similar vein, Haussmann’s planning practice was predicated on the refusal that property owners benefit from the public works just by virtue of being property owners. He saw the strong limits placed on the private capture of the added value to properties created by the public works as the contribution of property owners to the city’s transformation. While this planning practice did not provide much voice to either property owners or those affected by the demolitions, it was nonetheless an attempt to elevate the general interest above that of property owners in a context of extreme wealth inequality. It is difficult to reconcile this planning practice with the idea that the aim of the public works was to systematically rid Paris of its poor neighborhoods. The picture is further complicated by a series of cases that point to an element of concern for the condition of the working classes. A small number of other cases do point toward a different figure of Haussmann than that portrayed by recent work in the social sciences. First, the perspective offered by this

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    275 archive shows the flipside of the issue of insalubrious housing: the fact that Haussmann condemned property owners who did not respect the building codes. For example, he wrote the following to the minister of the interior in 1859 concerning the actions of a baroness who was also a multiple property owner: “The administration must to the contrary be tough toward speculators who under the pretext of building worker housing raise for the lowest possible price, in densely populated neighborhoods, poor constructions that won’t survive longer than a tenancy and which jeopardize the lives of tenants.”60 In another case, this time 1854, Haussmann points out in a letter to the minister of the interior that a property owner is using the fact that his property houses eighty worker families to attempt to escape his administration’s order for the property to be pulled back to the decreed alignment. Haussmann’s preoccupation was with the state of the property and the improvement to the street network the realignment would allow. Second, the cases which originated in requests to have a fine imposed by Haussmann’s administration cancelled show that Haussmann was not vehemently anti-​poor. Indeed, he agrees to cancel the fines imposed on two individuals who had raised wooden sheds on land they were renting given that they had rebuilt their houses with materials permitted in the building code (constructions out of wood were banned in Paris since 1607). The two individuals, who describe themselves as “merchants” (marchands) explain their actions by the high rent levels. Haussmann writes the following to the minister of the interior to explain his decision in an 1858 letter: “It emerges from information I requested on their circumstances that it was very difficult for them to meet the costs of regularization and reconstruction and that it would be very difficult for them, if not impossible, to also pay the requested fines.” In this particular case, Haussmann thus works to allow individuals in financial difficulty to remain in Paris. It is particularly surprising because in other instances Haussmann was adamant that property owners who were found to have infringed building regulations needed to pay their fines. Finally, there are cases in which Haussmann sides with the interests of local populations against those of large corporate entities. The most striking case here is Haussmann’s strong plea to the minister of the interior to take action to force the shareholders of what turned out to be a financial scam (the Docks Napoléon) to clear materials and constructions blocking a critical thoroughfare in the Quartier de l’Europe. In this instance, the case was initiated by a collective petition signed by more than eight hundred individuals. Based on the handwriting and the professions sometimes listed alongside the signature, it appears as though these were individuals in the lower and middle classes. In another case, Haussmann works to convince the minister of the interior to follow the course of action advocated by local elected officials in defense of their constituents, one that is at odds with the interests of a railroad company defended by the minister for agriculture and commerce. These small glimpses of Haussmann’s daily decisions can perhaps nuance the general picture of the Paris public works as slum clearance. They also provide a contrast to accounts of the public works that highlight the “authorities’ basic unwillingness to disturb private interests”61 and that assert that Haussmann’s “personal views were strictly

276   ANTOINE PACCOUD conservative.”62 The insights derived from Haussmann’s planning practice of course provide only a fragmentary picture of the public works, but it is a side not usually discussed by authors who draw on the ready-​made interpretations of this series of events.

Conclusion Careful analysis of Haussmann’s public works in Paris suggest that more nuance is needed in the interpretation of such large-​scale and extended urban transformations, and in characterizations of Haussmann as a trail blazer in such undertakings. This is still the accepted wisdom. Patrick Geddes described Haussmann in these terms early in the twentieth century.63 A century later, David Harvey likewise wrote that “Haussmann tore through the old Parisian slums, using powers of expropriation in the name of civic improvement and renovation. He deliberately engineered the removal of much of the working class and other unruly elements from the city centre, where they constituted a threat to public order and political power.”64 Although a number of “zones of high population density and cheap rents”65 were indeed leveled as part of the public works pushed forward by Napoleon III and Haussmann, it is unlikely that slum clearance was their central rationale. An alternative explanation is that faced with Paris’s urban dysfunctions and influenced by his view of the city’s population as transitory and not attached to place, Haussmann decided to unsentimentally sacrifice the medieval core of the city so that the greater whole could function more efficiently. While this was accompanied by a strict control of the speculative tendencies of property owners in the first half of his tenure, his defeats in the courts sent the public works on a much more speculative course. The generalized increase in rents the urban transformation created and the lack of rehousing for those pushed out of their homes by the demolitions set the city on the unequal course decried today. Whether this course was intentionally set into motion by Haussmann and Napoleon III remains to be proven. The case of the public works that transformed Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century thus shows the importance of carefully considering evidence produced in a variety of places, and languages, before holding up a series of events as the exemplar of a generalized process. The public works seem to have steered a course between the three choices confronting policy makers when faced with “slums”: neglect, clear, or improve. While a number of central neighborhoods were destroyed, Haussmann’s main efforts sought to regularize buildings, widen streets, and ensure all areas of the city were connected to the infrastructural network. Many working-​class areas were left untouched by Haussmann’s public works and remained intact well into the twentieth century. The focus of the current social science literature only on the “clearance” aspect of Haussmann’s public works does much disservice to scholarly debate. It tends to perpetuate unhelpful “slum” stereotypes (by assuming that the working-​class neighborhoods of nineteenth-​century Paris were only describable in this way), and false

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    277 characterizations of the unitary nature of complex historical events (by encapsulating them under the umbrella of “haussmannization”).

Notes 1. Friedrich Engels, The Housing Question (London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1872] 1942); Henri Lefebvre, Espace et Politique: Le Droit à la Ville II (Paris: Edition Economica, [1972] 2000); Andy Merrifield, The New Urban Question (London: Pluto Press, 2014); Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (London: Routledge, 1996). 2. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2006). 3. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. François Loyer, Paris XIXe Siècle: L’Immeuble et la Rue (Paris: Hazan, 1987). 5. Florence Bourillon, “La Rénovation du Quartier Saint-​Victor sous le Second Empire,” Recherches Contemporaines 2 (1994): 79–​112. 6. Antoine Paccoud, “Planning Law, Power, and Practice: Haussmann in Paris (1853–​1870),” Planning Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2016): 341–​361. 7. Engels, Housing Question; Karl Marx, The Civil War in France (London: Lawrence and Wishart, [1871] 1933); Emile Zola, La Curée (Paris: Gallimard, [1871] 1999). 8. Antoine Paccoud, “Badiou, Haussmann and Saint-​Simon: Opening Spaces for the State and Planning Between ‘Post-​Politics’ and Urban Insurgencies,” Planning Theory (2018). 9. Thomas Piketty, Gilles Postel-​Vinay, and Jean-​Laurent Rosenthal, “Wealth Concentration in a Developing Economy: Paris and France, 1807–​1994,” American Economic Review 96, no. 1 (2006): 236–​256. 10. Paccoud, “Badiou, Haussmann and Saint Simon.” 11. Benjamin, Arcades Project. 12. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 108. 13. Jean Ceaux, “Rénovation Urbaine et Stratégie de Classe. Rappel de Quelques Aspects de l’Haussmannisation,” Espaces et Sociétés 13–​ 14 (1975): 19–​ 31; Andy Merrifield, “Metropolitan Birth Pangs: Reflections on Lefebvre’s The Urban Revolution,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 3 (2005): 693–​702. 14. Thomas Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities: Aspects of Nineteenth-​Century Urban Development (London: E & FN Spon, 1997). 15. Pierre Casselle, “Les Travaux de la Commission des Embellissements de Paris en 1853: Pouvait-​on Transformer la Capitale sans Haussmann?,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 155, no. 2 (1997): 645–​689. 16. Hall, Planning Europe’s Capital Cities. 17. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943). 18. Joan Chapman and Brian Chapman, The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann, Paris in the Second Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1957); David Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labours of Baron Haussmann (New York: Free Press, 1995); David H. Pinkney, Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958). 19. Adeline Daumard, Maisons de Paris et Propriétaires Parisiens au XIXe Siècle, 1809–​1880 (Paris: Éditions Cujas, 1965); Adeline Halbwachs, La Population et les Tracés de Voies à

278   ANTOINE PACCOUD Paris depuis un Siècle (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1928); Jeanne Gaillard, Paris, la Ville: 1852–​1870 (Paris: L’Harmattan, [1976] 2000). 20. Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (London: Routledge, 1967); Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle: Sur la Théorie de l’Architecture et de l’Urbanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996); Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture; Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States, and France, 1780–​1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981). 21. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots (London: Edward Arnold, 1983); Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity; Lefebvre, Espace et Politique. 22. Engels, Housing Question, Part 2: III. 23. Lefebvre, Espace et Politique; Merrifield, New Urban Question; Smith, New Urban Frontier. 24. Ceaux, “Rénovation Urbaine.” 25. Merrifield, “Metropolitan Birth Pangs,” 700. 26. Alain Faure, “Spéculation et Société: les Grands Travaux à Paris au 19e Siècle,” Histoire, Economie et Société 23, no. 3 (2004): 434–​448. 27. Ceaux, “Rénovation Urbaine.” 28. Renaud Epstein, “(Dé)politisation d’une Politique de Peuplement: La Rénovation Urbaine du XIXe au XXIe siècle,” in Le Peuplement Comme Politiques, ed. Fabien Desage, Christelle Morel-​Journel, and Valérie Sala Pala, 329–​354. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2014. 29. Jean-​Marie Thiveaud, “Le Financement des Infrastructures et de l’Immobilier du Début du XIXe Siècle Jusqu’au Milieu du XXe siècle,” Revue d’économie financière 51, no. 1 (1999): 229–​249. 30. Agnès Sander, “Building Development in the 19th Century: Between Planning Procedures and Local Action,” in The Social Fabric of the Networked City, ed. Géraldine Pflieger, Luca Pattaroni, Christophe Jemelin, and Vincent Kaufmann, 109–​130. Lausanne: EPFL, 2008. 31. Choay, La Règle et le Modèle, 274. 32. Catherine Bonvalet and Yves Tugault, “Les Racines du Dépeuplement de Paris.” Population (French ed.) 39, no. 3 (1984): 463–​481. 33. Epstein, “(Dé)politisation d’une Politique de Peuplement.” 34. Bonvalet and Tugault, “Les Racines du Dépeuplement de Paris.” 35. Faure, “Spéculation et Société.” 36. Kiva Silver, “Building Communities: Immigration, Occupation, and the Boundaries of Limousin Solidarity in Nineteenth-​Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 35, no. 1 (2012): 61–​92. 37. Bourillon, “La Rénovation du Quartier Saint-​Victor.” 38. Faure, “Spéculation et Société.” 39. Anne-​Louise Shapiro, “Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control.” French Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 486–​507. 40. Bourillon, “La Rénovation du Quartier Saint-​Victor.” 41. Ibid. 42. Shapiro, “Housing Reform in Paris.” 43. Florence Bourillon, “Changer la Ville. La Question Urbaine au Milieu du 19e siècle,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 64 (1999): 11–​23. 44. Barrie M. Ratcliffe, “Lieux en Images–​Lieux Imaginés à Paris au Milieu du XIXe Siècle: Déconstruction de Photographies Anciennes de la Montagne Sainte-​ Geneviève; Reconstruction d’espaces Vécus,” Revue d’Histoire du XIXe Siècle 26/​27 (2003): 17–​64.

Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris    279 45. Louis Chevalier, “Description Littéraire et Description Historique de Paris Pendant la Première Moitié du XIXe siècle,” Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises 6 (1954): 165–​179. 46. Ibid. 47. Jacques Rougerie, “Le Mouvement Associatif Populaire Comme Facteur d’Acculturation Politique à Paris de la Révolution aux Années 1840: Continuité, Discontinuités,” Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française 297 (1994): 493–​516. 48. Bonvalet and Tugault, “Les Racines du Dépeuplement de Paris,” 466. 49. Chevalier, “Description Littéraire.” 50. Brian Chapman, “Baron Haussmann and the Planning of Paris,” Town Planning Review 24, no. 3 (1953): 177–​192. 51. Franz Vossen, “Les Deux Villes: du Paris de Quasimodo au Paris d’Haussmann,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 2, no. 4 (1947): 385–​396. 52. Chevalier, “Description Littéraire.” 53. Bernard Magubane, “Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 and the Housing Question (1872) Revisited: Their Relevance for Urban Anthropology,” Dialectical Anthropology 10, no. 1–​2 (1985): 43–​68; 50.50 54. Casselle, “Les Travaux de la Commission”; Rosa Tamborrino, “Le Plan d’Haussmann en 1864,” Genèses 15 (1994): 130–​141. 55. Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning, 135–​136; Gaillard, Paris, la Ville, 28–​30; Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 131–​133. 56. Detailed in Paccoud, “Planning Law, Power, and Practice.” 57. Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City. 58. Michel Lacave, “Stratégies d’Expropriation et Haussmannisation: l’Exemple de Montpellier,” Annales. Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 35, no. 5 (1980): 1011–​1025; Michaël Darin, “Les Grandes Percées Urbaines du XIXe Siècle: Quatre Villes de Province,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 43, no. 2 (1988): 477–​505. 59. Paccoud, Badiou, Haussmann and Saint Simon. 60. The letters written by Haussmann that are discussed here come from the archives of the Departmental Affairs section of the Interior Ministry, and more specifically, from three boxes (coded as F2 II Seine 33, 34, and 35 in the National Archives) containing cases related to the urban road network in the Department of the Seine from 1853 to 1859. 61. Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City, 134. 62. Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning, 134. 63. Patrick Geddes, Town Planning towards City Development: A Report to the Durbar of Indore, Part I (Indore: Holkar State Printing, 1918), 10. 64. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review 53 (September–​October 2008): 33. 65. Ratcliffe, “Lieux en Images.”

Bibliography Bourillon, Florence. “Changer la Ville: La Question Urbaine au Milieu du 19e siècle.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 64, Numéro Spécial: Villes en Crise? (1999): 11–​23. Ceaux, Jean. “Rénovation Urbaine et Stratégie de Classe: Rappel de Quelques Aspects de l’Haussmannisation.” Espaces et Sociétés 13–​14 (1975): 19–​31.

280   ANTOINE PACCOUD Chapman, Joan, and Brian Chapman. The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann, Paris in the Second Empire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1957. Choay, Françoise. La Règle et le Modèle: Sur la Théorie de l’Architecture et de l’Urbanisme. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Gaillard, Jeanne. Paris, la Ville: 1852–​1870 (1976). Reprint, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2006. Lacave, Michel. “Stratégies d’Expropriation et Haussmannisation: l’Exemple de Montpellier.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 35, no. 5 (1980): 1011–​1025. Loyer, François. Paris XIXe Siècle: L’Immeuble et la Rue. Paris: Hazan, 1987. Paccoud, Antoine. “Planning Law, Power, and Practice: Haussmann in Paris (1853–​1870).” Planning Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2016): 341–​361. Pinkney, David H. Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958. Shapiro, Ann-​Louise. “Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control,” French Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 486–​507. Sutcliffe, Anthony. Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States, and France, 1780–​1914. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981.

CHAPTER 15

REGUL ATION OF SLUMS A ND SLUM IM PROV E ME NT I N B RIT ISH C OL ON IA L H I STORY ROBERT HOME

The word “slum” conjures up images from Charles Dickens, who likened slum areas to a labyrinth, “a world of lost paths, wrong turnings, dead ends, trap doors, secret hideaways and subterranean cells.”1 The “classic site of the slum” was Victorian London.2 The word has obscure origins in slang or cant rather than an acknowledged etymology, and its first recorded use dates from 1825 in London (and in Dickens from 1851). Originally applied to an individual room, it soon expanded to encompass entire houses and districts.3 The dictionary definition is: A street, alley, court, etc., situated in a crowded district of a town or city and inhabited by people of a low class or by the very poor; a number of these streets or courts forming a thickly populated neighbourhood or district where the houses and the conditions of life are of a squalid and wretched character.4

The slum in Britain’s Victorian cities, and responses to it, have a well-​established historiography.5 Less well researched are the slums of Britain’s overseas colonies, especially in its tropical port cities of Asia, such as Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Yet these were also by the early twentieth century among the world’s largest cities and contained the worst slums. Edwin Richards’s classic 1914 study of Calcutta saw its slums as being “of an extent and a density undreamt of in European cities,” and claimed that similar conditions could be found only in Bombay, Cairo, Constantinople, and some Chinese cities. He contrasted Calcutta’s overcrowding of twenty persons per household with a figure of only five in the worst British cities: Glasgow’s worst slum covered an area of 90 acres, while Calcutta’s “slum-​like city mass” was many times larger, estimated at 2,500 acres.6 The diffusion of the slum phenomenon is now being addressed within academic discourses on colonialism and global urban history.7 There was a transfer and

282   ROBERT HOME continuity of official approaches to slums between metropolitan Britain and its colonial cities, approaches that survive in the policy agendas of national and international development agencies today. Various recent theoretical developments from different academic disciplines offer ways to examine this global phenomenon. Foucault’s genealogical method is helpful for exploring the evolution of legal regulatory frameworks,8 and path dependency theory for institutional longevity and resistance to change.9 Actor network theory offers insights into the social dynamics of projects and global knowledge transfers.10 Global knowledge transfer can also be examined as policy mobilities or “travelling urban form.”11 Slums are physical places and landscapes containing complex particularities of ownership, occupation, and use of land, which can be explored from various disciplinary perspectives. Local histories can offer insights into places that may have been erased by government intervention but survive in community memory.12 Power relationships and interactions can be explored by the new critical toponymy through naming processes, name changes, and differential naming by different social groups.13 Local building forms of slum housing such as chawls and tenements can be explored through architectural and planning history.14 The slum phenomenon can also be approached through the application and interplay of oppositional pairs of words, particularly slum and suburb, temporary and permanent (or kacha and pakka in a colonial context). Slums in both Britain and her colonial cities typically began as places where large houses were vacated by the middle classes as they escaped to more spacious planned suburbs, and this interplay between slums and suburbs was recognized early by historians of slums. As Jim Dyos and David Reeder argued, “Centrifugal forces drew the rich into the airy suburbs; centripetal forces held the poor in the airless slums . . . [Slums were] the final stage in a whole cycle of human occupation which could start up again only by the razing of the site.”15 The distinction between temporary and permanent might see the occupiers of slums as typically temporary and transient rather than settled residents, and this impermanence could be reflected in their cheaply built and poorly maintained housing. The contrast at least in Asian slum cities can be understood through two words familiar in Hindi language and culture: kacha and pakka. A kacha building is of natural local materials, such as mud, grass, thatch, or sticks, not made to last and requiring constant maintenance and replacement. A pakka building implies superior, modern, hygienic, and well-​ ordered construction: “a more intensively processed and refined materiality . . . [The two terms are] short hand for that greatest and [most] enduring of colonial divisions within India, that . . . between the village and the city.”16 Slum housing was thus a physical expression of impermanence as reflected in poor housing standards.

Slums: Finding Causes And Remedies Slums arose mainly in the period of rapid industrialization and urbanization in nineteenth-​century Britain and Europe, and spread globally through the political

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    283 economy of British colonialism. Developments in transport concentrated trade and production in fewer, larger ports, a process exemplified by the rapid establishment of cotton mills in Bombay and jute mills in Bengal, with their workers housed in overcrowded slum conditions. The initial Victorian response to the state of their cities saw slum housing, pollution, and inequality as an inevitable part of the price of progress, and slums underpinned prosperity in Britain by keeping wages down and allowing the export of capital.17 Slum areas (previously called “rookeries” from the eighteenth century) were seen as islands within the city, isolated from the rest of society, as were their tenants and landlords. With some rookeries having existed for over a hundred years, they were thought to harbor a dangerous and hardened semi-​criminal class, a race of outlaws explained by a theory of urban degeneration inherited over generations. Slums were regarded as a moral and sanitary problem, an unfortunate “residuum” in the dynamic industrial city. Poverty among slum dwellers was thus a product of character rather than environment, and unemployment resulted from the individual’s lack of industry and forethought rather than any forces of political economy. Slum-​dwellers were an irresponsible group that should be made to pay for their own laxity and misconduct.18 Over time demographic statistics (nationally recorded after the Office of the Registrar-​General was created in 1834) and the impact of repeated epidemics revealed how urban slum conditions damaged the health of the residents and shortened lives. Overcrowding was initially measured by numbers of persons per house (rising to over ten in some British slum areas by 1881), and the 1891 census was the first to record the number of persons per room. Data on colonial slums were poorer but revealing nonetheless. Bombay, for example, measured overcrowding as persons per building, which produced density estimates over ten times higher than in London. In Calcutta the number of persons per house rose from 6.7 in 1850 to over twenty by 1921, the latter contrasting with an average of five per house in British cities at the time. Mortality rates were three or four times the equivalent rates in Britain, and colonial cities also had huge gender imbalances; male:female ratios of two or three to one in late nineteenth-​century Singapore and Calcutta reflected an official discouragement of family life for workers.19 By the mid-​nineteenth century there was increased social pressure upon politicians and industrialists to improve public health in the British conurbations. As a correspondent to The Builder wrote in 1848: “Whilst we are exhausting our ingenuity to supply our villas with every possible convenience, we are leaving our working classes to the enjoyment of every possible inconvenience in wretched stalls to which men of substance would not consign their beasts of burden.”20 After the 1848 Public Health Act required each local government district to appoint a medical officer of health (MOH), these new specialists quickly rose to national prominence for their expertise in diseases of overcrowding, and also in the complex factors that led to the creation of slums. They bypassed the role of surveyors and magistrates to promote better water and drainage systems, and to criticize vocally the poor street layouts and internal arrangements of housing in slum areas, which had often been badly designed for their purpose and then subdivided. Railway building and road

284   ROBERT HOME improvements added to slum housing by forcibly displacing up to four million people in British cities between 1850 and 1900. By the 1880s there was an economic and social crisis, with society increasingly threatened by a large class, trapped in poverty by the “scissors effect” of low and insecure wages and high rents. Moral and sanitary disapproval of the poor shifted to a recognition that wealth inequalities were related to housing supply shortages, made worse by redevelopment and the practical difficulties of building decent affordable housing.21 These issues were also apparent in the crowded colonial cities, where British officials followed the metropolitan practice of blaming conditions upon the slum residents themselves rather than acknowledging a failure of housing markets that might need government intervention. That these attitudes lasted longer than in the metropolis reflected the racial divide in the colonial political economy. Dr W. J. Simpson, MOH for Calcutta and an influential figure in tropical medicine and public health in the early twentieth century, blamed dirty “native” health practices for causing disease, attributed high mortality rates to “the insanitary and immoral lives of the Asiatic races,” and claimed that the lack of pure water in the crowded tropical cities was “mainly due to the pollution to which the water is subjected by the customs of the people.”22 A later writer on Bombay housing conditions wrote a horrified description of a typical chawl: Ground-​floor rooms are invariably dark, dismal and unhealthy, and often permeated with obnoxious effluvia . . . It is no exaggeration to say that the masses are utterly unacquainted with even elementary ideas of hygiene and sanitation, and little improvement can take place until they have been educated to a different standard of living.23

The chairman of the Calcutta Improvement Trust as late as 1927 claimed that the city’s poor were merely “temporary immigrants to Calcutta, whose displacement would cause no great hardship . . . who prefer to live in insanitary conditions near their work, rather than in more healthy and distant localities,” ignoring any issues of wage rates and housing affordability.24 He maintained, conveniently and cheaply for British interests, that the migrant who disliked factory labor had the option of returning to his village, where the joint family system would secure him against want, even though European businessmen continued to complain about the poor quality of labor and seasonal shortages because of its temporary character. Policies toward colonial slum housing were determined by small closed “actor networks” of British experts, mostly doctors and engineers unconstrained by democratic processes. Medical attention in the colonial ports shifted to public health measures that might combat the threat of disease to trade and commerce, and the health of Europeans, especially when a plague pandemic began in 1894, starting in Hong Kong.25 Simpson advocated remedies derived from British practice: better ventilated houses, pure water and good drains, better waste and sewage disposal, open spaces, and the ventilating effects of new roads. His textbook on tropical hygiene advocated wide straight streets with shade-​giving trees on either side, with no street in a new district less than 50 feet wide, while principal ones should be 60, 80, or 100 feet, and the road space protected

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    285 against “encroachments.”26 A civil engineer like Edwin Richards in Calcutta, with experience of Victorian England’s industrial cities, found the largely streetless state of the city “a giant defect, and one of extreme gravity,” and advocated that the “first great act of improvement” should be “a general system of main roads,” comparing its existing road coverage adversely with European and American cities.27 Patrick Geddes, a pioneering town planning thinker of the early twentieth century, criticized the official approach to Indian slum redevelopment, which he called “death-​dealing Haussmannising” by “the well-​intentioned fanatic of sanitation.” He preferred a process of what he called “conservative surgery,” which would keep as much of the existing urban fabric as possible and apply selective demolition to create small public spaces and highway improvements without drastic demolition for wide highways.28 European colonial “modernization” promoted by such “experts” largely devalued vernacular building forms by distinguishing between “temporary” structures of local materials and “permanent” buildings of imported designs and materials. Public works departments in British India and other colonies showcased their model designs as visible benefits of colonial rule, and emphasized pakkā/​kacchā distinctions.29 Colonial building regulations discriminated against traditional designs, whether the Indian courtyard house or the airwells of the traditional Chinese shophouse, in spite of their suitability for hot climates and for privacy. The interior airwell maintained a flow of fresh and relatively cool air, but was unacceptable to Simpson, who in Singapore advocated partial demolition of shophouses to create back-​lanes, allowing access for night-​soil collection while minimizing disturbance to private property, and this became the distinctive Singapore approach to urban renewal in the colonial period.30

Development of a Legal Regulatory Framework Government in Britain found itself increasingly drawn into regulating slum housing.31 Royal Commissions on Municipal Corporations in 1837–​1838, and on the State of Large Towns in 1845, led to the Towns Improvement Clauses Act 1847 and Public Health Act 1848. Rather than local authorities making their bylaws by individual private acts of parliament, the Local Government Act 1858 resulted in the creation of model bylaws, and by the 1880s most authorities had adopted the national models, establishing what historian S. Martin Gaskell has called “the first truly effective set of national building regulations produced by central government.”32 With many slums harboring overcrowded “common lodging houses” for those migrating to the city without support from relatives, the Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act 1851 (known as the Shaftesbury Act) provided for registration and regulation, enforceable by the police (although they were more interested in criminality than sanitary conditions). The Act also empowered local authorities to build lodging houses

286   ROBERT HOME with funds from local rates or public works loans, but these powers were little used. The Nuisances Removal Act 1855 allowed vestries to control overcrowding, but the MOH for Hackney declared that enforcing the controls would result in ten thousand people sleeping on the streets.33 The 1868 Artisans and Labourers Dwelling Act (known as the Torrens Act) was the first national legislation to attempt to regulate individual slum dwellings. The French comprehensive redevelopment approach (by Haussmann in Paris) was seen in Britain as too expensive, and an assault on private property rights by arbitrary power. Instead the Torrens Act placed responsibility upon private owners to keep their rental housing in a habitable state, while empowering the local authority to act by default to demolish or repair insanitary dwellings. Compulsory purchase powers were available but rarely used, hardly surprising when landlords were often members of the local vestry board. Recognizing the Torrens Act’s failures, the Artisans and Labourers Dwellings Improvement Act 1875 (known as the Cross Act) empowered local authorities to designate, compulsorily acquire, and redevelop whole areas (the so-​called “plague spots”) where suitable in size and shape. The compensation arrangements guaranteed fair market value for acquired properties, and slum landlords inflated their claims by packing in lodgers, and afterward using the money to make new slums nearby. As Rule observed, “The landlords, who had already received fat compensation payments for the demolition, must have rubbed their hands with glee.”34 The hope was that site clearance would lead to philanthropic capitalism building new affordable homes, but many cleared plots stayed undeveloped for years. London’s Metropolitan Board of Works over a two-​year period used the Act to buy and demolish sixteen slums on an area of 42 acres, at a cost of £1.5m in compensation, but sale of the land to charities for affordable homes gathered only £330,000.35 The Torrens and Cross Acts thus largely failed, although Octavia Hill’s private philanthropic system had some success: its close management of both buildings and tenants allowed improved properties to be let to those on intermittent and low incomes while achieving a good return on capital.36 By the 1880s three decades of legislation had only made slum dwellers’ living conditions worse, while private rental housing was becoming less profitable: the 1882 Artisans’ Dwelling Act reduced compensation to property owners, model bylaws increased costs, and property taxes rose. By the early twentieth century private housing was facing cyclical problems of oversupply and reduced demand (with falling population growth and stagnant real wages). Short-​let accommodation was supposed to help labor mobility, but tenants resented the lack of basic amenities, and they were hostile to landlords and bailiffs pursuing arrears of rent. Falling house prices meant that landlords were less inclined to invest in new housing, even before rent controls were introduced during the First World War.37 By 1914 a broad consensus held that the solution to these problems was subsidized council housing and planned suburban house-​building. The wider social policy was less concerned with controlling the slum-​dwelling poor than with town planning to link slum redevelopment more closely with the surrounding urban structure. The Progressive-​controlled London County Council developed a flagship estate in

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    287 Boundary Street after 1897, on the site of one of the worst “rookeries” (called the Old Nichol), and went on to develop suburban cottage estates. The colonial port cities followed the metropolis with legislation on sanitary and housing matters, notably in Bombay and Calcutta, which had bigger and worse slums than Britain and frequent lethal epidemics. The official approach was based upon assumptions of racial superiority and inferiority that reinforced colonial power structures. The Bombay presidency in 1865 legislated to create an unelected Bombay municipality with its own commissioner, Arthur Crawford, who embarked upon expensive infrastructure projects and gave his name to Bombay’s main market. Ratepayer revolt forced his resignation and a new partially elected municipality was created in 1872.38 Calcutta, long associated with teeming millions, poverty, squalor, and the policies of laissez faire, was physically largely segregated by race, with the white population living in spacious suburbs and the Indians in crowded slums. In 1803 a Town Improvement Committee of British officials began a new grid of streets, with nine parallel broad avenues 21 meters wide, creating in the “native town” street blocks half a mile square, which became in-​filled with the classic labyrinth of slums. A municipal corporation was reluctantly created in 1876.39 Regulation of worker housing conditions in the colonies was influenced by metropolitan labor laws, often of mediaeval origin. Master and servant legislation required employers to provide adequate housing for their workers, but not where suitable housing was available nearby. Indentured workers’ rights were supposedly safeguarded by an official protector of immigrants and model labor regulations under government inspection. Bad conditions among Indian indentured workers in Natal from the 1870s led to various commissions of inquiry, which recommended minimum space standards and encouraged more women immigrants to encourage family living, but the regulations were largely ineffective and routinely ignored by employers.40 By the late nineteenth century housing conditions in both Britain and its colonial cities were provoking protest and debate. Landlords complained about over-​regulation and inadequate compensation for compulsory purchase, forced evictions were resisted, and clearances only increased slum conditions elsewhere. Anti-​colonial movements challenged the colonial order through street protests and riots over anti-​plague measures.41

Institutional Structures and Responses The characteristics and organization of slum landlords appear to have been similar in Britain and the port cities of Asia. Slum property could be profitable if rents were efficiently collected, costs kept down, and demand remained high, even with low-​income occupiers in often casual and insecure employment. In Britain ground leases were often controlled by the large landowners, given the extreme concentration of land ownership

288   ROBERT HOME in nineteenth-​century Britain, and letting was organized through a chain of intermediate leases, with “house farmers” leasing, subdividing, and subletting. Slums in Indian cities seem to have been on land in fragmented ownership, by Anglo-​Indians and traders of various religions leasing through intermediaries and renting in mixed uses to mixed castes. In both Britain and India slum landlords sought representation on municipal bodies, and ratepayer and landlord associations opposed public regulation and expenditure. During the nineteenth century British public authorities increased their intervention in urban improvement, with some three hundred boards of improvement commissioners created by private acts before 1850. Local improvement acts were passed in Liverpool in 1864, Glasgow in 1866, and Edinburgh in 1867. Glasgow then created a City Improvement Trust in 1868, “imbued from the start with a fiery philanthropic evangelism, though tempered always by an unwavering sense of commercial expediency.”42 The improvement trust model implied a high public purpose, and in colonial situations had a perceived advantage of freedom from elected democratic control, which ensured their survival into the postcolonial period, usually renamed but still controlled by officials with little local democratic accountability. Port trusts were created in Calcutta (1870), Karachi (1880), Aden (1889), and Singapore (1908). In the early twentieth century the improvement trust mechanism was resorted to when the plague pandemic crossed continents, and became a preferred approach to demolishing congested areas, improving drainage, and facilitating communications. Slum clearance powers were based upon English legislation but were more drastic, allowing sweeping demolition with minimal compensation to the predominantly non-​white property-​owners. Bombay had the first improvement trust (1989), followed by Calcutta (1912), Hyderabad (1914), Lucknow and Cawnpore (1919), Allahabad, Rangoon, and Singapore (1920), and Lagos (1928).43 Singapore’s trust started as a department within the corporation, but was limited to back-​lane improvement, having no powers for large-​scale compulsory purchase or house-​building. With the growth of state institutions in the twentieth century the term “trust” was supplanted by the terms “board,” “corporation,” or “authority,” although the functions remained similar. The trusts for the two biggest colonial cities, Bombay and Calcutta, merit a little closer attention. The Bombay City Improvement Trust, created in response to the outbreak of plague, was active in opening crowded areas, cutting new streets, and reclaiming land, and was empowered to control development, buy land, and then re-​sell it after planning layouts. It had autocratic powers to acquire and demolish any property simply by serving a notice, without compensation, which were understandably resented by both landlords and displaced tenants. By 1920 the Trust had demolished more dwellings than were built to replace them, thus adding to the housing shortage rather than alleviating it. Patrick Geddes successfully predicted, from his own experience of the Edinburgh Improvement Trust, that workers’ housing would be too expensive, and likened the Improvement Trust chawls to “Bolshevik barracks,” offering crowded conditions with little natural light, family rooms ten feet square, and shared inadequate bathing and toilet provision.44

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    289 In Calcutta a Municipal Act of 1899 curbed the municipal corporation’s powers, taking anti-​plague measures into its own Municipal Department. Subsequently the Calcutta Improvement Trust was created as an independent entity from the corporation, headed by a British official. Its objectives were wider than those of the Bombay trust: to open up congested areas, construct or alter roads, provide ventilation through open spaces, construct new buildings, acquire land for urban development, and rehabilitate displaced communities. Called by Indian residents “a scheme to gratify the white population of Calcutta,” “there was no public body in Calcutta so intensely unpopular and so cordially disliked” as the trust.45 Bustee clearances (bustee being the local term for slum) compensated landlords and displaced the poor, just as London had done a few decades earlier. By 1927 the trust claimed to have improved 294 acres and developed about 950 acres of suburban housing and open space. Richards, a trenchant critic of the trust that employed him, described its enabling act as “almost useless for the great task set” because it overlooked “all the great blessings town planning would confer,” and claimed that “only a completely authoritarian regime with huge resources and a vigorous policy of demolition would make any impact whatsoever.”46 Improvement trust activities soon encountered local opposition from the unrepresented inhabitants expected to pay for the new public works. Demolition resulted in communal riots, with tensions between castes or between Muslims and Hindus in India exacerbated by the destruction of religious buildings or the building of abattoirs. The improvement trusts seem to have achieved little to combat the underlying problems of urban overcrowding and poor housing, and little to curb the plague and other diseases; indeed, they probably assisted their spread by the scale of disruption they caused to human and animal populations in the cities.47 After the Second World War the Cold War provided ideological endorsement for slum redevelopment measures, for example in Hong Kong, where large numbers of refugees were displaced by the Communist take-​over in 1949. Disastrous fires in the squatter camps at Shek Kip Mei north of Kowloon in 1953 made more than fifty thousand people homeless, and the colonial government instituted a major resettlement program of new block housing.48 When Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, its government had not long before demolished Kowloon’s Walled City, previously called the most densely populated place on the planet and “a world unto itself,” replacing it with a public park.49

Conclusions: The Return of the Slum? Even as the worst European urban slums were being redeveloped in the course of the twentieth century, the meaning of “slum” was being expanded to include peri-​urban squatter settlements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. While the numbers of such slum dwellers were initially fewer than in the teeming cities of Asia, “slum” became a catch-​all word for poor-​quality housing, and is now firmly embedded in the development discourse about the rapidly growing cities of the Global South. The terms

290   ROBERT HOME “slum” and “squatter area” were often used interchangeably, and the emphasis shifted to the type of tenure as much as physical conditions. Charles Abrams, an influential writer on Third World housing in the years after the Second World War, classified slums into no less than nine types based upon tenure: owner squatter, squatter tenant, squatter holdover (no longer paying rent), squatter landlord, speculator squatter, store squatter, semi-​squatter, floating squatter, and squatter co-​operator (sharing common foothold).50 A recent typology of slums in South Africa reflected a similar broader approach by identifying six separate types: townships, housing-​turned-​slum, squatter camps, site and service settlements, transit camps, and hybrid multi-​structured settlements.51 In Africa the dual mandate ideology associated with the British colonial governor Lord Lugard generally denied Africans the right to own land or property in towns and criminalized occupation of land without official sanction. Government interventions used the slum clearance argument to justify destroying areas that had developed complex socioeconomic networks of kinship and neighborhood, notably in apartheid South Africa with the notorious clearance of Cape Town’s District Six.52 Outside the official township boundaries African self-​built housing might grow to densities ten times higher than the high-​income townships themselves, resulting in these peri-​urban areas being called a “septic fringe,” within which “such provision as Africans have made for themselves is squalid and overcrowded almost beyond belief.”53 Lord Hailey, who toured Africa on behalf of the British colonial government, wrote about slums in his African Survey: “Healthy community life cannot be expected to flourish in the slum conditions which are found in many of the native quarters of towns, and the need for town-​planning schemes, adequate sanitation and water supplies, and suitable dwellings is now more generally realized.”54 One much-​publicized case was the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, which has been called the biggest slum in Africa, with an estimated million residents, although a door-​ to-​door survey in 2008 reduced that figure to about 270,000. Originally a place where Nubian ex-​soldiers from the colonial King’s African Rifles were allocated land around 1904 on military exercise grounds, it became a place where rural migrants without papers could live outside Nairobi’s municipal limits. The government of Kenya after independence in 1963 classed it as an unauthorized settlement on government land, denied it basic services, and continues to evict forcibly. Incomers from underdeveloped and overpopulated rural areas brought tensions between ethnic groups, which were exploited politically and hindered upgrading programs.55 The United Nations in its development and human settlements policies and programs increasingly deploys the “slum” word emotively in order to publicize the seriousness of urban problems and attract funding. UN-​Habitat now defines a slum household broadly, as a group of individuals living under the same roof in an urban area with the following attributes: lack of basic services, substandard housing or illegal and inadequate building structures, overcrowding and high density, unhealthy living conditions and hazardous locations, insecure tenure, poverty and social exclusion, and a minimum settlement size. The remedies proposed are similarly broad: durable housing of a permanent nature, sufficient living space, easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    291 an affordable price, access to adequate sanitation, and security of tenure that prevents forced evictions.56 Slums are now organizing politically to lobby through international NGOs such as the Slum/​Shack Dwellers International. The term “slum” has since 2016 become embedded within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 11 (“Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”), with the supporting text stating: In 2014, 30 per cent of the urban population in developing regions lived in conditions categorized as slums. In sub-​Saharan Africa, the proportion was 55 per cent—​the highest of any region. The proportion of the urban population that lives in developing country slums fell from 39 per cent in 2000 to 30 per cent in 2014. Despite some gains, the absolute number of urban residents who live in slums continued to grow, owing in part to accelerating urbanization, population growth and can if appropriate land and housing policies. In 2014, an estimated 880 million urban residents lived in slum conditions, compared to 792 million urban residents in 2000.57

Critics of this normalization of the term “slum” assert that “cities without slums” initiatives revive an emotive word with implied moral disapproval of slum inhabitants, and confuse the physical problem of poor housing with the characteristics of the people living there. Who would want to be identified as a slum dweller? (or a “slumdog” as in the title of the film Slumdog Millionaire). The Cities Without Slums campaign implies that cities can actually rid themselves of slums.58 Governments still undertake mass evictions with little or no compensation, and neither richer nor poorer countries can resolve the underlying issue of affordable housing. There is no sign of the slum disappearing any time soon, either on the ground or from the rhetoric of international development policies.

Notes 1. Quoted in Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Bodley Head, 2008), 38. 2. J. A. Yelling, 1986. Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 1. 3. David Ward, “The Victorian Slum: An Enduring Myth,” ’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66 (1976): 323–​336. 4. Oxford English Dictionary. 5. H. J. Dyos, “The Slums of Victorian London,” Victorian Studies 11, no. 1 (1967): 5–​40; Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Edward Arnold, 1977). 6. E. P. Richards, The Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas (London: Routledge, [1914] 2015), 21, 232–​233.

292   ROBERT HOME 7. Partho Datta, Planning the City: Urbanisation and Reform in Calcutta, c1800–​c1940 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2012); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay City, 1845–​ 1875 (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1991); Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-​Economy: Cultural and Spatial foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge, 1990); Siddhartha Sen, Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata: From a Colonial to a Post-​Marxist City (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017). 8. Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Using Foucault’s Methods (London: Sage, 1999). 9. Andre Sorenson, “Taking Path Dependency Seriously: An Historical Institutionalist Research Agenda in Planning History,” Planning Perspectives 30, no. 1 (2015): 17–​38. 10. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​ Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Hiro Saito, “An Actor-​Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 2 (2011): 124–​150. 11. Duanfang Lu, “Travelling Urban Form: The Neighborhood Unit in China,” Planning Perspectives 21, no. 4 (2006): 369–​392; Eugene McCann, “Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 101, no.1 (2011): 107–​130. 12. Fiona Rule, The Worst Street in London (Hersham, Surrey: Ian Allan, 2008); Philip Bonner and Lauren Segal, Soweto: A History (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1998). 13. R. Rose Redwood, Derek Alderman, and M. Azaryahu, “Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-​ Names Studies,” Progress in Human Geography 34, no. 4 (2010): 453–​470; Richard Harris and Charlotte Vorms, eds., What’s in a Name: Talking about Urban Peripheries (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 14. P. N. Karandikar, “Chawls: Analysis of a Middle Class Housing Type in Mumbai, India” (MSc diss., Iowa State University, 2010); Marie Huchzermeyer, Tenement Cities: From 19th Century Berlin to 21st Century Nairobi (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011). Chawl is the South Asian equivalent of tenement: a large building divided into many apartments for the cheap accommodation of laboring families. 15. H. J. Dyos and David A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge, 1973), vol. 1, 360, 363. 16. Michael Cowell, “The Kacchā–​Pakkā Divide: Material, Space and Architecture in the Military Cantonments of British India (1765–​1889),” ABE Journal [Online] 9–​10 (2016). https://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​abe/​10893. 17. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). 18. Stedman Jones, Outcast London; Anthony Sutcliffe, “The Growth of Public Intervention in the British Urban Environment During the Nineteenth Century: A Structural Approach,” in The Structure of Nineteenth Century Cities, ed. James Henry Johnson and Colin G. Pooley (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 107–​124. 19. Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, “Colonial Anxiety Counted: Plague and Census in Bombay and Calcutta, 1901,” In Imperial Contagions: Medicine and Cultures of Planning in Asia, 1880–​1949, ed. Robert Peckham and David Pomfret (Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong Press, 2013), 94–​126. 20. Dyos and Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” 379. 21. Anthony S. Wohl, “Unfit for Human Habitation,” in Dyos and Wolff, The Victorian City, vol. 2, 359–​386; Richard Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain, 1780–​1914: Class, Capitalism and Construction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    293 22. William J. R. Simpson, Principles of Hygiene as Applied to Tropical and Sub-​Tropical Climates (London: John Bale, 1908). 23. A. R. Burnett-​Hurst, Labour and Housing in Bombay (London: King and Sons, 1925), 21. 24. C. Bompas, “The Work of the Calcutta Improvement Trust,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 75 (1927): 200–​213. 25. Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis, Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of Western Expansion (London: Routledge, 1988), 3; Myron Echenberg, Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–​1901 (New York: New York University Press, 2010); I. J. Catanach, “Plague and the Tensions of Empire: India 1896–​1918,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 194–​172. 26. Simpson, Principles of Hygiene, 305; R. A. Baker and R. A. Bayliss, “William John Ritchie Simpson (1855–​1931),” Medical History 31 (1987): 450–​465. 27. Robert Home, “British Colonial Civic Improvement in the Early 20th Century: E. P Richards in Madras, Calcutta and Singapore,” Planning Perspectives 31, no. 4 (2016): 635–​644. 28. Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London: Spon, 1996), 175–​180. 29. Cowell, “The Kacchā–​Pakkā Divide”; Peter Scriver, “Empire-​Building and Thinking in the Public Works Department of British India,” in Colonial Modernities: Building, Dwelling and Architecture in British India and Ceylon, ed. Peter Scriver and Vikramaditya Prakash (London and New York: Routledge/​Architext, 2007), 69–​92; A. F. Daldry, Temporary Buildings in Northern Nigeria (Lagos: Government Printer, 1945). 30. Home, Of Planting and Planning, 89–​90. 31. This section draws particularly upon S. Martin Gaskell, Building Control: National Legislation and the Introduction of Local Bye-​Laws in Victorian England (London: Bedford Square Press, 1983); Rodger, Housing in Urban Britain; Sutcliffe, “The Growth of Public Intervention in the British Urban Environment”; and J. A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986). 32. Gaskell, Building Control, 47. 33. Wohl, “Unfit for Human Habitation,” 363. 34. Rule, The Worst Street in London, 80. 35. Wise, The Blackest Streets, 80. 36. Anthony S. Wohl, “Octavia Hill and the Homes of the London Poor,” Journal of British Studies 10, no. 2 (1971): 105–​131. 37. David Englander, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–​1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 38. Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities. 39. Sen, Colonizing, Decolonizing, and Globalizing Kolkata. 40. W. Wragg, Report of the Indian Immigrants Commission (Pietermaritzburg: Government Printer, 1887). 41. Anindita Ghosh, Claiming the City: Protest, Crime, and Scandals in Colonial Calcutta, c.1860–​1920 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016); Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003). 42. M. Withey, “The Glasgow City Improvement Trust: An Analysis of its Genesis, Impact and Legacy and an Inventory of its Buildings, 1866–​1910” (PhD diss., St. Andrews, 2002).

294   ROBERT HOME 43. Stephen Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008). 44. Prashant Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance and Public Culture in Bombay (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishers, 2007). 45. Rajat K. Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 1875–​1939 (New Delhi: Vikas, 1979), 71. 46. Home, “British Colonial Civic Improvement.” 47. Ghosh, Claiming the City; Kidambi, The Making of an Indian Metropolis; Yeoh, Contesting Space. 48. Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950−1963 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 49. Seth Harter, “Hong Kong’s Dirty Little Secret: Clearing the Walled City of Kowloon,” Journal of Urban History 27, no. 1 (2000): 92–​113; Elizabeth Sinn, “Kowloon Walled City: Its Origin and Early History,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch 27 (1987): 30–​45. 50. Charles Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 21–​22; Robert A. Obudho and Constance C. Mhlanga, Slums and Squatter Settlements in Sub-​Saharan Africa: Towards a Planning Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1988). 51. Suzanne Smit, Josephine K. Musango, Zora Kovacic, and Alan C. Brent, “Conceptualising Slum in an Urban African Context,” Cities 62 (2017): 107–​119. 52. Marco Bezzoli, Rafael Marks, Martin Kruger, and Stewart Harris, edited and updated by Penny Pistorius, Texture and Memory: The Urbanism of District Six (Cape Town: Cape Technikon, 2002); Bonner and Segal, Soweto: A History. 53. M. G. Baker, “Citizenship on the Septic Fringe: Urban Social Policy and Peri-​Urban Development in Kisumu, Kenya” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2002); M. Parker, “Political and Social Aspects of the Development of Municipal Government in Kenya, with Special Reference to Nairobi” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 1949), 101. 54. L. Hailey, African Survey (London: HMSO, 1956), 510–​512, 542–​543. 55. Greg Lanier et al., Slum: The People of Kibera (2011), https://​app.box.com/​s/​sgely​mmuu​ n9d0​b1nn​5wk. 56. UN Human Settlements Programme, The Challenge of Slums: Global Report (London: Earthscan, 2003), 10–​11; M. Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007). 57. UN Development Programme, Sustainable Development Goals. Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities (2018), http://​www.undp.org/​cont​ent/​undp/​en/​home/​sust​aina​ble-​deve​ lopm​ent-​goals/​goal-​11-​sust​aina​ble-​cit​ies-​and-​comm​unit​ies. 58. Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–​7 13.

Bibliography Abrams, Charles. Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Bompas, C. “The Work of the Calcutta Improvement Trust.” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 75 (1927): 200–​213.

Regulation of Slums and Slum Improvement    295 Burnett-​Hurst, A. R. Labour and Housing in Bombay. London: King and Sons, 1925. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2007. Echenberg, Myron. Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894–​1901. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Gilbert, Alan. “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–​7 13. Home, Robert. Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities. London: Spon, 1996. Huchzermeyer, Marie. Tenement Cities: From 19th Century Berlin to 21st Century Nairobi. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011. Legg, Stephen. Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Obudho, Robert A., and Constance C. Mhlanga. Slums and Squatter Settlements in Sub-​ Saharan Africa: Towards a Planning Strategy. New York: Praeger, 1988. Richards, E. P. The Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of the City of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas (1914). Reprint, London: Routledge, 2015. Simpson, William J. R. Principles of Hygiene as Applied to Tropical and Sub-​Tropical Climates. London: John Bale, 1908. Smit, Suzanne, Josephine K. Musango, Zora Kovacic, and Alan C. Brent. “Conceptualising Slum in an Urban African Context.” Cities 62 (2017): 107–​119. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. The Challenge of Slums: Global Report. London: Earthscan, 2003. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 16

T HE SPILL OVER E FFE C TS OF F IRE, RIOT, AN D E PI DE MI C S FROM SLUMS ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER

The tragic 2017 fire that destroyed Grenfell Tower in Kensington, London, prompted a deluge of calls for reforms to avoid death and suffering by the inhabitants of other buildings for low-​income people. This wave of solidarity and concern has occurred repeatedly around such disasters, as it has in regard to appalling working conditions like those that led to New York’s 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that caused the deaths of 146 people, or the Tazreen Fashion factory fire in Bangladesh in 2012 that left at least 117 dead. The Grenfell tragedy seemed particularly atrocious because the cladding that contributed to the rapid spread of fire had been prioritized over more effective fire precautions in order to make the building more attractive. The cladding issue was an especially sensitive one for the Kensington Borough Council because the Tower was located near some of the most expensive housing on earth, in the borough with the greatest inequality in London. The aesthetic spillover of public housing, and its impact on property values, appeared to be of greater concern to the council than the risks of fire. These considerations tie the Grenfell fire to an earlier wave of reform focused not on the consequences of fires for the poor, but for the wealthy and powerful who could be affected by their spread in highly flammable cities.1 To a great extent, the forms of urban planning that developed in the industrializing Global North and its colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were responses to risks that threatened to spread from the slums to the elite districts: fires, riots, and epidemics. These evolving urban planning practices involved, primarily, public or governmental interventions that addressed cities as wholes. There were earlier and more focused interventions such as the building of grand palaces and cathedrals, and other forms of urban improvement in which the elite predominated. But interventions prompted by fires, riots, and epidemics resulted in comprehensive zoning, or the assignment of particular land-​uses across an entire urban area. In the United

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    297 States the first city to adopt zoning was New York in 1916; most large cities adopted it over the following decade.2 This shift to comprehensive zoning from responses to fire, riot, and pestilence occurred later in most other nations, but not at all in some postcolonial cities of the Global South. Colonial cities, particularly ports, required proximity to large numbers of non-​ Europeans. However colonizers feared that non-​Europeans would transform these cities, in deleterious and undesirable ways, through dangers to public health, public order, and public safety. Just as in nineteenth-​century Europe and North America, these cities brought risks that could spread from the disadvantaged to the privileged: epidemic, riot, floods, and fire.3 However, in both colonial and metropolitan cities, government intervention to ameliorate problems seen as being unlikely to spread to the elite, such as malnutrition, poverty, and unemployment, tended only to influence urban planning at a much later date, if at all. F. B. Smith even argues that early responses to hygienic problems actually worsened the sanitary situation for the poor due to the channeling of the waste of the rich into waters that supplied the needs of the poor.4 Managing risks that could expand outward from the non-​white quarters while maintaining access to necessary labor (domestic servants, laborers, shopkeepers, and clerks) was a fundamental challenge for administrators of colonial cities from at least the seventeenth century. The most common response to dangers posed by non-​European residents was the construction of dual cities, where new cities built on European designs to provide safe and beautiful havens for colonial representatives were segregated from non-​Europeans.5 The segregated city, importantly, was justified in primarily hygienic terms, although internal security was also a common concern. In India, Madras (acquired in 1639), Bombay (1665), and Calcutta (1690) were divided between the “White Town” and “Black Town.” Wealthier Indians could lay out their own grid of streets, surrounding which was an unplanned and largely unmanaged periphery of villages for the common people. In Bombay, the ground around the white town was “leveled and cleared of buildings and trees, to create a free field of fire,” which became an area for recreation.6 This dual city model has similarities to racial segregation in the United States, particularly in the urban south.7 Throughout the world, there was a common tendency for urban planning effort to contain threats, real or perceived, that could spread from slums to elite areas. Many historical studies of epidemics, fire, and riot have stressed their importance in the transformation of particular cities, or sometimes western and colonial cities more generally. However, the common feature of epidemics, fires, and riot, that they could spread from the slums and affect elite districts, has usually not been considered. Nor is there much consideration of the widespread influence of fears of such spillovers on early modern urban planning initiatives. A rare but important exception can be seen in Eric Hobsbawm’s contention that only after the revolutions of 1848, “when the new epidemics sprung from the slums began to kill the rich also, and the desperate masses who grew up in them had frightened the powers-​that-​be by social revolution, was systematic urban rebuilding and improvement undertaken.”8 In this spirit it is worth reconsidering the

298    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER role of slums in inciting the planning of cities in their entirety, not simply promoting improvements in privileged precincts.

Fire Fires have devastated cities throughout history, particularly in areas where most construction is done with wood or other easily combustible materials. In the absence of effective firefighting, and with dwellings tightly clustered together (inherent to walled cities but common everywhere prior to rapid and accessible public transport such as trams, and especially automobiles that enabled low-​density sprawl), initial sparks from candles or cooking could spread like, well, wildfire. Fires were a major cause of property loss when in the city center, and a threat to both the powerful and non-​powerful if allowed to spread from the slums.9 For instance, the Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed 13,200 houses, affecting seven-​eighths of the city’s population of 80,000. It led to new regulations for rebuilding: wider streets, accessible wharves along the Thames, with no buildings obstructing access to the river, and buildings constructed of brick and stone only. Stephen Porter notes that its impact was magnified by an outbreak of plague the prior year, and that the social impact of fire and epidemic differed considerably. Plague struck the poorer areas more heavily than the wealthier ones, whereas fire could destroy everything in its path. The risk of fire might be greater in overcrowded slums, but once established fire engulfed rich and poor districts alike.10 Globally, fire has given major impetus to urban planning and building rules.11 Infrastructures were typically modernized after major fires, epidemics, serious environmental crises, or a political reform movement forced action usually long after the need had become clear.12 Toronto was struck by two massive fires, the first in 1849. Government responded after 1849 by making construction in brick or stone mandatory. Responses were not always straightforward, or successful. Christine Meisner Rosen compared city rebuilding after great fires. Chicago’s, in 1871, left four square miles of densely occupied land bare. Boston’s 1872 fire destroyed 65 acres of the central business district. Burnt districts were opportunities to resolve problems. However, politics influenced the extent of reform. After the Chicago and Boston fires, as with others, people regarded the destruction as providing an opportunity to improve sanitation and urban planning, but they were constrained by the persistence of factors that created the problems. Residents of Chicago and Boston wanted improvements in infrastructures for public services such as water supply, firefighting, and transportation, and rationalized street patterns. Chicago largely failed to reform effectively, while Boston managed more. In Chicago, improvements took place in the upper-​and middle-​class districts, rather than the poor parts of the city where they were most needed. Perceived risk of fire, and related racial animus in the United States, were also significant since at least the late nineteenth century in shaping zoning ordinances and land-​use

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    299 controls. M. Christine Boyer, for example, notes how concerns about the fire risk from “Chinese laundries” in San Francisco led to the creation of land-​use controls on their development.13 Private insurance underwriters, and their fire insurance maps, provided some of the first tools for comprehensive urban planning in the United States. Fire insurance maps were designed to inform potential investors about the most fire-​prone areas and buildings in cities, and they had a substantial and long-​term impact on urban development, especially by channeling investment away from more-​fire-​prone districts and thus encouraging the creation of slums.14 Industrial activities that were fire prone could not be removed from cities, but planning could influence who was more likely to be its victim. Some people could be more exposed to, or less segregated from, the threat of incineration. Research by Henry Taylor showed how blacks were at an increased risk of fire, noting that a 1855 Fire Insurance map of Cincinnati “indicate[d]‌that blacks, despite their small numbers, were much more likely than whites to live next door to factories and to reside in wooden structures and tenements.”15 While cities became less flammable in the west by the early twentieth century, the threat and impact of conflagration on planning continued in its former colonies. Hong Kong aptly illustrates these dynamics, as it also serves in the following sections on riot and epidemic. Colonial Hong Kong’s population soared from four hundred thousand at the end of the Japanese Occupation in 1945 to over two million in 1950. The number of residents per private domestic floor (intended for single families, but mostly subdivided), was 18.144 in 1950, compared to 9.05 in 1934. The housing crisis resulted in widespread squatting, expressed in two forms: unauthorized building on Crown Land, and building on private agricultural land without conversion to Building Land. The latter took two forms: owners renting and selling illegal dwellings, or non-​owners building without permission. By the end of 1949 the number of squatters exploded to three hundred thousand from an estimated 45,430 in June 1949. Fires in squatter areas created both crises and opportunities for Hong Kong’s government. There is a perennial myth that the Squatter Resettlement Programme, which in the 1970s turned into a broad low-​cost housing system that still houses over 45 percent of the population, developed overnight after a fire in a squatter district on Christmas Eve 1953 left more than fifty thousand people homeless. However, this was only the largest of a series of fires, with three others burning the homes of over fifteen thousand people. At least two hundred thousand squatter residents were displaced by fires in the 1950s alone. In 1949 the chief officer of the fire brigade warned that “if an outbreak of Fire occurs in the Kowloon City Squatter area it will turn out to be one of the biggest Fire disasters on record. Nothing could be done to save or rescue the Thousands that are residing there.” Thirty-​three days later, a fire in this squatter area destroyed the homes of at least seventeen thousand people. Nothing had been done on his modest fire safety recommendations, because the deputy colonial secretary (third in the Hong Kong hierarchy) responded that “these shacks are entirely illegal structures and it is not up to Government to take measures for their protection. If a large number of them were burnt down we should probably have to take steps to assist the occupants in re-​provisioning

300    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER themselves, but we can hardly overlook the fact that the effect would be no bad thing politically.”16 The government’s main interest with regard to squatting was to make land available to the formal land market for redevelopment, and it resisted rehousing squatters until 1954, having tried various other ineffective schemes. In 1954, past modest government-​built housing schemes were eclipsed by the Squatter Resettlement Programme, which after 1967 was changed to public housing for nearly half Hong Kong’s population. Squatter resettlement broke the political logjam but did not end the squatter problem. By 1981, the squatter population peaked at eight hundred thousand people. By contrast of motivation (if not outcome), the large Bukit Ho Swee fire in Singapore that destroyed the homes of fifteen thousand people in 1961 was mobilized by the newly independent government there to incorporate the victims, and other squatters, into the new nation as citizens, producing much higher quality public housing than had Hong Kong, and rapidly eradicating squatting.17

Epidemics During a 1900 smallpox outbreak, the New York Times warned its readers that the outbreak was not “safely confined to ‘the congested tenements of one locality’ . . . ‘Public conveyances and places of public assembly bring all classes together to such an extent that only the recluse can feel quite safe.’ ”18 In his history of smallpox in America, Michael Willrich argues that the interdependence of modern urban life was the key unifying theme of many progressive reform campaigns at the end of the nineteenth century.19 Diseases like smallpox and cholera, which kill many but leave survivors immune, are distinctively urban, since they need a critical mass of unexposed people to persist. In small populations like those of foragers or farmers, they burn through like wildfire. Denser populations create immune populations; people from rural communities or smaller cities have less resistance. Prior to antibiotics, pestilence would fight on the side of the largest city, helping to protect ancient Rome from nomadic invaders like the Huns, and devastating the indigenous populations of the New World during the Columbian Exchange of diseases.20 Prior to vaccination and variolation, the only ways to combat this kind of epidemic were through public health measures, particularly providing clean water and managing waste. The risk of some diseases, such as tuberculosis, increased with crowded living conditions, encouraging reformers to call for sanitation laws and housing improvements, or the provision of public housing. Effective response to disease usually requires accurate knowledge about causes, treatment, and modes of transmission, yet until the nineteenth century understanding of bacteria was minimal and was deeply contested before about 1880. The earlier contender to germ theory, contamination by filthy environments, underlay most early sanitary reforms. Western doctors and scientists widely believed that the source of diseases such as typhoid was exposure to tainted air, the miasma theory. It explained sickness as

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    301 the result of “heat, putrid air, foul water, rotting vegetation, and ‘emanations’ from the soil. Certain places had more of these things—​for example, cities like London, swampy areas,” and tropical zones.21 While inaccurate, public health responses based on miasmatic theory produced some good interventions, such as the draining of swamps tainted with untreated sewage and attempts to improve the built environment, with better circulation of air or reduced density, for example. Decisions about sanitary systems in the nineteenth century continued to have profound impacts on cities over a century later due to the long-​term nature of infrastructure and its associated path dependency. Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) argued the need for a system of pressurized water to place house drainage, main drainage, paving, and street cleaning into a single sanitary process.22 Like fire risk, one response to epidemics in the nineteenth century that was important to urban planning was the growing use and sophistication of maps. Cholera in particular generated many innovative maps of the distribution of infections, deaths, and their association with features like filthy water sources. Medical mapping revealed the interdependence of the wealthy with the lower classes who were more likely to suffer from the disease.23 John Snow’s famous map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in the district of St James’s in London, which attracted great attention because it included the royal court area, revealed that it centered on a tainted Broad Street well, unveiling invisible water-​borne connections with poor areas and the filthy Thames river. With epidemics revealed as not simply associated with the degree of cleanliness in a district but as the subterranean interconnection of bodies in a metropolis, sanitary reforms could civilize, clean, and separate those bodies.24 Sanitary and medical maps made it possible to see the city as an organism with circulatory systems extending through an entire city, with hidden underground conduits that could carry infection to apparently clean areas.25 Deaths in St. James’s revealed the epidemiological vulnerability of the rich to the poor, and encouraged interventions, not only for humanitarian reasons but also for the self-​ protection of the elite. In Paris, reappearance of cholera in 1848 and 1849 was perceived as threatening the entire city. For example, Victor Considerant, a French utopian socialist, wrote in this period that the “rich did speak of the misery of the poor, but it was a thing for pity, not fear; they had no notion of this frightful contagious poverty; the cholera starkly revealed it.”26 Commentators after 1848 argued that the working classes, “who were both biologically and politically suspect,” had to be integrated into the social fabric. The agent for this task was improved housing. Housing reform promised to reduce social tensions, moralize the working classes, and improve public health. In response, the 1850 Melun Law opened private lodgings to public surveillance.27 Tuberculosis also promoted urban reforms, despite being less prone to spread from poor areas to those of the rich than cholera or typhoid, requiring close contact. Highly associated with crowding and poor housing, in 1900 it accounted for 15 percent of the deaths of blacks in American cities, and 9.8 percent of urban whites.28 Segregation was a major cause of overcrowding and bad housing in US cities, and thus, of higher prevalence for tuberculosis. Racism resulted in minimal deployment of public health

302    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER resources in black areas. Claims that the living conditions were rooted in racial characteristics justified continued neglect beyond increased surveillance and coercive intervention on individual cases.29 However, racial utilitarian ideas of interdependence emphasized the risks that tuberculosis could spread from black areas to the rest of the city, and encouraged more progressive interventions to provide health services to African Americans. Two key strategies of public health promotion are heightening surveillance (through detention, quarantine, and compulsory inspection) or promoting hygiene through the self-​governance of individuals.30 In colonial contexts, the first strategy dominated longer. Minimal or nonexistent education and welfare reduced the levers that could help turn mothers into health care auxiliaries. Non-​westerners in colonies were considered prone to problematic practices, which only powers of intrusive inspection and compulsion could overcome. Replacement of waste and health systems or far-​ranging reconstructions of the built environment were seen as too expensive. Authorities in Singapore and elsewhere instead tried to require Asians to reform their practices, particularly in the nineteenth century.31 Yet, new forms of medical and public health intervention expanded considerably in the nineteenth century due to what historian David Arnold called the “growing realization . . . that the health of European soldiers and civilians could not be secured through measures directed at their health alone.”32 The introduction of epidemics from the colonies to the metropoles increased the sense of vulnerability. For instance, the first International Sanitary Conference of 1851, which focused particularly on cholera, put much of the blame for its international spread on Britain’s ineffective controls in India.33 Since many colonial cities were trading ports, diseases that damaged trade, such as the 1894 plague outbreak that quarantined Hong Kong and Bombay, were a serious concern. Reliance of ports on manual labor required looking beyond European health to respond to the greater problems of Asian morbidity and mortality.34 The result in Singapore, as elsewhere, was pervasive bureaucracy that reshaped the urban environment to control the Asian population, and improve their habits and customs.35 Half of Bombay’s population fled from the 1894 plague to the countryside.36 It killed an estimated 12.5 million people in India between 1894 and 1938, 95 percent of the global total death toll from this epidemic. Plague called into question British strategies for separating themselves from the native population and thereby protecting them from disease.37 While separation, other than for reliance on native domestics, was fairly successful in most of India, the rapid growth and size of Bombay and Calcutta created unavoidable mixtures. Harsh anti-​plague measures created resentment and a major riot in Bombay in 1898. One response was the creation of a planning agency, the Bombay Improvement Trust, with a mandate to demolish overcrowded buildings, and increase segregation of Europeans. The Bombay and Calcutta Trusts produced three-​, four-​, and five-​story buildings of reinforced concrete of modest size and amenities.38 Expansion of the 1901 Indian Census, already one of the most elaborate and sophisticated in the world, was another response to reveal the impact of the plague upon the diverse and segregated population of the city.39 While disease mapping in India lagged behind England, the 1901 censuses of

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    303 Calcutta and Bombay produced a wealth of localized data decades before equivalent information was collected for New York, London, or Toronto.40 The appearance of bubonic plague in Hong Kong during 1894 generated fear among Europeans of contracting diseases from the Chinese.41 A plan to demolish 384 buildings in the area where most of the 2,500 plague deaths occurred was argued to be crucial for remaking it into a healthy district.42 European and Chinese property owners unsuccessfully protested the plan, citing the economic risks and that loss of housing would make the health situation even worse by exacerbating overcrowding. Concerns about unsanitary conditions in overcrowded Chinese dwellings were constrained by the worry that increased building regulations would deter property investment and lower tax revenue.43 Perceptions about public health affected planning and segregation in both the Global North and South. In the United States, in the early twentieth century it was common in southern cities for early public works projects to bypass African American neighborhoods and only make infrastructural improvements available after concerns about the health of the white residents had been addressed.44 In Hong Kong, reforms after the 1880s concentrated on improving sanitary infrastructure, building codes, policing, record keeping, and health education rather than segregation.45 However, racial segregation as a proposed solution grew rather than shrank toward the end of the nineteenth century, particularly from those in the European population for whom the Chinese were seen to represent irrational, insanitary, and uncivilized practices.46 While scientific and governmental acceptance of bacteriological causation was well established by the early twentieth century, it did not end earlier miasmatic approaches. They continued alongside acceptance of contagionist ideas, the medical theory that most diseases were caused by the transmission of some kind of infectious agent through contact. Fears of contagion actually reinforced segregationist efforts to protect the health of Europeans, especially women and children, as in the formal exclusion of Chinese from the Hong Kong Peak District in 1904.47

Riot At least since ancient Rome, the powerful have worried about dangers posed by mobs. Slums were widely seen as dangerous because they fostered violence that could spill over from poor districts to privileged urban precincts in the form of riot and revolt. The nineteenth century and industrialization made revolt and revolution a pervasive fear of those whose wealth expanded tremendously in tandem with new forms of inequality, particularly visible and dangerous in the capital cities. As Hobsbawm remarked, behind the Parisian revolt of 1789 and the barricades of 1830, 1848, and the 1871 Commune “lay the substratum of an even older tradition . . . that of riot, or the occasional public protest by desperate men. The direct action or rioting, the smashing of machines, shops or the houses of the rich, had a long history.”48

304    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER Paris is a classic case where fear of revolt from working-​class districts influenced adoption of urban planning initiatives. In 1843 reformer Flora Tristan noted that reports and statistics had demonstrated that due to abandonment and neglect, the majority of workers “were becoming dangerous to society,” proving that “not only justice and humanity imposed the duty of coming to the aid of the working classes . . . but that even general interest and security” required reforms.49 First the French Revolution, then the 1848 revolution, created a situation where in the decades before the Paris Commune of 1871, commentators warned of “the danger of allowing Paris to be surrounded by impoverished enclaves hostile to the social order . . . The hygienist Du Mesnil voiced the chronic anxiety of his contemporaries that in the hovels of the poor ‘heroism was necessary in order not to succumb to hate for society.’ ”50 The legacy of 1848 included a strong sense of a divided Paris, in which as geographer David Harvey remarked, “everyone knew where the barricades had been erected, what part of the city belonged to ‘the other.’ A barricade makes for a simple dividing line. The experience of 1848 lived on in simplified, polarized representations of social and physical space.”51 The barricade became a symbol of popular insurrection after 1830, but its history in Paris goes back to at least 1588.52 Even sympathetic descriptions of the dire conditions of the poor worked against them; the bourgeoisie concluded that living in such circumstances, how could people be anything other than animalistic? Such areas had to be guarded for the safety of the decent population; as the poet Théophile Gautier cautioned, if the guards left the gate unlocked, “these ferocious creatures go about a terrified city with savage cries. The cages open, the hyenas of ’93 and the gorillas of the Commune pour forth.”53 Georges-​Eugene Haussmann, prefect of Paris from 1853 to 1870, launched massive plans to restructure Paris. The common contemporary interpretation concentrates on how his new road system surrounded some of the traditional sources of revolutionary ferment and would facilitate free circulation of forces of order.54 Increased class segregation protected the bourgeoisie from real or feared dangers and used planning powers to restructure the city into relatively secure spaces of reproduction for the different social classes.55 Antoine Paccoud thoroughly criticizes this interpretation of Haussmannization as gentrification, and demonstrates that while it might have been the consequence, there is no evidence that it was the primary motivation.56 Other research suggests that concerns about spillover from Parisian slums did influence planning interventions. In Paris in 1870–​1871 the simultaneous appearance of political revolt and epidemic disease echoed a familiar and disturbing pattern where poverty and poor health in the eastern half of the city threatened the entire population.57 The French engineer and social reformer Emile Cheysson conceded that one was obliged to deal with the poor “as much from the calculated egoism of self-​preservation as from love of our fellow man.”58 Housing reform in Paris became a means to preserve society from both disorder and disease.59 The reaction against the 1871 Paris Commune led to gentrification of the center and produced a continuing crisis of affordable housing.60 In Vienna, too, 1848 left animosity between the elite in the center and the proletarian suburbs. The threat posed by the suburbs re-​emerged in 1911 with a large hunger revolt

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    305 in the Ottakring quarter could be seen as the first significant rebellion of marginalized suburban masses.61 The Viennese suburbs were seen as dark landscapes that challenged modernity, populated by agitators, revolutionaries, and criminals, and with prostitutes who infected the rich with the poison of syphilis. The terrors and anxieties projected on these suburbs separate them sharply from the center, even more so than did the segregating architecture of the Ringstrasse.62 For the sociologist Manuel Castells, any “theory of the city must be, at its starting point, a theory of social conflict.”63 Urban conflict, however, need not be violent and involve riot or revolt, if social movements can obtain, typically after resistance from the state, change through nonviolent protest. The Glasgow rent strike of 1915 is a good example. Although the strike began with angry and sometimes violent responses to evictions of soldiers’ families, the ability of the strikers to demonize rapacious landlords evicting widows and children of heroes dying in the First World War received wide public support. This had considerable influence on housing policy, in Glasgow but also more broadly in the United Kingdom. The Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act was passed in 1915, and the strike contributed strongly to the first Housing and Town Planning Act in 1919, funding local governments to build housing for workers, contributing to the eventual creation of a large public housing sector.64 But conflict often was violent, and urban race riots in the United States, in the early part of the twentieth century, figured significantly in urban planning efforts that promoted racial and class apartheid.65 The years 1917–​1919 were particularly tumultuous, with at least nine major race riots in the United States; hundreds of people were injured and sometimes killed. Most race riots resulted from white on black violence, particularly in neighborhoods where lower-​class ethnic whites competed with African-​Americans for housing. Planners at that time, such as Robert Whitten, argued that a solution could be found in better comprehensive planning because it “was essential in the interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored races. Care has been taken [in plans] to prevent [housing] discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.”66 Whitten’s famous 1922 Atlanta plan was fashioned for a city that was sharply divided into three residential districts: white, colored, and undetermined (or to-​be-​determined racial land-​uses). Racial divisions were even clearer in most colonial cities. More so than in racially divided America, they were seen as fundamentally subject to the danger of riot and revolt, given the immense disparity between the numbers of Europeans and of the indigenous population (including migrants from the rural hinterland). Dual cities were key projects for defending Europeans from revolt. Government services were restricted to the European city, while intervention in the rest of the city focused on public health and security threats to the colonial elite.67 In the interior of India, cities were located where substantial indigenous cities already existed, except for the hill towns where the Europeans retreated to escape the summer heat. New cities were usually established outside native towns, whose labor they depended on, with demolitions carried out to maintain the desired distance, frequently one to three miles of separation.

306    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER Slums and squatter settlements in colonial and postcolonial cities were often feared by the Right, and hoped for by the Left, as sources of revolutionary ferment.68 More commonly, however, squatters have focused less on revolution than on being allowed to get on with the hard work of making a living and setting their children on a path toward a better life, as long as governments do not impede such goals.69 Hong Kong is a good example. At the end of the nineteenth century, military leaders believed that Hong Kong was in a precarious security position. Next to an unstable China, military authorities perceived a necessary conflict of interest among the Chinese population of Hong Kong which could turn at any moment into civil disorder if the diplomatic situation were to deteriorate.70 The 1949 victory of the Chinese Communist Party amplified these concerns. Hong Kong’s Governor Alexander Grantham was asked by Britain’s secretary of state in 1952 if Hong Kong could be defended from a blockade and air attacks without land invasion. He said this scenario was unrealistic as it neglected an additional threat: Communist capacity to foment internal disturbances by strikes, riots, or extensive sabotage and terrorism. Hong Kong’s resources were insufficient to protect against blockades and the threat to internal security simultaneously. Internal disturbances would make Hong Kong untenable. Grantham referred in support of this argument to the events of March 1, 1952: a protest by thousands of what he labeled Communist-​led students and workers who attacked “police, servicemen and Europeans, overturned and burned vehicles . . . in a roaring riot.”71 The crowd had gathered to await the expected arrival of the Canton mission to provide material and political support to the Tung Tau Village fire victims. When the mission was denied entry, “The mood of the paraders grew uglier as they marched, and disturbances broke out.”72 The Hong Kong government saw squatter settlements as a key security threat after they expanded from very small numbers to vast settlements after 1949. A 1950 report emphasized that “from a military point of view” the principal objection to the squatter colonies related to defense problems. Even “in the unlikely event” that 90 percent of Hong Kong’s squatters proved in an emergency “not only to be peaceable but also to be co-​operative with the authorities, the remaining 30,000 could constitute a very real potential threat.”73 Worries about squatters as Communist sympathizers added to this perception of squatter settlements as being prone to riots. In the early 1950s, squatter clearance without resettlement frequently led to violent resistance, which after the comfort mission riot of 1952 worried the government about further interventions from China. Riots that involved squatters or Resettlement Estates occurred in 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1966.74 It became clear that geopolitical precarity made solving the squatter problem without resettlement infeasible. The Squatter Resettlement Programme began in 1954. This would likely not have occurred if demolition without rehousing was viable: the government made it clear that squatters, as law breakers who should not be encouraged, were at the bottom of their housing priority list.75 Many of the most “progressive” reforms of colonial Hong Kong occurred in the aftermath of the 1967 Disturbances, a spillover of the Chinese Cultural Revolution that caused widespread disruption in Hong Kong. New policies under Governor Murray

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    307 MacLehose (1971–​1982) included the ambitious Ten Year Housing Scheme, which turned Resettlement into a broad public housing program, now housing almost half of the population, as well as more active roles in the provision of medical and social welfare services. These responses were not single-​handedly brought about by the Disturbances in the 1960s but were conditioned by the experience of prior disturbances in the postwar period, which had exposed the dangers of street violence for a British colony on the edge of China during a period of decolonization elsewhere in the world.76

Conclusions Nineteenth-​century urban planning in the west and its colonies was motivated, to a significant degree, by efforts to contain threats—​particularly those generated by fire, epidemic, and riot—​geographically within slums so as to stymie their transmission to other more elite parts of a city. For this reason, urban planning was increasingly distinguished by attempts to administer the whole city, the spaces of the poor as well as the rich, not just the individualized areas of elites. Certainly, humanitarian concerns for the poor were significant in this development. In particular, there was a deepening concern about the dramatic new challenges and problems posed by industrialization, but this alone was insufficient to bring into being the new urban planning regime. Many revolutionaries and reformers, especially between the French Revolution in 1789 and the European revolts of 1848, envisioned and proposed radical or more modest, respectively, urban and social changes designed to reduce or eradicate the extraordinary inequalities and maladies bought about by the Industrial Revolution.77 However, most revolts failed, and humanitarian sentiments proved largely inadequate to address these industrial challenges. Instead, urban planning arose in response to the threat of negative spillovers from urban problems that concentrated in the poorer precincts but that could easily diffuse across space and threaten the comfort and security of elite districts. The triple threats of fire, epidemic, and riot were different from other problems because of how they were prone to propagate beyond the quarters of the poor to those of the privileged. Later waves of urban planning, from about the time of the First World War, especially in the west, were indeed more influenced by concern for the poor and disadvantaged, but this too seems to be changing. Increasingly, urban planners became concerned about the effects of inadequate living conditions on the residents of disadvantaged districts, but planning was also increasingly about how these conditions could create public scandals and impact their careers. However, to return to the Grenfell Tower disaster, this distinction between the earlier concern primarily for risks posed to the elites versus the later concern for the disadvantaged (as well) paints too broad-​brush. To our shame, even now worries about the spillovers of negative externalities from poor areas to the rich appear to be the primary motivation over a genuine concern for relieving the conditions of the poor. In Grenfell, the addition of external cladding, which was the

308    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER fire’s accelerant and made it truly catastrophic, was reportedly adopted to reduce the unsightliness of the deteriorating building for its wealthier South Kensington neighbors. All the while, the building’s other fire safety issues, such as fire alarm maintenance or the installation of sprinklers, were forsaken. This points to another way in which slums may impact wealthier neighborhoods beyond their confines: the appearance and stigma of a slum nearby may reduce neighboring property values. Governments also share this cost of slums because of decreased property taxes. So, urban renewal or gentrification remain the two ways that the public and private sector attempt to manage the spillovers from the slums. It appears then that the shift from early to later urban planning responses to slums are less a transformation than a preservation with only slightly new characteristics. And one of the tragedies of the twenty-​first century is that later, victim-​oriented, planning interventions are again being eclipsed by a resurgence of the earlier, elite-​oriented, types of interventions to control, regulate, and displace slums.

Notes 1. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds., Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 2. William A. Fischel, “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects,” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 317–​340. 3. Juanita de Barros, Order and Place in a Colonial City: Patterns of Struggle and Resistance in Georgetown, British Guiana, 1889–​ 1924 (Montreal: McGill-​ Queen’s University Press, 2003); Richard L. Derderian, “Urban Space in the French Imperial Past and the Postcolonial Present,” Asia Europe Journal 1, no. 1 (2003): 75–​90. 4. F. B. Smith, The People’s Health, 1830–​1910 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 1979). 5. Carl H. Nightingale, Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 6. Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities (London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1997). 7. Christopher Silver and John V. Moeser, The Separate City: Black Communities in the Urban South, 1940–​1968 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995). 8. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–​1848 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962). 9. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lubken, and Jordan Sand, eds., Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 10. Stephen Porter, Great Fire of London (Stroud: The History Press, 2011). 11. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lubken and Jordan Sand, “Introduction,” in Bankoff, Lubken and Sand, Flammable Cities, 3–​22. 12. Christine M. Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 13. M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1986).

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    309 14. Walter W. Ristow, “United States Fire Insurance and Underwriters Maps 1852–​1968,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 25, no. 3 (1968): 194–​218. 15. Henry Taylor, “The Use of Maps in the Study of the Black Ghetto-​Formation Process: Cincinnati, 1802–​1910,” Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 2 (1984): 44–​58. 16. Quoted in Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–​1963 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006), 66. 17. Kah Seng Loh, “Kampong, Fire, Nation: Towards a Social History of Postwar Singapore,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 613–​643. 18. Michael Willrich, Pox: An American History (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011), 2. 19. Ibid. 20. David Clark, Germs, Genes, and Civilizations: How Epidemics Shaped who We Are Today (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2010). 21. Nightingale, Segregation, 88. 22. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). 23. Pamela K. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 51. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Ibid., 77. 26. Quoted in Ann-​Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–​1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 16. 27. Ibid., xv. 28. Samuel K. Roberts, Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 29. Ibid. 30. Alison Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 31. Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 32. David Arnold, “Introduction: Disease, Medicine and Empire,” in Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies, ed. David Arnold (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 1–​26. 33. Gilbert, Mapping the Victorian Social Body. 34. Yeoh, Contesting Space, 86. 35. Ibid., 66. 36. Home, Of Planting and Planning, 75. 37. Richard Harris and Robert Lewis, “Colonial Anxiety Counted: Plague and Census in Bombay and Calcutta,” in Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, ed. Robert Peckham and David Pomfret (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 73. 38. Home, Of Planting and Planning. 39. Harris and Lewis, “Colonial Anxiety Counted,” 76. 40. Ibid., 61. 41. Cecilia Chu, “Combating Nuisance: Sanitation, Regulation, and the Politics of Property in Colonial Hong Kong,” in Peckham and Pomfret, Imperial Contagions, 30. 42. Ibid., 33.

310    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER 43. Ibid. 44. Craig E. Colten, An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006), 80. 45. Nightingale, Segregation, 143. 46. Ibid., 239. 47. David Pomfret, “ ‘Beyond Risk of Contagion’: Childhood, Hill Stations, and the Planning of British and French Colonial Cities,” in Peckham and Pomfret, Imperial Contagions, 81–​103. 48. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 212. 49. Quoted in David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2006), 71. 50. Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, xiv. 51. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 273. 52. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution. 53. Théophile Gautier, quoted in Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity, 280. 54. Ibid., 113. 55. Ibid., 150. 56. See for example Antoine Paccoud, “Planning Law, Power, and Practice: Haussmann in Paris (1853–​1870),” Planning Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2016): 341–​361. 57. Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 84. 58. Quoted in ibid. 59. Ibid., xviii. 60. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-​cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 61. Wolfgang Maderthaner and Lutz Musner, Unruly Masses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 6. 62. Ibid., 59. 63. Castells, The City and the Grassroots, 318. 64. Ibid. 65. Richard H. Chused, “Euclid’s Historical Imagery,” Case Western Law Review 51 (2000): 597–​ 616; Michael Jones‐Correa, “The Origins and Diffusion of Racial Restrictive Covenants,” Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 4 (2000): 541–​568. 66. Robert Whitten, “The Atlanta Zoning Plan,” Survey 40, no. 8 (1992): 114–​115. 67. Home, Of Planting and Planning. 68. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006). 69. Thomas Aguilera and Alan Smart, “Squatting, North, South and Turnabout: A Dialogue Comparing Illegal Housing Research,” in Public Goods versus Economic Interests: Global Perspectives on the History of Squatting, ed. Freia Anders and Alexander Sedlmaier (New York: Routledge, 2016), 29–​55. 70. G. Alex Bremner and David P. Y. Lung, “Spaces of Exclusion: The Significance of Cultural Identity in the Formation of European Residential Districts in British Hong Kong, 1877–​ 1904,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21, no. 2 (2003): 240. 71. Alexander Grantham, Inward Telegram to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, March 22, 1952, COS37-​17669, Hong Kong Public Records Office. 72. Hong Kong Standard, “Huge Kowloon Parade Turns into Violent Riot,” March 2, 1952. 73. J. C. McDouall, “Report on Squatters,” November 8, 1950, HKRS 163-​1-​779, Hong Kong Public Records Office.

Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot, and Epidemics    311 74. Wai-​Man Lam, Understanding the Political Culture of Hong Kong: The Paradox of Activism and Depoliticization (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2004). 75. Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth. 76. Alan Smart and Tai-​lok Lui, “Learning from Civil Unrest: State/​Society Relations in Hong Kong Before and After the 1967 Disturbances,” in May Days in Hong Kong: Riot and Emergency in 1967, ed. Robert Bickers and Ray Yep (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 145–​159. 77. Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity.

Bibliography Bankoff, Greg, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds. Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Bashford, Alison. Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Chu, Cecilia. “Combating Nuisance: Sanitation, Regulation, and the Politics of Property in Colonial Hong Kong.” In Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, edited by Robert Peckham and David Pomfret, 17–​36. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. Clark, David. Germs, Genes, and Civilizations: How Epidemics Shaped Who We Are Today. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2010. Colten, Craig E. An Unnatural Metropolis: Wresting New Orleans from Nature. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2006. Fischel, William A. “An Economic History of Zoning and a Cure for its Exclusionary Effects.” Urban Studies 41, no. 2 (2004): 317–​340. Gilbert, Pamela K. Mapping the Victorian Social Body. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Harvey, David. Paris, Capital of Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2006. Harris, Richard, and Robert Lewis. “Colonial Anxiety Counted: Plague and Census in Bombay and Calcutta.” In Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures of Planning in Asia, edited by Robert Peckham and David Pomfret, 61–​78. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. Hobsbawm, Eric J. The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–​ 1848. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962. Home, Robert. Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities. London: E. & F. N. Spon, 1997. Loh, Kah Seng. “Kampong, Fire, Nation: Towards a Social History of Postwar Singapore.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40, no. 3 (2009): 613–​643. Maderthaner, Wolfgang, and Lutz Musner. Unruly Masses. New York: Berghahn, 2008. Melosi, Martin V. The Sanitary City: Environmental Services in Urban America from Colonial Times to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008. Nightingale, Carl H. Segregation: A Global History of Divided Cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pomfret, David. “‘Beyond Risk of Contagion’: Childhood, Hill Stations, and the Planning of British and French Colonial Cities.” In Imperial Contagions: Medicine, Hygiene, and Cultures

312    ALAN SMART AND ELIOT TRETTER of Planning in Asia, edited by Robert Peckham and David Pomfret, 81–​103. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013. Porter, Stephen. Great Fire of London. Stroud: The History Press, 2011. Roberts, Samuel Kelton. Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease and the Health Effects of Segregation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Rosen, Christine Meisner. The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Shapiro, Ann-​Louise. Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850–​1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Smart, Alan. The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–​ 1963. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Willrich, Michael. Pox: An American History. New York: Penguin Press, 2011. Yeoh, Saw Ai Brenda. Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

CHAPTER 17

THE P OLI T I C A L C ON STRUCTION OF SLUMS IN INDIA NANDINI GOOPTU

“A Slum, for the purpose of Census, has been defined as residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to the safety and health.”1 This approach by the Census of India 2011 gives the slum a spatial definition as a bounded and physically identifiable entity, characterized by deficiencies in its physical environment. This essentialized and reductionist characterization of the slum overlooks its multiple connotations and meanings that are created through political discourse and practice, as the following two, very different, examples illustrate. On October 2, 2014, the birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a highly orchestrated national campaign to create a “clean India” (Swachh Bharat) by wielding a broom to sweep dirt in Valmiki Basti, a slum in Delhi where Gandhi once stayed. The slum was projected as deserving of the virtuous ministrations of the enlightened, welfarist state and of an altruistic nationalist leadership imbued with civic virtue. It served as the ethical locus around which the government sought to galvanize the nation for developmental action to eradicate filth, animated by a spirit of morally charged social improvement associated with Gandhi as a national icon. In contrast to Modi’s attention to the environment of the slum, its residents are highlighted on the website of the property development firm of Mukesh Mehta, best known for his controversial and highly disruptive and destructive plan for the commercial redevelopment of Mumbai’s Dharavi district, Asia’s largest slum: “The failure [of slum development policies so far] lies in not harnessing the spirit of a group of people that can and will act as an engine for economic growth. If slum-​dwellers are treated as

314   NANDINI GOOPTU valuable human resources, they can act as a key stone to a vibrant and robust economy anywhere.”2 The website then goes on to explain that unsanitary conditions, high incidence of disease, and the lack of educational and sociocultural infrastructure retard the realization of the full potentials of slum-​dwellers as productive agents. Mehta, a private real-​estate developer who made a fortune by building luxury homes, now describes himself as a social entrepreneur, and he justifies his lucrative slum reconstruction project and strategy of capital accumulation by invoking slums as repositories of entrepreneurial talent and the home of a potentially productive human resource. These examples draw attention to the slum as a relational concept brought into being through the actions and interventions of the state and non-​state actors. These interactions create specific forms of knowledge about the slum that are integrally linked with the economic and political life of the city and the nation. Slums are imbued with multiple meanings and attributes through struggles over the control, identity, and imaginaries of the city as well as through the dynamics of wider national politics. If one accepts that the slum is a socially and politically constructed category, it becomes worthwhile to eschew empirical enquiry into the condition of slums in India in order to explore their production through political and social discourse over time, and to trace the historical evolution of the slum as a concept in the colonial and postcolonial periods. This approach does not imply that the physical spaces described as slums do not exist in reality and are mere figments of imagination. On the contrary, an analysis of the conceptual development and the construction of slums through political and social discourse reveals wider urban struggles, conflicts, and inequalities that slums represent in a microcosm. As such, this analytical perspective explains why slums have proved to be so durable in India and come to signify the negative features of the urban condition. Moreover, a historically informed and contextualized enquiry into the social and political construction of slums helps to explain the local iterations of some widely prevalent global ideas about slums. It reveals the specificity and local roots of apparently similar characterization of slums across many parts of the world.

Sanitation, Poverty, and Colonial Power Slums were first identified as an urban problem in colonial India in the later nineteenth century. Approaches to them were largely shaped by analogy with similar developments in Britain in the same period.3 Major colonial cities like Calcutta and Bombay witnessed the influx of laboring populations, with an attendant overcrowding in under-​developed areas that lacked proper housing, sanitary infrastructure, and planned roads and often consisted of informal settlements and dilapidated buildings. The identification of such areas as slums and as a major challenge of municipal governance arose out of colonial concerns with disease epidemics and the consequent preoccupation with sanitation,

Political Construction of Slums in India    315 public health, and the safety of British troops and personnel. Colonial sanitary and municipal officers recognized the need to construct sanitary infrastructure and suitable housing. However, the lack of resources at the disposal of municipal authorities as well as the fear of unleashing urban political unrest after the country-​wide uprising of 1857 against the British, prevented large-​scale investment on infrastructure and the wholesale re-​planning of cities.4 Instead, the focus was on slums as habitats of the poor, who were considered responsible for causing unsanitary conditions due to their unhygienic habits and behavior. Some of the most durable characterizations of the slum emerged from this period, as public health issues assumed overwhelming urgency during the outbreak of disease epidemics, such as the cholera, and most importantly, the plague in the 1890s. As historian Prashant Kidambi has argued in relation to Bombay, colonial officials ignored emerging scientific evidence of the microbial, rather than the miasmic, origin of the plague, and instead approached the plague through a contagionist lens as an “infection of locality” that could spread to white areas and affect Indian elites.5 Consequently, they sought to tackle the plague through a spatialized approach, targeting areas identified as unsanitary, overcrowded, and prone to breeding disease. As a result, the characterization of slums took on two enduring features. First, slums as unsanitary spaces were seen as localized phenomena without reference to the wider social, economic, and political factors responsible for the production of what had come to be seen as plague spots. In fact, the term “plague spot” gradually came not only to refer to areas affected by the plague, but also to signify poor hygiene, sanitation, and health as well as congestion, dirt, squalor, and filth. The outcome was the identification of the slum as a distinct type of urban space that caused disease contagion, the solution to which lay in localized interventions. Second, the culpability for the problem was placed squarely on the shoulders of those who lived in the slums, notably the poor. Irrespective of the actual composition of their populations, slums came to be synonymous with poverty and low life. In this way, the urban spatial politics of slums and control of the poor would become a critical facet of the exercise of biopower as a mode of imposing colonial rule in India.

Civic Nationalism and Elite Control of Cities In the early decades of the twentieth century, and the interwar period in particular, slums came to be held responsible for jeopardizing not only the physical morphology and public health of the city but also its body politic and social fabric. The context for this shift in the conception of the slum was set by two sets of development that exacerbated class tensions in many rapidly growing cities: first, urban demographic expansion with migration of the poor into cities and overcrowding, and second, the increasing political

316   NANDINI GOOPTU mobilization and action of the urban poor through nationalist, religious, and caste politics in urban India, eliciting concerns and political unrest among Indian elites and the colonial state alike. As the habitat of the growing number of the poor, slums came to be associated not only with squalor, but also with morally degraded life and a political threat. In north India, where urban population growth was particularly striking with in-​migration of laboring classes, the insalubrious living conditions of the poor were identified by Raj Bahadur Gupta in 1930 as the factor that “lie[s]‌at the root of the characteristic inefficiency, slothfulness and other short-​comings” of the poor.6 An enquiry report on urban labor in the city of Kanpur in north India held the opinion that “the only relief available to the worker from the dirt and squalor of his house and its surroundings . . . is the liquor shop or the grog shop.”7 Not surprisingly, the transformation of slums as the physical environment of the poor through improvement projects and slum clearance campaigns came to assume a central place in urban local policies. This trend was further fortified by the emergence of a new form of civic nationalism among Indian elites, who were newly ensconced in town halls from the early decades of the twentieth century.8 The colonial state had devolved the powers of local administration to Indian elites, who were to be elected by property-​owning rate payers. For these new municipal elites and their propertied middle-​class electorates, local institutions afforded them access to political and administrative power within the framework of the colonial state, in which they were otherwise disempowered. With their newfound power at the helm of urban affairs, these elites envisioned the city as a vehicle of nationalist modernization, progress, and order to be planned and organized under their enlightened leadership.9 Their nationalist urbanism and economic and political predilections came to shape urban policy, notably the need of their middle-​class electorate to find safe and hygienic residential areas. Municipal bodies began to replan and remold cities to expand into new areas for middle-​class housing. Private investment on middle-​class housing was spurred on by high rents, the opening up of new land for building construction by local authorities, and the redirection of capital from the countryside to investment on urban real estate from the time of the agrarian depression of the 1930s. Slums were anathema to this optimistic and expansive urban vision of orderly modernity. Local bodies began to demolish or relocate slums to urban outskirts, leading to the spatial segregation of slum populations. This process was underpinned by a new moral discourse about the adverse impact of environment on character and behavior and about the interplay of dirt and degeneracy in slums, in addition to preexisting concerns about public health and sanitation. Slums, thus, came to be framed in terms of a dualistic conception of the city along the lines of class, with formally planned, well-​ developed areas of the well-​off as the norm and informal, unwholesome spaces of the poor as the aberration. Yet, at the same time, a nationalist vision of a common purpose of social reform and mass anti-​colonial mobilization animated the nationalist leadership, thus making possible an alternative view of slums as areas deserving of benevolent attention for

Political Construction of Slums in India    317 improvement. Patrick Geddes, the highly influential town planner, who was warmly welcomed by Indian elites in this period to develop plans of urban development, contributed to this approach by emphasizing a constructive and inclusive approach to slums. A high-​profile pageant that he organized during a religious festival in the city of Indore represented this exalted mission of urban development. The festival procession, organized on the occasion of Diwali (the festival of light to usher in the new year) and well known across India in nationalist circles, depicted the war on slums, dirt, and disease as a shared social mission. Not only eminent citizens but also the lower castes featured in the event as key actors, with untouchable sweepers appearing in pure white clothing, carrying their brooms and bedecked with garlands to celebrate their contribution to urban cleansing.10 In this way, an ambiguous and contradictory approach to slums came into existence, with a binary framing of their negative impact on cities on the one hand, and their need for benign reform on the other.

State Authoritarianism and Class Conflict The dual approach of slum clearance and slum improvement, initiated during the late colonial period, continued into the early years after independence, until a much more accelerated and intensive phase of the onslaught on slums emerged in the 1970s, with new implications for the concept of the slum and its political significance. In 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of internal “Emergency” to deal with what she saw as the outbreak of political movements and unrest that destabilized and threatened the state. Democratic processes were suspended and civil liberties were curbed during this authoritarian interlude in Indian politics between 1975 and 1977.The Emergency period has gained notoriety for hitherto unseen violence on urban slums across the country and the wholesale destruction and displacement of many slums in major cities. The high authoritarianism of the Emergency was played out on the body and habitat of the slum poor. As Patrick Clibbens argues, the Emergency removed any inhibition and impediment to a full-​scale onslaught on slums by putting central emphasis on a uniform urban policy.11 The attack on slums was also a manifestation of rising class tensions, and slum demolition reflected increasing middle-​class anger and hostility toward the poor. In the period immediately preceding the Emergency, Gandhi had launched a populist campaign, claiming to eradicate poverty. She undertook a number of policy initiatives that were ostensibly for the benefit of the poor. Indeed, she proclaimed the Emergency in the name of the common people of India whose interests she purported to represent and advance. On the one hand, Gandhi invoked the poor not only to legitimize her authoritarian populism or authoritarian republicanism, but also to justify draconian slum clearance

318   NANDINI GOOPTU measures. On the other hand, this rhetorical political emphasis on the poor served to create an image of Gandhi as a leader who failed to uphold the interests of the middle classes, not least because the early and mid-​1970s and Gandhi’s regime coincided with a period of economic problems affecting the middle classes, with high levels of unemployment, inflation, and an agrarian crisis. All this had fueled middle-​class discontent and at times, fed into political unrest. Moreover, Gandhi’s populist electoral mobilization imparted the poor hitherto unprecedented visibility in electoral politics and conveyed a mistaken impression of their growing power and agency in politics. In this context, slums, as the most easily identifiable residential concentration of the poor multitude, came to represent spaces that endanger the proper functioning of democracy and middle-​class interests. Underpinned by middle-​class support, large-​scale, often brutal and violent, initiatives of slum clearance as well as fertility control of the poor through forced sterilization of men were rolled out in this period across India, and notably in Delhi.12 Many of these campaigns are attributed to Sanjay, Gandhi’s son, who was at the helm of the youth wing of the Congress Party that is associated with disgruntled middle-​class urban youth, venting their anger through public violence. Clibbens’s study of Delhi during the Emergency further shows that policies to remove and relocate slums to the urban periphery and the poor to the margins of the city aimed at an elitist cultural regeneration and revival in the city, in order to rectify what was seen as the rise of debased plebian public culture. Jagmohan, lieutenant governor of Delhi, who presided over slum clearance, said that he aspired to achieve a “revolution of the mind” and a new civic consciousness as well as a new aesthetic of the city that would remove the putatively unaesthetic presence of slums of the poor from the heart of the city. Elaborating on his vision of Delhi, Jagmohan explained: “I have often believed in the destiny of this city, in its historic role, in its being a spiritual workshop of the nation, in its capacity to impart urbanity and civility to the rural migrant. . . . The real problem of the slums is not taking people out of slums but slums out of people.”13 The Emergency unambiguously cast legitimate urban aesthetics and civic life in terms of the superior preferences and priorities of elites and the middle classes, with slums of the poor being marked as illegitimate anomalies that were to be subjected to a civilizing mission and to be excised from the city, due to their degraded culture and lack of civic virtue. This echoed similar elite propensities during the late colonial period, but a common nationalist purpose of an earlier era to solve the problem of slums gradually gave way to a more explicit class polarization, which would be further hardened in the following decades.

New Urbansim and the Middle Classes Following the excesses of the Emergency and after the restoration of democracy, the intensity of slum clearance campaigns abated for some time and in situ slum development

Political Construction of Slums in India    319 became the main thrust of slum policy. However, matters changed with the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy from the early 1990s and into the early decades of the twenty-​first century. This period is marked by the acceleration of urbanization, increasingly lucrative investment in urban real estate and an intensified struggle over the urban built environment as well as the unabashed expression of hostility against slums by a culturally and socially ascendant and aspiring middle-​class. Historical constructions of the slum have fed into present-​day policies and practices, and new approaches to slums have emerged as cities are reimagined as instruments of economic globalization and modernization and as sites of a middle-​class consumer revolution, lifestyle enhancement, and upward social mobility. With the emergence of a new economic nationalism, the early years of the twenty-​first century have elicited most intense nationwide controversy over slums. Extensive slum demolition started taking place in the early 2000s. P. Sainath, a journalist, put into perspective the physical scale, demographic magnitude, and human cost of slum demolition in Mumbai (previously called Bombay) in December 2004 and January 2005: “Number of homes damaged by the tsunami in Nagapattinam [the worst-​ affected coastal district in southern India]: 30,300; Number of homes destroyed . . . in Mumbai: 84,000.”14 With the full backing of the local state’s coercive powers and extensive public support in the city, an estimated three hundred thousand people were displaced in this slum clearance drive alone. This particular spate of demolitions eventually stopped when the national government in Delhi instructed the local government in Mumbai to exercise restraint for fear of alienating slum electorates. This immediately led to a public outcry against the government, and party politics more generally, for capitulating to electoral considerations, instead of resolutely stamping out the problem of slums. Delhi did not lag far behind Mumbai in demolitions. As in Mumbai, citizens’ groups and residents’ associations of private middle-​class housing colonies in Delhi mounted concerted anti-​slum campaigns from the 1990s. They appealed to the local authorities and the law courts through public interest petitions to remove slums and squatter settlements in order to cleanse the city. In February and April 2004, with the help of armed police, more than 150,000 people were violently evacuated from the Pushta colony in Delhi, along the river Yamuna, to develop and “beautify” the area into a recreational promenade. The experience in other major Indian cities, such as Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai, were not quite so catastrophic, but all witnessed middle-​class citizen activism against slums and often their removal, affecting several million people. The onslaught on slums and the related urban land grab have been analytically understood in terms of the growing importance of real estate as an important site of private investment since the 1990s, when the Indian economy began to be gradually liberalized. The urban building boom from the turn of the century is also driven by rising demands from India’s burgeoning middle class and the private corporate sector. The geographer Swapna Banerjee-​Guha argues that urban land is now the key instrument of capital accumulation.15 This has led to a process of displacement of slums and dispossession of the

320   NANDINI GOOPTU poor from valuable urban space and prime real estate, often through force and coercion, in order to reconfigure the built environment for exclusive use by the privileged and the well-​off. Beyond this economic rationale, the reconceptualization of the role of slums is also underpinned by new visions of the city that emerged from the turn of the century. One of India’s most high-​profile entrepreneurs of a globally successful IT company, later turned politician, has argued that the city has come to take the place of the village as the quintessence of a “new” India.16 Similarly, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while launching a major, nationwide urban development program on December 3, 2005, stated: “Our urban economy has become an important driver of economic growth. It is also the bridge between the domestic economy and the global economy. It is a bridge we must strengthen.” The centrality of the city in India’s growth economy has found expression in the oft-​repeated official aspiration to transform Mumbai into Shanghai, and more widely to create global cities in India. Indeed, it now seems axiomatic in the Indian state and corporate circles to envision the city as the engine of economic growth, the beacon of India’s future and the crucible of enterprise and innovation. This spirit of economic nationalism and urban optimism was reflected in the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), India’s largest ever and most ambitious urban regeneration program, launched in 2005, driven by a shared government and private corporate imperative to transform cities.17 This economic nationalist and entrepreneurial urbanism has been further elaborated with a techno-​modern civic imagination more recently, with the launch of the Smart Cities Mission in 2015 for a technology-​led enhancement and management of urban infrastructure and resources.18 The city has also been reimagined by the increasingly assertive and consumerist middle and upper classes. The past few decades of the liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy have witnessed the crystallization of a new passionate commitment by the Indian elites and middle classes to the idea of economic growth, enterprise, and consumption. As is widely recognized, political ideas have hardened against the redistributive policies of an earlier era and against what is now widely perceived to be the pro-​poor orientation of India’s post-​independence developmental state, which is held responsible for undermining capitalist development and prosperity. The sociologist Satish Deshpande has argued that middle-​class visions of nationalism have come to be focused on an imagined economy defined by consumption. He states: “cosmopolitan consumption (rather than the patriotic production of Nehruvian socialism) appears to be the preferred terrain for the national imagination associated with India’s globalized capitalist economy.”19 The middle classes as sovereign consumers have focused specifically on cities as not only the symbols of the new imagined economy but also the site of fulfilment of consumer identity. Urban prosperity and modernity are at the heart of this vision. The cliché of urban shopping malls as the icons of a globalizing India does indeed capture this buoyant middle-​class mood. The middle classes now view the city in terms of privatized enclaves and spaces, from which the poor are sought to be excluded, as evident from the rise of a vast private security system to protect

Political Construction of Slums in India    321 spaces of consumption, leisure, work, and housing for the exclusive use of these classes. Sanjay Srivastava refers to the consumer-​citizen whose identity is now rooted to private spaces of consumption.20 “Bypass urbanism”21 now characterizes Indian cities, with new residential areas being fortified within gated spaces and constructed away from the perceived filth and squalor of the poor and bypassing congestion and overcrowding, most notably in slums. These middle and upper classes have also staked their prior claim to urban citizenship and privileged entitlement to the city through myriad forms of civic activism and “social municipalism”22 that also seek to exclude the poor and outlaw the slum. An opportunity for this urban stakeholder activism has been afforded by the institutional reengineering of urban local governance to elicit the participation and involvement of citizens, as stakeholders, in the management of local services in partnership with municipal institutions. In particular, urban residents have been given greater autonomy to form local associations in their neighborhoods to mobilize local resources for service delivery. In response, Residents Welfare Associations (RWA) have been formed in many India cities, but overwhelmingly in affluent and middle-​class areas. In contrast, local units of municipal governance and representative institutions in slums and other settlements of the poor are largely defunct or paper organizations, or only engaged in limited activities. This is despite the fact that some of these, such as ward committees (wards are the primary units of local governance) are mandated by law and have a statutory status. In comparison, RWAs have been highly activist, for local residents possess the skills and resources to fulfil their role as active citizens. In Delhi, for instance, RWAs implement neighborhood security arrangements, manage local infrastructure and services, such as drinking water and sanitation, and maintain roads, parks, community halls, and street lights.23 In addition, RWAs have emerged as vociferous campaigners for the right of the privileged and the denial of the rights of the poor. As they are given direct access to municipal councils, they have the capacity to corner existing resources at the cost of poorer neighborhoods. The poor are seen to contribute little to the resource base of the city compared to tax-​paying, property-​owning citizens, while putting intolerable and unsustainable pressure on urban infrastructure, thus thwarting the modernization and environmental upgrading of cities. Indeed, resonating with enduring tropes of the unhygienic propensities of the poor, they are now seen to contribute to an environmental crisis in the city, consisting of overcrowding, congestion, insanitation, and pollution, thus imperiling the health and lifestyle aspirations of the upper and middle classes. In contrast to the supposedly public-​spirited, active citizens of RWAs, the poor are seen as irresponsible and parasitic on the city, thus being undeserving of any right to the city and devoid of any legitimate claim to urban citizenship status. In tune with this zeitgeist of new urbanism, RWAs have mounted concerted campaigns to protect and insulate putatively superior residential areas from the incursion of the poor as well as to remove slums and squatter settlements away from the city. All this has fueled a strident new environmentalism among the upper and middle-​classes, focused on the “brown

322   NANDINI GOOPTU agenda” of protecting and enhancing the quality of the built environment for citizens’ well-​being. Public spaces have been privatized and wrested from occupation by the poor for “beautification” and environmental and aesthetic upgradation, reminiscent of earlier eras of urban development in the colonial, early postcolonial and Emergency periods. Strident campaigns have also been taken to the courts through public interest litigation for the removal of slums and to enforce the rights of the upper and middle classes to a high quality of life in the city, unencumbered by squatters or slum-​dwellers. The Indian judiciary has often upheld and conferred legitimacy to these dominant middle-​class and elite dispositions toward the slum for the supposed economic and social havoc wreaked in cities by slum-​dwellers. The hostile attitude toward slum-​dwellers has been fortified by judicial activism and by marked shifts in judicial rulings in favor of the middle classes and against slums and squatter settlements.24 In 1986, the Supreme Court gave a landmark verdict in the Olga Tellis case, upholding the right of pavement dwellers to occupy public land to earn their livelihood, under Article 21 of the Constitution that guarantees Right to Life. In striking contrast, in 2000 and 2002, in two widely known judgements in the Almrita Patel and Pitampura-​Manchanda cases, respectively, the courts ruled decisively in favor of residents of private middle-​class housing estates in Delhi, whose quality of life was argued to be detrimentally affected by a plethora of “nuisance” perpetrated by nearby squatter settlements. In the Almrita Patel case, the Supreme Court judgment was unequivocal about the illegal status, and consequently the attenuated citizenship rights, of slum people, by stating that “rewarding an encroacher on public land with a free alternative site is like giving a reward to a pickpocket.”25 In the second (Pitampura-​Manchanda) case, the Delhi High Court verdict held: “The welfare of the residents of these [private housing] colonies is also in the realm of public interest which cannot be overlooked. . . . The welfare, health, maintenance of law and order, safety and sanitation of these residents cannot be sacrificed and their right under Article 21 is violated in the name of social justice to the slum-​dwellers.”26 These judgments lent formal authority and legal endorsement, not only to government action against slum-​dwellers and squatters, but also to a public mood of contempt, abhorrence and outrage against the urban poor, as vociferously expressed by residents associations, and as stridently articulated in large swathes of the media. In tune with these court judgements, slum residents are viewed as pathological lawbreakers who not only illegally occupy public land but also have a more general criminal and immoral disposition. A sense of moral panic appears to have gripped the middle and upper classes, with a fear that the proliferation of urban crime, emanating from the slums, would cause anything from theft and burglary to large-​scale violence, and imperil the lives of law-​abiding citizens. Thus, for example, in 2008 a citizens’ organization filed a court case against squatter colonies in Delhi and stated in its petition: in the process of sponsoring, motivating and encouraging the setting up of these unauthorized, and subsequently, regularized colonies, the interests of the

Political Construction of Slums in India    323 underprivileged persons do not really get served; they are encouraged to act illegally and to gain from such illegal acts; their moral fabric gets undermined; . . . these measures inevitably generate an atmosphere of crime . . . and a general lowering of the standards of morals.27

The outlawing of slums as illegitimate spaces also represents a significant backlash against the increasing political democratization of the urban poor. Slums are seen as a threat, not simply because of their putative illegal occupation of space, but also because of the apparent power of slum residents in urban electoral politics. It is now amply documented that the 1980s and 1990s were characterized by a democratic, electoral participatory upsurge of the poor and lower orders.28 The increasing electoral participation of the poor in urban politics and their political assertiveness have triggered an “elite revolt,” to use the formulation of Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss,29 in the form of upper and middle-​class denial of the legitimacy of democratic politics as being increasingly driven by the perverse imperatives of electoral mobilization of the multitudinous poor. This particular idea has manifested itself in the form of an outpouring of righteous civic opposition to so-​called “vote bank” politics that is believed to thrive in the slums, and the supposed capacity of slum-​dwellers as squatters to lay illegal claims to urban land as well as to demand various undeserved rights and entitlements—​all on the back of electoral politics as mobilized voters. A subject of intense political controversy and contention is the concept of the slum “cut-​off date,” which would allow certain slums established before a particular year to be granted legal status, or to be “regularized,” while focusing demolition efforts on settlements that appeared after the “cut-​off date.” The slum “cut-​off date” has become the most powerful signifier of the putative capacity of slum residents to manipulate their electoral clout to gain recognition of what is seen as their entirely illegal and unfounded claim to urban settlement and citizenship. Thus, in obvious support of slum demolitions in Mumbai in 2005, a journalist condemned “the sea of slum-​dwellers who have taken root in Mumbai and who are encouraged and protected by political parties of every hue as they provide a huge catchment area of votes.”30 In a related vein, a report shows that in 2004, “11 prominent Maharashtrians moved the Bombay High Court to bar slum-​dwellers from voting” and in 2005, “the city’s Municipal Corporation itself asked the Chief Electoral Officer to drop residents of demolished slums from the voters’ lists.” The mentality behind these demands was interpreted in this report as follows: “the Indian poor have the audacity to believe that their votes can change things. . . . take away their votes. That should teach them they cannot live among us.”31 At the present juncture then, slums are seen as the key spatial concentration, variously, of criminal, immoral, and illegal interlopers in the city, of irresponsible and multitudinous consumers of scarce and vital urban resources and of reckless polluters who degrade the quality of urban life and thwart both urban and national development. Slums are, therefore, now framed through a highly charged and emotive cleavage between the “outsider” or “alien” versus the “insider” or “citizen-​resident” of the city.

324   NANDINI GOOPTU

Politics of the Urban Poor The action and agency of slum-​dwellers themselves also shape wider understanding of slums, while the exigencies of mass electoral politics force exclusionary urban ideologies to be tempered. Precisely at the time of an intensely exclusionary approach toward slums, an increasingly and highly mobilized popular electorate in a mass democracy has rendered it politically inexpedient to mount a wholesale attack on slums. Within an increasingly strong democratic culture of the poor and their electoral democratic upsurge, slum-​dwellers have developed contested urban imaginaries and forged a variety of forms of political action and engagement to claim their own rights, entitlements, services, and territories. The terms “occupancy urbanism” and the “dynamic ground up city” in the critical analytical literature describe the myriad ways in which the poor challenge and subvert urban elite policy and politics and shape the aesthetics of the city.32 These have an impact on discursively reshaping space and reimagining the city, even though the ability of such politics from below to affect major shifts in urban policy remains limited. Nevertheless, these forms of subaltern urbanism in slums and “chronic street level subversion”33 of policies represent the political agency of the poor that can scarcely be ignored or marginalized by the government and political parties, and it requires the hostility toward slums to be reined in. A war on slums could unleash significant political instability and unmanageable violence, posing a far greater threat to life and property than slums otherwise do. Veena Das and Michael Walton argue that it is “in the process of engaging the legal, administrative, and democratic resources that are available to them—​in courts, in offices of the bureaucrats, and in the party offices—​that the poor learn to become political actors.”34 Through these forms of action, the slum poor assert their legal and moral right to live in the city and articulate their vision of inclusive cities. In this way, the poor have made it impossible to treat slums as unmitigated and irredeemable negative spaces, and have wrested the right for slums to be represented in a positive light and to attract developmental attention of both the state and middle and upper classes. In this context, a rhetoric of inclusion of slums and slum-​dwellers has taken shape, as in the examples of the prime minister and a real estate developer construing slums and slum-​dwellers as morally deserving of support. This inclusive orientation has taken many different developmental and political forms. The provision and improvement of basic services for the poor in slums was a key component of JNNURM, India’s largest-​ever urban renewal project.35 For the delivery and embedding of such developmental programs, participatory forms of governance have been promoted at the local level to involve slum-​dwellers, with greater or lesser degrees of effective implementation in actual practice in different places. However, these institutional arrangements for the involvement of slum-​dwellers in local governance have created the channels of transactional, patron-​client relationships between

Political Construction of Slums in India    325 politicians and local residents. Various studies show how slum-​dwellers are located in networks of urban political patronage.36 Not only politicians, but also a large variety and number of NGOs now work among slum-​dwellers for the provision of local services as well as for poverty alleviation. The NGOs, at times, assist slum-​dwellers to resist draconian slum demolition policies and to ensure adequate rehabilitation, relocation, and alternative housing for displaced populations. Some commentators have seen NGO action in aid of slums as a form of deepening of democracy on behalf of the poor that also enables the articulation of development alternatives.37 Others, however, argue that they fail to represent the interests of their constituents adequately and help to buttress government policy.38 Indeed, the action of NGOs as well as the operation of patron-​client linkages in slums have been critically assessed, variously for disciplining the political assertion of slum-​dwellers, containing political energy within slums, muting the political expression of the slum poor, and casting them in a supplicant mode vis-​à-​vis the state as denizens rather than citizens.39 Despite these limitations, popular politics in slums has undeniably drawn attention to inequality, neglect, and unjust deprivation, and thus given rise to a positive discourse and inclusive orientation that has even drawn in the otherwise hostile middle and upper classes to engage with slums through various kinds of voluntary developmental and charitable interventions, social enterprises, and NGO activism. These initiatives also represent the search for political agency and civic virtue by the middle classes, who have lost their faith in electoral democracy and eschewed party politics. Through a new culture of voluntarism that resonates with older traditions of social service associated with Gandhian nationalism,40 these middle classes seek to assert their superiority and control over the slums, in an idiom of non-​political or apolitical charity and welfarist philanthropy. Social-​service-​oriented involvement in slums, thus, enables middle-​class self-​constitution as political actors. These various forms of management of and intervention in politics in slums have served to reverse and complicate some of the hostile attitudes toward slums and have instead led to their construal as objects of reform and benevolent succor. A further dimension of the positive orientation toward slums is the creation of the image of slum-​dwellers as fundamentally entrepreneurial in disposition. Slum-​dwellers are imagined to be adept at enterprise, supposedly due to their unparalleled resilience, coping ability, and capacity for frugal innovation (jugaad in Hindi), in the face of the enduring adversity that they face in slums. This entrepreneurial image of slum inhabitants is in tune with current Indian economic nationalism and the much-​vaunted image of India as the nation of entrepreneurs par excellence. Economic inclusion of slums through the mobilization of the entrepreneurial potentials of their inhabitants is now seen as an important element of the strategy of national economic growth, in line with prevalent global and national narratives of inclusive development.41 This is evident from the extensive promotion of micro-​credit, micro-​enterprise, and self-​help groups as a major plank of developmental intervention and poverty alleviation in slums. More

326   NANDINI GOOPTU broadly, with reference to the economic promise and profitable market potential of those at the bottom of the pyramid, slum populations and the vast informal economy of slums are sought to be integrated, or even adversely incorporated, into the wider economy through a boost to enterprise. Moreover, as is evident from the example of the property developer, Mukesh Mehta, the environment of slums is argued to stifle and constrain the supposedly innate entrepreneurial urge of slum populations, thus justifying the need to redevelop slums. The rhetoric of slum enterprise then paradoxically turns into an alibi for attacks on slums as a physical space endowed with negative characteristics, harking back to the abiding tropes that originated in the later nineteenth century under colonialism and that were reproduced repeatedly throughout the twentieth century.

Conclusion The colonial imagery of slums in India as unsanitary, miasmic sites of disease contagion, and the late-​colonial construction of slums as a spatial aberration consisting of debased humanity, were further extended and elaborated in postcolonial India with the changing dynamics of nationalism and national politics as well as class conflict over the right to the city and citizenship. New connotations of environmental degradation, illegality, and threat to democracy and development were attached to slums, while also construing slums as worthy of benevolent attention, in response, at least in part, to the assertion of political agency by slum-​dwellers. It hardly bears stating that slum residents, their economic activities. and political engagement are all central to the very constitution of a city’s economy and polity. Slums supply labor and sustain the urban informal economy, while slum populations are arguably the mainstay of urban democratic politics. Yet slums in India continue to be seen as a problem, an imposition on the city and the source of many of its woes, sustained by myths and narratives of their fundamentally detrimental impact on the city. The idea of the slum has been at the heart of political conflict and contestation, and of struggles over the city and the nation, spatially, ideologically, and politically.

Notes 1. Dr C. Chandramouli, Registrar General and Census Commissioner, India, “Housing Stock, Amenities & Assets in Slums—​Census 2011.” Powerpoint presentation, http://​cens​usin​dia. gov.in/​2011-​Doc​ueme​nts/​On_​Sl​ums-​2011Fi​nal.ppt. 2. “Development Strategy,” cited on website of M M (Mukesh Mehta) Project Consultants Pvt Ltd., https://​www.mmp​cpl.com/​deve​lopm​ent-​strat​egy. 3. Christine Furedy, “Whose Responsibility: Dilemmas of Calcutta’s Bustee Policy in the Nineteenth Century,” South Asia 5, no. 2 (1982): 24–​46.

Political Construction of Slums in India    327 4. David Arnold, “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–​1900,” in Subaltern Studies V, edited by Ranajit Guha (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55–​90. 5. Prashant Kidambi, “‘An Infection of Locality’: Plague, Pythogenesis and the Poor in Bombay, c. 1896–​1905,” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 249–​267. 6. R. B. Gupta, Labour and Housing in India (Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co., 1930): 64. 7. Report of the Cawnpore [Kanpur] Labour Inquiry Committee, Chairman: Babu Rajendra Prasad (Allahabad, 1938): 420. 8. Prashant Kidambi, “From ‘Social Reform’ to ‘Social Service’: Indian Civic Activism and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Bombay, c. 1900–​1920,” in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development, edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 217–​239; Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-​Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 66–​110. 9. Helen E. Meller, “Urbanization and the Introduction of Modern Town Planning Ideas in India, 1900–​1925,” in Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History, edited by K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 330–​350. 10. Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 386–​390; Philip Boardman, The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-​Educator, Peace-​Warrior (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1978), 294–​297. 11. Patrick Clibbens, “‘The Destiny of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation:’ Clearing Cities and Making Citizens during the Indian Emergency, 1975–​1977,” Contemporary South Asia 22, no. 1 (2014): 53–​55. 12. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 13. Cited in Clibbens, “Destiny of the City,” 62 and passim. 14. P. Sainath, “The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing,” The Hindu, February 5, 2005. 15. Swapna Banerjee-​Guha, “Neoliberalising the ‘Urban’: New Geographies of Power and Injustice in Indian Cities,” Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 22 (2009): 95–​107. 16. Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (New Delhi: Allen Lane, Penguin Books India, 2008), 207–​232. 17. Darshini Mahadevia, “Branded and Renewed? Policies, Politics and Processes of Urban Development in the Reform Era,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 56–​64. 18. Ayona Datta, “Postcolonial Urban Futures: Imagining and Governing India’s Smart Urban Age,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, online only (October 4, 2018), https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​02637​7581​8800​721. 19. Satish Deshpande, “Imagined Economies: Styles of Nation-​Building in Twentieth Century India,” Journal of Arts and Ideas nos. 25–​26 (1993): 27. 20. Sanjay Srivastava, “Urban Spaces, Post-​Nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-​ Citizen in India,” in New Cultural Histories of India, ed. Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha Thakurta and Bodhisattva Kar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), ch. 13. 21. Rajesh Bhattacharya and Kalyan Sanyal, “Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-​Colonial Urbanisation,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 41–​48.

328   NANDINI GOOPTU 22. Janaki Nair, “‘Social Municipalism’ and the New Metropolis,” in Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, ed. Mary John et al. (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006), 125–​146. 23. Debolina Kundu, “Elite Capture in Participatory Urban Governance,” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 10 (2011): 23–​25. 24. D. Asher Ghertner, “Analysis of New Legal Discourses behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions,” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 57–​66. 25. All these cases are cited in ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Cited in Aman Sethi, “Some Home Truths,” Frontline, August 15, 2008, 38. 28. Yogendra Yadav, “India’s Third Electoral System, 1989–​99,” Economic and Political Weekly 34, nos. 34–​35 (1999): 2393–​2399. 29. Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss, Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 30. Siddharth Srivastava, “Mumbai Struggles to Catch Up with Shanghai,” Asia Times On-​line, March 16, 2005, https://​www.ati​mes.com/​ati​mes/​Sou​th_​A​sia/​GC16D​f02.html. 31. P. Sainath, “The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing,” The Hindu, February 5, 2005. 32. Solomon Benjamin, “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy Beyond Policy and Programs,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 3 (2008): 719–​729; Solomon Benjamin, “The Aesthetics of ‘the Ground Up’ City,” Seminar 612 (August 2010), http://​www.india​semi​nar.com/​2010/​612/​612_​s​olom​on_​b​enja​min.htm. 33. Gavin Shatkin and Sanjeev Vidyarthi, “Introduction: Contesting the Indian city: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local,” in Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local, ed. Gavin Shatkin (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, Blackwell, 2014), 1–​38. 34. Veena Das and Michael Walton, “Political Leadership and the Urban Poor: Local Histories,” Current Anthropology 56, Supplement 11 (October 2015): S53. 35. Darshini Mahadevia, “NURM and the Poor in Globalising Mega Cities,” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 31 (2006): 3399–​3403. 36. Das and Walton, “Political Leadership”; Lalitha Kamath and M. Vijayabaskar, “Middle-​ Class and Slum-​Based Collective Action in Bangalore: Contestations and Convergences in a Time of Market Reforms,” Journal of South Asian Development 9, no. 2 (2014): 147–​ 171; John Harriss, “‘New Politics’ and the Governmentality of the Post-​Liberalization State in India: An Ethnographic Perspective,” in The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), 91–​108. 37. Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 21–​47; Colin McFarlane, “Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance,” Antipode 35, no. 5 (2004): 890–​916. 38. Judy Whitehead and Nitin More, “Revanchism in Mumbai? Political Economy of Rent Gaps and Urban Restructuring in a Global City,” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 25 (2007): 2428–​2434; Ananya Roy, “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai,” Antipode 4, no. 1 (2009): 159–​179. 39. Harriss, “New Politics”; Roy, “Civic Governmentality.” 40. Carey A. Watt, “Philanthropy and Civilizing Missions in India, 1820–​1960: States, NGOs and Development,” in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From

Political Construction of Slums in India    329 Improvement to Development, ed. Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 271–​316. 41. Colin McFarlane, “The Entrepreneurial Slum: Civil Society, Mobility and the Co-​ production of Urban Development,” Urban Studies 49, no. 13 (2012): 2795–​2816.

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 21–​47. Arnold, David. “Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896–​1900.” In Subaltern Studies V, edited by Ranajit Guha, 55–​ 90. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Banerjee-​ Guha, Swapna. “Neoliberalising the ‘Urban’: New Geographies of Power and Injustice in Indian Cities.” Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 22 (2009): 95–​107. Bhattacharya, Rajesh, and Kalyan Sanyal. “Bypassing the Squalor: New Towns, Immaterial Labour and Exclusion in Post-​Colonial Urbanisation.” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 41–​48. Benjamin, Solomon. “The Aesthetics of ‘the Ground Up’ City.” Seminar 612 (August 2010). http://​www.india-​semi​nar.com/​2010/​612/​612_​s​olom​on_​b​enja​min.htm. Benjamin, Solomon. “Occupancy Urbanism: Radicalizing Politics and Economy beyond Policy and Programs.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 3 (2008): 719–​729. Boardman, Philip. Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Boardman, Philip. The Worlds of Patrick Geddes: Biologist, Town Planner, Re-​Educator, Peace-​ Warrior. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1978. Clibbens, Patrick. “‘The Destiny of this City is to be the Spiritual Workshop of the Nation’: Clearing Cities and Making Citizens during the Indian Emergency, 1975–​ 1977.” Contemporary South Asia 22, no. 1 (2014): 51–​66. Corbridge, Stuart, and John Harriss. Reinventing India: Liberalization, Hindu Nationalism and Popular Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Das, Veena, and Michael Walton. “Political Leadership and the Urban Poor: Local Histories.” Current Anthropology 56, Supplement 11 (October 2015): S44–​S54. Datta, Ayona. “Postcolonial Urban Futures: Imagining and Governing India’s Smart Urban Age.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 37, no. 3 (2019): 393–​410. Deshpande, Satish. “Imagined Economies: Styles of Nation-​Building in Twentieth-​Century India.” Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos. 25–​26 (1993): 5–​33. Furedy, Christine. “Whose Responsibility: Dilemmas of Calcutta’s Bustee Policy in the Nineteenth Century.” South Asia 5, no. 2 (1982): 24–​46. Ghertner, D. Asher. “Analysis of New Legal Discourses behind Delhi’s Slum Demolitions.” Economic and Political Weekly 43, no. 20 (2008): 57–​66. Gooptu, Nandini. The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-​Century India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Gupta, R. B. Labour and Housing in India. Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co., 1930. Harriss, John. “‘New Politics’ and the Governmentality of the Post-​Liberalization State in India: An Ethnographic Perspective.” In The State in India after Liberalization: Interdisciplinary

330   NANDINI GOOPTU Perspectives, edited by Akhil Gupta and K. Sivaramakrishnan, 91–​108. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011. Kamath, Lalitha, and M. Vijayabaskar. “Middle-​Class and Slum-​Based Collective Action in Bangalore: Contestations and Convergences in a Time of Market Reforms.” Journal of South Asian Development 9, no. 2 (2014): 147–​171. Kidambi, Prashant. “‘An Infection of Locality’: Plague, Pythogenesis and the Poor in Bombay, c. 1896–​1905.” Urban History 31, no. 2 (2004): 249–​267. Kidambi, Prashant. “From ‘Social Reform’ to ‘Social Service’: Indian Civic Activism and the Civilizing Mission in Colonial Bombay, c. 1900–​1920.” In Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development, edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann, 217–​239. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Kundu, Debolina. “Elite Capture in Participatory Urban Governance.” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 10 (2011): 23–​25. Mahadevia, Darshini. “Branded and Renewed? Policies, Politics and Processes of Urban Development in the Reform Era.” Economic and Political Weekly 46, no. 31 (2011): 56–​64. Mahadevia, Darshini. “NURM and the Poor in Globalising Mega Cities.” Economic and Political Weekly 41, no. 31 (2006): 3399–​3403. McFarlane, Colin. “The Entrepreneurial Slum: Civil Society, Mobility and the Co-​production of Urban Development,” Urban Studies, 49, no. 13 (2012): 2795–​2816. McFarlane, Colin. “Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance.” Antipode 35, no. 5 (2004): 890–​916. Meller, Helen E. “Urbanization and the Introduction of Modern Town Planning Ideas in India, 1900–​1925.” In Economy and Society: Essays in Indian Economic and Social History, edited by K. N. Chaudhuri and Clive J. Dewey, 330–​350. Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Nair, Janaki. “‘Social Municipalism’ and the New Metropolis.” In Contested Transformations: Changing Economies and Identities in Contemporary India, edited by Mary John et al., 125–​ 146. New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2006. Nilekani, Nandan. Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century. New Delhi: Allen Lane, Penguin Books India, 2008. Roy, Ananya. “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai.” Antipode 4, no. 1 (2009): 159–​179. Srivastava, Sanjay. “Urban Spaces, Post-​Nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-​Citizen in India.” In New Cultural Histories of India, edited by Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha Thakurta, and Bodhisattva Kar, ch. 13, 85–​111. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Shatkin, Gavin and Sanjeev Vidyarthi. “Introduction: Contesting the Indian City: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local.” In Contesting the Indian city: Global Visions and the Politics of the Local, edited by Gavin Shatkin, 1–​38. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley, Blackwell, 2014. Tarlo, Emma. Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Watt, Carey A. “Philanthropy and Civilizing Missions in India, 1820–​1960: States, NGOs and Development.” In Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development, edited by Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann, 271–​316. London: Anthem Press, 2011.

Political Construction of Slums in India    331 Whitehead, Judy, and Nitin More. “Revanchism in Mumbai? Political Economy of Rent Gaps and Urban Restructuring in a Global City.” Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 25 (2007): 2428–​2434. Yadav, Yogendra. “India’s Third Electoral System, 1989–​99.” Economic and Political Weekly 34, nos. 34–​35 (1999): 2393–​2399.

CHAPTER 18

T HE RETURN OF T H E SLUMS IN P OST WAR A ME RI C A ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN

In the decade or so after the Second World War, slums returned to America. Not the notorious slums of the nineteenth and early twentieth century: by the 1940s these no longer posed the threat they used to, even if the memory of them lingered. Rather, during the war and continuing in the years following, new slums appeared in American cities. Masses of people—​African Americans, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Appalachian whites—​poured into urban and industrial centers, searching to escape the hardship of their homes and find economic opportunity in the booming cities. The migrants as well as native city dwellers funneled into areas that postwar middle-​ class Americans identified as “slums,” “blighted areas,” and sometimes “slum-​ghettos” or “ghettos.” By whatever label, these places were defined above all as sites of physical and social ills, which harmed their occupants and placed a burden on society. But the migrant and ethnic neighborhoods of the city, however unappealing they appeared to outsiders, were not uniformly miserable. They were surprisingly diverse in population and functions, and rich in spiritual, social, cultural, political, and entrepreneurial activities. Echoing the reformers who confronted slums in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, however, postwar Americans decried the new slums as dirty and disorderly places composed of run-​down buildings that were overcrowded, highly flammable, lacked sanitary plumbing, and inhabited by uncivilized people prone to indigence, disease, and crime. Applying the environmental determinism of earlier generations, journalists, reformers, and government officials conceived of such neighborhoods as places suffering from a disorder, often referred to as blight, that was largely caused by physical problems. It followed, then, that, policies aimed at improving physical conditions, especially through razing buildings, would halt the spread of the slum-​ blight disease. Eventually government adopted new policies aimed at the social and economic factors that underlay slum conditions. But by the time the United States confronted poverty and racial discrimination head on, the postwar slum had begun to fade away.

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    333

The Old Slums During the great industrial period of the late nineteenth century, working-​class immigrants and African Americans flooded into the large cities of the United States. The crowded neighborhoods where they settled, such as the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the Near West Side of Chicago, became characterized as notorious slums. Missionaries and social reformers decried such slums as physically and morally dangerous environments. They called for action against the dreadful conditions: overcrowded dwellings, unsafe tenements, unsanitary conditions, disease, fires, crime, and the immorality of saloons and prostitution. In newspaper articles and his popular book, How the Other Half Lives (1890), journalist Jacob Riis amplified the warnings of the reformers, vividly portraying the slums of New York as a threat to its trapped denizens and society at large. In the Progressive era, the crusade against the slums inspired numerous reforms, including indoor plumbing for bathing and toilets, building codes, fire escapes, health clinics, and playgrounds. The relentless fixation on the worst conditions, however, neglected the lives and activities of working-​class residents and helped created a stereotype of the slums as pathological prisons. By the 1940s the fearsome conditions of the nineteenth century had largely dissipated. With the development of new neighborhoods and the construction of subways and elevated cars connecting the different parts of the expanding city, the masses drifted away from the old industrial quarters. At the same time, the passage of immigration restrictions in the early 1920s drastically reduced the flow of new “aliens” into the cities. The immigrant neighborhoods became less crowded, as the first-​and second-​generation foreign-​born people settled further from the center. To the public, the old immigrant slums were no longer fearful places, but simply working-​class neighborhoods. Some, like the Little Italy neighborhoods, attracted tourists who came to sightsee and dine. Although the nineteenth-​century slums were largely gone, the memory of them survived into the twentieth century. As they witnessed the appearance of new lower-​ class neighborhoods in cities around the country, Americans reached back in time to explain them. In postwar New York City, journalists such as Clarence Woodbury described East Harlem, a beachhead for newly arrived Puerto Ricans, in the sensational Gothic prose of nineteenth-​century reformers as “an area of appalling poverty, ignorance, and discontent,” and a “spawning ground of crime, drug addiction, prostitution, and disease.” The worst part of East Harlem was a block on East 100th Street, where, according to The Reporter magazine, census takers, climbing over its litter and up its dim-​lit rickety stairwells, reported that an unparalleled total of some four thousand human beings were living its twenty-​seven “multiple dwellings”—​a figure that did not include numbers of dope-​ ridden derelicts who huddle day and night around the bonfires of its vacant lots.1

334   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN In a 1961 documentary about a notorious tenement on East 100th Street, television newscaster David Brinkley directly linked the present to the past: “New York City’s famous crusader, Jacob Riis, said in 1902, ‘The way to get rid of the slums is to take the profit out of them.’ That was 59 years ago,” Brinkley explained to the nation. He continued, “Nobody has done anything yet.”2

Peoples in Motion The slum conditions that appeared in East Harlem and elsewhere were a byproduct of vast population movements that transformed the nation’s social geography. For much of the twentieth century, the rural South sent masses of people to cities, some in the South, but most to the urban centers of the North, Midwest, and West. Over the course of the twentieth century, almost eight million African Americans, 19.5 million whites, and one million Hispanics left the South, with the majority leaving before 1970.3 The migrations synchronized with the nation’s economic booms, beginning with the industrial expansion during the First World War and the Roaring Twenties, slowing during the Depression years of idle factories, and soaring during the wartime mobilization of the 1940s and the postwar prosperity of the 1950s. Blacks, poor whites, Puerto Ricans, and ethnic Mexicans—​some from America, others from south of the border—​ sought to escape grinding rural poverty and the loss of employment due to the mechanization of agriculture. During the First World War rapid industrialization set off the first large wave of internal migration. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, a smaller number of Americans, both black and white, hit the road in search of jobs or government relief in the nation’s cities. The Second World War set off powerful new population flows from the South as well as other regions of the nation that would persist into the 1960s. During the Second World War voracious demand for labor in war-​related industries again attracted large numbers of migrants to military industrial areas—​in old manufacturing cities such as Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and booming new production centers such as Richmond, California, and Willow Run, Michigan—​setting off a scramble by workers to find scarce housing.4 After the war ended, demobilization sent millions of former military personnel back home, causing such a severe shortage of dwellings that President Truman and Congress responded with emergency legislation aimed at creating a centralized mass-​production housing program. Truman’s program was short-​lived, but it helped spark the construction of millions of dwellings in the late 1940s. The government also implemented policies aimed at housing veterans—​by adopting, most famously, the housing provisions of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill, but also looser requirements for the government’s primary housing program, Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance.5

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    335 In the postwar decades, both returning veterans and young civilians felt an urge to marry and have children, which they did in such numbers that they created the great postwar baby boom. The mass mating and domiciling boosted demand for homes, appliances, and cars. The resulting growth in employment in construction and manufacturing in turn lured ever more Americans to move to urban centers, which became more crowded until development of suburban areas relieved the pressure. The southern migrants dispersed to all parts of the country, but they moved in largest numbers to the industrial Midwest and Middle Atlantic states and the burgeoning West Coast, particularly California. The southern white migration was the greatest in volume but less visible because many southern-​born whites settled in small towns and suburbs as well as cities and often returned to the South. For decades, African Americans in growing numbers departed the oppression and poverty of the rural South for cities both North and South, where they hoped they would find greater freedom and economic opportunities. Unlike whites, blacks for the most part left the South for good, at least until late in the century.6 Hispanic peoples joined southern whites and blacks in the northern passage. Programs such as Operation Bootstrap and the Bracero programs begun in the 1940s encouraged Mexicans and Puerto Ricans to come to the United States temporarily to work in agriculture. Although members of both groups frequently returned to their homes or went back and forth, the numbers of permanent Hispanic settlers grew. From Mexico came untold numbers of immigrants. The average annual number of legal Mexican immigrants rose from 7,500 in the late 1940s to nearly 30,000 in the 1950s to more than 43,000 in the 1960s, totaling 800,000 between 1945 and 1970. Given that a program initiated in 1954, Operation Wetback, located and deported a total of 3.8 million illegal immigrants over a five-​year period, it is likely that a significant number of unauthorized immigrants remained in the United States undetected. In addition, starting in the late 1930s, Mexican-​American US citizens, including almost half a million from Texas, spread out to the Southwest and Midwest. After the Second World War, Puerto Ricans settled in increasing numbers on the US mainland, mostly in the Northeast. Native Americans also moved, albeit in smaller numbers, to urban centers during the postwar years, not always of their own volition.7 The migrations of rural peoples transformed the population of American cities. By 1970 more than 1.4 million Hispanics, including 830,000 Mexican Americans and 284,000 natives of Mexico lived in the Los Angeles region, with more people of Mexican origin living in Los Angeles than even Mexico City. From 1940 to 1960, the Puerto Rican population of New York City multiplied tenfold, from 61,000 in 1940 to 613,000.8 Most of the whites who departed homes in western Virginia, Kentucky, and West Virginia settled in suburbs, but enough settled in cities of the Midwest, especially Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati, to redefine dozens of urban neighborhoods as the domain of southern whites. In 1950, almost 200,000 southern whites had taken up residence in Detroit, in the Cass Corridor and the Briggs neighborhood outside downtown, which became known as Appalachian districts.9

336   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN But it was the African American exodus, known as the Great Migration, that had the most visible impact on US cities. Once African Americans lived overwhelmingly in the rural South, but over the course of the twentieth century they became an urban people. By 1960 the black proportion of the total population of Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis had risen to 29 percent; in Newark, New Jersey, the black population was a third of the total; in Washington, DC, it was more than half. In the same year, more than a million African Americans lived in New York City and more than 800,000 in Chicago. In 1920 16,000 blacks lived in Los Angeles; fifty years later, half a million called the City of Angels home.10

The Transformation of Urban Places By the onset of the Second World War, the large urban centers of the United States had developed numerous enclaves for immigrant and racial minority groups. In Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, for example, African Americans settled in the central city in or next to industrial and immigrant neighborhoods; farther out in nineteenth-​century streetcar neighborhoods; and in undeveloped areas on the urban fringe. Similarly, in 1940 Los Angeles Mexican Americans found homes in the Plaza, Boyle Heights, and just outside the city limits in the town of Belvedere. During and after the war, migrants poured into America’s large cities and industrial centers, redrawing the social maps of American cities as they did so.11 Several factors contributed to the growth of places known as Black Belts, barrios, and little Appalachias. To begin, migrants followed family members, friends, or neighbors into enclaves, small and large, of people of similar backgrounds. Although newcomers often moved after they arrived, they tended to live among people of the same race, ethnicity, income class, and even geographic origins with whom they felt comfortable.12 Access to money, of course, delimited the choice of neighborhood. A significant portion of rural migrants and native city dwellers in the North and West were poor. In 1959 about a third of African American migrants and 16 percent of southern white migrants reported incomes below the government’s designated poverty line, the same proportions of poverty as northern-​born blacks and whites. Low-​income newcomers and natives moved where rents and house prices were low enough to afford and landlords were willing to do business with them. The operations of the housing market encouraged poverty-​stricken urban dwellers to cluster in buildings and blocks that outsiders deemed slums.13 But the most pernicious force that pushed minority-​group migrants together was racial and ethnic prejudice. African Americans especially, but also Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, encountered a web of discrimination that channeled them into certain areas but not others. Even as members of such minority groups increased in number and moved to new neighborhoods, patterns of segregation persisted.14

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    337 During the twentieth century, whites took a number of measures to prevent members of minority groups, but particularly African Americans, from settling in all-​white districts. Early in the century, the governments of several cities adopted racial zoning ordinances that restricted areas to one race or the other. After the Supreme Court’s 1917 decision in Buchanan v. Warley rejected racial zoning as unconstitutional, white real estate developers and homeowners adopted racially restrictive covenants, which could be either an attachment to a property deed or an agreement between fellow property owners to prevent blacks, Jews, and other unwanted population groups from purchasing homes in white neighborhoods. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley v. Kraemer that they were not legally enforceable. Nonetheless, whites continued to discriminate in sales, renting, realtor services, and mortgage lending. In addition, the Federal Housing Administration supported and reinforced racial discrimination by offering mortgage insurance to real estate developers of all-​white suburban subdivisions but rarely to black property holders. Not until 1968 brought the passage of the Fair Housing Act and a landmark Supreme Court decision in Jones v. Mayer would non-​discrimination become the law of the land.15 White Americans’ pervasive antipathy toward blacks underlay the legal and institutional mechanisms of racial discrimination. Their motives ranged from fears that an influx of lower-​class blacks would lower property values to pure racism. At different flash points, whites attacked—​sometimes in riots, more often in isolated incidents—​African Americans but also Hispanics. During the 1940s and 1950s, the mingling of the races in places of employment and recreation sparked outbreaks of violence, but much of the racial conflict occurred over competition for residential space as minority groups settled in new areas. Whites in cities as disparate as Miami, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles attacked African Americans as they attempted to move to previously white or contested neighborhoods. Even when there was no violence, white residents’ unfriendly attitudes discouraged blacks from moving or staying close to them.16 Other ethnic and racial minority groups also experienced oppression. Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans suffered assaults in the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles and deportation during the federal government’s Operation Wetback campaign of 1954. Like African Americans, Mexican Americans were relegated to certain sections of cities, which often lacked suitable housing and sometimes even public services. Puerto Ricans migrating to New York City and Chicago were viewed first as pathetically impoverished migrants and later as members of violent street gangs. As such they encountered discrimination in housing, employment, and schools, brutal treatment at the hands of the police, and violence from Italian American gangs.17 Many racial transitions, nonetheless, occurred without overt conflict. In neighborhoods that no longer attracted members of the group that had occupied them, the number of vacant homes increased, and property owners were more than willing to sell. Property owners in lower-​and lower-​middle class Jewish sections of Brownsville in Brooklyn and Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago decided that racial transition was inevitable and sold to African Americans. These neighborhoods, it should be noted,

338   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN were never considered of great value even by the Eastern European Jews who occupied them.18 Even where there was overt opposition, the legal and extra-​legal barriers to entry of blacks and other minority groups often broke down over time. The legal attack on discrimination and the increased political power of racial minorities played a role, but by far the greatest factor was the boom in housing construction that drew whites away from central city neighborhoods and into the suburbs. In numerous places where whites had fought against racial integration—​such as the city of Compton outside Los Angeles and numerous South Side Chicago neighborhoods—​white demand for housing eventually dwindled, opening the door to African Americans, whose arrival often triggered the departure of remaining white residents and a complete turnover of the racial population.19 In the process, during the postwar period the territory occupied by African Americans and other minority groups expanded dramatically. In the 1960s predominantly black neighborhoods became known as “ghettos,” a term that encompassed the ills of slums but was overlain with the ravages of racism. “The pathologies of the ghetto community,” wrote the scholar Kenneth Clark, “perpetuate themselves through cumulative ugliness, deterioration, and isolation.” If anything, ghettos were worse than slums.20

In Reality, A Rich and Complex Environment Not everyone perceived postwar lower-​and working-​class urban neighborhoods as unrelentingly awful. Jane Jacobs, the journalist and city planning critic, observed that East Harlem was a motley district with better-​and worse-​off residents, housing of varied quality, and an “immense array of Puerto Rican cultural, social, and business establishments.” John Seeley, one of the rare sociologists who had actually lived in a so-​ called slum, found it to be a society marked by “intensity, excitement, rewardingness, and color” and unmatched for fulfilling a wide array of basic human needs.21 In contrast to the static, prison-​like environment that the words “slum” and “ghetto” conveyed, postwar low-​income neighborhoods were complex and dynamic places. The population of such communities churned constantly, swelling, spreading out, and eventually shrinking. Some neighborhoods functioned as ports of arrival for America’s twentieth-​century migrants; such places often were more crowded, poorer, and had worse conditions, but also were more transient than other low-​income districts. In contrast, long-​settled working-​class districts had well-​established community institutions and a significant number of homeowners. Places known as slums or ghettos frequently contained a mix of ethnicities and races. Working-​class neighborhoods in Boston’s West and South Ends were home to “old” immigrant groups, including the Irish, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, as well as African Americans. In the postwar years first-​and

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    339 second-​generation Mexican immigrants shared East Los Angeles neighborhoods with European Jews and Japanese Americans and Chicago’s Lower West Side with Polish and Czech Americans. In predominantly black neighborhoods one could find small numbers of white ethnic shopkeepers and residents, who remained from an earlier time, as well as African-​descended immigrants—​many of whom were well-​educated professionals—​from Caribbean nations such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Barbados. The inhabitants of slums were, in Seeley’s words, “immensely various.” He classified the denizens of an Indianapolis slum into types of permanent and temporary residents. Among the former were the apathetic and immobilized “indolent”; the “adjusted poor,” chiefly destitute elderly and single mothers with dependents; “social outcasts,” such as street alcoholics, drug addicts and dealers, prostitutes, and others involved in semi-​or illegal activities; the “sporting crowd,” cheerfully casual people who enjoyed drinking, gambling, and reveling; economic and social “fugitives,” including merchants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals; and “social and religious missionaries” who remained to serve their fellow slum dwellers. Seeley’s categories of temporary residents to the city, among them many young married couples for whom the slum was their “area of first settlement”; “climbers,” who lived there to save money before moving to a “better” neighborhood; the “respectable poor,” hard-​working people who identified with middle-​class society but could not afford to move out; and entrepreneurs, small-​scale landlords or shopkeepers who usually by the age of fifty departed for greener pastures.22 Indeed, despite their reputations, the inhabitants of inner-​city neighborhoods were not all lower class in income or values. In Chicago and other cities, working-​class people, including homeowners, joined block clubs to encourage their lower-​class neighbors to behave in a more orderly, middle-​class way. The economic advance of former southern sharecroppers who moved to northern cities illustrates the aspirations of urban working-​class people for themselves and their children.23 Although urban historians have tended to view them through the lens of deprivation and discrimination, lower-​class urban neighborhoods, however scruffy in appearance, were exciting places to live.24 Religion was important to people of all racial and national backgrounds, and inner-​city neighborhoods offered innumerable houses of worship—​mainline churches including the Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and African Methodist Episcopal denominations; storefront Pentecostal churches, such as the one James Baldwin described in Harlem in his semi-​autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953); and in the largest cities, mosques. Inner-​city residents joined social clubs, including hometown clubs organized by migrants from southern communities such as Monroe, Louisiana and Clarksdale, Mississippi. Residents of all ages played on community baseball, basketball, and football teams and leagues. In large cities from New York to Los Angeles, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Puerto Ricans participated in political organizations and campaigns. Postwar lower-​ class neighborhoods were hotbeds of entrepreneurial activity. Businesses ranged from reputable firms such as life insurance companies, publishers, and automobile dealers to shady outfits, such as the bars where prostitution and drugs

340   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN were proffered. A dizzying array of establishments lined the commercial streets of lower-​ class neighborhoods. A historian of Chicago’s ghetto described one such corridor: During the 1950s Woodlawn’s East 63rd Street housed a large assortment of businesses from women’s dress shops, haberdasheries, drug stores, meat markets, department stores, and grocery stores to vulgar neon lit taverns of questionable character. On the 800 block alone, just east of Cottage Grove Avenue, stood Vito’s Certified Super Mart, May Sons’ Women’s Fashions, Harold’s Complete Women’s Sportswear, The Hat Shop, and Derrick’s School of Dress Design and Tailoring in the Maryland Theater Building. Farther up and down the street and just off of 63rd Street on side streets stood old storefronts with pharmacies, pawnshops, barbershops, jewelers, liquor stores, stockbrokers, optometrists, hardware stores, more taverns, and all the other businesses that cater to urban neighborhoods. These made the street a major gathering place for young and old alike.25

Such places generated fond memories. “West Oakland was a beautiful place” until the city cleared it, an African American newspaper publisher in Oakland, California, declared. Another resident recalled the “vibrant” main street lined on both sides with cleaners, butchers, grocery stores, furniture stores, and many more shops. “There were stores of all kinds on 47th and on Cottage Grove five and ten cent stores, hardware stores, hotels, bakeries,” a South Side Chicagoan reminisced. “There was a movie theater . . . at 39th and Drexel. The only thing you had to go downtown for was first-​run movies.”26 Inner-​city nightlife, particularly in African American neighborhoods, was legendary, including blues joints, jazz clubs, and theaters like the Apollo in Harlem where top rhythm-​and-​blues artists and comedians performed. In the postwar years working-​ class neighborhoods produced both the audience and the artists for numerous genres of popular music. The African American communities generated blues, gospel, rhythm-​ and-​blues, and jazz, in styles that varied by region, city, and sometimes neighborhood. Urban southern whites helped popularize country music. Cubans and Puerto Ricans introduced white Americans to mambo; Mexican Americans popularized Tejano, conjunto, and son jarocho, which in the 1950s gave rise to the Mexican American singer Ritchie Valens’ popular hit song, “La Bamba.” Ironically, the urban lower classes generated some of the worst problems and some of the best forms of cultural innovation in the postwar period.

New Slums Like the Old Slums Except for an intrepid few who sallied forth to hear blues or eat Mexican food, Americans who lived outside inner-​city neighborhoods had little appreciation for their positive features and saw only their ills. In assessing low-​income neighborhoods, officials, journalists, and academic researchers applied the negative criteria that their nineteenth-​ century predecessors had used to define slums. The first unmistakable marker of a

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    341 slum was and is still unsightly low-​quality housing. During the Great Depression and the Second World War virtually no homes were constructed in America’s central cities, so postwar city dwellers were forced to make do with what already existed. The urban poor of the mid-​twentieth century inherited not only nineteenth-​century working-​class dwellings—​such as tenement and three-​decker apartment buildings—​but also once-​ respectable single-​family houses and even mansions, all of which were cut up into small units to accommodate numerous households. Because it was old, much of the housing stock had faulty or sometimes absent plumbing or electrical wiring or lacked running hot water. Government officials in Baltimore, Maryland, St. Louis, Missouri, and Charlotte, North Carolina, counted tens of thousands of houses that still relied on outdoor privies instead of indoor toilets.27 Overcrowding, the bane of reformers in the Progressive era, returned with a vengeance in the postwar era. Especially during the late 1940s and early 1950s, people with small incomes crammed together to an alarming degree. In 1946, in the midst of the housing crisis precipitated by demobilization of the troops, Time magazine gave national notoriety to the case of a four-​story brick mansion on the North Side of Chicago that the landlady had chopped into fourteen tiny units, including a small space in the basement created by hanging a curtain, and leased them to dozens of single white women seeking work and desperate for a place to live.28 In cities across the United States, African Americans suffered from housing shortages even in good times, and poor African Americans suffered the most. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, blacks lived in the section with the oldest housing, where sixty-​year-​old wood-​frame two-​family houses were chopped up to hold six families and one building was home to nearly fifty people. During the war and for some years after, blacks in large Midwestern cities found shelter in stables, shacks, garages, attics, and cellars. Long after the war, low-​income black families still paid extraordinarily high rents or went homeless.29 The rising demand for dwellings in low-​rent districts led to subletting, sharing apartments with numerous roommates, and particularly in the African American neighborhoods of New York and Chicago, subdividing apartments into single-​room kitchenettes, which offered cooking facilities but not private bathrooms. Even once-​ sound structures soon deteriorated from heavy use and the failure of scrimping landlords to maintain them.30 Like the slums of old, the new slums were seen as a threat to health and safety. Especially in the most crowded times and places, fires ravaged lower-​ class neighborhoods, spurring newspaper reporters and reformers to deploy the nineteenth-​ century term for a shoddily built tenement, “firetrap,” to describe the structures that claimed the lives of their inhabitants. After moving from one illegal apartment to another on Detroit’s West Side, Elizabeth Jenkins and her six children finally found refuge in an attic of a crammed house, where they died in December 1948 when fire consumed the structure. Cities across the United States experienced dozens of similar tragedies; in Chicago, the official record showed that between 1947 and 1953, 180 people had died in fires in slum buildings.31

342   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN Densely settled neighborhoods also gave rise to sanitation problems, which Progressive-​ era reformers thought they had solved decades earlier. Garbage accumulated in alleys, yards, and on the streets of the densely populated areas, attracting insects and vermin. In 1951 and 1952 more than two hundred rodent bites were reported in a largely African American district on Detroit’s East Side, leading city officials to refer to the area as the “rat belt.” In spring 1953 the Chicago Daily News reported the shocking story of rats chewing to death a nine-​month old infant “as she lay in her crib in her West Side home,” which galvanized the paper’s editors to publish a series of exposés that in turn inspired civic leaders to launch a city-​wide citizens committee to fight slums.32 Disease haunted the new slums as it had the old. From the distressed neighborhoods of Baltimore to the shack towns of Dallas, health officials and city planners tabulated the high toll of illnesses, particularly tuberculosis. Official documents in America’s cities recorded that the low-​income areas had the highest rates of mortality and particularly infant mortality. In a study commissioned by a mayor’s committee on local conditions in 1953, researchers at the Urban Life Research Institute of Tulane University found that the poor-​quality housing areas of New Orleans contained 27 percent of the city’s population but accounted for 53 percent of overcrowded dwellings, 44 percent of the tuberculosis cases, and 32 percent of total mortality.33 Postwar experts and officials like the Tulane researchers also correlated crime rates with high levels of crowding, inferior housing, and disease. Since the 1840s American reformers and public officials had characterized slums as breeding grounds of crime, and a century later their successors continued the tradition. In the mid-​twentieth century, indeed, many middle-​class Americans believed that slums and ghettos were rife with crime.34 The extent of criminal activity in lower-​ class neighborhoods may have been exaggerated, particularly in the early postwar years. After the war, a national crusade against juvenile delinquency, which many associated with the low-​income districts, featured warnings that young men were forming wild gangs going on rampages. The press publicized any violent crimes committed by African Americans, identifying the alleged perpetrators by race. Street gangs and crime, however, were nothing new in working-​class communities. Long before Prohibition made bootlegging a big business, criminal organizations had established themselves in urban immigrant neighborhoods. In the postwar era, gangsters, primarily of Irish, Jewish, and Italian backgrounds, operated entertainment and gambling businesses and racketeering enterprises involving labor unions and local government service contracts. Similarly, for much of the twentieth century, teenage gangs had flourished in lower-​class Jewish and other European immigrant neighborhoods such as Brownsville, Brooklyn, and Lawndale on the West Side of Chicago. Nonetheless when black and Puerto Rican youths joined street gangs, fought other gangs, and committed petty crimes, whites became perturbed that delinquency was out of control. In response, police cracked down on minority youth often with such brutal force that the residents held rallies to protest.35

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    343

Blame and Blight Clearly slums were a dangerous problem, but who was responsible for them? As in times past, the obvious answer was the owners of slum buildings. Since the nineteenth century, the heartless slumlord whose pursuit of profit made him indifferent to his tenants’ suffering has been a legendary villain in American cities. So it was that in 1953 a Chicago newspaper reporter compiled a list of the city’s twenty worst “slum makers,” whom he blamed “for the wretched conditions that threaten to destroy Chicago as a decent place to live.” Yet all inner-​city landlords had to work with tight operating margins in low-​income markets. Some landlords exploited tenants, but most were small-​scale operators, and many were members of minority groups and lived in the neighborhoods where they owned property. A related culprit was the building inspector who failed to enforce building codes. Seen as collaborators of landlords, building inspectors overlooked gross cases of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and fire hazards. Many were corrupt, and their lax approach to the work allowed property owners to keep down costs and, consequently, rents.36 Many observers blamed the inhabitants of low-​income neighborhoods themselves for the squalid conditions in which they lived. One editorial writer went so far as to declare that “a man who chooses to live in a foul firetrap is himself chiefly to blame if he, his wife, and his children are destroyed in a fire.” On the streets, indignant long-​time or former residents of changing neighborhoods denounced the recent arrivals as invaders and, if the speakers were bigots, inferior people. Taking a more circumspect approach, scholars, newspaper reporters, and officials attributed the spread of urban problems to southern rural migrants, white and black, who failed to adjust to city ways. Unlike blanket condemnations of slum dwellers, the urban adjustment theory allowed for the optimistic possibility that in time migrants would adapt to their environment.37 Remarkably, until the 1960s observers of postwar slums rarely fingered poverty as the primary cause of the abysmal circumstances they documented. A few accounts mentioned the slum dwellers’ lack of money in passing to explain why they chose to live in substandard housing. Official reports might note the high rates of welfare aid payments, an indicator of poverty, in certain neighborhoods, but without explaining whether this data reflected another social ill or the fiscal burden welfare recipients placed on the community. In no case, however, did observers argue that poverty was the source of slum conditions or a problem that needed to be addressed before others. Nor was there much public discussion in the postwar period about the racial aspect of urban slums. In an effort to keep from fanning the flames, newspapers in the late 1940s and 1950s gave scant coverage to the violent incidents committed by whites against blacks. Behind closed doors, white city planners and officials worked to contain the black population safely away from white neighborhoods, but in their public reports and statements, they downplayed racial problems and ignored the racial consequences of their slum clearance policies. Hence the authors of exposés of slums went out of

344   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN their way to declare that “the common denominator of Chicago’s slums is not race but misery,”38 adding that reporters had discovered slum dwellers of many races, religions, and nationalities. Only in the 1960s when the civil rights movement made racial equality a national issue would the role of discrimination in creating slum conditions become a matter of public debate. Instead of poverty or racial discrimination, real estate industry representatives, housing reformers, and officials during the postwar years fixed responsibility for the slums on urban “blight,” a concept which had the advantage of blaming the problem rather than any individual or classes of people. In the 1930s real estate industry experts borrowed the term for plant disease to describe economically weak or declining urban neighborhoods, often located around the central business district, which would eventually become slums. In popular use, “blight” and “blighted areas” retained the economic connotation of a place of tax delinquencies but included other physical and social characteristics—​such as substandard housing, frequent fires, and crime—​which blurred the distinction between slums and blight. At times the terms were used to describe the same types of situations. In 1952, for example, a grand jury investigating how seven people came to die by fire in an illegal abode in Brooklyn found that “occupancy of dark, damp and filthy cellars that defy description, and families, of six, seven and more, cooking and eating and sleeping in one room lacking proper toilet facilities, are spreading the slum blight.”38

Physical Cures for Physical Problems Given the perception that slums and blight were fundamentally physical phenomena, it followed that in addressing them the government would emphasize physical redevelopment above all. In 1937, the United States had instituted a permanent public housing program explicitly for the “elimination of unsafe and insanitary housing conditions” and “the eradication of slums.” The program provided a funding mechanism by which local authorities would develop and maintain housing for low-​income families in order to, as the 1937 law stated, demolish and replace slums. In the 1940s housing authorities in dozens of cities across the United States built housing projects, but for several years during and after the war Congress for political reasons declined to renew funding for public housing. The Housing Act of 1949 reauthorized federal funding, setting off another round of public housing construction, mostly in the cities of the East and Midwest. All across the United States, cities and even a few states produced quasi-​modernist-​style row houses and elevator apartment buildings with rents made affordable to low-​income households.39 The proponents of public housing believed the program was based on the principle of “rehousing” slum dwellers into new well-​built dwellings. In cities as diverse as Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, and Chicago, however, the slum clearance for public housing projects permanently displaced almost all previous occupants of the sites. Many of them

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    345 were ineligible for public housing because they earned too much or too little, were single parents, or their families were too large. Even eligible households often preferred to live in private-​market apartments rather than public housing with its stigma of paternalistic housing for poor people. Furthermore, public housing officials ignored social and economic problems facing the residents of central city neighborhoods, presuming better-​ quality housing would suffice to improve lives. In matters of race, officials worsened the situation by racially segregating housing projects even in ethnically mixed communities and locating housing projects for African Americans well away from all-​ white neighborhoods. And, oblivious to the social structures of the slums, housing officials wiped out but did not replace the small businesses and institutions that supported the existing communities.40 Ironically, starting in the late 1950s, public housing projects, once promoted as a cure for the slums, seemed to some to reproduce slum conditions. In the late 1940s housing officials had begun evicting families whose income exceeded poverty levels, thus excluding stable working-​class tenants. As a result, an increasing number of tenants in public housing were single mothers on public welfare and individuals with problems such as violent behavior and alcoholism. In the New York Times, former Moscow correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote that the Fort Greene and other public housing projects in New York were worse than Russian apartment houses, incubators of crime that spawned teenage gangs, “fiendishly contrived institutions for the debasing of family and community life to the lowest common mean.” Reformers began to question whether the physical improvement of the living environment would solve crime, disease, and other problems of the slums.41 The other national program intended to remove and replace slums was urban redevelopment, established in the Housing Act of 1949. Known better as urban renewal, the program emphasized bulldozing sites and rebuilding them with even less regard for the fate of the inhabitants of the cleared areas than the public housing program had. Long sought by urban real estate interests to halt economic and physical “blight,” Title I of the 1949 Act authorized the federal government to provide grants and loans to a local redevelopment authority for the purpose of clearing land of slums and blighted areas and transferring the parcels to other private or public parties to redevelop. The language of Title I nodded toward housing needs, and some projects rolled out in the 1950s and 1960s included residential development. In some locales, this took the form of public housing, but more often planners chose to build private market-​ rate homes too expensive for low-​income people. The urban redevelopment program also allowed and over the years increased funding for non-​residential projects. As a result, low-​income, racial minority, and ethnic neighborhoods were cleared for a wide range of uses—​government office buildings, sports arenas, civic centers, or even parking lots. In the years following enactment, a chorus of protests rose ever louder against urban renewal. The term “blight” was a broad but loosely defined concept, which made it easy for local authorities to justify seizing properties on the grounds that they were “blighted areas.” Property owners opposed the classification of their neighborhoods as blighted areas, residents objected to the demolition

346   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN of working-​class and minority residences—​some scorned urban renewal as “Negro Removal”—​and almost everyone complained about the prolonged delays in developing sites after they were cleared. In parallel with urban redevelopment, the federal highway program was used by local officials for slum clearance, demolishing untold numbers of working-​and middle-​class homes in the name of improving transportation. Ironically, the people displaced by clearing slums moved to other areas, often creating new slums in the process.42 Partly because of the unpopularity of demolishing neighborhoods, citizens’ organizations in numerous cities sought an alternative way to save neighborhoods from becoming slums: the enforcement of building codes and rehabilitation of substandard buildings. Like public housing and urban renewal, neighborhood code enforcement and fix-​up campaigns took a largely physical approach. Blight could be reversed or stopped, the reasoning went, if property owners would simply improve their properties. In the first instance, the leaders of fix-​up campaigns called for housing inspections to force landlords to repair their substandard properties. With the help of the home building industry, a group of reformers led by James Rouse launched a national campaign to popularize code enforcement and rehab, which eventually received federal support through the Housing Act of 1954. Realizing that some landlords and homeowners might not have the means to rehabilitate their buildings, cities such as Boston, Detroit, and Miami instituted programs to aid them.43 The goal of fight-​blight campaigns, whether stated or not, was to stop the infiltration of lower-​class citizens. In Chicago and other cities with large African American populations, “conservation” of neighborhoods meant racial containment. Yet only rarely did such efforts succeed. Strict enforcement of codes met great resistance not only from landlords but also from tenants, who feared it would lead to higher rents and eviction. Even where property owners put in improvements, the effort did not affect the neighborhoods’ other problems such as truck routes on local streets and too many liquor stores. In any case, neither code enforcement nor rehabilitation could prevent racial and economic transitions, which were a product of differing levels of demand from different population groups.44

The Waning of the Postwar Slums Not until after the postwar period in the 1960s did the federal government diversify its approach to the problems of low-​income neighborhoods beyond the physical. The efforts of the United States to stimulate economic development in Third World countries as part of the Cold War as well as the debate among social scientists about the effects of modernization on society helped make poverty a national issue. Influenced by books such as Michael Harrington’s The Other America, officials in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson pushed numerous anti-​poverty proposals. Johnson’s War on Poverty included many schemes—​from the Head Start program for preschool

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    347 children to the Community Action Program for mobilizing residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods—​that were largely directed at low-​income city dwellers. Taking direct aim at urban slums and blight, the Johnson administration in 1966 passed the Model Cities program, which called for improving not only the physical environment but also social qualities of urban life through schemes for economic opportunity, novel educational methods, social services, anti-​crime measures, recreation, and so on. And, in order to break up the nation’s ghettos, Congress in 1968 passed the Fair Housing Act, which prohibited racial discrimination in almost all types of real estate sales and rental transactions.45 Housing remained a central policy for helping the urban poor. Congress passed major housing acts in 1961, 1964, and 1968, which contained a series of public-​private programs, whose production would in time surpass that of public housing. The goal of the 1968 housing bill was to stimulate enormous housing production—​twenty-​six million homes, six million of which were for low-​and moderate-​income Americans, within ten years—​that would completely rebuild the slums of America. By the time the government adopted these new policies, however, the slums or, at least, the physical characteristics that had defined them, were disappearing. Over the 1950s and 1960s the United States added twenty-​two million new homes, many of them in suburbs, and countless more dwellings were renovated. As a result, by 1970 the number of homes in the United States lacking complete plumbing facilities (hot water, bath, and toilet) had dropped to 7 percent of the total, while the number of severely crowded dwellings fell to only 2 percent of all reported units. The hallmarks of the slums, substandard housing and overcrowding, had become rare. Moreover, another massive migration, this time from the central city to the outer neighborhoods and suburbs, drained the population of the postwar slums. From the mid-​1960s, and in some places as early as the 1950s, middle-​and working-​class African Americans and other city dwellers moved out of the inner-​city neighborhoods to find better accommodations and jobs on the urban periphery. During the 1970s inner-​city neighborhoods—​in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, West and North Philadelphia, the South and West Sides of Chicago, and southern and eastern Atlanta—​lost from one-​ to two-​thirds of their population. Abandoned buildings, vacant lots, and shuttered storefronts now dominated urban landscapes. Mainly the poor and the elderly were left behind, creating what scholars called “concentration of poverty.” But the term was misleading since the poor were now dispersed over large areas, which often resembled ghost towns. Serious problems of the postwar era—​poverty, unemployment, crime, ill health, and racial segregation—​have persisted to one degree or another to the present time. But their context has changed. They have spread across large sections of cities and even beyond into the suburbs. They no longer reside in those colorful neighborhoods packed with people, many newly arrived, struggling to survive and get ahead, which liberal reformers and government officials did so much to eradicate. The crowded, troubled, but vital slums, the bane of postwar America, were but a transitory phenomenon in the ever-​evolving metropolis.

348   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN

Notes 1. Clarence Woodbury, “Our Worst Slum: Can We Save it From Going Red?” American Magazine, September 1949, 126–​131; William Harlan Hale, “Going Down This Street, Lord . . . ,” The Reporter, January 13, 1955, 15; cited in Michael McKenna, “Creating the Worst Block in the City: East 100th Street, 1945–​1985,” paper presented at the Urban History Association, Fifth Biennial Conference, October 21, 2010. 2. McKenna, “Creating the Worst Block in the City.” 3. James N. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 14–​15. 4. Philip J. Funigiello, The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-​City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 3–​38; Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 5. Suzanne Mettler, “The Creation of the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944: Melding Social and Participatory Citizenship Ideals,” Journal of Policy History 17, no. 4 (2005): 345–​374; “FHA Will Certify Veterans’ Loans,” New York Times, January 7, 1945. 6. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, 12–​19ff. 7. Ibid., 34–​35; Joan W. Moore, with Harry Pachon, Mexican Americans (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-​Hall, 1976), Table 3-​1, 41–​45. 8. Georges Sabagh and Mehdi Bozorgmehr, “Population Change: Immigration and Ethnic Transformation,” in Ethnic Los Angeles, Table 3.2, 95–​96; Moore, Mexican Americans, 112; Jon C. Teaford, The Twentieth-​Century American City: Problem, Promise, and Reality (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 117–​118. 9. Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 85, 155, 160–​163. 10. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1992); Teaford, The Twentieth-​Century American City, 115–​117; Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Population Division Working Paper No. 76, Tables 5, 23, 26, 31, 36. 11. John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–​1974 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987); Kenneth Kusmer, A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870–​1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, IL, 1976); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race, Industrial Decline, and Housing in Detroit, 1940–​1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican-​American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–​ 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71–​75, 195–​200. 12. Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 477–​480; Lemann, The Promised Land, 276–​277. 13. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, 83–​84. 14. Two important works in the voluminous literature on racial segregation of residential areas in the United States are Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993); Robert C. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1948).

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    349 15. Wendy Plotkin, “‘Hemmed In’: The Struggle against Racial Restrictive Covenants and Deed Restrictions in Post-​WWII Chicago,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 94, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 39–​69; Michael Jones-​Correa, “The Origins and Diffusion of Racial Restrictive Covenants,” Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 4 (2000–​2001): 541–​568; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 184–​189; Weaver, Negro Ghetto, 234–​237; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017); David M. P. Freund, Colored Property: State Policy and White Racial Politics in Suburban America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409. 16. Stephen Grant Meyer, As Long as They Don’t Move Next Door: Segregation and Racial Conflict in American Neighborhoods (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 64-​ 78, 90-​92, 101-​104, 106-​107, 112-​113, 115–​132; Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Story of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1955); Domenic J. Capeci, Jr., Race Relations in Wartime Detroit: The Sojourner Truth Housing Controversy of 1942 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1984); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–​1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 17. George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican-​ American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–​1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Herminia L. Cubillos, “Fair Housing and Latinos,” La Raza Law Journal 49, no. 2 (1988): 51–​53; Lorrin Thomas, Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-​Century New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 135–​146, 178–​188, 191–​196; Michael Staudenmaier, “‘Mostly of Spanish Extraction’: Second-​Class Citizenship and Racial Formation in Puerto Rican Chicago, 1946–​1965,” Journal of American History 104, no. 3 (December 2017): 681–​706. 18. Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 19. Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, 101–​102. 20. Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1965), 12. 21. In the early 1940s Seeley lived in the Back-​of-​the-​Yards neighborhood in Chicago; in the 1950s he studied a section of Indianapolis, Indiana, that had been condemned for urban redevelopment. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 399–​401; 400 (quotation); John Seeley, “The Slum: Its Nature, Use and Users,” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25, no. 1 (February 1959): 10. 22. Seeley, “The Slum,” 10–​14. 23. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 203–​206; Amanda I. Seligman, Chicago’s Block Clubs: How Neighbors Shape the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Gregory, Southern Diaspora, 102, table A-​4, 333. 24. For a positive assessment of postwar African American neighborhoods, however, see Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–​1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 25. Dominic A. Pacyga, “Responding to the Second Ghetto: Chicago’s Joe Smith and Sin Corner,” Journal of Urban History 37, no. 1 (2011): 76.

350   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN 26. Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) 157; Ron Grossman And Charles Leroux, “The Unmaking of a Ghetto: How the North Kenwood-​Oakland Neighborhood Came Back from the Grave,” Chicago Tribune, January 29, 2006. 27. Martin Millspaugh and Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal: A Study of the Attitude Changes Produced by Neighborhood Rehabilitation (New York: Washburn, 1960), 3; (St. Louis) City Plan Commission, Comprehensive City Plan, Saint Louis, Missouri (St. Louis, 1947), 27–​28; Martin Meyerson, Barbara Terrett, William L. C. Wheaton, Housing, People, and Cities (New York: McGraw-​Hill, 1962), 191–​192. 28. Laura McEnaney, “Nightmares on Elm Street: Demobilizing in Chicago, 1945–​1953,” Journal of American History 92 (March 2006): 1280–​1282. 29. Weaver, The Negro Ghetto, 84–​ 90, 100–​ 123; Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 84–​85; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race, Industrial Decline, and Housing in Detroit, 1940–​1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 42, 51–​55; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 16–​25. 30. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Life in a Northern City, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 576–​577; “Kitchenettes,” Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://​www.encyc​lope​dia.chi​cago​hist​ory.org/​pages/​692.html. 31. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 38–​39; Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 151; Lionel Kimble, A New Deal for Bronzeville (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 52–​53, 60–​62; Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto, 25–​27, 37; Robert Fairbanks, “The Texas Exception: San Antonio and Urban Renewal, 1949–​1965,” Journal of Planning History 1 (2002): 190; “Four Children Die In 83rd Street Slum Firetrap,” Cleveland Call and Post, June 4, 1949; “Fire in Condemned House Kills Woman,” Philadelphia Tribune, December 30, 1950, 1; “Trio Fined $325 for Firetrap in which Four Died,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 1947; “Death of Five Spurs Move to Find Firetraps, North Lawndale Council Plans Action,” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1951; Roy M. Fisher, “Slum Life—​City’s Shame Is Exposed,” Chicago Daily News, June 10, 1953. 32. Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis, 37; “Chicago’s Shame,” Time, June 29, 1953; The Road Back; A Dramatic Expose of Slum Housing in Chicago (Chicago: Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council of Chicago, 1954), 1–​2, 7. 33. Robert B. Fairbanks, The War on Slums in the Southwest (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014), 97; Jack M. Siegel and C. William Brooks, Slum Prevention through Conservation and Rehabilitation (Washington, DC: Subcommittee on Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Conservation, Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, 1953), 116. 34. Charles Abrams, The Future of Housing (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1946), 31–​32; Edith Elmer Wood, “The Cost of Bad Housing in Juvenile Delinquency and Crime,” Introduction to Housing: Facts and Principles (Washington, DC: U.S. Housing Authority, 1940), ch. 7; James Ford, “Slums and Crime Distribution,” Slums and Housing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), ch. 16. 35. Frederic M. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 44–​47, 58–​59, 89–​90; Beryl Satter, Family Properties, 94. 36. “List 20 Slum Landlords,” Chicago Daily News, in The Road Back, 4–​5; Jay McMullen, “Don’t Blame Me Says Building Chief,” Chicago Daily News, in The Road Back, 14;

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    351 Lawrence Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century of Frustration (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1968), 33, 39–​44; George Sternlieb, The Tenement Landlord (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1966). 37. Quotation from Gladys Priddy, “Tenants Often Create Building Code Violations: Housing Standards Book Being Prepared,” Chicago Tribune January 1, 1953; “Fires in the Slums,” Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1953; “Tenants Turn Flats Into Slums: Landlord,” Chicago Daily News, in The Road Back, 5–​6; Gregory, The Southern Diaspora, 66–​68. “ Slums No Respector of Races,” Chicago Daily News, n.d., reprinted, in The Road Back, 10. 38. Mabel Walker, Urban Blight and Slums: Economic and Legal Factors in their Origin, Reclamation, and Prevention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938); Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–​1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 106–​118; George Grimes, “Urban Blight: Real Estate Men Hope To Boost 66,000 Acres Out of ‘Slum’ Class,” Wall Street Journal, July 7, 1944; Charles Abrams, “How to Remedy Our Puerto Rican Problem,” Commentary 20, no. 2 (February 1955): 123. 39. The act defined “slum” as an area “where dwellings predominate which, by reason of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangement or design, lack of ventilation, light or sanitation facilities, or any combination of these factors, are detrimental to safety, health, or morals.” United States Housing Act of 1937 (Public Law 75-​412, September 1, 1937), Preamble, Sec. 2 (3), Sec. 10 (a); Nathan Straus, The Seven Myths of Housing (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1944), 47–​68; Richard O. Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1966). 40. Lawrence J. Vale, Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-​ Cleared Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 49–​51, 63–​69, 176–​ 177, 203–​204; Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 197–​216; Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 98–​103. 41. Harrison E. Salisbury, The Shook-​Up Generation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 74–​ 75 (quotation); D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Public Housing in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); H. B. Shaffer, “Persistence of Slums,” Editorial Research Reports 1958 II (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1958), http://​libr​ary. cqpr​ess.com/​cqres​earc​her/​cqr​esrr​e195​8073​000; Daniel Seligman, “The Enduring Slums,” in The Editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958), 106. 42. The urban renewal program was terminated in 1973. Lawrence M. Friedman, Government and Slum Housing: A Century of Frustration (Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1968), 148–​160; Jon Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urban Revitalization in America, 1940–​1985 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Francesca Ammon, Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), 963–​976. 43. Alexander von Hoffman, “The Lost History of Urban Renewal,” Journal of Urbanism 1, no. 3 (2008): 281–​301. 44. Martin Millspaugh and Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal: A Study of the Attitude Changes Produced by Neighborhood Rehabilitation (Baltimore, MD: Fight-​ Blight, Inc., 1958).

352   ALEXANDER VON HOFFMAN 45. Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-​Century US History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (New York: Macmillan Company, 1962); Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 (Public Law 89-​754, November 4, 1966); Charles M. Haar, Between the Idea and the Reality: A Study in the Origin, Fate, and Legacy of the Model Cities Program (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975).

Bibliography Bauman, John F. Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1910–​ 1974. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987. Beauregard, Robert A. Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of US Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993. Drake, St. Clair, and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945; rev. ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Duneier, Mitchell. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016. Fairbanks, Robert B. The War on Slums in the Southwest. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2014. Gibson, Campbell, and Kay Jung. “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States.” Population Division Working paper no. 76. U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC, 2005. https://​www.cen​sus.gov/​cont​ent/​dam/​Cen​sus/​libr​ary/​work​ing-​pap​ ers/​2005/​demo/​POP-​twps0​076.pdf Green, Adam. Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–​1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gregory, James N. The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Hirsch, Arnold R. Making the Second Ghetto, Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–​1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961; Modern Library 50th Anniversary Edition, 2011. Kimble, Lionel, Jr. A New Deal for Bronzeville: Housing, Employment, and Civil Rights in Black Chicago, 1935–​1955. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. Pritchett, Wendell. Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. The Road Back; A Dramatic Expose of Slum Housing in Chicago. Chicago: Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council of Chicago, 1954. Sanchez, George J. Becoming Mexican-​American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–​1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Seeley, John. “The Slum: Its Nature, Use and Users.” Journal of the American Institute of Planners 25, no. 1 (1959): 7–​14. Self, Robert O. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Return of the Slums in Postwar America    353 Seligman, Amanda I. Chicago’s Block Clubs: How Neighbors Shape the City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Seligman, Daniel. “The Enduring Slums,” in The Exploding Metropolis, edited by The Editors of Fortune, 92–​114. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Siegel, Jack M., and C. William Brooks. Slum Prevention Through Conservation and Rehabilitation. Washington, DC: Subcommittee on Urban Redevelopment, Rehabilitation, and Conservation, Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, 1953. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race, Industrial Decline, and Housing in Detroit, 1940–​1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Thomas, Lorrin. Puerto Rican Citizen: History and Political Identity in Twentieth-​Century New York City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Vale, Lawrence J. Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-​Cleared Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Weaver, Robert C. The Negro Ghetto. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948.

CHAPTER 19

SLUM S AND C OMMU NI SM (Un-​)Slumming the (Post-​)Soviet City IVAN NEVZGODIN

Despite their scale and wide extent, slums under communism are poorly studied. The Russian word for slums (truschoby) has been scarcely used to describe contemporary housing in either the Soviet period or in modern Russia. In Soviet Russia the term truschoby was mostly applied to the prerevolutionary situation or to describe the results of western capitalist development or the urban problems of the Third World. This usage was influenced by the criminal collocation of slums in the classical Russian literature, as in the famous novel The Slums of Saint Petersburg (1864) by Vsevolod V. Krestovsky, or The Stories of the Slums (1887) by Vladimir A. Gilyarovsky. However Soviet officials, when they described contemporary conditions at both national and local levels, preferred to use euphemisms. Thus buildings are referred to as being “physically” and “morally” obsolescent (fizicheskii i moral’nyi iznos). For instance, according to recent calculations by the Russian Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat), only 3 percent of the whole housing stock in the Russian Federation may be named slums. However 20 million square meters of the Russian housing stock (or dwelling space) are listed as being avariynoie zhil’ie (unhealthy accommodation), and nearly 80 million square meters as vetkhoe zhil’ie (dilapidated housing).1 In this Soviet Russian terminology, buildings are referred to as being avariynoie zhil’ie if structurally unsound, and as vetkhoe zhil’ie if dilapidated and lacking basic amenities. The word samostroy is a more neutral term that is used to describe the unauthorized construction of housing without the permission of local authorities. Although some researchers studied the problems of the urban and rural poor,2 the majority of scientific publications focused on government attempts to fight dilapidated housing, the slum clearance processes. In the twenty-​first century, however, Russian scholars have reconsidered Russia’s rapid urbanization during the twentieth century. This historical revision nuanced and brought a sound dissonance to the earlier bravura fanfare about the incredible speed of Soviet urbanization.3 There has been a deluge of publications explaining how the

Slums and Communism    355 Soviet government used housing to control and manipulate the population.4 Some publications, by concentrating on the mechanisms underpinning the Stalinization of Soviet society, have brought new insights in our understanding of the phenomena of slums under communism.5 Also evident is a new interest by researchers in the innovative exploration of the interactions between Soviet ideology and everyday life.6 However scientific publications focused on the vernacular architecture of slums or living strategies within them are still rare.7 There is also a cultural aspect in perceptions of slums in Russia. While the city and urbanization were considered progressive European achievements, slums in the Soviet Union and Russia tend to be seen as a hangover from a bad past, as being symptomatic of the backwardness of rural life, as being alien and Asian. Thus slums were alien both culturally and ideologically. Therefore the slums were denied; they did not exist according to politicians, urban professionals, and scholars. Even the general public pretended not to see them. One Siberian researcher explains the negative attitude of historians and anthropologists toward the slums by pointing out that they are all in fact outside observers, dramatizing the situations because they never experienced living in slums.8

Slums in Communist Theory The most obvious contradiction between the reality and theoretical political declarations concerning the Soviet City was the existence of slums. How were slums possible in a country in which the whole land had been nationalized (in state ownership), with government promising to supply everyone with free housing? Nevertheless slums could be found even inside city centers throughout the whole period of the Soviet Union. The nearly three decades of the reign of Joseph V. Stalin, until his death in 1953, have defined the slum history of Russia in the twentieth century. In 1934, at the seventeenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin declared that “an inevitable feature of the big towns in bourgeois countries is the slums, the so-​called working-​class districts on the outskirts of the towns—​a heap of dark, damp, and dilapidated dwellings, mostly of the basement type, where usually the poor live in filth and curse their fate. The revolution in the USSR has meant the disappearance of such slums.”9 Thus in official and professional publications the word “slum” was only applied to western and developing countries. Soviet slums, which were not supposed to exist, were improperly researched. Usually publications on early Soviet urban development and town planning are illustrated with innovative, beautiful drawings. The designs for socialist cities were avant-​garde in the beginning, and later became neo-​classical, but all this was an official political urbanism, which mostly remained on paper. The greater part of Soviet settlements and towns show the largely differing “unofficial” practices of Soviet urbanism.

356   IVAN NEVZGODIN The works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin provided the theoretical basis for Soviet urbanism. The party therefore declared the aim “of eliminating differences between town and country,” because the theory of socialist location of the productive forces was based on the idea of “even distribution of industry and population though the country.”10 The Soviet government tried to put a curb on the excessive growth of big cities. In 1931 the Central Committee of the Party issued a resolution stopping the building of new industrial plants in Moscow and Leningrad. At the eighteenth Congress of the Party in 1939, the ban on new industrial construction was extended to five more industrial cities in the western part of the Soviet Union. These ideological principles dominated Soviet town planning theory until 1991.

The First Housing Experiments The period following the October Revolution of 1917 made Russia, and later the Soviet Union, an arena for urban experiments. When the all-​Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) took power it was confronted with the paradox of having to build socialism in a backward agrarian country. In their declarations the Bolsheviks represented the proletariat; they were an urban-​oriented party. Their political agenda included industrialization and the social engineering of the New Man in the city. On the day after the revolution, October 26, 1917, the Bolsheviks issued a Decree on the Nationalization of Land. Slum dwellers from the urban outskirts were to be relocated in the city-​center flats of the former elite. The consequence of this action was already in 1921 an increasing proportion of workers living in the city centers, from between 3 to 5 percent of the total population up to 40 percent.11 Another result was the phenomenon of the communal flat in which families shared kitchen, bathroom, and toilet facilities. These shared communal households became a principle of the new collective life. The Civil War of 1917–​1922 compelled the Bolsheviks to enforce an austere policy of war communism. Labor became obligatory for everybody between the ages of sixteen and fifty. Rationing of food and most commodities, with centralized distribution in urban centers, replaced traditional market exchange. The state supplied free ration-​cards, housing and communal services, public transport, working clothes, and selected newspapers and magazines. In the cities there was a deficit of all kinds of goods. There was no electricity, trams did not run, and sewerage systems were destroyed. The first Soviet experiments to house the urban poor were likewise compromised by the war. The once comfortable apartments in which they were rehoused were badly maintained, they became overpopulated, and extremely quickly they degenerated into the first Soviet slums. Already by 1921 it had become obvious that the result of the Bolsheviks’ first housing experiment was an unforeseen urban disaster. Economic disruption, food shortages, and the Civil War caused a decrease in the urban population. In 1921 Vladimir I. Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy

Slums and Communism    357 (NEP). In order to stimulate economic recovery it allowed a market economy, but it preserved the monopoly of one party. As a result of the NEP from 1923 Russia’s cities began to grow again. The NEP activated trade in the cities and brought a new type of active townsman, the so-​called nepmen. The nepmen accumulated wealth and became influential in the cities. They established housing construction cooperatives and started to build houses. For a short period the Soviet government allowed people to form so-​called cooperative societies for house leasing or the construction of housing. Managers of state enterprises as well as the nepmen started to supply their employees with materials and instruments to build temporary shelter.

The First Five Year Plan The Soviet state continued to pursue social and cultural reforms. Workers got rights for free education and health care, state insurance, and pensions. The education of the population was improved, and illiteracy was virtually eliminated. However, despite the central socialist principle of equality, the party and administrative elite enjoyed special privileges and some also were given to the loyal intelligentsia. The Soviet writer Il’ia G. Ehrenburg described the NEP-​generated construction boom in the new capital of Siberia, Novosibirsk: It was a town like thousands of others. Then, in 1917, the Revolution came. The town was taken alternately by the Whites and the Reds until the Revolution finally carried the day. The town changed its name and became Novosibirsk. It changed not only its name: it began a new life. Newcomers arrived in Novosibirsk from all over the place. But there was nothing to live in. They built shanties and made dug-​outs. Their settlements were dubbed Brassavilles. The newcomers were brassy and no mistake: they wanted to live, regardless of anything. Novosibirsk became the regional center . . . The old houses were demolished. All the streets disappeared: the town was one big building site. It was powdered with lime. It smelled of linseed, oil, and pitch. Cars bounced over the potholes, got bogged down in the mud and, panting heavily, tore off to the outskirts. On the outskirts it was dusty and windy. On the outskirts people dug into the earth, and the editor of Soviet Siberia quipped, “In America they’ve got skyscrapers, but we’ve got earthscrapers.”12

It is remarkable that the Soviet authorities initially regarded Ehrenburg’s novel The Second Day (1933) as an anticommunist pamphlet. But later, Stalin’s regime realized that unorthodox propaganda could be good propaganda. The book was published in the USSR and in the 1980s it was available in various languages as an element of communist propaganda. However, the Soviet censorship castrated the novel unrecognizably. In the “adapted” version, for example, the “old city” replaced “shantytown” (nakhalovki in the original publication).

358   IVAN NEVZGODIN But even with proclamations about workers’ rights and intensive housing construction Novosibirsk could not solve its housing shortage. In 1932, the town’s living space was 870,000 square meters. This meant 3.3 square meters of living space per person. The population grew much faster than the available living space. For example, in Novosibirsk in 1926 there were 4.25 square meters per person; in 1928, 4.17 square meters (meanwhile the average in Siberia was 4.85 square meters). In general, people lived in barracks, earthen huts, and grass houses. They built without permission, and whole neighborhoods, called nakhalovki (squatter settlements or slums), were thrown up without plan. The NEP was successful in trade and agriculture, but it did not improve industrial production. Unemployment in cities was high. The city could not offer enough industrial products for exchange with the country. The refusal of peasants to give cereals to the state in the winter of 1927–​1928 brought a problem in supplying food to the big cities. The ration card was introduced again. This event became a reason for the mass repression of wealthy peasants by forced collectivization. The year 1929 is generally known as the year of the “Great Turn.” To achieve the First Five-​Year Plan (approved in May 1929), with its target to construct more than five thousand new factories in the colonized regions, the state needed around ten million new workers. The state did not have the resources to house this incredible number of new city-​dwellers. It is in this light that we should analyze the emerging political debate about the socialist city and all the intentions to liberate women from housekeeping and to socialize (collectivize) the way of life. In this way politicians and economists tried to economize on housing for the extra workers who were needed for industry. The usual way to estimate the urban population was to calculate the number of workers needed for industry, multiply this number with a family coefficient (all dependents of the worker) and a coefficient for persons involved in public services. Thus the government determined how much money should be invested to house one inhabitant. This traditional approach made it enormously expensive to construct sufficient housing for the workers who were needed for industrialization. The Soviet authorities tried to find a solution to this impasse, in which the involvement of the urban population in industrial production would be as near as possible to 100 percent. As a result of political decisions, town planners developed a new method of calculating the population and hence the housing required for new industrial cities. One of the consequences of this new method was the “natural” appearance of unplanned housing. Although the Soviet authorities officially never accepted the existence of slums, their presence made Soviet urban planning an extremely contradictory activity. It is clear that by 1929 some leading politicians already understood that industrialization would only be possible by the application of forced labor. The blueprints for the urbanization of the Gulag were in preparation. The deportations of the “rich” peasants, the Kulaks, to Siberia are still a greatly overlooked factor in the history of Soviet town planning. In 1930 the Soviets started these displacements in order to collect the Kulaks’ properties and to colonize the wild areas in northern Siberia. Inadequate preparation for this huge move resulted in

Slums and Communism    359 overcrowded transition points in southern and western Siberia. Because of the shortage of all sorts of workers who were needed for the industrialization targets of the First Five-​ Year Plan, the local authorities in Siberia decided to use these peasants for forced labor in the construction and operation of their new factories. This expedient became the general rule. The new Uralian and Siberian socialist towns were nothing more than company towns where people worked, who not only entirely depended on the factory (for work, housing, food, and clothing) but also could not freely leave these towns. The presence of the Gulag Archipelago infected the entire society. Although Russia inherited slums from the period before the October Revolution of 1917, the realization of the First Five-​Year Plan produced a new urban type, the Soviet Shadow City. The great scale and rapidity of urbanization in the USSR was a direct consequence of the First Five-​Year Plan. The state intensively built new industrial cities. “To the East”: that was the general direction of the economic development of the Soviet Union. The aim was to explore and harness the richest energy and mineral resources in the nation. In consequence, a galaxy of new towns emerged during the years of the First Five-​Year Plan in association with the exploitation of nearby natural resources: they included Asbest, Bobriki, Berezniki, Bolshoe Zaporozhye, Magnitogorsk, Karaganda, Kemerovo, Khibinogorsk, Kirasnouralsk, Prokopevsk, and Stalinsk (Novokuznetsk). In their projects for new towns the planners calculated a much lower density than in capitalist cities. This resulted in large open spaces and long distances. The absence of adequate transportation and the rigorous climate led consequently to temporary “dwellings” near the factories, as the workers preferred living in slums “around the corner” to residing in houses with modern conveniences at three to five kilometers’ walking distance. The principle of super-​blocks, consisting of housing, hostels, crèche, kindergarten, school, hospital, canteen, supermarket, and a cultural center with club, cinema, and sports field, was used in the master plans for new towns. The socialist town was understood as a sum of these separate blocks, each of them self-​contained in the material and cultural requirements of their inhabitants. But in reality bureaucratic inertia, together with miscalculations in the planning process, and the haphazard housing arrangements of the temporary towns, caused horrible living conditions in the new towns. After the mid-​1930s it became obvious that the Soviet government gave priority to the building of industry and had neither the will nor the resources to house all workers properly. Urbanization became a byproduct of industrialization. The urban population was created by force. The Stalinist mass repressions brought about numerous camps and prisons. The prisoners were used in the construction of new towns, industry, and the exploitation of raw materials. The result of industrialization was not only collectivization, but the disintegration of life quality in the cities. The food-​card system determined urban life between 1929 and 1933. In the famine of 1932–​1933, according to various calculations, from three to ten million Soviet citizens died. In the early 1930s millions of peasants escaping collectivization poured into the cities. State control on public and private life increased. The internal passport system,

360   IVAN NEVZGODIN abolished in 1923, returned in December 1932. The migration possibilities of Soviet citizens were severely limited. According to the official census of 1939 the urban population of the USSR had increased from 17.9 percent of the total (26 million) in 1926 to 32.8 percent (60 million) in 1939. In the twelve years before the census of 1939 the number of towns grew from 708 to 923. By January 1, 1941, there were 1,241 recognized towns. An agrarian economy was transformed into a predominantly industrial one, a rural society into an increasingly urban one. Soviet propaganda demonstrated the achievements of industrialization by highlighting the rapid urbanization of the country. But this urbanization was not real. In some cases it existed only on paper: villages were renamed towns, although they retained their rural features. From the late 1930s the civil specialization of many factories was replaced by military production. Industrialization became militarization. The backside of this impressive Soviet urbanization was the semi-​urban character of Soviet cities. The massive migration of peasants overwhelmed the traditional urban culture in old cities. The level of services and the variety of leisure possibilities in Soviet cities were far below western standards. The Soviet state was virtually unable to keep its cities functioning properly, although it had taken full responsibility for the communal household, the social-​cultural infrastructure, and public transport. A clear picture of the sad results of the construction of new socialist cities is provided by a surveyor of the Planning Committee from Novosibirsk, who gave this description of Tsheglovsk (now Kemerovo) in the late 1930s: With a few exceptions, all buildings of the town are half village-​like. Some part of the population is involved in grain cultivation, has horses and other livestock and stables and gardens. There are many slums and half-​caves, that formed separate “shameless” neighborhoods [squatter settlements]. Many buildings are unfinished. Often you see that an old house has a roof with unsweetened planks as cornice or a roof with two slopes, without wooden planks on the other two sides. The plots are unfenced. As miserable as the houses look from the outside, they are so uncomfortable inside. The small houses usually have only one room, which is also used as a kitchen. Often two families and also single tenants are living in this room. There are also houses with one room and a separate kitchen. In the five-​walled houses [typical Russian wooden houses] it is customary that one half is rented out and in the other half the owners live. In such cases the kitchen is common. The inner walls are finished with clay and painted white, which does not help against the insects, wall lice, and cockroaches, which can be found everywhere in large quantities. The conveniences are usually at a considerable distance from the houses, which is not very comfortable in the harsh climate.13

Magnitogorsk Magnitogorsk was an exemplary socialist city. As one of the pioneers of the industrial transformation, it had pride of place in Soviet propaganda. Only after the collapse of

Slums and Communism    361 communism did it attract the attention of Western scholars. In his massive book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Stephen Kotkin gave a complete picture of the bureaucracy, the miscalculations in the plans, the random placement of urban blocks in temporary settlements, and the horrible living conditions in Magnitogorsk. Thus Magnitogorsk is a key example of the slums in the new Soviet city.14 The majority of the construction workers who arrived in 1929 to build Magnitogorsk lived in barracks and tents. Some nomadic folk, such as Kyrgyz, Bashkirs, and Tartars, lived in yurts. There were also booths, huts, dugouts, and semi-​dugouts. Originally canvas tents had been constructed as a temporary solution for the summer months, but they were also used during the winters. The tents were given an extra insulation for winter. The factory administration found it very difficult to get enough canvas for tents. Several times they asked the Council for Labor and Defense in Moscow to provide extra canvas for tents to accommodate ten thousand workers, arguing that otherwise the workers would have to sleep under the open sky. But the People’s Commissariat of Defense refused the request.15 Workers who were not allocated a place in the existing barracks or tents built huts and dugouts themselves. The earth served as a good insulation in the winter. A typical semi-​dugout consisted of an earth hole and timber roof with layers of tarpaper, slag, compacted earth and turf. In territories with enough forests, timber was used for the lower part of the dugout and insulated with turf. Sometimes walls were made from two layers of wooden boards with earth between them. Duckboards with layers of tarpaper, clay, and earth served as a roof. In summer these structures were green because of the grass growing over them. These types of constructions were so widespread at the construction sites of socialist cities that descriptions of them were published in 1929 in the official professional journal Kommunal’noye delo (Municipal household).16 An American writer, John Scott, described Magnitogorsk in 1942: Another part of the city . . . was “Shanghai.” Here a collection of improvised mud huts huddled in a sort of ravine overlooking the railroad yards. The inhabitants were largely Bashkirs, Tartars, and Kirghizi, and had built their dwellings out of materials found or stolen over a period of years. The roofs were usually made of old scrap metal, sometimes covered by sod or by thatch. The same house was inhabited by the family, the chickens, the pigs, and the cow, if there was one. This manner of housing livestock was usual in the poorer sections of the Russian countryside. The dwellers in these “zemlyanki” were laborers and semi-​skilled workers and their families. Their possession of chickens and goats was witness of the fact that they “were living well” by the standards of Russian peasantry. They had eggs and milk, while the fathers working in the mill supplied a cash income. There remained a dozen sections of the town composed of temporary wooden structures, barracks, or frame houses. The best of these were equipped with central heat, running water, and sewerage, though most had none of these conveniences, and were similar to Barrack 17, where I lived in 1932 and 1933. In 1938 Magnitogorsk’s 220,000 inhabitants lived as follows, as closely as I could ascertain through a friend in the city planning commission: Berezki and the Central Hotel –​2%, Kirov District and other permanent apartment houses –​15%, Permanent individual houses –​8%, Barracks and other “temporary” houses [including tents] –​50%, Zemlianki –​25%.17

362   IVAN NEVZGODIN Thus more than 75 percent of the total population of Magnitogorsk lived in 1938 in what we would call slums. In 1959 the temporary prefabricated panel-​hut and frame-​ backfilling barracks still supplied 262,000 square meters of living space in Magnitogorsk, or 14.7 percent of the total housing stock.18 Officially the latest barrack in Magnitogorsk was demolished in 1982.19 Sewage and toilets were common problems in socialist cities. Donald Filtzer, drawing upon contemporary archive sources, remarked that “in the barracks settlements of Magnitogorsk, where the outhouses lacked heat and lighting, residents created what they called ‘Siberian pits,’ that is, areas around the toilets where they relieved themselves or dumped their slops in the winter time because the toilets were inaccessible.”20 Filtzer continued: Worse still was the situation in the urban areas of Kemerovo oblast [region]. Commenting on what [he] called “the rather dangerous tradition” of people tossing slops and refuse into primitive “winter slop holes or snow bunkers,” a health inspector noted, people throw everything into them: slops, kitchen rubbish, slag, garbage, and the contents of chamber pots. In the course of the long Siberian winter these garbage bins are turned into huge frozen “flat cakes” [lepeshki], containing all the afore-​mentioned refuse of human habitation. Every spring a huge amount of labor power is devoted to chopping up these “flat cakes” and a significant quantity of transport resources to carting away what’s chipped off. Often these “flat cakes” are just left to thaw out where they are.21

The Second World War The Second World War caused the destruction of most cities in the western section of the USSR, and an overall drop in urban population. Officially 1,710 towns and urban settlements were ruined or deliberately destroyed. More than twenty-​five million people lost their dwellings. The war also caused massive redistributions of the urban population within the country. During the first years of the war the Soviet government evacuated factories and population to the east. Thus from the territories near the frontline in 1941 nearly seven million inhabitants were evacuated, and another four million in 1942. During the war so many factories and institutions were evacuated from the west to the east of the USSR that we could speak about the Second Industrialization of the Urals and Siberia. This industrialization was more rapid and more ambitious in scale than that of the famous two First Five-​Years Plans (1928/​9–​1932/​3 and 1933–​37). In comparison with the first phase of industrialization, the second one had a completely military character, and it was not well-​planned at all. This forced local authorities even more to improvise and apply “temporary” solutions, which later led to great difficulties in attempting to solve long-​term urban problems.

Slums and Communism    363 Because of this unplanned growth many cities developed a fragmented structure. Ravines, small rivers, and railway reserves formed obstacles to orderly growth and aggravated transport problems. Inhabitants had to cross permanent and temporary bridges, overpasses, viaducts, and crossings. Particularly in times of war, when it was impossible to provide the urban population with public transport, industrial workers and other townspeople had to walk great distances every day. Many workers, most of them women and children aged 12–​14 years, spent the night in the enterprises where they worked. During the war years the problem of functionally linking industry and housing in order to create compact cities became acute and obvious. The massive redistribution of industry and population during wartime, and the lack of attention to the urban infrastructure required by the growing urban population, created a new sort of urban life that is very difficult to imagine. The municipal authorities did not maintain urban infrastructure in many parts of the cities during the war. Thus by August 1944 the population of Novosibirsk had cut down one-​fifth (70,000 sq. m.) of prewar greenery for firewood.22 The best territories of these new cities were occupied by the factories, which monopolized the railways and tramlines to transport their production, and which polluted the rivers with industrial waste. All transportation resources were applied to the needs of industry, and public transport barely existed. The “self-​ service” responses by the population in these eastern territories brought urban structure to ruin. At a meeting in Novosibirsk one architect spoke about “the major destruction of the Siberian towns, the huge damage of their urban infrastructure and greenery during the war.”23 How was it possible thus to destroy towns in the Soviet heartland, thousands of kilometers from the front line? After the war the Soviet state concentrated all its resources on the reconstruction of industry and rebuilding the cities, but it was only from the mid-​1950s that living standards in cities improved. The urban experiments and mistakes under the extreme circumstances of wartime determined the development of provincial cities during the whole Soviet period of the Russian history.

Nikita Khrushchev’s Housing Revolution The period of the so-​called “Thaw” (1953–​1964) humanized the Soviet regime to some degree. The new Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev changed the state policy on housing, architecture, and town planning. It rejected the earlier neo-​classical decorations and started an intensive mass program of constructing workers’ housing. The USSR established an impressive building industry producing prefabricated concrete blocks and panels. All municipal housing production became standardized. The majority of workers moved from slums and barracks to new apartments with modern amenities. Although the apartments were very modest and the quality of building construction

364   IVAN NEVZGODIN was low, the Khrushchev housing program allowed the state by the beginning of the 1970s to supply a family with an apartment instead of a room. Thus between 1956 and 1970, 126.5 million Soviet citizens (more than half of the total population) had moved to new housing.24 During the years after Khrushchev’s housing reforms, from the 1960s to the 1980s, the shape of the Soviet city was again redefined. As the result of the Soviet arms race with the west, USSR industry concentrated on producing armaments and energy, and fully exploiting its natural resources. Steel production and the allied branches of heavy industry dominated planning thinking. This big investment in the further militarization of the economy resulted in a deficit of consumer products. By the end of the 1980s the majority of Soviet towns comprised mixed administrative centers and industrial areas. Urbanization had become even more a side-​product of industrialization. The typical Soviet city was a sum of its industrial settlements. A handful of actors (the Central Government, the Municipal Council (Soviet), the Municipal Executive Committee of the Party, and Vedomstvo [Central Government Department, an authority immediately under the ministry level]) regulated urban life and the construction priorities of the Soviet city. Sometimes the interests and positions of these actors were different. Vedomstvos had a big influence on urban matters, because they financed the construction of the industrial settlements, carried the cost of operating them, and supplied their employees with public services. Although the state through the Vedomstvo and the municipalities was responsible for housing construction, from 1930 to 1980 a great amount of unsupervised private housing was nonetheless built. Even the intensive housing construction under Khrushchev had not been able to solve the housing shortage. In June 1959, US Vice-​President Richard Nixon visited Novosibirsk. At the main avenue of the city, Red Prospect, he asked his driver to stop the car near Kalinin Square. As is generally known, slum clearing had been one of the important points in Nixon’s political agenda. Here he could see a slum district in a nearby ravine. The Soviet officials, who obviously did not know about Nixon’s preoccupation with slums, tried to explain the view as being the result of Novosibirians’ hobby to breed pigs: “these barns are pigsties, people do not live there.” But Nixon did not allow himself to be fooled; he pointed out the television antennas and joked: “you have extremely educated and demanding pigs here, they even watch TV!”25

Soviet Un-​Slumming Practice: The Case of the Kamenka River Ravine in Novosibirsk Novosibirsk’s great shame was the notorious slum in a ravine of the Kamenka River. This squatter settlement, called Nakhalovka (Impudent district), was located in the city

Slums and Communism    365 center at the crossing point of the main urban arteries. Most of the city’s population lived in communal apartments, barracks, or in the so-​called “private sector.” The city remained low-​rise; single-​storied apartment houses comprised 62 percent of the total housing area in 1955.26 Even in the central part of the city, large squatter settlements persisted. These Siberian favelas were located in ravines and along the banks of rivers. The topography of Novosibirsk is comparable to that of Toronto, which also has many ravines. But in Novosibirsk, from its foundation, the ravines had been squatted by the poor. These squatters took advantage of the central location: they worked in the city and had their own cattle and vegetable gardens in their squatter settlement. Some of the inhabitants were involved in criminal activities. Housing conditions in the ravine were very poor, comprising low-​rise timber-​built houses. Sometimes, because of the steep terrain, sewage from higher-​situated houses collected on the roofs of the lower ones. The Kamenka River was so polluted by industrial sewage that it always stank and did not freeze in winter. Forced by these embarrassments, the municipal authorities decided in 1960 to start a huge slum clearance project, harnessing river water to scour out the ravine. The municipal authorities consulted the patriarch of Stalinist architecture, Academician Boris M. Iofan, who proposed an option for both combating the hovels and solving the river’s ecological problems. Thus the designer of the Palace of Soviets in Moscow became involved in a gigantic slum clearance project in remote Siberia. Work began only in 1967. Using huge pipes, water and sand from the Ob River were pumped into the ravine, while the smaller Kamenka River was diverted into a concrete collector. As result of financial and technical problems these works took nearly a quarter of a century. The removing of the squatters had also been a very complicated process. In accordance with Soviet legislation, the inhabitants got free apartments in the prefab multi-​story housing blocks on the outskirts of the city. The washing out of the Kamenka ravine was completed only after the collapse of the USSR in 1992. In total, up till 1992, 6,100 meters of the river valley were washed away.27

Slums in the New Oil-​P roducing Towns in Siberia It is shocking that the very places that are the source of global wealth nonetheless have slums. It is doubly shocking that these cities were built by a government that proclaimed itself to be communist, and that should already have learned about slum problems from its experiences when erecting new company towns during the 1920s and 1930s. Yet in the towns built for oil production in western Siberia between the 1960s and the 1980s, the temporary samostroy (housing constructed without the official permission of the local authorities) played a decisive role. These oil slums in Surgut, Nefteiugansk, and Megion even got their own local term: balki. The term balki is locally used but has nevertheless been accepted by town planners in professional publications.28

366   IVAN NEVZGODIN The balki is a small, low-​rise, and crooked structure made from wooden, metal, or other improvised materials, and with a small fenced plot used for growing vegetables or raising animals for household consumption. These rickety balki and caravans were the main housing used by oil-​pioneers, workers, and engineers. Thus in early 1968 there were one thousand balki in Surgut, 1,400 in Nefteiugansk, seven hundred in Urai, and four hundred in Nizhnevartovsk.29 The caravans were used for shops, canteens, and hospitals. The oil enterprises, desperate to overcome a labor and housing shortage, supplied newly arrived workers with construction instruments and materials (sawdust was provided for insulation) and tolerated their unauthorized housing constructions. The usual practice was to use stolen construction materials. Squatters were able to erect one balki in two to three days. Some of these “temporary” structures were lived in for more than thirty years, and indeed are still in use.

Slums After the Collapse of Communism In his book Planet of Slums Mike Davis wrote, “The fastest-​growing slums are in the Russian Federation (especially ex-​‘socialist company towns’ dependent on a single, now-​closed industry) and the former Soviet republics, where urban dereliction has been bred at the same stomach-​churning velocity as economic inequality and civic disinvestment.”30 Indeed, after the collapse of communism the social mobility of the populations of many socialist company towns has been ruined. The sudden onset of unemployment has transformed socialist company towns into shantytowns. Thus in the youngest city of the Irkutsk Region, Sayansk, one of the so-​called Blue Cities in Siberia that had arisen as a result of gas production, almost 30 percent of the population found themselves suddenly unemployed in 1992. Yet in Sayansk 40 percent of the working population was highly educated.31 A year after the collapse of Soviet communism in 1991, the Russian government began to privatize housing, with the objective of transferring a substantial share of the housing stock to the population and thereby jolting the housing sector into operating more on market principles. The inhabitants could buy their apartments for an extremely low price. Later the rules changed, and the state even gave housing away for free. In this way the inhabitants became responsible for the maintenance of the housing stock. In some historical towns, such as Tomsk or Irkutsk, the city centers were areas of low-​rise wooden housing that were protected as monuments. Once sold off, these neighborhoods very quickly deteriorated, as their new owners registered additional tenants in the expectation of getting a free apartment from the government (under Russian legislation, inhabitants received free apartments if the government resumed their neighborhood for redevelopment). The architectural and urban quality of neighborhoods could not guarantee their survival. For instance a workers’ housing settlement at the Tiazhstankogidropress’ plant

Slums and Communism    367 in Novosibirsk (built by German prisoners of war in 1950–​1955), despite it lovely scale, solid construction, and historical past, degenerated into a slum during the 1990s.32 Paradoxically, this workers’ settlement had been shown to Nixon in 1959 as representing an outstanding example of the achievements of socialist housing. After the collapse of communism, however, the plant was closed and the territory became a slum, nurturing prostitution, the drug trade, and other criminal activities. From 2015 onward the municipality demolished some of the houses, despite their obviously high architectural qualities. Another problem, which could transform a visually normal prefab apartment block into a slum, was mistakes in the use of materials and construction techniques. Thus in the early 1970s, for example, phenol formaldehyde resin was applied to the concrete prefab panels of a number of nine-​floor residential blocks. This was subsequently found to be a very unhealthy addition into concrete. Several of these residential blocks are situated in Moscow. Those who can afford to move are beginning to escape from them, leaving the poor and ethnic minorities to concentrate there. Moreover, with the collapse of communism, emerging capitalism brought to the big Russian cities low-​paid migrants from the provinces, rural areas, and former Soviet republics (mostly from Ukraine and Central Asia). In the Moscow region especially, the city’s outskirts and surrounding settlements were transformed into a galactic of slums, with such horrifying examples of inhumanity as the village of Chelobityevo.33

The Un-​slumming Response In 1999 the mayor of Moscow, Yuri M. Luzhkov, started a comprehensive program of demolition (officially called “complex reconstruction”) of the five-​storied buildings that dated from the first period of industrial housing construction during the Khrushchev era. The inhabitants were offered new housing on the city’s outskirts, while the cleared territory was proposed to be used for new high-​rise construction. The layout of these five-​storied buildings from the Khrushchev era are not typical of slums. The housing-​ block arrangements are spacious, meeting the urban requirements of the Modern Movement: light, space, and air. There is a lot of greenery and an acceptable level of public services and transportation; the inhabitants are highly educated and do not consider themselves as belonging to the urban poor.34 Luzhkov’s program has proved to be less successful than a comparable slum clearance program at the same period in Tatarstan. In Tatarstan’s capital, Kazan, the city authorities successfully removed the slums from the center of the city, supported the local construction industry, and resolved social tensions.35 The government of Tatarstan effectively attracted private investors. The authorities were not only driven by commercial, populistic, or corruption interests, but also tried to present the president of Tatarstan as a morally responsible leader. The majority of the region’s population is Muslim. The personal responsibility of the president to care for the poor was presented as a long-​lasting tradition of Islam, in contrast to the indifference of the Russian Orthodox Church toward the slum inhabitants.

368   IVAN NEVZGODIN In 2017 both the Russian federal government and the government of Moscow launched a new clearance program called “the program of renovation of housing in Moscow.” Moscow’s government aimed in this large-​scale gentrification program to resettle inhabitants to the outskirts and to eliminate the dilapidated low-​rise housing stock that had been built between 1957 and 1968, as well as to support the construction industry, which was collapsing from the effects of international sanctions. The cleared sites will be used for new up-​market residential and commercial construction. Commercial drivers dominated this enterprise. The program is proposed to continue over fifteen years. It has a larger scale and more aggressive character than the program of 1999. Muscovites in the clearance areas were allowed to vote on which apartment buildings should be included in the program. But in reality they are forced to leave their homes for denser urban blocks. As a result more than five thousand residential buildings have already been designated for demolition. This program has provoked a series of mass protests and demonstrations.

The Socialist City of Slums Reconsidered The Soviet period began in a time of quasi-​urbanization, when city populations lived in semi-​rural ways with a lack of basic conveniences. Soviet slums presented a mix of urban and rural traditions. They gave birth to a unique culture. The Gulag urbanization is still a largely unknown research area, and further investigations should help us to better understand the phenomenon of Soviet slums. Even after Stalin’s time, and after the Gulag system had been dismantled, the Russian Federation still contained many imprisoned persons compared with other civilized countries. Thus ex-​prisoners were the main source of slum populations. We still know very little about how the enormous task of constructing the labor camps and industrial towns was organized. Also, very little statistical information about the post-​Soviet urban poor is as yet available. Thus, there are still many discoveries to be made in the history of both official and unofficial Soviet urbanization between the 1920s and the 1980s. And much archival and field research is still needed to understand the culture of (post-​)Soviet slums.

Notes 1. Alexander P. Ogarkov and Sergei A. Ogarkov, “Sotsial’no-​ ekologicheskie problem zhizneustrtoistva na sele” [Social and ecological problems of livelihood in rural areas], Nikonovskie chteniia (2013): 190. 2. Ibid. 3. See Aleksandr S. Akhiezer, “Dialektika Urbanizatsiii Migratsii v Rossii” [Dialectics of urbanization and migration in Russia], Obshestvennye nauki i sovremennost no.1

Slums and Communism    369 (2000): 78–​ 89. Jurii L. Pivovarov, “Urbanizatsia Rossii v XX veke: predstavlenie i real’nost’ ” [Urbanization in Russia in the twentieth century: Representation and reality], Obshestvennye nauki i sovremennost no. 6 (2001): 101–​113. 4. Mark G. Meerovich, Kvadratnye Metry, Opredeliaiushchie Soznanie. Gosudarstvennaia Zhilishchnaia Politika v SSSR. 1921–​1941 gg. [Square meters that determine consciousness: State housing policy in the USSR, 1921–​1941] (Stuttgart: Ibidem–​Verlag, 2005); and Mark. G. Meerovich, “Kontseptsiia ‘Sotsialisticheskogo Goroda’ i Praktika ee Realizatsii” [The concept of the “socialist city” and the practice of its realization], in Sovetskoe Gradostroitel’stvo 1917–​1941 [The Soviet town planning in 1917–​1941], edited by Julia L. Kosenkova, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress-​Traditsiia, 2018), 180–​239. 5. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 6. Olga Zdravomyslova, “Die Privatisierung des Lebensstils in Russland,” in Lebensverhältnisse in Osteuropa. Prekäre Entwicklungen und neue Konturen, ed. Wolfgang Glatzer (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1996), 55–​66; Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–​1957, trans. and ed. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998); and Nataliia B. Leblina. Povsednevnaia zhizn' sovetskogo goroda: Normy i anomalii 1920/​1930 gody [Daily life of the Soviet city: Norms and anomalies, 1920–​1930] (St. Petersburg: Kikimora Publications, 1999). 7. Igor’ N. Stas’, “Urbanizatsiia samostoia: trushoby v neftedobyvaiushikh raionakh Sovetskoi Sibiri (1960–​1980-​e gg.)” [Urbanization through Samostroy: Slums in oil-​producing regions of Soviet Siberia in the 1960s to the 1980s], Sibirskie Istoricheskie Issledovaniia [Siberian Historical Researches], no. 2 (2017): 80–​99. 8. Ibid., 94. 9. XVII S’yezd Vsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii (Bol’shevikov). Stenograficheskii Otchet [XVII Congress of the All-​Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). A shorthand report] (Moscow: Partizdat, 1934), 7. The English translation is from J. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 13, 1930–​ January 1934 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), Marxists Internet Archive, https://​www.marxi​sts.org/​refere​nce/​arch​ive/​sta​lin/​works/​1934/​01/​26.htm. 10. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Collected Works, vol. 6: 1845–​1848, translated by Samuel Moore (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 505. 11. “Novoe v Zhilishnoi Politike RSFSR” [New in the housing policy of the RSFSR], in Kommunal’noe delo. [Municipal household] Sb. Glavnogo upravleniia kommunal’nogo khoziastva NKVD [A collection of the Main Management Department of municipal household of NKVD], no. 1 (1921): 18. 12. Iliia G. Ehrenburg. “Den’ Vtoroi,” in Sobranie Sochinenii [Complete works], vol. 3 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1991), 242–​244. 13. GANO, f. R-​12, op. 1, d. 2075, p. 46. Cited in Ivan Nevzgodin Het Nieuwe Bouwen in West-​ Siberië: architectuur en stedenbouw in de jaren 1920–​1940 (PhD diss., TU Delft, 2004), 172. 14. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. 15. GARF F. R-​7952. Op. 5. D. 173, l. 17, cited in Nadezhda N. Makarova Povsednevnaia Zhizn’ Magnitogorska v 1929–​1935 gg. [Everyday life of Magnitogorsk in the years 1929–​1935] (PhD diss., Chelyabinsk State University, 2010), 64–​65. 16. A. Petrov, “Samovol’noye dernovoye stroitel’stvo” [Unauthorized turf construction], Kommunal’noye delo [Municipal household], no. 4 (1929): 93–​96. 17. John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel, enl. ed. prepared by Stephen Kotkin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 233–​234.

370   IVAN NEVZGODIN 18. Mark. G. Meerovich, “Kontseptsiia ‘Sotsialisticheskogo Goroda’ i Praktika ee Realizatsii” [The concept of the “socialist city” and the practice of its realization], in Sovetskoe gradostroitel’stvo 1917–​1941 [The Soviet town planning in 1917–​1941], vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress-​Traditsiia, 2018), 204. 19. Elena Kuklina, “Vizhu Gorod, Kotorogo Net . . . ” [I see a city that does not exist . . . ], Magnitogorskiy Rabochiy [Magnitogorsk worker], January 16, 2014. https://​www.mr-​info. ru/​8617-​vizhu-​gorod-​kotor​ogo-​net.html. 20. GARF, f. A-​482, op. 49, d. 1628, l. 59. Cited in Donald Filtzer, The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–​1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 57. 21. GARF, f. 9226, op. 1, d. 932, l. 48. Cited in ibid. 22. GANO F. R.-​1444, op.1. d. 32. 40 backside. 23. GANO F. R.-​1444, op.1. d. 30. 9-​9 backside, 14 backside. 24. Henry W. Morton and Rudolf L. Tökés, eds., Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s (New York: The Free Press, 1974), 163. 25. L. Kuzmenkina, “Zachem Novosibirsk Ponadobilsya Amerike?” [Why USA was needed Novosibirsk?], Vecherniy Novosibirsk [Evening Novosibirsk], August 29, 2009, 6. 26. K. Lagutin Lagutin, “Preodolet’ nedostatki v zastroyke gorodov RSFSR” [Overcoming the shortcomings in the construction of cities of the RSFSR], Arkhitektura SSSR [Architecture of the USSR], no. 9 (1955): 4. 27. Ivan Nevzgodin, Sovetskii Neoklassitsizm v Arkhitekture Novosibirska [Soviet neoclassism in the architecture of Novosibirsk] (Novosibirsk: EA City, 2016), 366. 28. Aleksandr N. Klevakin, Sibirskii Gorod v Epokhu Peremen [The Siberian city in the transition epoch] (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 2008), 59. 29. Igor’ N. Stas’, “Urbanizatsiia Samostoia: Trushoby v Neftedobyvaiushikh Raionakh Sovetskoi Sibiri (1960-​1980-​e gg.)” [Urbanization through Samostroy: Slums in oil-​ producing regions of Soviet Siberia in the 1960s to the 1980s], Sibirskie Istoricheskie Issledovaniia [Siberian historical researches], no. 2 (2017): 80–​99 30. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 24. 31. Viktor G. Miller, “Die Stadt Sajansk -​Besonderheiten der Planung, Entwicklung und ihre Perspektiven,” in Die Zukunft der Blauen Städte Sibiriens (Cottbus: BTU Cottbus 2001), 164. 32. Nevzgodin, Sovetskii Neoklassitsizm, 230. 33. Michael Schwirtz, “For Russia’s Migrants, Economic Despair Douses Flickers of Hope,” The New York Times February 9, 2009, http://​www.nyti​mes.com/​2009/​02/​10/​world/​eur​ ope/​10m​igra​nts.html; and Paul Goble, “Moscow’s Muslim Slums Now Breeding Grounds for Despair,” The Moscow Times, February 23, 2010, https://​www.the​mosc​owti​mes.com/​ 2010/​02/​23/​mosc​ows-​mus​lim-​slums-​now-​breed​ing-​grou​nds-​for-​desp​air-​a35​091 34. Alexey Krasheninnikov, “Urban Slums Reports: The Case of Moscow, Russia,” in Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements (London: Development Planning Unit, University College London, 2003), 8–​12. 35. Adel R. Valeev, “Realizatsiia Programmy Likvidattsii Vethogo Zhil’ia v Respublike Tatarstan v 1995–​ 2004 godah” [The realization of the program of dismantling of slum dwellings in the Republic of Tatarstan in 1995–​2004], Vestnik TGGPU 22, no. 4 (2010): 10–​14.

Slums and Communism    371

Bibliography Andrusz, Gregory. Housing and Urban Development in the USSR. London: Macmillan, 1984. Andrusz, Gregory, Michael Harloe, and Iván Szelényi. Cities after Socialism: Urban and Regional Change and Conflict in Post-​Socialist Societies. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Bodenschatz, Harald, Christiane Post, Uwe Altrock, and Benjamin Braun, eds. Städtebau im Schatten Stalins: die Internationale Suche nach der Sozialistischen Stadt in der Sowjetunion 1929–​1935. Berlin: Braun, 2003. Brumfield, William Craft, and Blair A. Ruble, eds. Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History. Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993. Czaplicka, John, Nida Gelazis, and Blair A. Ruble, eds. Cities After the Fall of Communism: Reshaping Cultural Landscapes and European Identity. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. Field, Deborah A. Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Filtzer, Donald. The Hazards of Urban Life in Late Stalinist Russia: Health, Hygiene, and Living Standards, 1943–​1953. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Filtzer, Donald. “Standard of Living versus Quality of Life: Struggling with the Urban Environment in Russia during the Early Years of Post-​War Reconstruction.” In Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, edited by Juliane Fürst, 81–​102. London: Routledge, 2006. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Postwar Soviet Society: The ‘Return to Normalcy,’ 1945–​1953.” In The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, edited by Susan J. Linz, 129–​155. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985. French, R. A. Plans, Pragmatism & People: The Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today’s Cities. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995. French, R. A., and F. E. I. Hamilton. The Socialist City: Spatial Structure and Urban Policy. Chichester: Wiley, 1979. Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Krasheninnikov, Alexey. “Urban Slums Reports: The Case of Moscow, Russia.” In Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements, 1–​24. London: Development Planning Unit, University College London, 2003. http://​www.ucl. ac.uk/​dpu-​proje​cts/​Global​_​Rep​ort/​pdfs/​Mos​cow.pdf. Kreis, Barbara. “The Idea of the Dom-​Kommuna and the Dilemma of the Soviet Avant-​Garde.” Oppositions 21 (Summer 1980): 53–​77. Kreis, Barbara. Moskau 1917–​35 Vom Wohnungsbau zum Städtebau. Düsseldorf: Edition Marzona, 1985. Makaš, Emily Gunzburger, and Tanja Damljanović Conley, eds. Capital Cities in the Aftermath of Empires: Planning in Central and Southeastern Europe. 1985. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Manley, Rebecca. “Where Should We Resettle the Comrades Next? The Adjudication of Housing Claims and the Construction of the Post-​War Order.” In Late Stalinist Russia: Society between Reconstruction and Reinvention, edited by Juliane Fürst, 233–​246. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

372   IVAN NEVZGODIN Morton, Henry W., and Rudolf L. Tökés, eds. Soviet Politics and Society in the 1970s. New York: The Free Press, 1974. Nevzgodin, Ivan. “The Impact of the Trans-​Siberian Railway on Architecture and Urban Planning of Siberian Cities.” In The City and the Railway in Europe, edited by Ralf Roth and Marie-​Noëlle Polino, 79–​103. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pryde, P. R. “The Post Soviet Environment.” In Geography and Transition in the Post-​Soviet Republics, edited by Michael J. Bradshaw, 129–​144. West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel (1942). Reprint, enlarged ed. prepared by Stephen Kotkin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Sosnovy, Timothy. “Town Planning and Housing.” Survey, no. 38 (October1961): 170–​178. Stanilov, Kiril, ed. The Post-​Socialist City: Urban Form and Space Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe after Socialism. Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Zubkova, Elena. Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–​1957. Translated and edited by Hugh Ragsdale. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998.

CHAPTER 20

NGO REPRESEN TAT I ON OF INF ORMAL SET T L E ME NTS The Case of Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI) MARIE HUCHZERMEYER

Informal settlements are a ubiquitous though complex and varied phenomenon across towns and cities of the Global South. Since the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, they have received collective global attention, with efforts to commit member states to measures that acknowledge the limited reach of state and private-​sector housing delivery models. Participants in local and global agenda-​setting forums have put forward a variety of approaches. As participants in such forums, non-​governmental organizations (NGOs) have taken on a representative role. Among the best known of these organizations is Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI). It is an international NGO that, since 2000, has sought to directly represent informal settlement dwellers in national and global deliberations. Through donor-​facilitated travel SDI was able to exert influence in these deliberations. However, in 2019 systems and forensic audits by SDI’s main international funder raised serious systemic governance weaknesses1 that led to a drastic reduction in SDI’s international funding and necessitated review and restructuring within the organization. The covid-​19 pandemic declared in March of the following year also shifted modes of international representation. An extensive literature exists on SDI. The published narrative by SDI’s staff and close associates has been a dominant, useful but also often unquestioned reference in this body of literature. Published studies by SDI and others have focused on one or more of SDI’s national affiliates and their work at the grassroots level, including transnational exchanges. Little has been written on SDI’s approach as an international network and NGO, and as representing the voice of the urban poor globally, a claim that SDI made in its branding and official communications up to 2019.

374   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER It is therefore important to re-​examine SDI as a whole, including its work at the global level with organizations such as Cities Alliance and UN-​Habitat, in the period in which it enjoyed extensive international funding support. This re-​examination involved reviewing published literature selected for its contribution to understanding the international and global dimension of SDI’s work. It analyzed grey literature, including annual reports and website content as well as interviews with key individuals in global agencies that worked with SDI, and with key coordinators within the organization. These interviews were mostly conducted around UN-​Habitat’s ninth World Urban Forum in February 2018, in which SDI participated with over eighty delegates in collaboration with its global partner institutions.2

The Formation, Expansion, and Regional Footprint of SDI SDI’s history dates back to the mid-​1990s, when it emerged as a result of various influences and historical confluences, including the much-​anticipated dawn of democratic rule in South Africa. It formed out of preexisting networks, in particular the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), which was established in 1988 to take on coordination for Habitat International Coalition (HIC) in the Asian region.3 HIC in turn is a global network mainly of NGOs and social movements with roots in the shelter and urban land debates surrounding the UN’s first Habitat Conference in 1976; at the time, it included the prominent self-​help housing proponent John Turner.4 Both ACHR and HIC exist to date alongside SDI, but the former’s relationship with HIC waned over time; SDI refers to it as tenuous, both ACHR and SDI interacting with HIC through the Geneva-​based NGO UrbaMonde rather than as affiliates.5 Progressive Catholic–​ inspired approaches were central to ACHR and later SDI, and included transnational dialogues and community-​to-​community exchanges as a means to empower the grassroots.6 Catholic aid funded these activities. In the early 1990s, Catholic development networks invited a few South Africans to participate in exchanges and dialogues within ACHR, followed by dialogues in and exchange visits to South Africa, and subsequently other Sub-​Saharan African countries.7 Through these exchanges, participants debated and embraced non-​confrontational approaches of self-​reliance through grassroots savings, self-​representation by means of data collection, and partnership building. Key to this orientation was an alliance of three organizations in Mumbai (India), which participated in early exchange visits to South Africa: Mahila Milan, an organization of women pavement dwellers; the NGO Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), which helped organize pavement dwellers into Mahila Milan and provides ongoing support; and the National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), which worked closely with SPARC, in particular through NSDF’s charismatic and influential leader Jokin Arputham.8 Both NSDF and SPARC

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    375 supported Mahila Milan in developing savings and credit schemes. These centered on self-​reliance, the women in Mahila Milan having learnt to resist eviction threats through passive means that put forward bottom-​up alternatives. Eviction threats across India in the 1970s had also led to the formation of NSDF, which in turn sought to learn savings methodologies from Mahila Milan.9 Through interaction with the pavement dwellers, NSDF leader Arputham was sensitized to categories of urban poor more vulnerable than the NSDF constituency, and became aware of the need to include their voices and needs.10 In the early 1990s, the transcontinental exchanges sparked the formation in South Africa of a support organization called People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter and a grassroots organization built around savings schemes, the South African Homeless People’s Federation. Exchanges at the time were primarily between India and South Africa, though also including other African and Asian countries. NSDF leader Arputham put forward the idea of a transnational network of grassroots organizations of the urban poor and their dedicated support NGOs, as a counterpart to ACHR, which, at its inception, consisted mainly of NGOs, though today actively engaging networks of community organizations.11 This led to the creation of Slum Dwellers International or SDI in 1996, which was formalized under this name in 2000. Two aspects were central to Arputham’s idea. One was that through SDI, vulnerable groups were not only to be included but also to have voice and identity.12 The other was that SDI should adopt the grassroots organizing methodology of horizontally federated savings collectives, to the point of this approach becoming non-​negotiable. In an essay about the Indian Alliance and SDI, cultural anthropologist Appadurai observed that Arputham “sees daily savings as the bedrock of all federation activities; indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that in Jokin’s organizational exhortations wherever he goes, federation equals savings.”13 Since the formation of SDI, and until his unexpected passing in October 2018, Arputham maintained the position of the organization’s president.14 In contrast to SDI, ACHR and HIC continued in a plural form, in that they were open to different types of member organizations and methodologies. Unlike SDI, HIC committed to democratic governing principles in its regional and international structures. This includes regular elections for its regional and international leadership positions, including president. HIC and ACHR brought together like-​minded people or “stakeholders” from different organizational types spanning NGOs, academic institutions, social movements, and progressive government entities where these existed; they facilitated dialogue across different approaches to the shared concern for land and housing rights violations.15 HIC has also worked closely with the Global Platform for the Right to the City, which promotes advances in urban inclusion largely through legal and policy reform and campaigns against evictions. HIC is therefore associated with the embrace of “rights-​based” approaches. Up to the early 2000s SDI actively participated in HIC, hosting HIC’s secretariat with support from SDI’s country affiliate in Cape Town for a short period in 2000.16 However, SDI’s approach, which Patel and Mitlin portray as distinct from “rights-​based” work, had little in common with many others within HIC, this contributing to a distance between the organizations.17

376   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER SDI maintained a close working relationship with ACHR, sharing certain methodologies, in particular grassroots savings and credit schemes.18 However, as Astrid Ley, Josefine Fokdal, and Peter Herrle have pointed out, ACHR differed from SDI in that it “separated savings collectives from community-​based organizing/​political mobilization.”19 A founding member of SDI, Celine D’Cruz, speaking in her personal capacity, recalls that savings did not take off in Asia as they did in South Africa and in several other African countries, where they flourished in the way envisaged by the SDI president.20 SDI became known as a largely unitary network in the uniformity of the organizations it incorporated. The member organizations replicated a particular approach combining savings federations with rotating credit schemes, community-​to-​community exchanges, enumerations (self-​collection of household and community data), modeling, self-​construction and self-​management of housing, the establishment of dedicated externally resourced funds, partnership-​building, and a stance that avoided confrontation with governments.21 Bolnick talks of this set of approaches as an “orthodoxy,” though not uncontested within the network, and practiced in different ways by its strongest proponents, namely the SDI affiliates in India, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.22 Through the orthodox approach of organizing through federated grassroots savings groups, SDI undertook to represent pragmatic shack dwellers, rather than those organizing to hold their governments or other violators to account. There have been exceptions within SDI, although these are not emphasized in SDI’s representations at the global level. As the network expanded it also opened gradually and somewhat ambiguously to embrace other organizational forms, and in the case of Nigeria an NGO that, in its online profile, is overtly rights-​based. Bolnick speaks of an “increasing engagement of like-​minded organizations who nevertheless use different approaches.”23 SDI’s partnership-​ building between shack dwellers and governments has not excluded repressive regimes. Post-​1999, when Zimbabwe’s government enjoyed little or no legitimacy among urban citizens, SDI’s Zimbabwean affiliates found they could achieve gains for savings scheme members through both conflict and pragmatism. This involved alliances with key individuals and entities of the Zimbabwean government, even if their philosophies or approaches were “at odds.”24 In SDI’s partnerships with more legitimate governments, situations have arisen where SDI deemed certain interventions inevitable, even if it would have advocated for a different approach. In such cases, SDI has understood the partnership as an opportunity to shape (rather than oppose) such interventions. Thus SDI has come to be known (and drew concerned attention from researchers) for brokering and facilitating relocation of informal settlements or attempting to do so, rather than insisting on less disruptive land regularization and in situ upgrading, for instance in Mumbai, Nairobi, Cape Town, and Accra.25 The partnership building aspect of SDI’s orthodoxy led to the organization’s entry into global policy forums. In 2000, prominent former South African housing official in national and local government, Billy Cobbett, who had come to know SDI in that capacity through its partnership-​building, had moved to the then UN Human Settlements Programme (UNCHS [Habitat]) to lead the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure.

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    377 Cobbett invited SDI to partner with this campaign.26 With its leader, the campaign subsequently relocated to the newly formed Cities Alliance, a “coalition of cities and their development partners, committed to address urban poverty reduction as a global public policy issue,” hosted by the World Bank.27 SDI and Cities Alliance entered into a longstanding mutually beneficial relationship. SDI and its affiliates have used their position in global organizations such as Cities Alliance consistently to build relationships and broker deals with key representatives of their own governments. As Cobbett explains, “Cities Alliance was a space they could use and exploit for themselves.”28 SDI maintains the relatively unitary nature of its structures through its governance system. This involves democratic election of leaders at the local level with some latitude for country-​level federations to decide on exact procedures and terms, but careful selection, mentoring, and appointment of leaders for regional, national, and international leadership and representative roles, based on qualities and track record.29 Donor funding allowed remuneration of these appointees,30 meaning that SDI did not escape questions about self-​perpetuation by its remunerated “grassroots” decision-​makers. SDI’s 2016 Annual Report explains grassroots involvement in its governance as follows: “SDI has a core team of community leadership with considerable experience in governing the global movement. These leaders have prioritised the mentorship of a cohort of second-​tier leadership at the national level. National leaders, in turn, are actively engaged in the mentorship of a selection of regional and city leaders.”31 The “core team” in 2018 was composed of national leaders from twelve country-​level “alliances” that are deemed “mature” (see Table 20.1). These alliances continue to consist of a national federation of grassroots savings schemes and a “small professional secretariat” in the form of an NGO.32 The “core team” of national leaders of the mature alliances make up the “Council of Federations,” SDI’s central governing body, and are also represented on its board.33 Other governance structures are the “professional secretariat” and a “federation-​led Management Committee.”34 “Emerging” SDI affiliates in a further eleven countries practice aspects of SDI’s approach but have not fully aligned themselves, or have dropped from SDI’s management and decision-​making structures as they no longer meet key criteria. Until his passing, SDI’s President Arputham, though less active in the years leading up to 2018 due to his age, maintained control over key decisions in SDI, but Coordinator Rose Molokoane (founding member of SDI and national leader for South Africa’s federations) became the most prominent global voice and public speaker for grassroots within SDI. Among SDI’s professional staff, Joel Bolnick (based in Cape Town, resigning from the organization in 2019 at the time of the forensic audit) and Sheela Patel (based in Mumbai) played leading roles in the NGO since inception, reinforcing the India–​South Africa axis within SDI. Anglophone Sub-​Saharan Africa undoubtedly forms the bedrock of SDI, in terms of the organization’s reach. Ten of the twelve “mature” alliances and seven of the eleven “emerging” alliances were in this region in 2018 (see Table 20.2). On the Asian continent, the organization’s two “mature” alliances were in India and the Philippines, these also being members of SDI’s collaborator ACHR. Several erstwhile Asian affiliates of SDI now linked to it through ACHR and were no longer on SDI’s governance structures.35

SDI Netherlands (The Hague) (2008)

Inqolobane Trust (a subsidiary of SDI) (Cape Town) (2015)

Federation

South African Homeless People’s Federation –​ SAHPF (1994–​2006)1 Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor –​FEDUP (2005)

Shack Dwellers Federation of Namibia –​ SDFN (1998)5

Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation –​ZIHOPFE (1997/​1998)

Zambia Homeless People’s Federation –​ZHP (2000)

Malawi Homeless People’s Federation (2003)

Tanzanian Urban Poor Federation (TUPF) (2004)

Muungano wa Wanavijiji (1996, joined SDI 2001)

National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda –​ NSDFU (2002)

Nigeria Slum/​Informal Settlement Federation –​Naija Federation

Country

South Africa

Namibia

Zimbabwe

Zambia

Malawi

Tanzania

Kenya

Uganda

Nigeria

2

Urban Poor Fund (1999), Twahangana Fund

uTshani Fund (1995)3 Informal Settlement Network –​ISN (2009)4

Funds /​other affiliates

Justice and Empowerment Initiatives –​JEI

Act Together (first mentioned 2006)

Pamoja Trust (2000, joined SDI 2001, exited SDI 2009)6 Muungano Support Trust –​MuST (2010–​2015) SDI Kenya (2016)

Centre for Community Initiatives –​CCI (2004)

Centre for Community Organisation and Development –​CCODE (2003)

People’s Process on Housing and Poverty

Akiba Mashinani Trust –​AMT (2003)

Informal Settlement Network –​ISN

Dialogue on Shelter for the Homeless in Zimbabwe Trust Gungano Fund (1999) (1997)

Namibia Housing Action Group –​NHAG (1992), affiliated to SDI in 1998.

People’s Dialogue –​PD (1991–​2006) Community Organisation Resource Centre –​CORC (2002)

NGO support organization

Ten “mature” SDI-​affiliated alliances in Africa (with date of formation where available)

Netherlands

SDI secretariat office (Cape Town) (1996)

South Africa

Urban Poor Fund International –​UPFI (a subsidiary of SDI) (Cape Town) (2007)

Component

Country

SDI Secretariat (with date formed)

Table 20.1 SDI’s Secretariat and “Mature” Affiliates as of 2018

Savings groups (2003), Ghana Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor –​GHAFUP (2004)

People’s Dialogue on Human Settlements Ghana –​PD (2003)

Homeless People’s Federation Philippines Inc. –​HPFPI Initial NGO support from Vincentian Missionaries Social Urban Poor Fund for Disaster Relief (2008 (formed between 1996 and 2000) Development Fund Inc. –​VMSDFI remained informal) Philippine Action for Community-​led Shelter Initiatives, Urban Poor Development Fund (1999) Inc –​PACSII (2002)

6 Pamoja Trust continues to exist outside of SDI, and Muungano continues to work with it.

5 Formerly Saamstaan, a housing cooperative founded in 1987, changing its name when it adopted SDI’s savings approach and joined SDI as an affiliated federation.

4 ISN had a forerunner in a network called CUP.

Governance: Interfaces between Local Government and Civil Society Organisations in Cape Town, South Africa [Münster: Lit Verlag, 2009]) and iKhayalami (Noah Schermbrucker, Scheela Patel, and Nico Keijzer, “A View from Below: What Shack Dwellers International [SDI] Has Learnt from Its Urban Poor Fund International [UPFI],” International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development 8, no. 1 [2016]: 83–​91).

3 Other organizations mentioned as affiliated to SDI in the course of the South African Alliance’s history are People’s Environmental Planning (PEP; Astrid Ley, Housing as

2 People’s Dialogue disbanded in 2006.

1 The South African Homeless People’s Federation split from SDI in 2006 and continues to exist autonomously.

Source: Author’s own construction from literature cited in this chapter and from comments made by Bolnick (personal communication).

Community-​Led Infrastructure Finance Facility (CLIFF) Nirman

Philippines

Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres –​SPARC (1985)

National Slum Dwellers Federation –​NSDF (late 1970s) Mahila Milan (1986)

Funds/​other affiliates

India

NGO support organization

Federation

Country

Two “mature” SDI-​affiliated alliances in Asia (with date of formation where available)

Ghana

Federation (1999)

Slum Dwellers Association of Liberia –​ Slumdal Replaced by Federation of Liberian Urban Poor Savers (FOLUPS) (2014)

Senegalese Federation of Inhabitants –​FSH (formed in 2014, affiliated to SDI in 2015)

Botswana Homeless and Poor People’s Federation (BHPPF)7

Savings Groups (2007); Federation of Rural and Urban Poor –​FEDURP (2011)8

Savings groups (2012)

Savings groups (1998)

Federation

Swaziland

Liberia

Senegal

Botswana

Sierra Leone

Burkina Faso Federation

Lesotho

Togo

YMCA Togo

Laboratoire Citoyeentés

Centre of Dialogue on Human Settlement and Poverty Alleviation –​CODOHSAPA (2011)

urbaSen (2009)

YMCA (Working with Cities Alliance and SDI since 2016)

NGO support organization

Supported by the South African federation

SDI signed an Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with City of Monrovia (2009)

Supported from South Africa by PD, later CORC

Other linkage or affiliation

Federation

Women’s Bank Development Federation (1999)9

Savings schemes (2009) “Bolivian Federation” (first mentioned 2013)

Country

Sri Lanka

Bolivia

Red de Acción Comunitaria

Janarakula

10

NGO support organization

Federation supported by SDI affiliates in India.

Other linkage or affiliation

Three “emerging” SDI-​affiliated federations outside of Africa (with date of formation where available)

Federation

Country

Eight “emerging” SDI-​affiliated country level alliances in Africa (one of these Francophone) (with date of formation where available)

Table 20.2 SDI’s Emerging Affiliates as of 2018

Initially (mentioned in 1996) savings groups in Fortaleza, supported by Cearah Periferia

Interação: Rede Internacional de Ação Communitária (2004)11

SDI made contact with Brazil's governmentand social movements (2003); MoU between SDI and Br gov. (2006); Santo Andre Santo Andre Municipality & eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality (Durban) signed MoU, Durban Metro Mun signed MoU (2006)

11 Had representation on SDI’s council because it gave Latin America a presence on the SDI structures, but this decision was reversed by the council in 2012.

10 Currently dormant.

9 Dormant, revived in 2015 and considered “mature,” but reverted to “emerging.”

8 FEDURP was categorized as “mature” but reverted to “emerging.”

in 2018.

7 SDI’s management committee motivated for BHPPS’s inclusion SDI’s board of governors in 2016. This did not carry at council level (2017). This was to be reviewed

Source: Author’s own construction from literature cited in this chapter and from comments made by Bolnick (personal communication).

Brazil

382   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER In Latin America, SDI’s presence was in the “emerging” category. SDI provided little information about its federation in Bolivia and its affiliates in Brazil. In SDI’s 2016 and 2017 annual reports, which are structured according to “regional hubs,” it is evident how much deeper and richer SDI’s work is in the Southern, Eastern and Western African regional hubs, and in Asia where it overlaps with ACHR.36 In sub-​Saharan Africa, SDI expanded in various ways. Its pragmatism found fertile ground in countries with governments willing to partner effectively with grassroots federations. To SDI’s erstwhile global partners, the savings group federations in Namibia and Uganda stood out as relative success stories.37 However, in SDI’s view, its federations in Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Nigeria were the “most active and effective,” despite governments in these countries not being pro-​poor.38 The federations in Zimbabwe and Uganda emerged through transnational community-​to-​community exchanges. In Namibia and Kenya, preexisting grassroots movements transformed into SDI-​affiliated savings group federations. With the gradual opening of SDI to greater diversity of organizational forms, SDI encouraged interested NGOs to provide support to newly forming savings groups; examples are the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) in Liberia and other urban NGOs in Sierra Leone and Senegal. SDI also responded to existing organizations that expressed interest in joining it, “by offering to expose community groups to SDI methodologies without requiring organizational alignment or affiliation.”39 Another expansion modality was that SDI’s secretariat collaborated with close contacts in, for instance, the Africa Regional Office of UN-​Habitat, to “look for a good location [to] set something up.”40 In Burkina Faso, UN-​Habitat’s country program was able to include a component on which SDI served as advisor, facilitating “peer to peer . . . exchanges of experience” around savings and enumerations with SDI affiliates in other African countries.41 The new savings groups that resulted continued to operate.42 However, language as well as the non-​Anglophone urban legal and regulatory system proved difficult for SDI to navigate.43

Shifts in the Representational Strategy Within SDI SDI mentions a change in approach around 2008, the timeline on its website stating “SDI makes a major shift to informal settlement upgrading and incremental housing.”44 Bolnick refers to this as a “tipping point,” with the SDI affiliates in South Africa, due to difficulties in securing housing subsidies, turning their main focus to incremental water, sanitation, and drainage improvements, which affiliates in many other countries had long prioritized.45 He sees it as coincidental that this followed SDI’s application in 2007 for formal membership of Cities Alliance.46 Under its founding slogan “Cities Without Slums,” Cities Alliance is tasked with promoting city-​wide slum upgrading. Cities Alliance understood the significance of its granting of membership to SDI in

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    383 2008, less in terms of SDI’s role in slum upgrading but rather in terms of its own relevance and legitimacy. For Cities Alliance, SDI “represented or purported to represent” Cities Alliance’s “real target,” namely the urban poor.47 This “big shift”48 and “historic step” by Cities Alliance49 changed the composition of Cities Alliance and with it its deliberations. However, Cities Alliance’s latitude opened more significantly with its move in 2013 out of the World Bank to become part of the UN Office for Project Service (UNOPS), the World Bank remaining available to Cities Alliance as funder and implementing partner.50 In effect, SDI became closely intertwined with Cities Alliance and other global agencies, SDI sitting on their advisory bodies and vice versa, each seeking to influence the other, and to some extent succeeding. SDI’s annual report of 2012 mentions “formal relationships” with Cities Alliance, the World Bank, United Cities and Local Government (UCLG), and “a number of important bi-​lateral agencies.”51 It observes that SDI “may be unique amongst international social movements insofar as it not only serves on the governance structures of some of these institutions but has representation from them, at Ministerial and Executive Director level on its own advisory boards.”52 A representative from SDI served on the advisory board of UN-​Habitat’s Slum Upgrading Facility.53 UN-​Habitat’s executive director served on the advisory board of SDI’s Urban Poor Fund International (UPFI), which formed part of SDI’s secretariat. Ministers from India, Sri Lanka, Uganda, and Norway served on this board, and in 2018 it included ministerial or higher level representatives from South Africa, Namibia, Sweden, and Brazil.54 At the time of research in 2018, SDI was merging this board with the Urban Poor Fund International facilitators from SDI’s Federations, in order to create one board that would consist of community members and professionals. This change meant that whereas it was expected that some ministers would still serve on the board, most would nominate experts from the urban development field in their countries.55 In South Africa, SDI’s shift from self-​help housing to incremental upgrading saw a prioritization of communal sanitation in informal settlements, which in many settlements required “re-​blocking” to provide the necessary space. Re-​blocking was already promoted within ACHR at the time.56 Walter Fieuw and Diana Mitlin review six of roughly nine re-​blocking projects SDI has facilitated in South Africa, only one having secured administrative recognition of the land occupation.57 The others nevertheless remained put despite “being earmarked for relocation.”58 As Fieuw and Mitlin acknowledge, the route to formal legal tenure security is not through re-​blocking but through the statutory Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme (UISP), which the state adopted in 2004 but which has had uneven support from the South African state.59 In the analysis in Huchzermeyer,60 if SDI had championed UISP implementation, it could have speeded up the process toward permanent occupational rights through in situ upgrading; however, it left this task to “rights-​based” movements or coalitions. Similarly in Ananya Roy’s analysis of SDI’s informal settlement work in Mumbai, sanitation took priority over securing formal land tenure.61 SDI’s shift in 2008 responded in South Africa to a weakening of SDI’s methodological and representational hold through the approaches it espoused up to that point.

384   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER The South African Federation, which is said to have peaked at a membership of eighty thousand,62 had experienced a decline, with only in the order of forty thousand actively saving individuals in federations across seven hundred settlements in 2007.63 This coincided with a “steady decline” in SDI’s “shining characteristics,” namely “savings, collective action and self-​reliance,” in turn the result of the “governance approach of a paternalistic state.”64 The organization’s inability to significantly influence policy became evident in South Africa and was due to its partial and declining representation of informal settlements through membership in its savings schemes. At this stage SDI had already begun building a new type of grassroots affiliate, the Informal Settlement Network (ISN), “an agglomeration of settlement-​level and nationwide community-​ based leadership structures” across several towns and cities in South Africa.65 As Fieuw and Mitlin put it, there was a “shift in the Alliance’s strategy towards broad-​based social movements to supplement the membership-​based FEDUP [Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor].”66 According to Bolnick, this had a precedent in aspects of the NSDF in India.67 An ISN was also formed in Malawi,68 although in late 2018 an anonymous board member of the SDI-​affiliated support NGO in Malawi had no knowledge of this.69 The Kenyan and Nigerian grassroots affiliates are understood by SDI as “a hybrid between a savings network and a network of neighbourhood-​based organizations.”70 A key activity that SDI has driven through ISN in South Africa is city-​wide profiling of informal settlements, including those without SDI-​affiliated savings schemes. However, setting up savings schemes where possible was also one reason, though not a precondition, for SDI to invest in building the ISN.71 Although a founder and key leader of the South African savings group federation FEDUP was appointed to coordinate and represent ISN nationally, tension arose between the two structures.72 Bolnick sees this as being rooted in part in the “accountability, proof of participation and transparency in leadership selection” that the Federation and supporting NGO demanded and that it found to sit at odds with established practice in many settlements represented in the ISN.73 Here SDI elevated its own system of appointed and mentored grassroots leadership over a range of self-​organized approaches. SDI and its affiliates since inception are associated with a distancing from “rights-​ based” approaches, which SDI frames as unhelpful claim-​making through protest action and the use of courts.74 Some ambiguity emerged as SDI in South Africa built ISN. Fieuw and Mitlin mention that in 2012 and 2014 “ISN organised large scale . . . protest marches.”75 SDI’s global coordinator and South African federation leader Rose Molokoane explains that where communities resort to courts or protest, SDI and its affiliates do not prevent this; they may provide advice and information, but such “rights-​based” measures are not undertaken “under the auspices of SDI.”76 In this way, SDI sets itself apart from organizations, for instance within HIC, that publicly support such action where it is deemed necessary to hold violating states and other actors to account. However, this distinction is uneven and shifting across the SDI network. As already mentioned, SDI’s NGO affiliate in Nigeria claims on its website to be rights based. In Kenya, SDI’s grassroots affiliate works with both the orthodox SDI-​affiliated support organization and the more diverse Pamoja Trust, which joined HIC, cohosting its 2017 annual general meeting. Bolnick acknowledges that within SDI “the balance of

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    385 power is shifting towards countries like Nigeria and Kenya (more pluralist) and away from India and South Africa (orthodox).”77 This contradicted SDI’s representation at the global level, which continued to articulate non-​association with protest and court action, an approach with which global agencies, funders, and governments are comfortable. SDI’s 2017 annual report refers to savings schemes as the “building blocks” of SDI.78 Thus, while the ISN approach exists within SDI, it remained an orphan in SDI’s representations at the global level where ISN is seldom mentioned.79 A different form of representation within SDI, which funders and global agencies were embracing and promoting, is by means of data. The 2013–​2017 Strategic Plan promoted mobilization across SDI, not through settlement networks, but in the form of “community profiling, mapping and surveying.”80 This elevated standardized data as a less directly mandated form of representation within SDI, one of making “ ‘visible’ the invisible communities,” particularly to the global level.81 SDI’s President Aprutham highlighted the persuasive power of numbers of standardized data and the importance of this for SDI’s global influence: We need one SDI questionnaire, so we can use the information globally. We want to understand what the magnitude of our power is. We want to make different cases to different audiences. We want to collaborate with all the actors speaking about land, housing, infrastructure, all the people speaking about the urban poor . . . [W]‌e want to have a voice at these forums.82

SDI’s 2013 Annual Report focusses on city-​wide data collection through the Know Your City Campaign, launched that year with support from Cities Alliance, UCLG-​A [United Cities and Local Government—​Africa], UN-​Habitat, “and others.”83 Know Your City (or KYC) built on and refined SDI’s erstwhile low-​technology approach to enumeration and settlement profiling.84 In Uganda, KYC activities in collaboration with Cities Alliance and UCLG-​A allowed for the expansion of savings schemes to additional cities,85 thus serving representational as well as mobilization, recruitment, or expansion agendas. As Bolnick notes, “profiling and enumeration are as much about information gathering as they are about mobilisation.”86 SDI’s unsolicited city-​wide and global “slum” data-​collection has not been subjected to academic analysis. The possible dangers of visibility to unsupportive authorities is one dimension that will require scrutiny, particularly should the funding flow from donors open toward this form of representation.

SDI’s Structure as an International NGO SDI is a formally constituted international NGO with a professional secretariat that provides financial and logistical support to a network of country-​level professional NGOs. SDI’s secretariat is based in Cape Town but has an office in the Netherlands

386   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER termed “SDI Netherlands,” not to be confused with “SDI Kenya,” which is a recently re-​ constituted professional country-​level affiliate. SDI Netherlands, led by a former staff member of SDI’s early funder CORDAID, provides proximity to European funders. As Bolnick explains: The main reason for SDI Netherlands is to try to manage international hard and soft currency challenges. A proportion of SDI’s annual grants from northern agencies are held in a hard currency bank account in The Hague until they are drawn down by the various affiliates. While SDI’s foreign currency regulations have become less stringent it remains more efficient to operate a hard currency account in the Netherlands.87

SDI’s annual reports up to 2019 disclose funding largely from the Global North. From 2014 to 2017, government-​funded agencies in Norway and Sweden contributed the largest proportions.88 More diverse government funding, though still largely from the Global North, is through Cities Alliance, SDI’s second largest contributor in the 2016–​2017 financial year. Prominent private foundations are Skoll and Ford, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation winding down its substantial support in 2016. SDI’s earliest funders were Dutch and German Catholic aid organizations CORDAID and Misereor. Like other NGOs based in the Global South but funded by agencies in the North, SDI does not identify itself as a northern NGO. SDI’s main base is in South Africa, its roots in India and Asia, and its activities in countries of the Global South. However, its strongest academic links are two influential UK academics, Diana Mitlin (University of Manchester and International Institute for Environment and Development [IIED]) and David Satterthwaite (IIED and main editor of the academic and development journal Environment and Urbanization). Their writing has persistently represented SDI’s orthodoxy as unquestionable to the Anglo-​American and Anglophone academic and professional world.89

International NGOs and Global Representation: What is at Stake? Any organization wishing to represent a defined constituency must build credibility and legitimacy in order to be taken seriously in such endeavors. SDI has done so over more than two decades by presenting a track record in its annual reports, website, newsletters, and academic portrayals. However, legitimacy in advocacy, as Lister notes, requires representativeness.90 Democratic standards for representation in international NGO legitimacy may be derived through one or more of the following: the “claim to speak for an entire class of actors”; democratic processes; and the claim to speak on behalf of “selected stakeholders,” usually members.91 In its orthodox approach, SDI is membership based through grassroots savings collectives. Its democratic procedure is not in the

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    387 form of elections by its grassroots to the global level, but rather through appointed representatives deemed accountable in passing a mandate from the grassroots upward, but also tasked with ensuring adherence to the orthodoxy. Since 2017 SDI professed to represent the entire global body of urban poor. Its 2017 annual report and staff business cards in 2018 claim “[t]‌he global voice of the urban poor.” Molokoane is adamant that “our organization is a global organization.”92 SDI underlined this through the growing number of countries in which it alleged to have affiliates. From within SDI and its academic partners, consistent claims were that its affiliated savings federations were in anything from “over thirty” to thirty-​nine countries globally.93 However, as Tables 20.1–​3 show, countries with mature and emerging affiliates within SDI added up to only twenty-​three, with a further three affiliated through the ACHR. Professionals within or close to SDI, overstating its global reach by 30 to 70 percent, may be caught in the enthusiasm for global recognition of SDI. This may also explain the ease with which mere “expressions of interest” from within new countries were loosely added to the number of countries in which SDI claimed to have affiliates; Bolnick notes that such approaches from new countries “are not infrequent,” adding that SDI’s professional secretariat “tried to dissuade aggressive expansion.”94 For representational purposes, accurately citing the number of countries in which SDI is active, even if closer to twenty than to thirty (as it finally does in its 2020 Annual report published on sdinet.org in 2022), should not detract from its credibility or reputation at the global level. The organization relies on data at various levels for the representation of needs of the urban poor. Thus data and its integrity at all levels could be added as a technical standard of legitimacy in Pallas, Gethings, and Harris’s categories of legitimacy standards for international NGOs. At the global level, distance from the grassroots limits scrutiny of integrity in representation.95 This opens up space for simplification, exaggeration, and misrepresentation. Pallas, Gethings, and Harris point out that as global agencies’ and forums’ own legitimacy depends on their being seen as inclusive and relevant, they rely on international NGOs to assist with democratizing global governance, in particular by representing the voice of the poor.96 This too may be exploited in NGOs’ representational approach, particularly where this eases the flow of funding on which these NGOs depend. Most NGOs use several ways to claim or ensure legitimacy.97 Technical standards through which NGOs derive the recognized right to represent include claims of effectiveness or achievement as well as expertise.98 In this respect, since its initial inception in 1996 and as it consolidated its global role, SDI underwent a noticeable professionalization of its look, feel, and messaging through its own and its affiliates’ branding, websites, and communication. The almost trademark “anti-​expert” position of SDI’s staff has retreated, as have grassroots tactics of making themselves heard by frequently disrupting global events with traditional song and dance.99 Instead, federation leaders speak globally through a carefully crafted grassroots discourse that signals familiarity with professional terms, but affords itself a charming directness that is not permissible in professional presentations. Molokoane herself, occasional anti-​intellectual utterances

National Federation of Squatter Communities; National Federation of Women’s Savings Collectives. NGO: Lumanti

Urban Poor Development Fund, now the Cambodia Development Fund (1996) and Community Savings Network of Cambodia

Community Organisation Development Initiative (CODI) (2000) Capital fund (2000)

Nepal

Cambodia

Thailand

Orangi Pilot Project

Pakistan

In Asia SDI and ACHR run the regional hub together, specifically holding at least one planning meeting per year. Funding and technical support comes from the secretariat of both networks.

12

Source: Author’s own construction from literature cited in this chapter and from comments made by Bolnick (personal communication).

Visits from SDI and efforts from one of SDI’s global partners

Savings groups in Southern Angola, supported by the Namibia Federation

Iran

Savings collectives (2008)

Angola

Urban Poor Development Fund (UPDF) (2004) worked with indigenous communities forced into the city (Leticia) through urbanization and guerrilla war

Linkage

SDI made contact with City of Maputo (2011)

Federation (1999)

Colombia

Mozambique

Organization

Country

Four countries formerly linked to SDI or visited by SDI, but currently dormant or inactive

Key leaders have close ties to SDI and ACHR though not affiliated.

Connected through Peer Africa, which continues to engage the groups on a regular basis.

Active –​minimal support from SDI SDI mentions contact made with social movements (2002)

Savings schemes (2011)

Peru

Support from India and Philippines Federation

Savings groups (2009)

Savings groups and profiling in Jakarta (2018)

Indonesia

Exchanges to and from Kenya and South Africa resulting in solid waste groups in both countries.

Linkage

Haiti

Spirit of the Youth –​SOY (in Zabaleen)

Egypt

Argentina

Organization

Country

Six countries listed as having solidarity links with SDI or receiving minimal or no support from SDI (with date of formation where available)

Organization

Country

Three countries linked to SDI only through ACHR12

Table 20.3 Other Countries that SDI Includes in the List of “Over 30,” as of 2018

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    389 aside, is recognized within the global agencies for her considerable experience, capability, and expertise.100 Moral standards of legitimacy include the bases on which NGOs choose the social groups and political aims they represent, ensuring that these are the “right” ones.101 In Pallas Gethings, and Harris’s analysis, international NGOs therefore conform to particular “standards or beliefs” in order to “appear right.”102 Moral standards have implications for NGOs’ responsiveness and representation. In the intertwined case of SDI, this leads to a chicken-​or-​egg situation: To what extent has SDI’s consistent advocacy for a particular approach, in no small part through its academic production, influenced what global agencies consider “right,” and to what extent does SDI’s approach mirror what global agencies consider “right?” Lister uses institutional theory to introduce “symbols” into such debates, suggesting that terms such as “the South,” “local,” and “partners” are symbols that enhance legitimacy in particular of northern NGOs.103 However, Lister concludes that “institutional theory is vague about how such symbols are created and gain legitimacy.”104 In SDI’s own claims, it has agency to create such symbols at the global level, as well as an ongoing aspiration to lead the endeavor to define the right solution. In its twenty-​year Annual Report of 2016, it refers to itself as “a global social movement solving the world’s problems.”105 Further, its vision statement is “[t]‌o be the leading organisation in fighting global, urban poverty.”106 However, efforts to comply with moral standards, especially if these are selected so as to be shared by governments and global agency partners, can open up fault lines in NGOs’ representational practice. In the case of SDI this applies to the moral differentiation between actively saving, pragmatically partnership-​seeking individuals or groups, and those using protest and litigation.

Representation through the Terms “Slum” and “International” At the coining of its name, SDI was an emerging network. Initially it called itself “the International Federation of the Homeless Poor, otherwise known as International Slum Dweller’s Network.”107 In 2000, SDI registered as a nonprofit organization with the name “Slum Dwellers International.”108 Once adopted, the name remained flexible, with various versions in use: “Shack Dwellers International,” “Slum Dwellers International,” “Slum/​Shack Dwellers International,” or “Shack/​Slum Dwellers International.” SDI explained the need for this flexibility not in response to the longstanding negative loading of the term “slum.”109 Instead, more pragmatically, it argued that “slum” at the time was the more common term used in Asia and “shack” in Africa.110 As Bolnick recalls, “The term “slum” is widely used in Asia and one of the founder organizations, NSDF, has “slum” in its name. Leaders from other countries felt there was an important message in using the name to i) make a negative identity affirmative and ii) call a spade a spade.”111

390   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER However, with its rebranding in 2016, SDI shifted its communication to prioritize the acronym rather than the full name. Bolnick explains: “We are trying to drop the name Shack/​Slum Dwellers International and just refer to ourselves and hopefully become known as SDI. This is because i) the name is so unwieldy and ii) slum or shack and international is rather paradoxical –​especially to those who know nothing about us.”112 For most of its existence, SDI did not publicly discuss or question the term “international” in its name. Researchers have chosen to refer to SDI as “transnational” rather than “international” or “global.” The transnational nature of SDI’s work is the subject of several studies.113 However, Podlashuc notes SDI federations’ self-​conscious choice to refer to themselves as “Shack/​slum Dwellers International,” revitalizing the traditional counter-​hegemonic and socialist appellation of the “International.”114 Podlashuc sees in SDI’s collective savings praxis the possibility of the formation of a transnational class of its own, an “internationalisation” with “a self-​conscious common identity” that “approximates the Gramscian notion of a ‘moral-​intellectual bloc,’ ” which could be seen as “a precursor to the ‘historical bloc’ capable of revolution.”115 He therefore presents a radical, and possibly romanticized, reading of SDI’s grassroots structures as “functional cells of a new order, organised on a collective and transnational basis, prefiguring but never completing a globalised network that embraces the poor universally—​in an International of Slum Dwellers.”116 Qualifying this reading, Bolnick describes “international” as reflecting “the SA-​ [South Africa-​] India origins and the growing trans-​national footprint” as savings schemes had “jumped borders” and were being set up in neighboring countries in particular.117 On the suggestion of a link between the acronym SDI and those such as SI (Situationist International), Bolnick explains there was no more than “a secret wink to the Situationists, a kind of inside joke”; whereas Situationist thought is not prominent in SDI, its “house modelling and street children and sanitation opening events are always referred to in India as ‘Mela,’ meaning festival.”118 Appadurai uses the term “toilet festival.”119 The Situationist term “festival” is the antonym of “spectacle,” which reflects a manufacturing of alienation, false consciousness, and delusion; it is invoked in Situationist critique of the complete colonization of society by commodities.120 While critical of such “spectacles,” SDI does not fully avoid this approach. In studies on representation, the term “spectacle” is applied to reductionism and shallow or misleading imagery.121 International NGOs have not escaped criticism of deploying “spectacles” in the representational images they use.

Digital Representation and Appeal to Funders Websites are a pervasive communication mechanism for NGOs, their near-​global accessibility making them particularly relevant for international NGOs, SDI being no

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    391 exception. Photographic imagery used on such websites has “shrunk the world geographically” as well as “culturally, morally and emotionally.”122 As Katharine Millar notes, websites function as a means for NGOs to better control their representation to the public, NGOs deploying branding as well as visual techniques to “evoke an emotional response.”123 Millar refers to “mediatization” in the representational practices of NGOs; this is captured in what she refers to as a “charitable media genre.”124 Such representation of people and of places, particularly in the “Global South,” is understood as “an exercise of power” that shapes and through repetition also “fixes” thinking, responses, and action.125 Exploiting this and also contributing to this trend, international NGOs govern compassion through images and technology.126 NGOs employ this form of representation in their fundraising strategies, compassion being at the core of how images can motivate spectators into action. This is particularly so where private voluntary donations are elicited from individuals. As Käpylä and Kennedy note, “donations from individuals . . . are the single largest source (57%) of NGO funding” and “also the fastest growing segment.”127 Indeed, at the time of research in 2018, fundraising from individuals was a key component of the websites of Oxfam, Save the Children, and SDI alike, and of several SDI-​affiliated NGOs. SDI included this fundraising approach hesitantly “in response to donor recommendations” and income from this route was low.128 In February 2019, SDI closed the website sdinet.org with this fundraising platform, later recreating it without this feature. Humanitarian NGOs have a long tradition of soliciting public generosity through images of suffering, pity being the emotion they have sought to provoke in website spectators. Through this messaging, human existence in the Global South came to be stereotyped as famine, disease, homelessness, and suffering in general. However, somewhat delimiting the power wielded through imagery, Hall warns against the assumption that meaning can be “finally fixed,” although “strategies of stereotyping” attempt to achieve this.129 Hall notes that “no one has complete control” over the connotations that “words and images carry,” and “counter-​strategies exist.”130 One of these is to replace negative images with positive ones, thus “righting the balance” and celebrating difference.131 Postcolonial criticism of the negative paradigm of pity has led NGOs to deploy images that elicit solidarity rather than pity, but in a way that analysts have framed as instrumentalizing and commodifying.132 Shani Orgad argues that in this new mode of “post-​humanitarian communication,” the “positive” paradigm of representation is promoted by “communications/​campaigns/​advocacy” departments within NGOs, although the old “negative” paradigm may still be promoted by “fundraising/​marketing” departments because of the ease with which it pulls at heartstrings.133 Orgad points to internal tensions between different parts of an NGO, the ultimate brand or imagery being the result of internal negotiation.134 In SDI’s case, its longstanding logo aligned with the negative paradigm. Though not showing a suffering human being, it was a sketch of a rickety shack threatening to fall apart. By early 2015, SDI replaced this with a neutral logo, a square with the capital letters SDI, followed by a full stop. A year later, SDI’s annual report displayed a further

392   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER development of the logo, now a bouncy circle with the acronym in lower case followed by a full stop. In Bolnick’s words, “this is much more effective . . . in the sense that its message is uncomplicated.”135 At the same time, SDI built branding on its website sdinet.org around its federation leaders or grassroots figureheads. Photographed portraits radiate a cheerful confidence, indeed inviting friendship or solidarity. Attached to each image was a campaign of similar appeal: “I’m an Urban Poverty Fighter.” As one paged down, a gallery similarly profiled informal settlement dwellers driving livelihood projects. Molokoane was separately featured with the banner “[j]‌oin Rose Molokoane in the fight to end global poverty.”136 For Molokoane, “it is the stories you see—​hard data, rich stories. It is the stories of people who volunteered to be part of this process to try their level best to address the issues of poverty.”137 However, the brand more than the stories dominated the website, and with frequent dollar signs invited the viewer to commit to once-​off or monthly donations. Bolnick explains that the website was the result of pro bono rebranding work by the Swedish company YouMe Agency.138 Its erstwhile website in turn displayed SDI’s 2016 Annual Report, circular logo, and Know Your City campaign as a branding example (alongside several commercial brands), signifying the SDI brand with “Typography Bold, Brave, Beautiful.”139 Orgad describes an approach, evidently deployed by YouMe Agency, that seeks to counter an overly positive imaging; it is the “hero” model or image, portraying the subject, in its social context and often the full figure, looking straight into the camera.140 This genre is also that of major international NGOs Save the Children and Oxfam, NGOs that Orgad’s respondents referred to as “mega-​brands in the aid and development sector.”141 However, Hall notes challenges to the practice of replacing negative with positive images.142 Such measures may merely increase ways of representing, but actually neither “displace the negative” nor undermine the reductionist binary that is often inherent in representations, in particular in imagery.143 Thus “complexity and ambivalence” prevail in representation, and it has been asked whether such strategies “evade difficult questions” and merely “appropriate ‘difference’ into a spectacle in order to sell a product.”144 According to Bolnick, with SDI’s website the drive to “sell” was not in the first instance to raise funds from the public, but “to lift the SDI profile” to “the broader public,” so as “to popularize the challenges of urban poverty, and secondarily the responses of the SDI network to these challenges.”145 However, the SDI website also served the purpose of indirect or unsolicited slum dweller representation. It featured the KYC campaign or project, and it continued to do so on SDI's erstwhile website, knowyourcity.info (now part of sdinet.org). This uses a standardized template to display the size, status, infrastructure level and community organization (including “number of savings groups” and “relationship with authorities”) of informal settlements in selected cities in fourteen African countries and the Philippines. Already with the erstwhile sdinet.org, with fundraising features, SDI saw KYC as the main feature of its website, the structure dating back to 2015, and the first KYC version “dating to 2012”; Bolnick added, “KYC 3.0 will launch in 2018” with “a substantive change to the structure of the site.”146 Under the banner “Transform Your City,” the website was to see a return to engaging potential institutional partners more so than

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    393 funding appeals to the public, and to profiling projects across SDI’s core themes rather than individuals and their livelihoods.147 SDI’s websites have played a further role that is not mentioned in the literature on NGOs’ digital representation and NGO legitimacy cited in this chapter. In the interrelatedness between legitimacy and representation, one source of SDI’s legitimacy may be understood as that by association. A gallery of partners’ logos on SDI and most of its affiliates’ websites displays respectable entities grouped in the categories of funders, multilateral agencies, international networks, and academic, research, or knowledge institutions. With SDI’s shift toward representation through comparable data, it celebrated an association with the prestigious Global North data institution, the Santa Fe Institute.148 Particularly relevant for SDI’s African footprint, and signaling a further shift, is the partnership with the African Association of Planning Schools (AAPS). The willingness to work with students, but also to be researched by academics, is a departure from SDI’s erstwhile “rationale . . . to generate autonomous action from below,” which had justified a “class-​based suspicion” of academics.149 In terms of representation, this opens opportunities for more diverse academic representations of SDI that may help balance the over fifty insider accounts in the journal Environment and Urbanization.150

Conclusion The representational ambiguity and contradiction within SDI are dilemmas that are shared across various international NGOs. SDI’s orthodox approach of organizing the poor into federated savings groups, engaging in local and transnational exchanges, self-​ collection of data, house modeling, self-​construction, self-​management, and partnership building has been associated with the moral standard of non-​confrontation. This lent it legitimacy among government partners and global organizations representing governments. At the national level and beyond, SDI’s grassroots savings groups are represented by selected, trained, and remunerated leaders, an approach that is understood to ensure accountability within the hierarchy of the network. This procedure forms part of SDI’s democratic or procedural standard of legitimacy through which it derived the right to represent slum dwellers in decision-​making forums at the national and global level. Whereas SDI’s grassroots representations at the global level primarily speak of actively saving slum dwellers, its discourse and branding included claims of global or universal representation of the urban poor. At the grassroots, SDI’s de facto representational practice went beyond savings collectives to include uneven iterations of settlement networks in at least four of the twenty-​three countries in which it had active affiliates. However, SDI did not use settlement networks in claiming representation at the global level. Instead, it could be seen to derive legitimacy in speaking for a wider body of informal settlement dwellers through standardized city-​wide data collection on informal settlements. Data collection and its

394   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER integrity, as a technical standard, brought with it a process of professionalization within SDI, which also strengthened a common technical legitimacy claim among international NGOs, that of effectiveness and efficiency. However, this did not prevent inaccuracy in communicating its international reach and in 2019 an audit by an international funder finding fault with other aspects of the organization’s integrity. In practice, both settlement-​wide networking and data-​collection are linked to SDI’s ongoing efforts to mobilize the urban poor into savings collectives, SDI’s orthodox moral standard that forefronts cooperative, pragmatic, and non-​confrontational behavior by the urban poor. The slow uptake of informal settlement networking in SDI’s core countries over the past decade suggests that this was not an easy route through which to improve representational reach while maintaining SDI’s orthodox moral standard, which was more appealing to many western donors. Standardized data-​collection sat comfortably with SDI’s global partners, some of which were directly involved in the Know Your City campaign. These partners themselves were a source of legitimacy by association for SDI, its partner relationships having permeated SDI’s digital representation and branding in significant ways. One can therefore no longer assess SDI at the time of this research to be making entirely bottom-​up choices in terms of its direction, but rather as maintaining a balance that ensured a flow of funding from the Global North. Its “global” narrative and messaging invited engagement with multilateral agencies seeking replicable solutions and needing a credible linkage to grassroots. As SDI expanded into additional countries, encouraged in part by its global agency partners, its affiliates diversified. However, rather than understanding SDI’s situation as being at a crossroads, with the possibility of representing a wider range of approaches and slum dweller formations, SDI still appeared committed to the pathway of its orthodoxy. In 2018, SDI was not considering consolidating its representation at the global level as primarily for the Anglophone regions of the African continent rather than the entire globe. SDI was not deriving a mandate for global representation through collaboration with diverse groups and formations, seeking instead to stand apart at the global level through a distinct branding and its orthodox approach. It was not adjusting its global discourse in accordance with the waning of its methodological hold, seemingly unable to shift the moral standard that lends legitimacy in the eyes of global partners. Thus a number of representational challenges put the post-​Arputham ‘sdi.’ to test.

Notes 1. SDI Annual Report 2019–​2020, 7, 57 (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International). 2. Before consenting to its staff, affiliates, and coordinators being interviewed, SDI requires researchers to agree to make draft analyses available to SDI’s secretariat for comment. The iterative process that unfolded around early drafts of this chapter included an email dialogue with Joel Bolnick of the SDI secretariat. This provided access to SDI’s own reflection on representational dilemmas it faces at the global level, including SDI’s recent digital forms of representation, of which there has been no mention or analysis in the published literature on SDI. This and the interviews granted by key individuals in various

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    395 organizations complimented the review of the extensive archive that SDI has compiled of its work. 3. Environment and Urbanization, “NGO Profile: The Asian Coalition for Housing Rights,” Environment and Urbanization 5, no. 2 (1993): 153–​165. 4. Environment and Urbanization, “Institutional Profile: Habitat International Coalition, 1976–​2006,” Environment and Urbanization 18, no. 1 (2006): 219–​236. 5. Joel Bolnick, Managing Director, Secretariat, SDI, Cape Town, March 29, May 18, 2018, personal communication by email. 6. Leopold N. Podlashuc, “Class for Itself? Shack/​Slum Dwellers International: The Praxis of a Transnational Poor Movement” (PhD diss., Social Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, 2007), 254. 7. Joel Bolnick, “People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter: Community-​driven Networking in South Africa’s Informal Settlements,” Environment and Urbanization 5, no. 1 (1993): 91–​110. 8. Sheela Patel, Sundar Burra, and Celine d’Cruz, “Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI)—​Foundations to Treetops,” Environment and Urbanization 13, no. 2 (2001): 45–​59; C. d’Cruz, founding member of SDI speaking in her personal capacity, Beijing, October 2, 2018, personal communication by Skype. 9. Sheela Patel and Celine d’Cruz, “The Mahila Milan Crisis Credit Scheme: From a Seed to a Tree,” Environment and Urbanization 5, no. 1 (1993): 9–​17. 10. D’Cruz, personal communication. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Arjun Appadurai, “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics,” Environment and Urbanization 13, no. 2 (2001): 33. 14. D’Cruz, personal communication. 15. Environment and Urbanization, “Institutional Profile.” 16. HIC archives—​Board Minutes June 2000, accessed electronically through longstanding HIC board member Joseph Schechla, Muhandisin. 17. Sheela Patel and Diana Mitlin, “Reinterpreting the Rights-​Based Approach: A Grassroots Perspective on Rights and Development,” in Rights-​Based Approaches to Development: Exploring the Potentials and Pitfalls, ed. Sam Hickey and Diana Mitlin, 107–​124 (Sterling, VA: Kumarian Press, 2009). 18. Bolnick, personal communication 19. Astrid Ley, Josefine Fokdal, and Peter Herrle, “How Urban Poor Networks are Re-​scaling the Housing Process in Thailand, the Philippines and South Africa,” in From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor, ed. Peter Herrle and Astrid Ley, 31–​43 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 36. 20. D’Cruz, personal communication. 21. Patel, Burra, and d’Cruz, “Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI)”; D’Cruz, personal communication; Diana Mitlin and Sheela Patel, “The Urban Poor and Strategies for a Pro-​poor Politics: Reflections on Shack/​Slum Dwellers International,” in The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 296–​308. 22. Bolnick, personal communication. 23. Ibid. 24. Beth Chitekwe-​Biti, “Struggles for Urban Land by the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation,” Environment and Urbanization 21, no. 2 (2009): 362.

396   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER 25. Ananya Roy, “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai,” Antipode 41, no. 1 (2009): 159–​17; Marie Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’: From Informal Settlement Eradication to a Right to the City in Africa (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2011); Thomas A. Gillespie, “Accumulation by Urban Dispossession: Struggles over Urban Space in Accra, Ghana” (PhD diss., School of Geography, University of Leeds, 2013). 26. Patel, Burra, and d’Cruz, “Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI)”; D’Cruz, personal communication. 27. Cities Alliance, 2001 Annual Report (Washington DC: Cities Alliance, 2001), 5. 28. William Cobbett, at the time Director, Cities Alliance, Brussels, February 21, 2018, personal communication by Skype. 29. Sarah Nandudu (Coordinator, National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda, SDI), Joseph Muturi (Coordinator, Muungano Wa Wanavijiji, SDI), and Rose Molokoane (Coordinator, SDI), February 12, 2018, group interview at the 9th World Urban Forum, Kuala Lumpur. 30. Klaus Teschner, Desk Officer, Urban Development, Misereor e.V. Africa Department, Kassel, March 8, 2018, personal communication by Skype. 31. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016. 20th Anniversary Edition (Cape Town, Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2016), 18. 32. Bolnick, personal communication. 33. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016, 20 ; SDI Annual Report 2020, 7. 34. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2017 (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2017), 6. 35. Bolnick, personal communication. 36. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016; SDI, SDI Annual Report 2017. 37. Teschner, personal communication; Rene P. Hohmann, Senior Urban Specialist, Cities Alliance, UNOPS, February 12, 2018, personal communication at the 9th World Urban Forum, Kuala Lumpur. 38. Bolnick, personal communication. 39. Ibid. 40. M. Spaliviero, Regional Office for Africa, UN-​Habitat, Nairobi, personal communication by Skype. 41. Ibid. 42. Bolnick, personal communication. 43. Spaliviero, personal communication. 44. SDI, “Timeline up to 2015,” Shack/​Slum Dwellers International website, www.sdi​net.org. Last visited, May 7, 2018 (website since discontinued). 45. Bolnick, personal communication. 46. Ibid. 47. Cobbett, personal communication. 48. Ibid. 49. Cities Alliance, 2008 Annual Report (Washington DC: Cities Alliance, 2008), 89. 50. Cities Alliance, 2013 Annual Report (Brussels: Cities Alliance, 2013). 51. SDI, 2012 Shack/​Slum Dwellers International Annual Report (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2012), 16. 52. Ibid. 53. Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums.’ 54. J. Bolnick, Managing Director, Secretariat, SDI, Cape Town, March 29, and May 18, 2018, by email.

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    397 55. Ibid. 56. Somsook Boonyabancha, “Scaling up Squatter Settlements Upgrading in Thailand Leading to Community-​Driven Integrated Social Development at City-​Wide Level,” Paper presented at the Conference, “New Frontiers of Social Policy,” Arusha, December 12–​15, 2005. 57. Walter Fieuw and Diana Mitlin, “What the Experiences of South Africa’s Mass Housing Programme Teach Us about the Contribution of Civil Society to Policy and Programme Reform,” Environment and Urbanization 30, no. 1 (2018): 215–​232. 58. Bolnick, personal communication. 59. Fieuw and Mitlin, “What the Experiences of South Africa’s Mass Housing Programme Teach Us.” 60. Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums.’ 61. Roy, “Civic Governmentality.” 62. Diana Mitlin and Jan Mogaladi, “Social Movements and the Struggle for Shelter: A Case Study of eThekwini (Durban),” Progress in Planning 84 (2013): 19. 63. Astrid Ley and Peter Herrle, “Report on the Evaluation of SDI Strategies to Secure Land and Basic Services in South Africa and Malawi,” Draft, October 31 (London and Cape Town: Oikos Human Settlements Research Group, commissioned by IIED and Slum Dwellers International, 2007), 10. 64. Joel Bolnick and Benjamin Bradlow, “‘Rather a Better Shack Now Than Wait Twenty Years for a Formal House’: Shack Dwellers International and Informal Settlement Upgrading in South Africa,” Trialog 104 (2010): 38. 65. Ibid., 36. 66. Fieuw and Mitlin, “What the Experiences of South Africa’s Mass Housing Programme Teach Us,” 223. 67. Bolnick, personal communication. 68. Ibid. 69. Anonymous, board member of Centre for Community Organisation and Development, CCODE (Malawi), October 31, 2018. 70. Bolnick, personal communication. 71. Huchzermeyer, Cities with ‘Slums’; Joel Bolnick, Untitled and undated position statement on the Informal Settlement Network, handed to the author by the uTshani Office, Johannesburg, September 2009; Bolnick, personal communication. 72. Ley, Fokdal, and Herrle, “How Urban Poor Networks are Re-​scaling the Housing Process.” 73. Bolnick, personal communication. 74. Ted Baumann, Joel Bolnick, and Diana Mitlin, “The Age of Cities and Organizations of the Urban Poor: The Work of the South African Homeless People’s Federation,” in Empowering Squatter Citizen: Local Government, Civil Society and Urban Poverty Reduction, ed. Diana Mitlin and David Satterthwaite (London: Earthscan, 2004), 245–​277; Patel and Mitlin, “Reinterpreting the Rights-​Based Approach”; Mitlin and Patel, “The Urban Poor and Strategies for a Pro-​poor Politics.” 75. Fiew and Mitlin, “What the Experiences of South Africa’s Mass Housing Programme Teach Us,” 227. 76. R. Molokoane, Coordinator, SDI, February 12, 2018, personal communication in Kuala Lumpur. 77. Bolnick, personal communication. 78. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2017, 6.

398   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER 79. Author’s notes of SDI’s interventions at WUF9. 80. SDI, Shack/​Slum Dwellers International Strategic Plan, 2013–​2017 (Cape Town: Shack/​ Slum Dwellers International, 2013), unpaginated. 81. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2013-​2-​14 (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2014), 7. 82. Jockin Arputham speaking at an enumerations meeting in Nairobi in 2013, quoted in Anni Beukes, “Making the Invisible Visible: Generating Data on ‘Slums’ at Local, City and Global Scales,” Working Paper (London: International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED); Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International (SDI), 2015), 11. 83. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2013-​2-​14, 4. 84. Marie Huchzermeyer, “Enumeration as a Grassroot Tool Towards Securing Tenure in Slums: Insights from Kisumu, Kenya,” Urban Forum 20, no.3 (2018): 271–​292; Beukes, “Making the Invisible Visible,” 14. 85. Molokoane, personal communication. 86. Bolnick, personal communication. 87. Ibid. 88. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2014-​2-​15 (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2015); SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016; SDI, SDI Annual Report 2017. 89. See David Satterthwaite, “Why Another Journal? Setting up Environment and Urbanization in 1989,” Urbanisation 1, no. 1 (2016): 6–​12. 90. Sarah Lister, “NGO Legitmacy: Technical Issue or Social Construct?,” Critique of Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2003): 175–​192. 91. Christopher Pallas, David Gethings, and Max Harris, “Do the Right Thing: The Impact of INGO Legitimacy Standards on Stakeholder Input,” Voluntas 26 (2015): 1270. 92. Molokoane, personal communication. 93. For example, SDI, 2012 Shack/​Slum Dwellers International Annual Report; SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016; SDI, SDI Annual Report 2017; SDI, Know Your City: Slum Dwellers Count (Cape Town: Shack/​Slum Dwellers International, 2018); Diana Mitlin, Sarah Colenbrander, and David Satterthwaite, “Editorial: Finance for Community-​led Local, City and National Development,” Environment and Urbanization 30, no. 1 (2018): 3–​14; Sheela Patel, Aseena Viccajee, and Jockin Arputham, “From Taking Money to Making Money: SPARC, NSDF and Mahila Milan Transform Low-​Income Shelter Options in India,” Environment and Urbanization 30, no. 1 (2018): 85–​102.; Joel Bolnick, “Poverty No Longer Compounded Daily: SDI’s Efforts to Address the Poverty Penalty Built into Housing Microfinance,” Environment and Urbanization 30, no. 1 (2018): 141–​154. 94. Bolnick, personal communication. 95. Pallas, Gethings, and Harris, “Do the Right Thing.” 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid., 1270. 99. Podlashuc, “Class for Itself?,” 7; Roy, “Civic Governmentality,” 165. 100. Cobbett, personal communication; Spaliviero, personal communication. 101. Pallas, Gethings, and Harris, “Do the Right Thing,” 1271. 102. Ibid., 1268. 103. Lister, “NGO Legitimacy.” 104. Ibid., 118. 105. SDI, SDI Annual Report 2016, 9.

NGO Representation of Informal Settlements    399 106. Ibid., 17. 107. Joel Boklnick, “uTshani buyakhuluma (the Grass Speaks): People’s Dialogue and the South African People’s Federation (1994–​1996),” Environment and Urbanization 8, no. 2 (1996): 159. 108. Rajesh Tandon, Kaustov Bandyopadhyay, Sohela Nazneen, and Matt Nohn, “Review of the Urban Poor Fund International (UPFI),” (Submitted to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), Norwegian Government, and Slum Dwellers International and their affiliated national and local federations, 2010), 11. 109. See Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017). 110. Patel, Burra, and d’Cruz, “Slum/​Shack Dwellers International (SDI),” 45 111. Bolnick, personal communication. 112. Ibid. 113. Colin McFarlane, “Translocal Assemblages: Space, Power and Social Movements,” Geoforum 40 (2009): 561–​567; Peter Herrle, Astrid Ley, and Josefine Fokdal, eds., From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 114. Podlashuc, “Class for Itself?,” 249. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid. 117. Bolnick, personal communication. 118. Ibid. 119. Appadurai, “Deep Democracy,” 37. 120. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: The Zone, 1967/​1994). 121. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 223–​290. 122. Juha Käpylä and Denis Kennedy, “Cruel to Care? Investigating the Governance of Compassion in the Humanitarian Imaginary,” International Theory 6, no. 2 (2014): 259. 123. Katharine Millar, “‘They Need Our Help’: Non-​governmental Organizations and the Subjectifying Dynamics of the Military as Social Cause,” Media, War & Conflict 9, no. 1 (2018): 11, 12. 124. Ibid., 10, 11. 125. Glen Williams, Paula Meth, and Katie Willis, Geographies of Developing Areas: The Global South in a Changing World, 2nd ed. (Oxon: Routledge, 2014), 9. 126. Käpylä and Kennedy, “Cruel to Care?” 127. Ibid., 270. 128. Bolnick, personal communication. 129. Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” 270. 130. Ibid. 131. Ibid., 272. 132. Shani Orgad, “Visualizers of Solidarity: Organizational Politics in Humanitarian and International Development NGOs,” Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (2013): 295–​314. 133. Ibid., 302, 310. 134. Ibid. 135. Bolnick, personal communication. 136. Shack/​Slum Dwellers International discontinued website, www.sdi​net.org. 137. Molokoane, personal communication. 138. Bolnick, personal communication.

400   MARIE HUCHZERMEYER 139. YouMe Agency, “SDI Global Vision Och Varumärke,” http://​youm​eage​ncy.se/​proj​ekt/​ sdi-​glo​bal-​vis​ion-​och-​varuma​rke/​. 140. Orgad, “Visualizers of Solidarity,” 303. 141. Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” 308. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid., 274. 144. Ibid., 273, 276. 145. Bolnick, personal communication. 146. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 148. Also mentioned in Beukes, “Making the Invisible Visible.” 149. Podlashuc, “Class for Itself?,” 7. 150. Satterthwaite, “Why Another Journal?”

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. “Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics.” Environment and Urbanization 13 no. 2 (2001): 23–​43. Bolnick, Joel. “People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter: Community-​Driven Networking in South Africa’s Informal Settlements.” Environment and Urbanization 5, no. 1 (1993): 91–​110. Chitekwe-​ Biti, Beth. “Struggles for Urban Land by the Zimbabwe Homeless People’s Federation.” Environment and Urbanization 21, no. 2 (2009): 347–​266. Hall, Stuart.“The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’ ” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, edited by Stuart Hall, 223–​290. London: Sage, 1997. Herrle, Peter, Astrid Ley, and Josefine Fokdal, eds. From Local Action to Global Networks: Housing the Urban Poor. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Käpylä, Juha, and Denis Kennedy. “Cruel to Care? Investigating the Governance of Compassion in the Humanitarian Imaginary.” International Theory 6, no. 2 (2014): 255–​292. Lister, Sarah. “NGO Legitmacy: Technical Issue or Social Construct?” Critique of Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2003): 175–​192. McFarlane, Colin. “Translocal Assemblages: Space, Power and Social Movements.” Geoforum 40 (2009): 561–​567. Millar, K. “‘They Need Our Help’: Non-​governmental Organizations and the Subjectifying Dynamics of the Military as Social Cause.” Media, War & Conflict 9, no. 1 (2018): 9–​26. Mitlin, Diana, and Sheela Patel. “The Urban Poor and Strategies for a Pro-​poor Politics: Reflections on Shack/​ Slum Dwellers International.” In The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, edited by Susan Parnell and Sophie Oldfield, 296–​308. Oxon: Routledge, 2014. Orgad, Shani. “Visualizers of Solidarity: Organizational Politics in Humanitarian and International Development NGOs.” Visual Communication 12, no. 3 (2013): 295–​314. Pallas, Christopher, David Gethings, and Max Harris. “Do the Right Thing: The Impact of INGO Legitimacy Standards on Stakeholder Input.” Voluntas 26 (2015): 1261–​1287. Roy, Aanaya. “Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai.” Antipode 41 no. 1 (2009): 159–​179.

Pa rt I v

P E R SP E C T I V E S AC RO S S T I M E : F ROM T H E I N SI DE

CHAPTER 21

NOT TING DA L E The Making and Breaking of a West London Slum, 1865–​1946 JERRY WHITE

In January 1893, the slum journalist George R. Sims—​here the anonymous “Special Commissioner” of the Daily News—​described “A West-​End Avernus,” or gateway to hell: If you drive up Oxford-​street, past the Marble Arch and Hyde Park . . . you may very reasonably suppose . . .that you must have left squalid homes and shivering destitution leagues away yonder in the east. In that very locality, however, I have spent this afternoon amid scenes of degradation and misery as God-​forsaken as anything I know of in London. . . . [H]‌ere are whole streets steeped to the lips in iniquity, veritable hotbeds of everything vile and abandoned, and hundreds, if not thousands, of people living under conditions of life that are a disgrace to our civilisation.1

Sims consciously subverted the trope of London’s East End as the metropolitan home of “slumdom.” He singlehandedly made the Bangor Street area—​unnamed in his article but plain to all who knew late-​Victorian Kensington—​west London’s most notorious slum. And he began a chain reaction that would end in the housebreaker’s wrecking-​ball some fifty years later. London was the birthplace of the “slum.” The very word originated in cockney slang, was popularized by journalists writing for a metropolitan readership, gave moral and sanitary reformers a shorthand with which to establish their policies of attrition and destruction, and spread across the English-​speaking world to describe the poorest districts of Johannesburg, Melbourne, New York, and elsewhere.2 It was no surprise then that English-​speaking social historians turned first to London to describe and explain the slum phenomenon. Some aspects of the slum became easier to capture than others, however. The work of Anthony Wohl on Victorian London as “the eternal slum” was most concerned with the shifting policies that reformers devised to solve the slum problem rather than charting life in the slum itself;3 and H. J. Dyos and D. A. Reeder

404   JERRY WHITE explored the accidents of urban development that turned some suburbs into slums almost as soon as they were built.4 The difficulties of discovering just how people came to live in slums, how they experienced life there, and how they came to stay or move on, largely deterred detailed exploration of any particular nineteenth-​century London slum, though much work was done more generally to explore the collective survival patterns that made slum life tolerable.5 The breakthrough here was provided by oral history, the richness of which began to be explored in the 1970s, when memories of late-​Victorian poverty were still just within reach. It was oral history that unwrapped some of the texture of life in the Old Nichol Street area of southwest Bethnal Green before its demolition in the 1890s;6 and for a later period offered a more extensive exploration of the closing years of a notorious street in north London, Campbell Bunk.7 But for all practical purposes the recovery of the Victorian slum had been impossible with the disappearance of oral evidence altogether by 1980 at the latest. In any event, the linguistic turn in historical studies made social history unfashionable, though the slum was still studied by those concerned with representation of slum life in print culture and the appropriation of the slum by middle-​class flâneurs and philanthropists.8 For a wider audience, too, the London slum continued to exert its fascination, for instance in re-​imaginings of the Nichol and of Dorset Street, Spitalfields, “the worst street in London” at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888.9 Neither of those two studies took much advantage of the new opportunities that have developed in response to the widespread popularity of the family history movement. There has been a revolution in the digitization of historical sources since the millennium. The riches now available for digitally searching archives and printed text, especially local and national newspapers, are immense and growing daily larger. So too, for the Victorian and Edwardian period, is the capacity to search census and other records to reconstruct family histories showing the movement of people over time. These are not inexhaustible, and their limitations can be frustrating. But in general they open out the possibility of casting light on some of those questions about slum life that historians might have asked but could not answer. The full benefits of this constantly expanding world of data have yet to be revealed. By 1893, George Sims’s “West-​End Avernus” had a long story to tell. The history of Notting Dale is familiar to historians of nineteenth-​century London, at least up to a point. Its earliest historian was the earnest evangelical Mary Bayly, who charted the movement of pig-​keepers and scavengers to the district’s brickfields and claypits in the 1830s in particular.10 It first came to wide public notice through the pages of Charles Dickens’s Household Words in August 1850 as a “more than Augean stable” where a thousand or so souls keep “many hundreds of pigs, ducks, and fowls . . . in an incredible state of filth. . . . In these hovels discontent, dirt, filth, and misery, are unsurpassed by anything known even in Ireland.”11 The “Potteries,” as they were known, would continue to attract a mixed population of laboring poor needing cheap lodgings and entrepreneurs (pig-​breeders, butchers, fat melters) who could ply their trades largely untroubled by the authorities. This immunity from interference also attracted travelers and gypsies

Notting Dale   405 in vans and sheds, seasonal winter migrations taking on a more permanent character, so that by 1864 George Borrow could describe it as “The second great [metropolitan] Gypsyry” after Wandsworth.12 At the same time a market for female labor established itself, catering for the growing suburban middle-​class in the new streets of Notting Hill close by, in part through casual domestic service as charwomen but mainly by taking in laundry.13 When Borrow visited the Potteries the seeds of its demise were already visible in the relentless encroachments of suburban London. He was optimistic about the future: there can be little doubt that within a few years order and beauty will be found here, that the misery, squalidness, and meanness will have disappeared, and the whole district up to the railroad arches which bound it on the west and north, will be covered with palaces, like those of Tyburnia.14

In the event things did not turn out that way, though the developers’ aspirations for the land on which the Avernus was built were hardly less grand. The ten-​roomed houses of Bangor Street and Crescent Street, and the less pretentious dwellings of William Street, St Katherine’s Road and St Clement’s Road were all aimed at a middle class that would never occupy them. Instead the poverty and irregularity of the Potteries would be transplanted into the houses run up next to the steadily shrinking area of pig-​keepers’ and brickmakers’ “hovels” and gypsy vans. What would become the Avernus was tarnished from the outset. The last pigs would leave the area by 1878, but by then the fate of Bangor Street and its neighbors was firmly sealed.15 The Bangor Street area was built between about 1854 and 1865, mostly in the early 1860s.16 It was home from the outset to a mixed population of newcomers to London, of locals cleared out of the Potteries as the land was built over, and of cockneys pushed out of the center of London by clearances of one kind or another.17 A mix of poor newcomers and Londoners would continue to supply the area’s inhabitants throughout its history. In the 1881 census there were some 3,500 people in the area (see Table 21.1).18 Fifty-​ three percent of adults of working age were born in Middlesex or London north of the Thames (see Table 21.2). Of the remainder 254 (12 percent) were Irish-​born, most probably moving to Notting Dale from the mid-​century enclaves of St Giles, Whitechapel, and the smaller Irish neighborhoods of outer west London (like Jennings’ Buildings off Kensington High Street, cleared in 1873).19 The remainder came mainly from the various counties of provincial England. In Bangor Street, the most crowded, where on average people lived at a density of twenty-​four persons per house, provincial migrants were only narrowly outnumbered by Londoners. In crowded no. 13, for instance, home to ten households of thirty-​five persons, we find adults recording their birthplaces as Devon, Lancashire, Worcestershire, Ireland (3), London and Middlesex (7), Kent, Essex, Oxfordshire (2), Croydon, Battersea and, within London, Holloway and St Giles. In the decades to come there would still be a mix, but the proportion of those born in London and Middlesex increased significantly (65 percent in 1901, though London now included the metropolis south of the river).

16.7

4.0

Pns =​persons

H/​hs =​ households

CLHs =​common lodging houses

Hss =​houses

KEY

** Persons per house, including common lodging houses.

* Households per house, excluding common lodging houses.

Source: RG 11/​32 (1881); RG 12/​23, 12/​29 (1891); RG 13/​24 (1901).

3,830,297

3157

Pns

749

H/​hs

9.6

2.3

COUNTY OF LONDON

15

421

102

Pns

13.6

3.7 H/​hs

827

224

Pns

16.8

4.0 H/​hs

369

83

Pns

14.9

3.6 H/​hs

594

128

Pns

24.3**

7.3* H/​hs

946

Pns

212

H/​hs

163,151

CLHs

204

CLHs

Hss

44

Hss

61

CLHs

1

22

Hss

CLHs

4

38

Hss

CLHs

10

39

Hss

CLHs

Hss

1881

KENSINGTON

NDSA

William (Kenley) Street

St Katherine’s Road

St Clement’s (Sirdar) Road

Crescent Street

Bangor Street

Table 21.1 Population

206

Hss

46

Hss

61

Hss

22

Hss

38

Hss

39

Hss

1891

18

CLHs

CLHs

CLHs

3

CLHs

4

CLHs

11

CLHs

4,227,954

170,071

4.5

842

H/​hs

2.5

116

H/​hs

4.8

291

H/​hs

5.8

111

H/​hs

4.6

155

H/​hs

6.0

169

H/​hs

15.1

2843

Pns

8.8

404

Pns

13.8

840

Pns

19.8

417

Pns

11.0

416

Pns

19.6

766

Pns

208

Hss

48

Hss

61

Hss

22

Hss

38

Hss

39

Hss

1901

24

CLHs

CLHs

CLHs

5

CLHs

8

CLHs

11

CLHs

4,536,267

176,628

5.2

951

H/​hs

3.3

159

H/​hs

5.4

328

H/​hs

4.3

78

H/​hs

5.4

163

H/​hs

7.1

200

H/​hs

19.3

3559

Pns

9.8

469

Pns

16.8

1026

Pns

22.0

484

Pns

17.3

657

Pns

22.3

869

Pns

Notting Dale   407 Table 21.2 Birthplaces of Adults 1881

1891

1901

All

2078

London and Middlesex

1102*

53%

1524 982

64%

2390 1558

65%

Ireland

254

12%

140

9%

126

5%

Source: RG 11/​32 (1881); RG 12/​23, 12/​29 (1891); RG 13/​24 (1901). * Excluding London south of the Thames.

The housing market these people entered was a peculiar one. The Bangor Street area was no typical London slum. The houses were reasonably well built—​as well, that is, as most others in what was cynically known by middle-​class residents as “Rotten Hill.”20 The houses were well drained (though the local sewers could surcharge in heavy rains, flooding the basements of Bangor and Crescent Streets) and each had a WC in the back yard. The problem was dense multiple occupation so that one WC for ten households and thirty-​five people could never be adequate and never be kept clean. These “tenement houses” or “houses let in lodgings” were increasingly a widespread problem in suburban London as developers built for a middle class never present in sufficient numbers to occupy them. They were let out by the floor or by the room, unfurnished for those tenants who could bring their own possessions and plan for a longer stay (generally the main tenant of the house), furnished for those who had no bed of their own. Rents in west London, especially Kensington, were high but here a single room could be had for 2s 6d or 3s a week, perhaps 5s for two.21 What marked out the Bangor Street area were two other distinctive features. First was its unique concentration of common lodging houses, where single lodgers or “married couples” rented a bed by the night, several beds to a room. There had been common lodging houses in the area soon after building began, certainly in Bangor Street by 1873 when Constantine Morris kept three: no. 21 was “the single man’s house—​there is a large kitchen there—​I have a good many lodgers, and they came to the kitchen to cook their food . . . the lodgers are in and out all time of the day.”22 By 1880 there were ten common lodging houses in the area (five in Bangor Street) but in the 1880s there was spectacular growth to twenty-​four in 1890 (eleven in Bangor Street).23 More than half of Kensington’s common lodging houses were located in the Bangor Street area. They accommodated men and women of all ages but they were in part a casualty receiving station for those brought low by poverty and the ravages of cold, hunger, and drink, the penultimate stop before the workhouse infirmary and the mortuary slab. Many were like Thomas Wells, 48, who presented himself at the workhouse in April 1891. He had stayed at a common lodging house in Bangor Street for two days and had been in similar houses in Shoreditch and Dorset Street, Spitalfields, on and off for some years, though born in Leicester. When interviewed by the relieving officer he could name no

408   JERRY WHITE settled parish: “man too ill to answer.”24 These “transit-​lodgers” or “wayfarers” were thought in 1897 to be in the minority—​around a hundred of the 650 in occupation on any night, the rest “old-​stayers” who “have occupied the same beds, for two, three, or four years, and some for still longer periods.”25 They paid 4d a night, with Sunday free for lodgers staying a week. Another element, also uniquely concentrated in the Bangor Street area, was the furnished room let at a shilling a night, sometimes with Sunday free if the lodger stayed a week. In 1912 there were 187 houses let in nightly furnished rooms in Kensington; 103 of them were in the Bangor Street area.26 Tenants in these houses had to vacate their rooms from ten in the morning and could only return in the evenings.27 The rooms could then be available for others to use during the day, sometimes by prostitutes, or by men working night shifts on a box-​and-​cox arrangement. A navvy digging the underground railway in Bloomsbury paid a shilling for “a lie down” at 37 Kenley (formerly William) Street in October 1897—​“I lay on the boards . . . there was a bed but I preferred the floor, because the bed was dirty.” He denied being there with a woman, but a year earlier Patrick Scully “went to No. 8 Bangor Street, with a woman for a purpose” though he was stabbed and robbed for his pains: that house was occupied in 1901 by forty persons in nine households.28 It was a similar room in Bangor Street that was occupied by the Shaw family from Birmingham, the father a skilled metalworker who had been mentally unwell and now sold newspapers in the streets. Evicted for rent arrears, the family tramped to London in 1894. After a night in the Edgware workhouse they found a furnished room in Bangor Street and moved in—​mother, father, and five children: Sam, ten years old, would soon be arrested for begging and sent to Feltham industrial school, some eight miles to the west.29 The lodging-​house keepers of the Bangor Street area were necessarily a tough bunch, or if not tough themselves had to employ rent collectors who were. For example, Sabina Grogan, “a portly woman” from East Anglia, her husband a prosperous rag-​and-​bone man, who lived in William Street and was said to have a “number of houses there, occupied by young girls for immoral purposes”: she was summonsed twice for separate assaults on neighbors in 1893, for assaulting police in 1902, and doubtless had many more encounters.30 Grogan, living over the shop as it were, could keep a sharp eye and heavy hand on her investments. Numbers of others did the same—​fourteen out of twenty-​five of the area’s lodging-​house keepers in 1912 lived there. Edwin Atkinson, a grocer living in St Katherine’s Road, kept four furnished houses in Crescent Street and two in Sirdar (formerly St Clement’s) Road in 1912; and a few doors away William Margetson, dealer in old iron, a Londoner who had been in the Notting Dale area since at least 1883, kept six furnished houses in the street and more outside the area.31 Others, living out of sight and taint of Bangor Street, blended anonymously into the wealthy streets of west London. Like George Hankins of nearby St Ann’s Villas, “property owner,” occupying an eight-​room house with his wife and daughters: a Londoner in his sixties, he kept furnished houses as well as common lodging houses (eleven of the former, four of the latter, all in Crescent Street) and must have made a small fortune.32 So did Thomas Burnell, living cozily with two single women in a ten-​roomed

Notting Dale   409 house in Notting Hill, who owned three of the most crowded houses in Bangor Street and had owned property in William Street and probably much elsewhere.33 And, despite appearances, so must the eccentric and miserly Alfred Rusha, born in Stepney but in 1912 living in Hume Road, Hammersmith, who owned no fewer than thirteen furnished houses and ten common lodging houses in the Bangor Street area in 1912.34 There was no exploitative ground landlord in the Bangor Street area, farming out the fag-​end of leases to extort the last ounce of profit. Rather this was a network of small freeholders, many of them living locally, who might extend a portfolio by picking up freeholds as they became available and then leasing or renting to someone near at hand who could act as house manager. Wherever the landlord lived, though, it was never easy to squeeze rents from the mobile poor of the Bangor Street area. H. W. Holmes kept seven or eight furnished houses there in 1898. When prosecuted for permitting overcrowding in one of his houses he claimed “he did not get half the rent for the houses”; he paid 11s for each house and charged 6s a week for each room: Dr. Forman [the Magistrate]: Then you get a good profit on the dealing, even if you lose 25 per cent on the rental. Defendant: I have to pay for all the breakages. [Sanitary] Inspector Steward was re-​called, and he stated that he did not know how there could be any breakages. He saw no china or glass in the room. The contents were a bed and some bedding, such as it was, a table, and a chair. Defendant said he referred to the wear and tear of the bedding. (Laughter.)35

Income from rents then, though uneven, provided a large income for some in the Bangor Street area. Sabina Grogan testified that she had fetched her husband from a local pub “and took £63 from him for safety”; she had no trouble paying fines and costs of £8 on a single assault.36 These were very large sums indeed. Most people in the Bangor Street area thought and dealt in shillings, if they were lucky. A breakdown of employment in the Bangor Street area at any of the census years shows a stubborn pattern of low-​wage employment for men, supplemented by large numbers of wives working, especially in the laundry trade. The high ratio of economically active women to men (38 percent of workers in 1881 were women and 36 percent in 1901) was itself indicative of the extent of family poverty (see Table 21.3). For men, general labor—​“unskilled” work on road-​mending, railway construction, moving coal stocks in docks, wharves, and railway sidings, sweeping and cleaning in omnibus yards, all casual work paid by the day or hour—​was notably common; so were building laborers assisting craftsmen like bricklayers, plasterers, and plumbers.37 These two categories accounted for 53 percent of all male jobs in the area in 1881, though this share fell to 35 percent in 1901 as the available land for building nearby dried up. Some of the shortfall was made up by a remarkable increase in the number and proportion of men working as penny capitalists, outside the disciplines of wage labor, in the diverse economy offered by London street life.

410   JERRY WHITE Table 21.3 Occupations 1881 Male Occupations

1891

1,231

1901

1,163

1,359

General labor

415

34%

Building trades

238

Street trades

146

Female Occupations

763

Laundry

425

56%

311

51%

444

59%

Service

157

21%

114

19%

125

17%

Needle

52

7%

39

7%

50

7%

100

13%

82

13%

120

16%

Street trades

281

24%

247

18%

19%

117

12%

243

10%

221

16%

21%

308

23%

614

757

Source: RG 11/​32 (1881); RG 12/​23, 12/​29 (1891); RG 13/​24 (1901).

In 1881, 146 men worked in the streets, 12 percent of all occupied men; in 1901 this had grown to 308 or 28 percent of the 1,350 or so men who gave an occupation. They offered peripatetic services to the householders of west London, rich and poor alike: mending pots and pans and other articles (zinc worker, tinker, “china mender,” “sash mender,” umbrella mender, chair caner); sharpening knives and scissors (cutler, “traveling saw sharpener”); painting signs; hawking, peddling, and selling fruit, vegetables, flowers, fish, “catsmeat,” china, and other articles; blacking shoes; selling newspapers; sweeping chimneys; offering street entertainments, often unwanted and perilously close to begging (“boxer,” “dancer,” “street musician [cornet],” “organ grinder”); and taking away the unwanted articles of middle-​class households, responding to the shifting fashions and tastes of domestic consumption (“bottle dealer,” old clothes man, rag-​and-​bone-​dealer, old iron dealer, “totter,” marine store dealer, wardrobe dealer, general dealer), collecting with a barrow or cart pulled by donkey or pony. Some might flourish. We might call it the Bangor Street dream—​renting houses to let furnished, investing in barrows and carts to hire out, setting up shop, like William Ives at 27–​28 Kenley Street, a marine store dealer, who joined a number of chandlers, coal dealers, grocers, beer retailers, a butcher, tobacconist, fishmonger, and fried fish shop that provisioned the Bangor Street area in 1901.38 Some of these shopkeepers were women, and many women also were street traders of one sort or another—​120 (16 percent of occupied women) in 1901 compared to 100 in 1881 (13 percent)—​especially flower sellers and hawkers, with a few costermongers, a chair caner, even a lone general dealer. There were also numerous charwomen and girls in live-​out domestic service, but relatively very few needlewomen, the staple calling of women in much of working-​class London. Most working women by far, though, were in one branch or another of the laundry trade. Laundry was big business in west London, with the sheets and shirts of one of the richest populations in the world to

Notting Dale   411 keep white and starched. Kensal New Town, to the north of Notting Dale, was known as Soap Suds Island and so was part of Acton Town to the west. Notting Dale was similarly favored with laundries, though whether the 450 or so laundresses, washerwomen, ironers, starchers, and dyers in the neighborhood would have thought it a benefit is dubious: low wages and long hours standing in saturated humidity made varicose veins and chest trouble the distinctive reward of the Notting Dale laundry worker. A shift from washerwomen taking in laundry at home and slaving at the dollytub and scullery copper to working in the growing number of steam laundries after 1900—​there was a large outfit at 11–​13 Crescent Street—​marked no or little improvement in the lives of these women. But almost every house had one or more laundresses among its residents, and for some the ready availability of laundry work was one of the district’s attractions. “It is well recognised amongst the poor,” wrote a local philanthropist in 1904, “that men move to North Kensington for the purpose of being kept by their wives,” citing one young man who declared “he had provided for himself by marrying a washer-​woman.”39 Despite much work around, the single defining feature of the people of the Bangor Street area was their poverty. We find evidence for it in every direction. In the high volume of sick poor admitted to the workhouse infirmary—​in 1896–​1897, with just one forty-​third of Kensington’s population, the area accounted for one-​fifth of hospital admissions (723 admissions of 675 persons).40 In the case of women having babies in the workhouse the proportion was even higher, over one-​third in 1903–​1904.41 We see it in the early deaths of children: in London in 1899, 167 infants died before reaching their first birthday, in Kensington it was 179, but in the Bangor Street area a spectacular 508 per thousand, slightly more than every other baby.42 In Sirdar Road London County Council (LCC) School in 1905—​a “very specially poor school” that took most children from the Bangor Street area—​some eight hundred children out of 1,200 were receiving free school lunches in the winter months at the St Agnes Soup Kitchen opposite Bangor Street, with “cases of extreme poverty” given breakfast (“a cup of cocoa and a piece of bread”); no other school coming to the attention of a government committee that year had “more than about 10 per cent” requiring to be fed.43 Lives spent at the margins of wage labor, in and out of the nation’s workhouses, are stark indicators of the depth of poverty among the people of the Bangor Street area. William Dallamore, 79, a laborer and street singer, turned up at Kensington workhouse with his wife Susan, 69, in May 1891. They had lived in a cellar under a shop in William Street for 6d a night for the last two years “on & off,” traveling about the Home Counties for “weeks at a time.” William had been eight months in Edgware workhouse—​his father had died there in 1862—​and he had been passed from Uxbridge to Harrow workhouses with his wife and three children in 1848 or 1850.44 And desperation could take many forms. We might instance an established “Daler,” Mary Finn, born in Crescent Street, her parents living in St Katherine’s Road, who presented herself at the workhouse in February 1891 in dire trouble. She was 22, single, pregnant, and living at “Manns,” 8 Bangor Street, for the last six weeks; she had been cohabiting with a rag and bone dealer, George Mead, who could no longer support her—​“(now locked up for 3 mo).”45 Or poor Elizabeth Coleman, 71, who died at Sirdar Road in early 1911 of heart disease and

412   JERRY WHITE gastro-​enteritis: “she used to sell matches in the street,” according to a fellow lodger. “Occasionally she was short of food.” The lodging-​house deputy told the inquest “that at times the deceased used to give way to drink.”46 If poverty was the defining characteristic of the Bangor Street area then drink came a close second. In 1936 Mary Benedetta visited Portobello Road market, just to the east of Notting Dale, in “one of the poorest districts in West London.” While there she overheard a conversation: “ ‘Oh, shut up, duck; come along and have a drink and forget it,’ said one old woman, trying to console another whose ‘old man’ had apparently left her high and dry.”47 Having a drink had by then been consoling the men and women of Notting Dale for three generations. Drink was the fastest way out of Bangor Street—​its poverty, its hunger, its overcrowding, its squalor, its petty meannesses. When money was to hand then drink often made the first call on it for oblivion was cheap at any cost. The price, though, in domestic violence, in the ill-​treatment of children, in the physical and mental toll of alcoholism, was high, often fatally so. Drunkenness seems to have been ubiquitous in the Bangor Street area. It certainly had a major impact on policing. Between January 1, 1896, and July 27, 1898, 1,144 charges were brought against residents; of these 598 included drunkenness in the charge (52 percent) and drink would have played a part in many of the charges of common assault (153) and disorderly conduct (132).48 The district had its main public house, the Cobden Arms, in St Katherine’s Road, and three beerhouses, the George and the Shamrock in Crescent Street, and the Dolphin in Sirdar Road.49 Each, like every other pub nearby, was a little hotbed of trouble, especially on Saturday nights. In July 1893, for instance, James Mitchell, a costermonger of St Katherine’s Road, was thrown out of the Cobden for being drunk. A police constable (PC) told him to go away but “he rushed past and struck the barman, who was standing at the door, in the face.” Mitchell then closed with the PC who had to use his truncheon, provoking a “riot,” with two further men and two laundresses variously assaulting other policemen who joined in the fray. All five Dalers were sent to prison for their night’s work.50 But the worst effects of drink were felt in relations between men and women in the home, rows frequently spilling into the streets; and in the neglect or abuse of children, by mothers and fathers alike. Two representative court cases were reported in 1901. Daniel Conboy, a hawker of St Katherine’s Road, received three months’ hard labor for assaulting his wife while drunk; he had begun by throwing things at his daughter “and told her to quit the place. While the wife was frying at the fire [Conboy] kicked her in the mouth,” knocking out two teeth, and told her to leave with her daughter.51 And when Edward Hobbs, a housepainter of Sirdar Road, set about Julia King, “his paramour,” the PC who rushed in on the cry of “Murder!” found her on the floor bleeding from a head wound, the room “like a slaughterhouse”; Hobbs had assaulted her many times and he too received six months’.52 Women suffered terribly at the hands of their men, whether in drink or not, in the Bangor Street area, though some gave as good as they got. That same year Maria Olley was sentenced to eighteen months’ hard labor for stabbing her husband in the neck at 30 Crescent Street: “I meant to kill him. . . . He has deceived me long enough.”53 The local

Notting Dale   413 magistrates had long experience of what one called “the ‘degenerate Amazons’ ” of the Bangor Street area.54 But if women could fight back, children could not. Neglect of children, often through drink, could be fatal. One tragic case, also in 1901, involved Phoebe Boswell, aka Dunn, who took her infant into the streets while selling flowers, got drunk, fell asleep on a November night on the stairs of a lodging-​house at St Katherine’s Road and awoke to find the child dead: she was convicted of “wilful exposure of the child” and was given two months’ imprisonment.55 In a case of child exploitation coming before a parliamentary inquiry into the employment of children in 1902, a boy of twelve, too ill from asthma, bronchitis, and being “lame in his feet” to attend Sirdar Road school, was sent to work for a butcher twenty-​nine hours a week for which he received the incredible sum of a shilling: “it is positively killing the boy,” though “entirely brought about by [his parents’] drinking.” In “many instances” the parents of working children were “drunkards” and sent their children out to finance their drinking though in work themselves: in forty-​four cases known to Sirdar Road school’s attendance officer, eight were “necessitous” and thirty-​six “non-​necessitous.”56 No doubt the parents of the Bangor Street area would have held a different view of what constituted necessity. For most, drink was an essential unguent to obliterate the rigors of existence at the bottom of the metropolitan labor market or outside it altogether. Drink was self-​destructive, but it was at the same time part of a culture of resistance that set the neighborhood apart from the mores of middle-​class society and of notions of respectability based on regular wage labor: “no respectable person would think of living here,” it was said of Crescent Street around 1898.57 This was a culture self-​ consciously at odds with the large majority of Londoners and those who set standards of “order” and “decency” in the wider society. It was also a culture that, despite elements of collective solidarity, was at war with itself. When Bangor Street’s residents spoke of it as “Do as you like street,”58 it accommodated independence from neighbors as well as the constraints of contemporary London. There were numerous elements to Bangor Street’s culture of resistance, and the list here cannot be construed as definitive. One related to the area’s relationship with the wealthier areas of west London that it abutted. The street traders providing services and commodities to well-​off households could shade into a more predatory relationship where (for instance) begging sought and sometimes demanded something for nothing. In middle-​class stereotypes of the Bangor Street area images of “cadging” and “professional beggars” abound: “the Notting Dale cadger,” a senior police officer thought around 1900, “is a peculiarity of the west end,” and it seems to be true that the area’s beggars were both legion and unusually importunate. Alms became a justified tax on the apparently idle rich at the Hyde Park end of the town. Again, a couple of instances must suffice. Mary Ann McMorris, living at a common lodging house in William Street and speaking “in broad Scotch,” was sent to prison for six weeks for soliciting alms from a lady in Campden Hill, representing to have been sent by a local clergyman whose name she cited. It was a fraud that other women from the Bangor Street area deployed, presumably learned one from another.59 Other methods were less sophisticated. In early 1911, Charles Furber, laborer of 15 Bangor Street, together with a “cab tout” with “no

414   JERRY WHITE home,” were given hard labor for being drunk and disorderly in South Kensington; they had followed “Lady Eden, of Launceston Place . . . for several hundred yards, begging of her.” She complained to a PC and they violently resisted arrest.60 Indeed a begging culture was said to have taken hold of domestic life in the Bangor Street area or at least its “more permanent” residents “for whom missionary effort is poured out,” with the result that they “appear poorer than they really are. ‘You must not look comfortable or you won’t get anything.’ As a consequence, they ‘don’t study their homes.’ ”61 This might also have something to do with the extraordinary numbers of children receiving free meals at school—​if children looked neglected the school would look after them. Another element in the area’s resistance strategies, understandable enough in the circumstances, was to wage war against a common oppressor, the landlord. Some assaults involving Sabina Grogan were housing related,62 and similar cases were not uncommon: the keeper of a common lodging house at 31 Crescent Street was assaulted by a disgruntled tenant deprived of his bed for arriving late, for instance.63 Even more frequent were thefts of bedding and other articles from furnished rooms. A married couple were fined for stealing and pawning a sheet and four pillow cases from a room in St Katherine’s Road and assaulting the landlady when she accused them of the crime; in a similar case from the same street, forty pawn tickets were found on Nancy Hamble, 46, a cook, who seems to have made a profitable business from peripatetic raids of this kind; she had been in the room just one night, paying 1s “on account.”64 This was often a case of stealing from one’s richer neighbors, and the more prosperous residents of the Bangor Street area, landlords or not, could sometimes be targeted in this way. John Grogan, the rag-​and-​bone dealer husband of portly Sabina, seems to have offered easy pickings, perhaps when fuddled in drink: he had three gold watches, £15 in cash, and other property stolen in two incidents in 1901 alone.65 In fact though everyone was vulnerable to the depredations of his or her neighbors. In the late twentieth century, recorded childhood memories of the area between the wars reveal some of the joys of living there that do not appear in the court reports: delivering food to sick neighbors, door-​to-​door collections on behalf of the desperate, the vibrant street life on summer evenings. “The happiest place we lived in was Bangor Street. They used to be all friends and neighbours. You walk along, they speak to you, they’re not like people now.”66 But even then, and certainly earlier, the realities were grimmer. Again a couple of examples must suffice. Patrick Brown, an ex-​convict living in Bangor Street in 1888, broke into 36 William Street and hooked out laundry taken in by a washerwoman, a carpenter’s wife; and a year later, two men living at 16 Bangor Street robbed James Young, a deaf mute, of 10d, knocking him to the ground in William Street—​he was a shoemaker living a few doors away from the perpetrators.67 Property crime against neighbors was but a tiny proportion of crime committed elsewhere in west London by residents of the Bangor Street area. “The inhabitants are, in fact, rather criminal than poor,” thought the sociologist Charles Booth; “or if not strictly criminal, very little removed from criminality.”68 Property crimes were very numerous but were marked in general by their small pickings, many thieves content with sums like James Young’s 10d. Take some cases again from 1901: Charlotte Hobbs, flower seller of

Notting Dale   415 Kenley Street, remanded on suspicion of stealing a pinafore from a nearby draper’s shop; John Smith, general dealer of St Katherine’s Road, two months’ for unlawful possession of cable thought to be stolen from the Electric Tramway Company of Chiswick; Samuel Sell, laborer of Simpson’s lodging house St Katherine’s Road, remanded on suspicion of stealing a jacket and waistcoat valued at 17s from a shop doorway in Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith; and many more.69 The most serious theft reported was a bag snatching by Thomas Williams, laborer of St Katherine’s Road, together with his brother and another man—​“three rough-​looking young men”—​who stole a bag sewn to the waistband of Miriam Faulkner, fine art dealer of Kensington Park Road; it contained £25 in banknotes, £2 in silver and other valuables. Williams took the whole thing on himself but all three were sent for trial.70 The tendency to pick stuff up whenever occasion offered, the taste for heavy drinking when money was to be had, the propensity of those earning a living in the streets to infringe petty trade or traffic and other obligations, all brought the people of the Bangor Street into frequent contact with the police. The interaction was often fractious—​not always, because some would need police protection from family or neighbors at one point or another. In general, though, police-​public relations in Notting Dale were hostile, sometimes furiously so. Henry Curtis Bennett gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Metropolitan Police, which reported in 1908, of his nearly twenty years as magistrate for “what was called the Avernus of London (the Notting Dale district—​probably the three worst streets in London)”: I know the class of characters that were resident entirely in those streets, and given up to them, and I know the terrible assaults that were committed upon the constables in those districts when they were serving, very often singly, and how they were kicked and battered about, and many and many a time a man has gone home wounded and injured, and has had to leave the force because of injuries received in that district. . . . I have never known a constable . . . when it was absolutely necessary for his own protection that he should use it.71

There is, though, evidence that the police gave as good as they got in many instances. There were frequent allegations of prisoners being beaten up after they were taken to Notting Dale police station, conveniently located in St Clement’s (Sirdar) Road since 1873. Allegations were made that police brutality caused the death of Thomas Walsh, a general laborer of St Katherine’s Road in January 1893. In the past fifteen years he had been convicted fifty-​four times and spent nearly twelve years in prison. He died from a bleed on the brain after fighting a local man and violently resisting arrest. The coroner’s jury returned an open verdict while exonerating the police.72 But assaults against police were a weekly occurrence in the Bangor Street area, indeed almost a daily affair, and no arrest could be made without the risk of the sort of “hostile crowd” that appeared outside the Cobden that lively night in July 1893. Reports from that same month, among others, record Ellen North of St Katherine’s Road, drunk and disorderly with her husband, assaulting the PC who arrested them; and a father and two sons, bricklayers of St

416   JERRY WHITE Clement’s Road, setting about a Bangor Street man, and who turned their attention to the two PCs who interfered to protect the victim.73 One group of workers on the streets had peculiarly tense relations with police, and also added significantly to the area’s pernicious reputation in the outside world. These were the many prostitutes, full-​time or part-​time sex workers, who found lodgings there. Just how many there were cannot be known: prostitution was an employment that no one claimed in the census. “Laundress,” “flower seller,” “hawker,” “general servant,” or not answering the occupation question, served for many women living on their wits in this way. The evidence we have on numbers is, though, suggestive. The Kensington Board of Guardians’ registers for women admitted as paupers to the London Lock Hospital have survived for certain years. The Lock for Females at Westbourne Green, Paddington, a short journey to the east of Notting Dale, solely treated women with venereal diseases. Not all would have been prostitutes—​men from the area were sent to the men’s Lock at Dean Street, Soho, and we know of one instance of a married couple admitted to their respective Locks from St Katherine’s Road in October 1901 where the wife might well have been infected by the husband.74 But it is reasonable to assume that many will have been. The register for 1891–​1893, with a very few additional entries from the year on either side, gives 124 admissions where the address from which the woman was sent was recorded (there were many more where no address was given). Of these, no fewer than 77 (or 62 percent) came from the five streets of the “Avernus”: St Katherine’s Road (29), Crescent Street (21), St Clement’s Road (11), Bangor Street (9), and William Street (7).75 The ages of the women, for the seventy-​five admissions where they were recorded, ranged from 16 (Hannah Gee) to 39 (Emily Smith and Catherine Bailey), and the average age was 23. Some houses provided multiple admissions, seven from the women’s lodging house at 33 Crescent Street, five from 44 St Clement’s Road, four from 25 St Katherine’s Road and so on. The Female Lock received about seven hundred admissions a year in this period from the whole of London,76 so it is plain that the Bangor Street area provided a distinctive proportion of prostitute women. Some were admitted a number of times over this three-​year period and they offer evidence of considerable internal mobility within the different streets and houses of this small area where presumably they found companionship and safety of a kind. We can give a few instances that can be made more than names in a register. Isabella Hill was admitted from 52, 53 (twice), 55 St Katherine’s Road and 15 Bangor Street. She was born in Westminster, her Surrey-​born father in the building trade, her mother a Norfolk woman, and in early 1891 she was living with her parents in Lambeth. Her first admission to the Lock was that July but what happened in the intervening few months to bring her to 52 St Katherine’s Road is unknown.77 Rose King, 29 in 1893 and married, was living alone at 49 William Street in 1891; she was admitted from 50 St Clement’s Road, now living with her parents, both Irish-​born, who had migrated to England before Rose was born.78 And Rose Cheesman, admitted to the Lock from 44 William Street in 1892, had lived a few months before in a house let in lodgings in Dartmoor Street, Notting Hill Gate. She was 18, the head of household,

Notting Dale   417 looking after a younger sister, a domestic servant, and her brother, a milk-​carrier though just 13 years old; they had a 17-​year-​old girl boarding with them.79 We can gain some insights into how these women made a living from reports in the local press and elsewhere. It was a mystery to some. The vicar of St Clement’s, Notting Hill, interviewed in April 1899, “thinks that they seldom if ever bring a man home and is at a loss to know where they ply their trade.”80 Some, he thought, picked up navvies and lived with them temporarily in one of the area’s many furnished rooms, and that seems very likely. Certainly some conducted their business in the streets (Sarah Ann Edwards of Bangor Street was arrested with a City man near Ladbroke Grove in June 1893)81 and in the parks: Mary August, a laundress of Crescent Street, was given the benefit of the doubt in October 1901 when she told the court that a “gold Spanish coin” in her possession “was given to her by a gentleman whom she met in Hyde Park,” though nearby Wormwood Scrubs was probably the favorite hunting ground.82 But there is also evidence that the good vicar was not all-​seeing. Elizabeth Stafford, “who described herself as a married woman,” was give one month for stealing 3s 4d from a man’s trousers in a Sirdar Road lodging house in October 1901; and a month later, in a common lodging house in the same road, Frederick Carter, 52, a married man of Shepherd’s Bush, was found dead in the bed where he had spent the night with Florence Ada Clements, “a single women and laundress.” Unlucky Frederick had “engaged and paid for the room.”83 In all, prostitution was so closely associated with the Bangor Street area that it provided another telling label for George R. Sims in a further visit he paid there in 1906: it was “The Garden of Guilt.”84 Sims’s report of January 1893 changed the fate of the Bangor Street area. Until then it had received little public attention as representing a special problem for public health or morality. For the first twenty years of its existence the Kensington Vestry, responsible for sanitary matters, was vexed most by the Potteries, Jennings’ Buildings, and elsewhere.85 Although deaths from infectious diseases were high in individual streets, especially St Katherine’s Road, the area was accorded no separate identity or special status. Even in the 1880s, when earlier problems had been removed and houses let in lodgings began to receive increasing attention, no special notice was accorded the Bangor Street area, although it was mentioned in passing as both poor and criminal in evidence given to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes in 1885; and it was described as “notorious” by Booth’s surveyors in 1889, though the district was outside the poverty maps published in 1891.86 Nor, before 1893, did the district win particular notice in the local press when reporting court cases and inquests, though certainly the wider area of Notting Dale had a reputation as a poor and lawless place. As such it had a well-​ established superstructure of Christian reforming endeavors. A Catholic church for the Irish settlers, a convent with visiting nuns, a Workman’s Institute (teetotal), at least seven missions, chapels, and tabernacles, two Anglican churches and associated schools were all lodged in and around the Potteries before the footings of much of the Bangor Street area were dug. The London City Mission was perhaps the first of these to give special recognition to “the Bangor Street District, Notting Hill” with its “fallen women, and

418   JERRY WHITE yet viler companions,” in August 1891, appealing for funds to continue its work there.87 For the mission and its fellows, Sims would be a godsend. Sims’s labeling of the Bangor Street area as a “West-​End Avernus” in the Daily News had an immediate and shattering impact. The term was greedily taken up in the local press, which for the next few years delighted in reporting court cases from the area, and by the local clergy who found themselves valued as never before. The Vestry, however, responded defensively. Pointing out it had only recently laid out Avondale Park on the edge of the “Avernus,” they loaded responsibility for conditions there on others. They blamed the inhabitants for their filthy ways, the clergy for not raising moral standards, the late Metropolitan Board of Works for driving the rough poor out of central London and into Notting Dale, the police for not controlling the common lodging houses, the local publicans for the drink problem. Stung by what looked like official inaction in the face of a public scandal, “a conference of the leading inhabitants of the district,” convened by the local Progressive LCC councilor John Lloyd, campaigned for increased sanitary rigor on the part of the Vestry. Action followed of a sort. The Vestry wrote to the commissioner of police to press for greater manpower in Notting Dale and appointed a temporary additional sanitary inspector to be assigned solely to the “Avernus.”88 The Vestry though proved reluctant to be bullied by the clamor and resisted its medical officer of health’s pleas for further resources for the Bangor Street area. It would only be in March 1896 that the consequences of Sims’s article would be plain to see in the definition of the five streets in the Bangor Street area as the “Notting Dale Special Area” (NDSA) with extra sanitary resources devoted to it.89 This construction of the NDSA would establish an increasing regime of surveillance that grew tighter over the next eight years. All or most houses let in lodgings were registered by the Vestry, imposing additional regulations requiring cleanliness and restricting overcrowding. The inspection regime included early-​morning visits by sanitary inspectors with police officers and the prosecution and eviction of offenders.90 Surveillance alone changed little. Mortality rates remained stubbornly and disproportionately high.91 Overcrowding, which had fallen in the decade after 1881, probably with the ready availability of multi-​occupied houses as the middle classes fled a deteriorating North Kensington, now rose so that the population of Bangor Street (for instance) increased from 766 in 1891 to 869 in 1901, and the numbers of persons per house went up from 19.6 to 22.3 (see Table 21.1). It seemed to many that a more permanent solution was needed.92 Charles Booth, in considering what should be done about the “semi-​criminal and degraded” class that he found in the Bangor Street area and in isolated pockets across London, had concluded that it “should be gradually harried out of existence.” He concluded that “no sooner do they make a street their own than it is ripe for destruction and should be destroyed.”93 Something of the sort now began to be contemplated in Kensington. In July 1897 the local clergy petitioned the LCC to acquire the area’s 275 houses and replace them with “properly managed and supervised lodging houses for the working classes.” Three months later the Vestry wrote similarly to the LCC to take the area over and provide “respectable and decent houses” there, either by demolishing

Notting Dale   419 or reconstructing existing property. Either way, the existing residents would be harried out of existence, at least in that part of Notting Dale. The LCC declined, Booth thought, “presumably on the ground that so wealthy a locality should be able to manage its own affairs.” Even so, Booth reflected, “it would really seem that nothing short of wholesale and drastic action would suffice.”94 Others thought so too. John Lloyd agitated with others to resurrect an old London ploy to deal with a troublesome area: drive a road through it. The scheme had emerged by October 1897, shortly after the LCC’s refusal to act, and Lloyd continued to press for it among his constituents, in County Hall, in the letters columns of The Times, and in the new Royal Borough of Kensington’s council chamber, all to no avail, the financial and human costs presumably too great to stomach.95 But a strategy of physical obliteration did take hold on a smaller scale, funded by the deep pockets of the Kensington plutocracy in the shape of the Royal Borough’s first mayor, Sir Henry Seymour King, MP. King was Balliol-​educated, bred into the family banking firm in Cornhill, and had extensive Indian merchant interests.96 When the freeholds of most of the property in Kenley Street were available for sale in 1904, King made the council an interest-​free loan to buy them over the following few months. The older south side of the street was demolished and replaced with new homes; those houses on the north side owned by the council were emptied and converted into self-​ contained flats, two in each house.97 George Sims hailed it as a “splendid rehousing scheme which will vastly improve the district,”98 but a few voices were raised locally to wonder, “Had the poor people who had been turned out merely been sent into surrounding districts that were almost, if not equally, as bad?”99 Certainly there would be no room for Sabina Grogan and her neighbors in the new dwellings; though Sabina could have afforded the rents she hardly fitted into the council’s conception of a suitable tenant. Instead the street became a respectable working-​class place. In the 1911 census there were no one-​room dwellings in Kenley Street, just two-​or three-​roomed; the uniformed working class (including a police constable), artisans and journeymen, a few clerks and shopmen, and a small host of laborers working for the council were in virtually sole occupation, with just one general dealer to represent the old way of life.100 From 1906 Kenley Street would no longer be part of the NDSA. In the remainder of the area things went on pretty much as they always had. Imaginative ways to make a shilling took a literal turn when coining became a temporary cottage industry in Sirdar Road around 1905.101 The area became marginally less poor, though in 1906–​1907 the four streets of the NDSA, with one-​fiftieth of Kensington’s population, still provided the workhouse infirmary with one-​sixth of its in-​patients. Infant mortality reduced, as in Kensington and London as a whole, but still stood at 308 per 1,000 live births in 1906 compared to 132 in Kensington. Perhaps most significant of all, the number of common lodging houses fell from twenty-​three in 1896 (for 703 persons) to seventeen in 1906 (467), though the furnished rooms continued to hold their own. The Borough’s Medical Officer, with thirty-​seven years’ experience of his district, put some of these improvements down to official effort but thought the redevelopment

420   JERRY WHITE of Kenley Street the turning point, tending “to make owners of properties in adjacent streets more circumspect in regard to the condition of their houses . . . and the character of the tenants.”102 These changes did nothing to dent the area’s public notoriety however. It appeared thinly disguised in Harold Begbie’s hugely popular survey of Christian enterprise in London, Broken Earthenware (1909);103 it continued to provoke complaints among middle-​class residents living nearby of drunken brawls and prostitution;104 it was resurrected as the Avernus in a 1911 collection of Sims’s slum investigations;105 and it still proved useful in raising cash for those who made a living out of Christianizing the poor.106 Yet these changes were beginning to have an impact on the usefulness to the London poor of the Bangor Street area. Because of the way the 1911 census was constructed and has survived precise comparisons with 1901 seem unobtainable. But there is suggestive evidence for population decline. Of thirty-​six houses in Bangor Street for which a comparison can be made, the numbers of persons per house were eighteen in 1911 compared with 22.3 in the street’s thirty-​nine houses in 1901, a significant fall. Even the street traders’ allegiance had diminished (97 in 36 houses against 141 in 39 in 1901), though the “general dealers” or rag-​and-​bone men were still much in evidence.107 No detailed population figures for the area from this point on currently exist. But the changes indicated from around 1906 would accelerate dramatically with the First World War. Like the rest of working-​class London and below, life in the Bangor Street area would be transformed by conscription, full employment for men and women, and an unprecedented rise in living standards that would not be entirely wiped away by the return to a peacetime economy; drastic reductions in the strength and availability of drink produced a dramatic fall in drunkenness; and a new world opened out for poor mothers in health education and child welfare. Elements of the old Bangor Street area and its culture of resistance survived the war—​its concentration of common lodging houses was still high for London though much reduced from pre-​ war days (ten houses for 283 lodgers)—​but it could never be what it had been before 1914.108 It was diminished, certainly, but it remained exceptional. The conditions for London’s workers, altered out of recognition by the war, continued generally to improve. Yet the Bangor Street area continued to provide a refuge for those rejected by the new London economy and for those who clung to an independent existence outside the world of wage labor. Even around 1930 the distinctive nature of the place and its people continued to vex the authorities and to provoke public opprobrium: “the Notting Dale region,” concluded the New Survey of London Life and Labour, revising Charles’ Booth’s work in 1934, “includes some of the most notorious slums in London. . . . Bangor Street is one of the worst slums in London, and there is much overcrowding and poverty in that street and Crescent Street and Sirdar Road. All three of these streets contain a criminal element.” And just as Charles Booth had done forty years before, all three would be colored black on the revised poverty maps produced by the Survey.109 An investigator for the Survey thought Bangor Street, “apparently knit closely together as if by the bonds of

Notting Dale   421 an out-​cast clan,” to be “certainly one of the worst streets in the London area, reminiscent of nothing so much as a Hogarth print.”110 That older close-​knit neighborhood by this time was under siege. The character of the housing and its inhabitants had really begun to shift. The Improved Tenements Association Ltd (ITA), a semi-​philanthropic housing trust, formed in 1900 and run on Octavia Hill lines requiring rigorous respectability among its tenants, began to acquire houses in Wilsham Street (formerly St Katherine’s Road) and Bangor Street during 1923.111 Common lodging houses in Bangor Street and the “Golden Gates,” a well-​known women’s lodging house at 25–​27 Crescent Street, were bought and improved by local philanthropists around 1928. By October 1931 the ITA would own the freeholds or leasehold interests of no fewer than twenty-​nine houses in Bangor Street, fifteen in Crescent Street, and sixteen in Sirdar Road. Houses were converted into two-​room dwellings and “eighty persons have been moved out of Bangor Street, into less crowded surroundings,” though what they thought about it is not recorded.112 In the remaining properties still under old-​style private landlordism the old way of life no doubt lingered on. But one other element of the prewar Bangor Street flourished, though in new ways. Probably from early in the life of the Bangor Street area it had been customary for general dealers to sell their pickings to their neighbors, usually a display of old clothes and household articles on the street railings on fine Sunday mornings. Certainly the Sunday morning “bazaar” was in full swing by 1909. Within a decade it was publicly called “Rag Fair, Bangor Street.”113 As it grew, perhaps with an increase in general dealing taken up by disabled ex-​servicemen, and as it gained notice among a wider public, calls for its abolition on sanitary and moral grounds (as an affront to the sanctity of the Sabbath rather than as a market for stolen goods, which it no doubt was) found a louder voice.114 By 1930 there were 202 stalls and forty-​two pitches, the fair running from 8:00–​10:30 on Sunday mornings, attracting crowds of some five thousand and sellers from all over London, including the Jewish East End, or so it was said. The new respectable landlords of much of Bangor Street discreetly added to the protests and in March that year the Borough Council petitioned the Labour Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, to suppress Rag Fair under the Fairs Acts. Advised by his officials he declined, saying the acts did not apply.115 There now began a war of attrition between the council and the traders of Bangor Street’s Rag Fair, with scores of summonses issued for unlicensed street trading. The traders found much sympathy among magistrates, the public, and even the local clergy, who deplored the fact that some traders unable to pay their fines had been imprisoned. Eventually, though, the High Court in early 1932 ruled the council was acting lawfully. Yet an administrative fiat was one thing, the general dealers of Bangor Street another, and it is clear from newspaper reports that Rag Fair continued to operate with traders risking a fine and worse. From 1937 the LCC weighed in against the traders, using new powers to suppress trading on Sundays. More prosecutions followed and for a time the Fair moved to Saturdays. By the summer of 1938 it was back to its Sunday ways. Just when it closed—​or more likely petered out—​is not known.116 By then the days of the Bangor Street area were numbered. In 1933 the borough council, with the assistance of the LCC, had resolved to make the remaining problem

422   JERRY WHITE streets of the old NDSA an Improvement Area under the Housing Act 1930, one of seven areas in the borough to be “reconditioned” or improved over the next five years.117 Some 193 basement rooms were scheduled for closure, rehousing 513 people; action would be taken to alleviate the overcrowding of sixty-​five large families.118 Soon after, the final steps were taken in a process stretching back many years that was designed to render the area less conspicuous in the public mind. In 1896 the vestry had urged the LCC to alter the names of the by-​now-​notorious streets in the NDSA. William Street was renamed Kenley Street that same year and Sirdar Road replaced St Clement’s Road shortly before the turn of the century. St Katherine’s Road, which in any case seems pretty much to have lost its criminal component around the time of the First World War or just after, became Wilsham Street before 1921. Now, in 1935, the final blow: Bangor Street would be no more, but was renamed Becher Street; and Crescent Street was soon after renamed Becher Place. Probably around this point or soon after, the question of clearing the area and replacing the old houses with new blocks of council flats began to be considered. The Improvement Area had been intended to “recondition” the houses. But a new national emphasis on slum clearance from April 1933 eventually encouraged the council to consider again the advantages of demolition over improvement, and in April 1938 the council resolved to demolish Becher Street, Becher Place, the north side of Wilsham Street adjoining, and the connecting part of Sirdar Road. By “the end of the year the council had acquired a large proportion of the land and were negotiating for the acquisition of the remainder,” the housing associations willing partners in the proposed clearance.119 The Second World War stalled thoughts of demolition, though in the absence of many children and mothers evacuated, and of men called up, the place must have become a desert. Or almost, because it continued to provide a crop of assaults (including on an air raid warden), thefts, and the odd deserter on the run until nearly the war’s end, although the Metropolitan Police decided they could safely close the Notting Dale station in Sirdar Road in 1943.120 The end was not far off. The demolition of Becher Street, Becher Place, and the north side of Wilsham Street took place in 1946 and, after huge rows over costs between the national Labour government and the local Conservative council—​the latter wanting a more luxurious scheme for its tenants than the government would sanction—​ construction began on Henry Dickens Court in the summer of 1949. Named after a son of Charles Dickens who became a high court judge and Kensington worthy, it remains there still. The Bangor Street area would become a fading memory. In truth it had died on its feet a quarter-​century before. What, though, had killed the Bangor Street area, its complex community, and its old way of life? There were many factors that weighed differently in importance over time. First we might put the contradictions of Bangor Street in its heyday—​the tendencies to inequality and exploitation even within the “slum”; the violence and cruelty, most savagely against women; the population divided among those moving through and those more established, and those driven there by desperate poverty and those moving there by choice. In other words it was unstable and fragile from the outset.

Notting Dale   423 The labeling of the Bangor Street area as the West-​End Avernus in 1893 then changed the area’s fortunes forever. It unleashed a war on the district on many fronts—​public opinion, the police and magistracy, the local state, organized religion and its adherents, changes in housing tenure, and finally the demolition contractor’s hammers. Everyone in the area must have been touched by the ripples in some way. On the other hand, little changed fundamentally, and everything could be adapted to until the housing market shifted from 1904, when private wealth combined with state action to produce extensive evictions. Even that was a consequence of Sims’s fateful intervention. From 1914 a new world took over. The improvement in working-​class resources and expectations brought about by the war would alone have made the Bangor Street area look like the product of an earlier, out-​of-​date, Victorian generation. Though it continued to have its uses, attracting the desperate and the marginal, it would have offered less to a younger generation, much less in the case of young women if we can read across from the experience of Campbell Bunk, which shared so many similarities with Bangor Street around this time.121 And the Bangor Street neighborhood was undermined by two key elements: by continuing attrition from the local state, especially on the means of earning a living there and, crucially, by new landlords whose very objective was to alter or remove the people they found there. Finally, can the new resources available to historians alter our perception of the slums of late-​Victorian London? They can at the margins. To be able to give something of the life-​story of a person who would otherwise be known to us only through court reports or poor law records at least humanizes “the slum” and demystifies its demons. With flair and imagination, skill and resources, more could be done.

Abbreviations Booth Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London, 17 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1902–​1903) Booth/​MSS Booth Archive [LPES] Census Census for England and Wales, 1881–​1911 (www.fin​dmyp​ast.co.uk) ITA Improved Tenements Association Ltd. KBG Kensington Board of Guardians records [LMA] K&CLSL Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library KEN/​MOH Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health of the Vestry of Kensington [to 1899] and of the Royal Borough of Kensington, for the Year.... (London: Vestry and Royal Borough of Kensington) LCC London County Council LCMM London City Mission Magazine (London: London City Mission) LMA London Metropolitan Archives LPES Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics NDSA Notting Dale Special Area

424   JERRY WHITE NSL  The New Survey of London Life & Labour, 9 Vols. (London: P.S. King & Son, 1930–​1935) NSOL New Survey of London Life and Labour Archive [LPES] OBP Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldb​aile​yonl​ine.org) TNA The National Archives HO Home Office WLO West London Observer RG Registrar General

Notes 1. Daily News, January 24, 1893. For Sims see Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities 1870–​1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993), 146 for Sims and “slumland story-​telling.” 2. See Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion, 2017), 16–​17. 3. Anthony S. Wohl, “Unfit for Human Habitation,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), vol. 2, 603–​624; Anthony S. Wohl, The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London (London: Arnold, 1977); see also J. A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), and Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918–​45, with Particular Reference to London (London: University College London Press, 1992). 4. D. A. Reeder, “A Theatre of Suburbs: Some Patterns of Development in West London, 1801–​ 1911,” in The Study of Urban History, ed. H. J. Dyos (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), 253–​ 271; H. J. Dyos and D. A. Reeder, “Slums and Suburbs,” in Dyos and Wolff, The Victorian City, vol. 1, 359–​386; H. J. Dyos, Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (Repr., Leicester: Leicester University Press, [1961] 1973), 109–​113. 5. See for instance Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–​ 1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996). 6. Raphael Samuel, East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 7. Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). 8. See for instance Mayne, The Imagined Slum; Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 9. Sarah Wise, The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum (London: Bodley Head, 2008); Fiona Rule, The Worst Street in London (Hersham: Ian Allan, 2008). 10. Mary Bayly, Ragged Homes and How to Mend Them (London: James Nisbet, 1860), ch. 1. 11. W. H. Wills, “Health by Act of Parliament,” Household Words, vol. 1, no. 20, August 10, 1850: 460–​463. 12. George Borrow, Romano Lavo-​Lil: Word-​Book of the Romany or, English Gypsy Language (Repr., London: John Murray, [1874] 1907), 228–​234. 13. See Patricia E. Malcolmson, “Getting a Living in the Slums of Victorian Kensington,” London Journal 1, no. 1 (May 1975), 28–​55.

Notting Dale   425 14. Borrow, Romano Lavo-​Lil. 15. For a thorough overview of these early years see F. H. W. Sheppard, gen. ed., Survey of London, Vol. XXXVII: Northern Kensington (London: Athlone Press, 1973), 341–​351. 16. Malcolmson, “Getting a Living,” 31n.10. 17. For the latter see KEN/​MOH, 1892, 153. 18. 1881 Census, RG 11/​32. 19. For Jennings’ Buildings see Jennifer Davis, “Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: The Construction of the Underclass in Mid-​Victorian London,” in Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Routledge, 1989), 11–​39. 20. Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 81. 21. Booth MSS/​B/​325, 9, 13, 15. A pound sterling (£) was divided into twenty shillings (20s); and a shilling was divided into twelve pence (12d) 22. OBP t18730818-​519. 23. KBG/​58, Minute Book of the Board, March 12, 1891. 24. KBG/​193/​14, p168, April 3, 1891. 25. KEN/​MOH, 1897, 130–​131. 26. KEN/​MOH, 1912, 90. 27. George R. Sims, Off the Track in London (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1911), 33 (written in 1904). 28. OBP t18980110-​120; t18960720-​585. 29. Sam Shaw, Guttersnipe (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1946), 29-​33. 30. WLO, April 8 and July 1, 1893, March 28, 1902. For Grogan see 1891 Census RG 12/​29/​38/​7; 1901 Census RG 13/​24/​92/​66. 31. The list of keepers of furnished rooms is in KEN/​MOH, 1912, 90. For Margetson see 1911 Census, RG 14/​2/​17/​156 32. 1911 Census, RG 14/​2/​19/​160. 33. 1911 Census, RG 14/​2/​19/​160. For William Street see WLO, June 3, 1893. 34. For his miserly ways see WLO, September 15, 1911; he had other property too (WLO, August 25, 1911). 1911 Census, RG 14/​3/​23/​219. 35. WLO, December 23, 1898. 36. WLO, April 8, 1893. 37. See Booth, Series 3, Vol. 3, 153. 38. The Post Office London Directory for 1901 (London: Kelly’s Directories, 1901). 39. Agnes Mary Alexander, Some Kensington Problems (London: Printed for Private Circulation, 1904), 9. 40. KEN/​MOH 1897, 132–​133. 41. Alexander, Some Kensington Problems, 6. 42. KEN/​MOH 1899, 13–​18. 43. Inter-​Departmental Committee on Medical Inspection and Feeding of Children Attending Public Elementary Schools, Report Vol. II (London: HMSO, Cd. 2784, 1905), questions 4768ff, 4885, 4888-​9. 44. KBG/​193/​14, 230. 45. KBG/​193/​14, 27. 46. WLO, May 12, 1911. 47. Mary Benedetta, The Street Markets of London (London: John Miles, 1936), 115–​117.

426   JERRY WHITE 48. Booth MSS/​B/​261, 51–​55. 49. Booth MSS/​B/​119 (c1899). 50. WLO, July 29, 1893. 51. WLO, November 15, 1901. 52. WLO, August 30, 1901. 53. WLO, June 14, 1901; OBP t19010624-​460. 54. WLO, November 8, 1901. 55. WLO, November 29, 1901. 56. Minutes of Evidence taken before the Inter-​Departmental Committee on Employment of School Children, with Appendices and Index (London: HMSO, Cd. 895, 1902), qq738-​60 and Appendix 6; qq1227ff and Appendix 16. 57. Booth MSS/​B/​325, 5–​7. 58. Shaaron Whetlor, The Story of Notting Dale. From Potteries & Piggeries to Present Times (London: Kensington and Chelsea Community History Group, 1998), 15, citing evidence it seems from the 1890s that I have been unable to trace. 59. WLO, March 18, 1893; see also September 23, 1893. 60. WLO, January 13, 1911. 61. Booth, Series 3, Vol. 3, 153. 62. WLO, July 1, 1893. 63. WLO, December 30, 1893. 64. WLO, October 18, 1901; June 16, 1911. 65. WLO, January 11 and September 6, 1901. 66. North Kensington Local History Project, Our Homes, Our Streets (London: North Kensington Local History Project, 1987), 6; see also Whetlor, Story of Notting Dale, 45–​47. 67. OBP t18880730-​737; OBP t18890408-​366. 68. Booth, Series 3, Vol. 3, 152. 69. WLO, February 22; March 1 (Smith and Sell), 1901. 70. WLO, November 22, 1901. 71. Royal Commission upon the Duties of the Metropolitan Police, Report Together with Appendices, Vol. III (London: HMSO, Cd. 4261, 1908), q45304. 72. WLO, February 4, 1893. 73. WLO, July 8 and 29, 1893. 74. KBG/​203/​1, ff101, 110. 75. KBG/​204/​002. 76. Low’s Handbook to the Charities of London 1896–​7 (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1897), 118. 77. 1891 Census, RG12/​399/​157/​42. Isabella gave her next of kin as Louisa Love, a married woman. There are several Isabella Hills born around this time, but this is the only one who had a sister Louisa, born a year after Isabella. 78. 1891 Census, RG 12/​23/​10/​16. 79. 1891 Census, RG 12/​20/​49/​34. 80. Booth MSS/​B/​261, 21–​23. 81. WLO, July 1, 1893. 82. WLO, October 4, 1901. 83. WLO, November 29, 1901. 84. George R. Sims, The Mysteries of Modern London (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1906), 119–​125.

Notting Dale   427 85. See for instance KEN/​MOH 1871, 6–​7. 86. First Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Housing of the Working Classes, Vol. II, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix as to England and Wales (London: HMSO, Cd. 4402-​1, 1885), qq2235, 5322ff. For the identification of the area by Booth’s surveyors see Richard Dennis’s chapter in this Handbook. 87. LCMM, August 1891, pp. 169–​175. For the early philanthropic endeavor, see Florence M. Gladstone, Notting Hill in Bygone Days (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1924), 147–​157. 88. See the correspondence and leader comment in the Daily News, January 26 and 31, 1893; WLO, February 25, April 8, 1893; KEN/​MOH 1892, pp.152–​163 (published in mid-​1893 and covering the first response to the Sims article). 89. KEN/​MOH 1896, 144–​155. 90. KEN/​MOH 1898, 129–​131; WLO, December 23, 1898. 91. KEN/​MOH 1899, 16. 92. On the lack of improvement see Booth, Series 3, Vol. 3, 153–​157; Booth MSS/​B/​261, 9. 93. Booth, Series 1, Vol. 1, 169, 174–​175. 94. LCC/​MIN/​07365, Bundle 18 (LMA); Booth, Series 3, Vol. 3, pp. 156–​157. 95. WLO, October 22, 1897; January 25, 1901. The Times, January 3, 1899. On the use of new roads to demolish troublesome areas see David Olsen, The Growth of Victorian London (London: B. T. Batsford, 1976), ch. 7; Wohl, Eternal Slum, 26–​34; White, London in the Nineteenth Century, 30–​35. 96. The Mayors of England and Wales 1902 (Brighton: W. T. Pike, 1902), 34–​35. He died in November 1933 aged 81, leaving an estate of gross value £186, 840. 97. KEN/​MOH 1906, 77; Sheppard, Survey of London, 348. 98. Sims, Off the Track, 30. 99. The Times, “Kensington Ratepayers’ Association,” October, 27, 1905. 100. 1911 Census, RG14PN155 RG78PN5 RD2 SD2 ED16 SN367. Sabina Grogan would die in Paddington in 1917. 101. See OBP t19051211-​84 and 85; t9081208-​10; The Times, October 12, 1908. 102. KEN/​MOH, Monthly Report, June 16–​July 13, 1907, 124–​134. 103. Harold Begbie, Broken Earthenware: A Footnote in Narrative to Professor William James’s Study in Human Nature “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1909), 33–​41. 104. KEN/​MOH 1911, 52–​53. 105. Sims, Off the Track, “In the Royal Borough of Kensington,” 28–​44. 106. LCMM, October 1911, 199–​201. 107. 1911 Census, RG14PN157 RG78PN5 RD2 SD2 ED17 SN595. 108. KEN/​MOH 1920, 48. For changes in London brought about by the war see Jerry White, “London in the First World War: Questions of Legacy,” London Journal 41, no. 3 (November 2016): 313–​327. 109. NSL, Vol. VI, 1934, p. 427; Vol. VII, 1934, Map 11. 110. NSOL/​1/​83, “Kensington” typescript, p. 4. There is a much more sympathetic portrait drawn by Mrs Cecil Chesterton, I Lived in a Slum (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), 11–​61. 111. KEN/​MOH 1923, 75. The ITA issued shares and paid dividends from rent income to shareholders. See What Is the ITA? (London: Improved Tenements Association Ltd., [ca. 1931]), in NSOL/​1/​1/​4. For the work of Octavia Hill see Elizabeth Baigent and Ben Cowell, eds., “Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles”: Octavia Hill, Social Activism, and the Remaking of British Society (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2016); Jenny

428   JERRY WHITE Rossiter, Nobler and Better Things: Octavia Hill’s Life and Work (London: Octavia, 2012); Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill: A Life (London: Constable, 1990). 112. NSOL/​1/​3/​1 and 1/​1/​4—​paper given at the ITA annual general meeting, October 20, 1931. 113. Begbie, Broken Earthenware, 38. 114. WLO, August 17, 1923 for an early naming; March 27, 1925 for an early reference to stolen bicycles being recovered there. For a call for abolition on Sabbattarian grounds see WLO, March 23, 1928. 115. HO45/​22978 [TNA]. 116. The Times, December 6 and 20, 1930, December 8, 1931, September 7, 1937; WLO, January 8, 1932, July 15, 1938. See also a Sunday at Rag Fair in James Curtis, What Immortal Hand (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1939), 96–​100. 117. KEN/​MOH 1933, 36. 118. KEN/​MOH 1934, 43; LCC, London Housing (London: London County Council, 1937), 10. See also, for a policy overview, Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment, chs. 4 and 7. 119. KEN/​MOH 1938, 42. 120. WLO, December 6, 1940, January 31, and October 17, 1941. 121. White, Campbell Bunk, ch. 7.

Bibliography Baigent, Elizabeth, and Cowell, Ben, eds. “Nobler Imaginings and Mightier Struggles”: Octavia Hill, Social Activism, and the Remaking of British Society. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2016. Booth, Charles. Life and Labour of the People in London. 17 vols. London: Macmillan, 1902–​1903. Chesterton, Mrs Cecil [Ada Elizabeth]. I Lived in a Slum. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936. Darley, Gillian. Octavia Hill. A Life. London: Constable, 1990. Davin, Anna. Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–​1914. London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996. Davis, Jennifer. “Jennings’ Buildings and the Royal Borough: The Construction of the Underclass in mid-​Victorian London.” In Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800, edited by David Feldman and Gareth Stedman Jones, 11–​39. London: Routledge, 1989. Dyos, H. J. Victorian Suburb: A Study of the Growth of Camberwell (1961). Reprint, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973. Dyos, H. J., and D. A. Reeder. “Slums and Suburbs.” In The Victorian City, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, vol. 1, 359–​386. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Mayne, Alan. The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​ 1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion, 2017. The New Survey of London Life & Labour, 9 vols. London: P. S. King & Son, 1930–​35. Olsen, David. The Growth of Victorian London. London: B. T. Batsford, 1976. Reeder, D. A. “A Theatre of Suburbs: Some Patterns of Development in West London, 1801–​1911.” In The Study of Urban History, edited by H. J. Dyos, 253–​271. London: Edward Arnold, 1968.

Notting Dale   429 Rossiter, Jenny. Nobler and Better Things: Octavia Hill’s Life and Work. London: Octavia, 2012. Rule, Fiona. The Worst Street in London. Hersham: Ian Allan, 2008. Samuel, Raphael. East End Underworld: Chapters in the Life of Arthur Harding. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Sheppard, F. H. W., gen. ed. Survey of London, Vol. XXXVII: Northern Kensington. London: Athlone Press, 1973. White, Jerry. “London in the First World War: Questions of Legacy.” London Journal 41, no. 3 (2016): 313–​327. White, Jerry. London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. White, Jerry. The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk, Islington, Between the Wars. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986. Wise, Sarah. The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum. London: Bodley Head, 2008. Wohl, Anthony S. The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London. London: Arnold, 1977. Wohl, Anthony S. “Unfit for Human Habitation.” In The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, vol. 2, 603–​624. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Yelling, J. A. Slums and Redevelopment: Policy and Practice in England, 1918–​45, with Particular Reference to London. London: University College London Press, 1992. Yelling, J. A. Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986.

CHAPTER 22

T HE HISTORI C FI RE S OF Singap ore KAH SENG LOH

Where are the histories of fires in slums and squatter areas? There are many passing references in the historical record, but little in the way of detailed and sustained commentaries. One of the few documented cases on the relationship between urban fires and low-​income housing is to be found in the city-​state of Singapore. There, a great fire in a squatter settlement called Bukit Ho Swee in 1961 was justifiably historic. The inferno was not only Singapore’s largest ever, rendering sixteen thousand people homeless within a few hours, but it was also a trigger for change, bringing to culmination a fire-​stoked process of emergency-​housing development that had commenced in the previous decade. The 1961 calamity brought forth an expansive public housing program by the state that transformed the physical and socioeconomic landscape of the island and the role and identity of the people.1 The development of Singapore after the 1961 fire was driven by public housing built by the Housing and Development Board (HDB), a statutory board established in 1960. The replacement of squatter areas (which were also sometimes called “slums” by the state, but which might more appropriately be termed “urban kampongs” or “village” in Malay) by public housing estates due to fire or clearance enabled an equally expansive program of urban renewal and slum removal in the inner city. Further, the surge of public housing underpinned the state’s industrialization program as homeowners assumed full-​time work in factories and became model citizen-​workers. Fire occupies a commanding position in this history, alongside the role of the state in brokering housing and industry, and life and work.

Fire Fragments Historic fires such as Bukit Ho Swee appear to have been rare and exceptional, although in the modern era infernos have long accompanied the growth of densely built

Historic Fires of Singapore    431 flammable housing in the city. This fact is not lost on rulers, city planners, and even victims. Following the inferno that razed London in 1666, the king vigorously replanned and rebuilt the city, which expanded his authority in relation to the landlords and labor guilds.2 Conversely, a much smaller and contained fire, the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in New York City, ignited a nationwide campaign for work safety in the US garment industry.3 Not all great fires, though, were historic in their aftermath: political and economic factors prevented municipal administrations in Chicago, Boston, and Baltimore from rebuilding the cities in the aftermath of blazes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 One of the most salient examples of historic fires, which has striking similarities to Singapore in time and place, is Hong Kong, another British colony. Hong Kong’s public housing after the Second World War was also an emergency project, built after a series of devastating conflagrations in squatter areas, initially on a small scale before expanding in the aftermath of the Shek Kip Mei inferno in 1953 and subsequent fires. This colonial building program should not be viewed merely as a humanitarian response to a disaster, but in the context of long-​standing British efforts to rule a Chinese population regarded as unruly and insanitary.5 In addition, as Manuel Castells and others have argued, the fire-​originating public housing expressed a “Shek Kip Mei syndrome,” which propelled industrial development in Hong Kong and Singapore; interestingly, though, these authors did not study the role of fires in Singapore.6 In Singapore, unlike Hong Kong, British control of housing and urban development ceased in 1959 when the island became a self-​governing state. Nevertheless, the People’s Action Party (PAP) government that inherited the portfolios of housing and urban renewal retained the colonial outlook on squatter and slum housing—​as bad housing—​and the desire to discipline the population (which was majority Chinese, as in Hong Kong). Urban fires in Southeast Asia in particular are little studied. One exception is a 2012 volume on flammable cities, which discussed how urban fires may act as catalysts for change, especially in Asian cities where, unlike their western counterparts, wooden housing remained the prevalent housing form deep into the twentieth century (and in many cases to this day).7 Indeed, in Southeast Asia, the growth of slums and squatter areas after the Second World War owed to rapid population growth, migration and in some instances the influx of refugees, but these themes have received little attention from historians. An interesting study of fires in the recent history of Jakarta traced how they occasionally enabled construction and housing projects, while also provoking widespread allegations of arson.8 Otherwise, there are merely tantalizing fragments available of historic fires in Southeast Asia: we know, for instance, that the majority of blazes in post-​war Manila took place in squatter areas but failed to elicit public housing responses,9 while Bangkok provides a tale, in 1968, of a community leader in a slum who defied the municipal authorities and rebuilt his home on a fire site.10 These incomplete fragments point to still-​unrecovered microhistories of fires, which are useful for future historical research into the relationship between slums and squatter settlements, and the political and socioeconomic life of a city or nation. To take an infamous example, in 1969 the mayor of Manila abruptly uprooted 2,800 families from

432   KAH SENG LOH a squatter area in Intramuros to a badly prepared resettlement area outside the city, some 35 kilometers away. He tried to prevent their return by demolishing and burning their makeshift housing. Displaced from their source of employment and community, many of the evictees returned to Manila to live in other squatter settlements, spelling the failure of forced resettlement.11 On the one hand, Intramuros illustrates how slum dwellers and squatters typically respond to coercive resettlement and the burning of their homes. On the other hand, it reinforces the strong image of enduring slums and squatter areas (and thus of “inconsequential” fires) in Southeast Asia, where weak efforts at urban planning are no more than paper plans and public housing developments are nominal prestige projects of the politicians.12 As Alan Mayne has pointed out, the term “slum” is a stereotype of people who, simply in terms of their dwelling form, are depicted as deviant, parasitic, or deficient.13 To this we may add attempts by the state to socialize slum dwellers and squatters, either in the context of the colonial governance of subject “races,” as in British Hong Kong and Singapore, or as part of nation-​building and the creation of citizenship, as in post-​1959 Singapore. We may view the historical impact of urban fires in a similar way. In Singapore, the HDB depicted the Bukit Ho Swee fire as a “blessing in disguise,” removing an “inert” people from dangerous, fire-​prone housing to clean, safe, and modern flats.14 The significance of fires lies, variously, in the combination of environmental and human factors that produce daily hazards for urban inhabitants, in the disciplinary projects that governments, planners, and reformers have occasionally envisaged consequent to a fire, and in residents’ responses to these hazards and projects. Even when fires have not had historical effects on the scale of the Bukit Ho Swee catastrophe, they highlight the chronic hazards that the dwellers of flammable housing face, and showcase people’s agency and response, either to prevent fire outbreaks or to return to previous housing in the aftermath of a conflagration.

Emergencity Singapore For more than a decade following the close of the Second World War, Singapore’s urban landscape mirrored those of other Southeast Asian capital cities. Between 1947 and 1957, a confluence of factors—​increased fertility and birth rates, reduced mortality rates, and arrival of migrants from the region—​expanded the city’s population growth at a yearly rate of 4.5 percent. The demographic change was not only quantitative: people were settling down to form nuclear families with multiple children instead of returning to their home countries as in the pre-​war period. In 1953, a new law limited immigration to wives and children who were reuniting with locals. The Chinese population, comprising three-​quarters of Singapore’s population, attained a near-​even sex ratio as a result of immigration. It also became younger; in 1957, two-​thirds of Chinese households were nuclear families with three to four children each.

Historic Fires of Singapore    433 Historically, Singapore’s working-​class population had dwelt in shophouses located in the old town area. Single males crammed in great numbers into these shophouses’ tiny cubicles, which often had no light or airflow. The living conditions were abysmal, but for practical reasons the residents tolerated the shared housing, which defrayed rental and transport costs and allowed them to live near their kin and community. A point that the municipal authorities ignored was that the dwellers did not spend much time inside the cubicles, which they merely slept in. The formation of nuclear families, however, compelled a search for bigger and more suitable housing. Such housing was to be found in the large and growing numbers of unauthorized wooden houses in the urban kampongs. In 1961, there were more than fifty such settlements within the city limits, housing 250,000 people or a quarter of the urban population. The squatter housing population was still smaller than that remaining in the city center but was growing at a faster rate. Most of it comprised the larger families departing from the shophouses or, more remarkably, immigrants who knew enough of the housing situation to bypass the shophouses and move directly into the squatter areas. The urban kampong dwellers rented their housing from a landlord or chief tenant and were technically not squatters. The land on which they lived was likely to have been leased out for temporary occupation. The urban kampongs stood along the main roads leading out of the town area, highlighting the continuing ties between the squatters and their workplace and kin. Working-​age residents (and sometimes older children) eked out their livelihoods as part-​time hawkers and vendors, day laborers, factory workers paid by the hour, or drivers of unlicensed taxis. They might also supplement their income with home-​based piecework or small-​scale husbandry and vegetable growing. Despite their low and irregular incomes, they formed an important part of the shadow economy that supported the formal economy of Singapore based on the entrepôt trade. Despite being under-​employed and characterized as inert, the squatters of Singapore, like their counterparts elsewhere, were modern in their outlook and keen to better their lives. The Chinese were hopeful about “finding a road” (che lor in Hokkien)—​a term some of them used in my oral history interviews—​for themselves and their children. The seemingly plain story of Tay Yan Woon’s parents, who left their ancestral village in China for Singapore in the 1950s, belies their optimism and mobility in charting new, improved lives, undeterred by the poor state of their housing and the intervention of a devastating fire: My mother came to Singapore when she was still very young . . . My mother joined my father in Singapore, who lived in Si Kah Teng [Kampong Tiong Bahru] at that time, and we were born there. But not long after, when I was four or five at the most, Si Kah Teng was burned. Then we moved to Bukit Ho Swee, rented an attap [thatched] house, where we reared some livestock.15

Fire was thus a cause of forced mobility, and it was common for squatters to move, and move repeatedly, within the city. Lee Ah Gar’s family shifted from Bukit Ho Swee to

434   KAH SENG LOH the opposing eastern side of the city where his father, a hawker, hoped to improve his business. There, they constructed a wooden house—​illegally as it had not (and likely would not have) been approved by the state. The whole process was autonomous, as Lee explained: “So my father went there and found a piece of land with his friend . . . We went to the construction company to buy all the materials, the wooden boards, then got the construction company to get it done for us. There was no registration.”16 In the dynamics of life in the urban kampongs, optimism was intertwined with an autonomous, often ambivalent worldview. Bukit Ho Swee, like many other kampongs, was built over a disused Chinese cemetery. This was a significant change from customary Chinese practice, which was to bury the dead on hilly ground (“Bukit” is “hill” in Malay) while people resided in the low-​lying plains and valleys of the town area. A dweller of Kampong Bukit Ho Swee, who lived in a house built atop a grave, recounted, “Living people and dead people were neighbors. We didn’t feel afraid.”17 Others converted old coffin boards into a makeshift bridge or pig sty, while children dug around the cemetery for bones. There was an absence of formal law in the urban kampongs which extended beyond the illegal housing—​“there was no government” (bo cheng hu in Hokkien), as one individual succinctly put it.18 In the postwar years, the state cracked down on secret societies and gangs for criminal activities such as extortion of businesses and kidnapping, which were often based in the squatter areas and shophouses and drew their members from unemployed youths and young men. But most squatters feared the police and viewed the unlawful groups as a benign influence, at worst a necessary evil to which businesses and hawkers had to pay “protection money.” But while extortion was at times coercive, in many cases secret society and gang members were regarded, as a female former resident surmised, as “very righteous and good-​natured.”19 They were acquaintances, classmates, or friends. In settlements that were rarely surveyed by the police, the gangsters served, partially at least, the protective function that the state normally performs, and they scrutinized strangers entering the kampong. However, squatter housing made sense only to their dwellers; to most third parties, it was a visual and sociological blight on the city. At the dawn of the twentieth century, sanitary experts such as W. J. R. Simpson had deemed Singapore’s shophouses as breeding grounds for infectious diseases, particularly tuberculosis.20 In the aftermath of the Second World War, western urban and town planners assumed control of the housing discourse. They viewed squatter settlements not only as foci of disease but also as instances of uncontrolled urban growth that threatened the social, moral, and political order of the city. To the experts, Singapore and other cities in the region were “emergencities.”21 The planners deemed the proliferation of urban squatter settlements as a great urban crisis, to which the only solution was for the state to organize urban development from above at the national scale, aided by planning expertise. This was the recommendation of the first housing “mission of experts” commissioned by the United Nations and headed by US planner Jacob Crane, which surveyed Southeast and South Asian cities in 1950–​1951, including Singapore. The mission warned of an especially severe regional

Historic Fires of Singapore    435 problem: “Prevailing conditions in Asia create the greatest housing problems in the world,” to which “only heroic measures could make these swollen cities livable and economic.”22 There was, to the mission, no real difference between squatter settlements and slums: “Every available open space within the shelter of the city limits becomes a camp of improvised shacks, and in no time the camp becomes an insanitary slum,” and it even claimed, “By and large a great many villages in South and South-​East Asia are slums.” The mission pointed out that “[t]‌he Attap Dwellings Committee of Singapore is concerned with slum clearance and the thinning out of congested areas.” Against such gigantic problems, the solution “must be planned and programmed and carried forward by governments, with the participation of co-​operative and other local groups, all as part of a national policy.”23 In particular, the UN mission adjudged that “Singapore is losing the war against poverty and disease.”24 This assessment converged with the emerging response of the British colonial government to the urban kampongs, and more broadly to the imagined future of postcolonial Singapore. The British convened a Singapore Housing Committee in 1947 to undertake the first study of the urban developments. The committee concluded that the island had become a “chaotic and unwieldy megalopolis,” a development “detrimental to health and morals.”25 The “insanitary kampongs” were an especially serious problem, being “the worst type of slum,” with “living conditions which are not fit for animals to live in,” and “[t]‌he only solution to this problem is demolition and re-​housing.”26 The kampongs were also “schools for training youth for crime,” and a skeptic could visit these areas “if he likes to risk his personal safety.”27 The committee called for two measures: a master plan to organize the development of Singapore and a fully empowered housing agency to build new towns, low-​cost housing, and green areas. The ideology of master-​planned development, embedded in the work of the UN mission of experts and the Housing Committee, sparked a growing conflict between squatters and the state throughout the 1950s. Livelihoods and lifestyles were at stake: two families of soybean growers, who were evicted from their land and offered apartment housing, wrote a letter to the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the colonial housing agency, demanding, “[H]‌ow can you expect us to give up our living system by altering the country life to city life? . . . That is to say let the vegetables grow on rocks.”28 Similar anger and resistance in the mid-​1950s delayed the development of Singapore’s first new town, Queenstown, which was based on the British concept of new towns to decanter the population from the congested inner city. In 1953, a SIT demolition team entering an urban kampong at Geylang Lorong 27 was met by a defiant crowd; it needed the presence of a riot squad to successfully carry out its task.29 Nevertheless, the master planning directed by British colonial officials expanded. The SIT undertook a “diagnostic survey” of the city in 1952–​1954, with its officials urging that “steps that must be taken AT THIS MOMENT” for a coordinated assault on the housing crisis.30 The survey included house-​to-​house inspection of the urban kampongs and produced the first Master Plan of 1955. On the premise that “[t]‌he Attap Dwelling will not be appropriate within the built-​up precincts of a modern City,”31 the plan aimed

436   KAH SENG LOH to resettle two-​thirds of urban kampong dwellers in public housing (of which the SIT would build 10,000 units per year) and rural resettlement areas over a period of twenty years. Squatter settlements such as Bukit Ho Swee would be demolished, while a smaller number of urban kampongs were “tolerated” and earmarked for cleansing and improvement in the interim.32 The Master Plan was one of two key components in the anti-​squatter policy, the other being the agency to implement it. The 1947 Housing Committee had assessed the SIT to be inadequate for the task, calling for the formation of a “Government Housing and Planning Department under a Director of Planning and Housing to carry out the Housing and Planning Ordinances which are so urgently required in Singapore.”33 In 1960, the PAP government established the HDB to replace the SIT. The board, unlike the trust, which was formally a sanitary agency, was a statutory board under the government with full powers to carry out slum clearance and build public housing. The HDB has been associated with the PAP’s housing program, although the bill to establish it was passed in January 1959, before the general elections in May for the self-​governing state of Singapore, which gave control of domestic affairs, including housing, to the PAP. Public housing received strong financial backing in the PAP’s State Development Plan for 1961–​1964, which assigned 17.5 percent of the budget to build 51,031 flats. The minister for finance, Goh Keng Swee, hailed the housing budget as being “an all-​time record for Singapore” and unmatched elsewhere in Asia.34 The state had taken over from the private sector in the construction of housing. The PAP had won the 1959 elections decisively, but its housing program was unlikely to be popular. Meeting the building targets required the erection of one-​room emergency flats en masse, which were cheaper to build than permanent concrete housing, but of lower quality and lifespan. Many such flats were equipped only with communal toilets and kitchens and did not offer adequate privacy or safety for larger families and women. In the State Development Plan, 30 percent of the public housing would be one-​room emergency flats with no bedroom, which were very small and inadequate for families with children. But emergency flats were expedient for the short-​term purpose behind their creation: to remove families from urban kampongs. The SIT had been unwilling to countenance such housing (although, as we will see, they built some), and even the HDB’s architects, who were mostly locals following the resignation of expatriates from the SIT, felt that the construction of flats, which would degenerate into “controlled slums,” was “inadvisable if not impolitic,” though “political considerations were more pressing and that the Housing Board might have to sacrifice its ideas on what units should be constructed.”35 Not surprisingly, the early HDB encountered the same problems that had plagued the SIT in the 1950s: the lack of land to build on and refusal of people to vacate or relocate. The board built only 2,112 flats in its first fourteen months, which was lower than the yearly average of 2,200 built by the SIT. At this point, in May 1961, the great fire at Bukit Ho Swee broke out to rejuvenate the building program. But to understand the impact of the inferno, we have to return to the previous decade to explore another facet of emergencity Singapore: the recurring urban fires.

Historic Fires of Singapore    437

Inflamed Decade Fire was a chronic hazard in the urban kampongs. The flammable housing was built closely without fire breaks, and mundane acts such as throwing away a cigarette, burning joss, or leaving cooking unattended might have dire consequences. To these factors, the fire department attributed the squatters’ apparent lack of safety consciousness, with “practically no one in the least fire-​minded and when a fire did occur the tendency was for kampong dwellers to snatch up their most valued possessions and run to safety.”36 Statements like this, however, ought to be seen in context. Most dwellers tried to be responsible and vigilant, and often warned their neighbors when a fire broke out, especially at night. After a devastating blaze in Kampong Koo Chye in 1958, the city council and fire department helped form volunteer fire-​fighting squads in thirty-​six urban kampongs. They provided basic training and equipment, but the individuals who shouldered the work of extinguishing fires were locals. However, the fire department had long had a difficult relationship with the urban kampongs. As a former fire chief admitted, the department gained notoriety for pilfering at fire sites, with fire engines dubbed “robbery vehicles” (pah chiu chia in Hokkien). This frequently led to heated and unproductive encounters at fire sites where locals, in the fire chief ’s words, “were quite a nuisance because they tended to want to pull our hoses. . . . to protect their own properties,” and “we had to get the police in to drive them away.”37 A series of big fires ravaged two zones of dense squatter housing in the city in the 1950s: at the western tip of the Singapore River, which contained Bukit Ho Swee, and along the Rochore and Kallang rivers to the east. Some of the fires had historic consequences, having important ramifications in housing and urban planning for the state and fire victims. In 1951, a “million dollar fire”—​so called because of the estimated value of property destroyed—​razed Kampong Bugis and rendered three thousand people homeless. This was the first major post-​war fire, and the colonial government left the task of rehousing the fire victims to voluntary organizations, which built a small number of houses. But this housing was unpopular, and most fire victims rebuilt Kampong Bugis themselves or went to live in other squatter areas. The first significant housing response by the state came in the aftermath of two fires in the vicinity of Kampong Bugis in 1953. After a conflagration burned out 2,400 people at Geylang Lorong 3, the government resumed the fire site for low-​cost public housing and built emergency housing nearby for the fire victims. Both responses foreshadowed the work of the PAP government and the HDB in the following decade. When a subsequent fire at Geylang Lorong 25 unhoused over a thousand people, the fire site was also appropriated for public housing. At this early stage, however, the SIT began to encounter problems in its building program: less than half of the fire victim families accepted public housing, with the majority choosing either to return to the fire site to rebuild their homes or to move to wooden housing elsewhere, while those who did accept public housing frequently flouted official regulations by unilaterally extending and

438   KAH SENG LOH using areas of the housing for storage and poultry-​rearing, as they had done in the kampong to maintain their livelihoods. The SIT assessed the emergency housing as “highly undesirable” and “at best only a palliative which could in the end become a heavy liability, both financially and on health and social grounds.”38 It did not build housing for the victims of a fire in Kampong Tiong Bahru in 1955. Still, the state’s response expanded, driven ahead by further outbreaks of fires. The 1958 Kampong Koo Chye fire, which destroyed the homes of two thousand people, was a historical milestone. Besides forming fire-​fighting squads, the government built emergency housing on the fire site for sale, although about half of the fire victims had no interest in it and preferred to receive cash relief. The disaster also committed the government to continue its experiment with multi-​story emergency housing, regardless of their unpopularity. This policy became clear in the aftermath of another conflagration at Kampong Tiong Bahru the following year, which made over five thousand people homeless. Most of the fire victims were housed temporarily in SIT flats on the other side of the city, though over a quarter soon returned to Kampong Tiong Bahru or to another kampong. The most crucial effect of the 1959 Tiong Bahru fire was on emergency housing. SIT officials urged that “[t]‌he opportunity to clean up the area presented by the occurrence of the fire must not be lost.”39 It was timely, they submitted, to robustly implement the Master Plan in the context of the emergency. The fire site and a nearby disused cemetery were acquired for housing, on which would be built over two thousand emergency flats, including communal one-​room flats with shared facilities. The SIT completed some of the housing but most were finished by the HDB. The emergency flats were again unpopular, the rents being too high, and most of the one-​room units were left unoccupied. At this juncture, in mid-​afternoon of May 25, 1961, a fire broke out in Kampong Tiong Bahru and crossed the main road into Bukit Ho Swee.

Unprecedented Inferno Even with the precedents set by devastating fires in the previous decade, the Bukit Ho Swee inferno was extraordinary. It burned over a hill and across two main roads. The latter was an indictment of the fire service, and the sight of fire engines stranded on the main roads, unable to traverse the small paths into the kampong, fueled social anger and gave rise to persistent rumors that the fire was intentional. Residents had received eviction notices prior to the blaze, and the kampong’s fire-​fighting squads had also put down a number of smaller fires. The fire engines arrived half an hour after the fire started, partly due to the late call to the fire service, but also because it was a public holiday (Hari Raya Haji), with the mostly Muslim fire-​fighting force on leave. What was just as blameworthy was how water pressure in such a fire-​prone area remained low, rendering firemen impotent against the growing flames.

Historic Fires of Singapore    439 The inferno traversed an arc of destruction, razing numerous temples that dotted the locality, as well as factories, warehouses, timber yards, and workshops with flammable material. A large sauce factory burned for three hours, signifying the destruction of the local economy. A reporter wrote, “The whole hillside is ablaze.”40 For residents, the experience was confusing and traumatic. A middle-​aged woman in the path of the advancing inferno exclaimed, “Everyone thought that the fire would not reach us . . . Then the fire came towards the top of the hill at us . . . This side was burning, that side was burning.”41 Most of the residents fled the flames with their families and belongings, but some able-​bodied men tried to stem the fiery tide. Zhou Lian Che was left alone at home, as her husband had left to help her sister. She alone had to bring five young children, including a one-​month-​old toddler, to safety. As she told me, “The children grabbed the back of my blouse and I was still carrying my baby. I kept pushing my sewing machine. That time I panicked and I just kept pushing until Kim Seng [the relief center]. My voice was totally gone.”42 Lee Ah Gar had brought his family to safety and returned to his house, where he tried to curb the flames by cutting off the attap roof. But “it was hopeless. I was preparing for the fire in front but the flames had come up behind my back.”43 A poet described the throng of fire victims on the main road “as if they had been through a war[:]‌men, women, old, and young; their faces are a sheet of pale.”44 The firefighters finally subdued the fire at a SIT housing estate in the evening, where it burned itself out against the concrete flats. The unprecedented blaze had destroyed over two thousand homes, and the government registered nearly sixteen thousand fire victims. Thus commenced the historic events consequent to the fire. The government provided shelter and aid to the fire victims at a relief center near the fire site, which was cordoned off to ward off looters and returning squatters. The disaster became a national emergency, as the government established a Bukit Ho Swee Fire National Relief Fund, composed of political parties, businesses, and social organizations, to mobilize support for the fire victims. The government decided to acquire the fire site and build low-​cost housing for the fire victims, following the precedent laid down by the SIT. Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew promised the fire victims that “[i]‌n nine months’ time a sufficient number of units will be completed by the Housing and Development Board to house every fire victim family.”45 While this housing was being built, the fire victims were housed temporarily in HDB flats elsewhere. These flats included the part-​empty emergency flats built after the 1959 Tiong Bahru fire, and the half-​completed blocks being erected on the disused cemetery. The fact that the cemetery flats were speedily completed (within four months of the Bukit Ho Swee disaster) intensified speculation about arson. Lee’s nine-​month pledge was politically shrewd, producing the powerful imagery of the birth of a modern housing estate upon the ashes of the fire site. Despite some difficulty with clearing the remaining dwellers, the HDB rebuilt the site into a modern estate over a number of phases. “The appearance of Bukit Ho Swee Fire Site,” it pronounced in 1963, “had been completely changed from one of the most congested slums in Singapore into that of a healthy housing estate with modern community services and amenities.”46

440   KAH SENG LOH The HDB’s chief architect privately intimated that “our building program would have run into difficulties if not for the God-​sent opportunity of the Bukit Ho Swee fire in 1961 where a site was made available for 10,000 units of flats.”47 Two years later, when Singapore became an independent nation-​state, the board had built over eleven thousand high-​rise flats on the fire site and adjoining areas. Many of the fire victims had returned to Bukit Ho Swee, but the new estate also served another key purpose: as the high-​rise housing could accommodate five times the number of people who had previously dwelt in the kampong, it also rehoused squatters from other clearance areas or those made homeless by other fires, as well as slum dwellers who were being dispersed from the old town in the urban renewal program. Bukit Ho Swee estate was a resounding success for the Singapore government. The fire had allowed the PAP to carry out squatter clearance without any loss of votes.48 The speed with which the government had been able to build a public housing estate in the aftermath of a catastrophic fire also gave it the self-​confidence to embark on other major housing projects to remake Singapore’s economy and society. In 1965, the PAP government declared that it would clear all urban kampongs that constituted a fire hazard. It also decided to build no more emergency flats and to convert existing ones into standard flats. As a housing form, the one-​room emergency flats had been a failure even in Bukit Ho Swee, with most fire victims preferring bigger units. The HDB conceded that “the general opinion of the public is that there is no marked improvement from moving out of a one-​room cubicle in the slum area to a one-​room Housing Board unit other than cleanliness.”49 But the flats had served the purpose of moving the squatters from the urban kampongs into the public housing system. Subsequent developments reinforced the effects of the emergency housing program at Bukit Ho Swee and forged Singapore into a public housing state. In 1963, the government conducted major crackdowns on leftwing socialist groups, including rural associations that had represented the squatters’ interests. This enabled the unopposed clearance of land for new towns and industries, giving the PAP a strong political mandate and an unbroken period in office, which continues to the present day. In 1966, new legislation gave the government the power to acquire land cheaply for development. Two years later, changes to the Home Ownership Scheme persuaded growing numbers of Singaporeans to purchase, rather than rent, HDB flats with their compulsory savings. The scheme has been wildly successful; today, most people except for a small minority live in flats they had bought on 99-​year leases. But home ownership is predicated on regular work and savings, and the ascendancy of public housing from the late 1960s converged with the growth of a permanent labor force engaged in full-​time work in Singapore’s newly established factories. Housing was a major pillar of the industrialization program. The housing developments following the Bukit Ho Swee inferno were thus transformative. Culturally, as the HDB stated in 1964, it engineered a disciplined population, heralding a “a minor revolution in the social and living habits of a sizeable portion of the population.”50 Within the confines of the HDB flat, residents were not allowed to keep livestock, sublet the flat without official approval, or make unauthorized alterations.

Historic Fires of Singapore    441 The HDB system has continued to be transformative. In the 1980s, the government encouraged the use of public housing as an asset to be traded for capital accumulation and for one’s retirement. As the Singapore state demonstrated its efficacy in determining how Singaporeans should live, the squatters lost much of their earlier agency and influence over their homes. From one perspective, public housing was modern, clean, and safe. But many of the fire victims felt they had no choice on their housing: as one stated, “We had no other roads to walk.”51 When I asked Tan Tiam Ho, a former fire victim, how he felt about HDB housing, he demanded, “What’s there to feel? Once you stayed there, you just carried on with it. She [his mother, who did not like the new housing] only reflected on the difference between the old days and present day and felt sad.”52

Conclusion So where are the unwritten histories of urban fires? Public housing in Singapore is often associated with a “success” narrative of governance: as a sociologist has argued, the housing that has delivered good shelter to the citizens has conferred political legitimacy on the government.53 Yet such an argument necessarily adopts the official vantage point that there was “no housing” or “only bad housing” prior to HDB housing. It ignores both the social history of slums and squatter areas, and the ways in which urban fires are, in specific situations, historically transformative. Very few fires, it seems, are catalysts on such a scale as in Singapore and Hong Kong. The “Shek Kip Mei syndrome” to which Castells and others have alluded appears to have been the exception rather than the norm in urban governance and development. Most governments have been relatively uninterested about reaping the political benefits of fire-​driven public housing; in the cities of Southeast Asia outside of Singapore, politicians, slum dwellers, and squatters have been drawn rather into expedient, short-​term patronage politics. Yet this highlights the fact that politics remains deeply embedded in public housing, slums and squatter areas alike. If nothing else, fires are also still very much part of the daily lives and experiences of great numbers of urban dwellers all over the world. It is timely to chart the histories of such fires, big and small, and of other urban hazards such as floods and diseases.

Notes 1. Loh Kah Seng, Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013). 2. Walter George Bell, The Great Fire in London in 1666 (London: Bodley Head, 1951). 3. John F. McClymer, The Triangle Strike and Fire (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1998).

442   KAH SENG LOH 4. Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 5. Alan Smart, The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rulers in Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). 6. Manuel Castells, Lee Goh, and Reginald Yin-​Wang Kwok, The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore (London: Pion, 1990). 7. Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds., Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 8. Jérôme Tadié, “Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta,” in Bankoff, Lübken, and Sand, Flammable Cities, 372–​389. 9. Terence Gary McGee, “Squatter Settlements in Southeast Asian Cities,” in Akshayakumar Ramalal Desai and S. Devadas Pillai, eds., Slums and Urbanisation (London: Sangam Books, 1970), 123–​128. 10. Akin Rabibhadana, “Bangkok Slum: Aspects of Social Organisation,” (PhD diss., Southeast Asian Program, Cornell University, 1975). 11. Aprodicio A. Laquian, The City in Nation-​ Building: Politics and Administration in Metropolitan Manila (Manila: School of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, 1966). 12. Loh Kah Seng, “Squatters, Colonial Subjects and Model Citizens: Informal Housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after World War Two,” Chapters in Asia 1 (February 2014): 169–​205. 13. Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Books, 2017). 14. Housing and Development Board, Annual Report 1967. 15. Author’s interview with Tay Yan Woon, September 28, 2006. 16. Author’s interview with Lee Ah Gar, November 4, 2006. 17. Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, interview with Lee Soo Seong, November 19, 1996. 18. Author’s interview with Tay Bok Chiu, January 24, 2007. 19. Author’s interview with Joyce Soh, April 5, 2007. 20. William John Simpson, Report of the Sanitary Condition of Singapore (London: Waterlow & Sons, 1907); Kah Seng Loh and Li Yang Hsu, Tuberculosis—​The Singapore Experience, 1867–​2018: Disease, Society and the State (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 21. Loh Kah Seng, “Emergencities: Experts, Squatters and Crisis in Postwar Southeast Asia,” Asian Journal of Social Science 44 no. 6 (2016): 684–​7 10. 22. United Nations Mission of Experts, Low Cost Housing in South and Southeast Asia (New York: United Nations, 1951), 11. 23. Ibid., 15, 17, 100. 24. Straits Times, January 11, 1951. 25. Singapore, Report of the Housing Committee (Singapore: Government Printing House, 1947), 11. 26. Ibid., 6, 11. 27. Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) 475/​ 47, Notes for Discussion on Housing by Commissioner of Lands, June 13, 1947, National Archives of Singapore. 28. SIT 183/​52, Letter from Aung Peang and Teo Ah Beh to Lands Manager, SIT, October 8, 1954.

Historic Fires of Singapore    443 29. HDB, HB 659/​53 National Archives of Singapore, Report on the Demolition of Three Timber and Attap Houses on Singapore Improvement Trust Land at Lorong 27, Geylang, on July 17, 1953 by Acting Lands Manager, July 22, 1953. 30. SIT 617/​54, Memo titled “Housing Programs and Policy” by Chief Architect, SIT, and Planning Adviser, SIT, July 5, 1954. 31. SIT 808/​50, Report by George Pepler titled “Attap Dwellings on Land Likely to be Required for Permanent Forms of Development in the City Area During the Next Five Years,” July 26, 1952. 32. Singapore, Master Plan: Report of Survey (Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1955), 26. 33. Singapore, Report of the Housing Committee, 9. 34. Singapore Legislative Assembly Debates, April 12, 1961, 1233. 35. HB 871/​57, Memo from CEO, HDB, to Members of the Board, October 10, 1960. 36. Fire Department, Annual Report 1958, 10. 37. Oral History Centre, National Archives of Singapore, interview with Arthur Lim Beng Lock, January 7, 1994. 38. SIT 617/​54, Memo titled “Housing Programs and Policy” by Chief Architect, SIT, and Planning Adviser, SIT, July 5, 1954. 39. HB 25/​59 Vol. I, Memo by Chief Architect, SIT, and Planning Adviser, SIT, February 16, 1959. 40. Straits Times, May 26, 1961. 41. National Archives of Singapore, A Pictorial Exhibition: The Emergence of Bukit Ho Swee Estate: from Desolation to Progress, audio recording broadcast in November 1983. 42. Author’s interview with Zhou Lian Che, February 21, 2006. 43. Author’s interview with Lee Ah Gar, November 4, 2006. 44. Sin Chew Jit Poh, May 26, 1961. 45. Straits Times, May 30, 1961. 46. Housing and Development Board, Annual Report 1963, 28. 47. HB 1013/​50 Vol. I, Memo from Chief Architect, HDB, to CEO, HDB, December 4, 1963. 48. Nancy Kwak, “The Politics of Singapore’s Fire Narrative,” in Bankoff, Lübken and Sand, Flammable Cities, 295–​313. 49. HB 16/​59 Vol. II, Memo from Estates Manager, HDB, to Secretary, HDB, June 5, 1962. 50. People’s Action Party, Our First Ten Years: PAP 10th Anniversary Souvenir (Singapore: PAP Central Editorial Board, 1964), 228. 51. Author’s interview with Wang Ah Tee, January 22, 2007. 52. Author’s interviews with Tan Tiam Ho, March 12, 2007, and Beh Swee Kim, January 22, 2007. 53. Chua Beng-​Huat, Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore (Singapore and New York: Routledge, 1997).

Bibliography Akin, Rabibhadana. “Bangkok Slum: Aspects of Social Organisation.” PhD diss., Southeast Asian Program, Cornell University, 1975. Bankoff, Greg, Uwe Lübken, and Jordan Sand, eds. Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.

444   KAH SENG LOH Bell, Walter George. The Great Fire in London in 1666. London: Bodley Head, 1951. Castells, Manuel, Lee Goh, and Reginald Yin-​Wang Kwok. The Shek Kip Mei Syndrome: Economic Development and Public Housing in Hong Kong and Singapore. London: Pion, 1990. Chua, Beng-​Huat. Political Legitimacy and Housing: Stakeholding in Singapore. New York: Routledge, 1997. Kwak, Nancy. “The Politics of Singapore’s Fire Narrative.” In Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken and Jordan Sand, 295–​313. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Laquian, Aprodicio A. The City in Nation-​Building: Politics and Administration in Metropolitan Manila. Manila: School of Public Administration, University of the Philippines, 1966. Loh, Kah Seng. “Emergencities: Experts, Squatters and Crisis in Postwar Southeast Asia.” Asian Journal of Social Science 44, no. 6 (2016): 684–​7 10. Loh, Kah Seng. “Squatters, Colonial Subjects and Model Citizens: Informal Housing in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong after World War Two.” Chapters in Asia 1 (February 2014): 169–​205. Loh, Kah Seng. Squatters into Citizens: The 1961 Bukit Ho Swee Fire and the Making of Modern Singapore. Singapore: NUS Press, 2013. Mayne, Alan. Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. London: Reaktion Books, 2017. McGee, Terence Gary. “Squatter Settlements in Southeast Asian Cities.” In Slums and Urbanisation, edited by Akshayakumar Ramalal Desai and S. Devadas Pillai, 123–​128. London: Sangam Books, 1970. People’s Action Party. Our First Ten Years: PAP 10th Anniversary Souvenir. Singapore: PAP Central Editorial Board, 1964. Rosen, Christine Meisner. The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Simpson, William John. Report of the Sanitary Condition of Singapore. London: Waterlow & Sons, 1907. Singapore. Master Plan: Report of Survey. Singapore: Government Printing Office, 1955. Singapore. Report of the Housing Committee. Singapore: Government Printing House, 1947. Smart, Alan. The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rulers in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Tadié, Jérôme. “Fires, Urban Environments, and Politics in Contemporary Jakarta.” In Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World, edited by Greg Bankoff, Uwe Lübken and Jordan Sand, 372–​389. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. United Nations Mission of Experts. Low Cost Housing in South and Southeast Asia. New York: United Nations, 1951.

CHAPTER 23

T HE ARCHAEOL O G Y OF IM M IGRANT L I V E S A ND LIVELIHO ODS AT NEW YORK CIT Y ’S FIVE P OI NTS REBECCA YAMIN

There is no getting rid of references to Five Points as New York City’s most notorious nineteenth-​century slum. From the nineteenth-​century penny press to twenty-​first century historical accounts the neighborhood is characterized in much the same way Charles Dickens described it in 1842: This is the place, these narrow ways, diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruits here as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home, and all the wide world over. Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken frays. Many of those pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright in lieu of going on all fours? And why they talk instead of grunting?1

By the time Dickens visited, Five Points was primarily Irish, famous for gangs with colorful names like Plug Uglies and Dead Rabbits, and considered too dangerous to enter without a police escort. Martin Scorsese brought the neighborhood to life in the movie Gangs of New York, released in 2002. Scorsese’s version of Five Points, inspired by reading a book of the same name when he was a child,2 included the reconstruction of Paradise Square, the open area at the center of the neighborhood. It conformed to Dickens’s picture of falling-​down hovels bursting with unsavory humanity. The plot was political and provided a vehicle for exploring the conflicts between Nativist Protestants and Irish Catholic immigrants.

446   REBECCA YAMIN Tyler Anbinder’s history of Five Points, published in 2001, begins with the much repeated depictions of a disorganized and depraved neighborhood, but the book attempts to “set the record straight.”3 Anbinder emphasizes the power Five Pointers came to have at the ballot box (“the first working-​class New Yorkers to snatch political power from the hands of the old elite”) and the forbearance the various immigrant groups showed in their struggle to make a go of it in New York. The book is laced with too many references to drunkenness and prostitution, but it is also a serious study of working conditions and opportunities, of the surprising ability of residents to save money, of fraternal organizations and political parties, and well-​meaning if ineffective efforts at reform. Attention is also paid to the exuberance of leisure activities including music, dancing, and especially theater. Curiously, a play produced as recently as January 2019 takes as its plot the harmonious relationship of free black and Irish Americans at Five Points before the Civil War, a new (and unlikely) angle. The free black population at the Points was significantly diminished by 1863, when the play, called Paradise Square, takes place. There seems to be no end to using Five Points’ notoriety for dramatic effect. The Eastern European immigrant residents of Five Points in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were less conspicuous than their Irish counterparts, at least to outsiders. Journalist George Foster paid some attention to the Jewish garment workers at Five Points, although he labeled all of their shops as “fences” and the apartments where the shopkeepers lived as “generally densely inhabited—​the descendants of Israel being as celebrated for fecundity as cats or Irish women.”4 With that sentence Foster managed to indict the two most prevalent ethnic groups at Five Points in the middle of the nineteenth century. The excavation of a block just east of Foley Square, where a new federal courthouse was going to be built in the early 1990s, was located in the heart of the old Five Points neighborhood, and the recovery of approximately 850,000 artifacts, along with detailed historical research to help contextualize these artifacts, provided the opportunity to see into the infamous neighborhood. Undertaken by a New Jersey company, Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc., between May 1991 and January 1992, the excavation uncovered fifty mainly stone-​lined shaft features, most of them privies, and fully excavated twenty-​two of them. The features were associated with fourteen different historic properties, six of them facing Pearl Street, another six facing Orange Street, and two facing Chatham Street (Figure 23.1).5 The recovered materials represent remnants of everyday life including things people used to prepare and serve meals, to decorate their homes, to take care of personal hygiene and health, and construct their individual identities. The art, as well as the science, of historical archaeology depends in great part upon the analysis of such “small things.”6 Connected to the people to whom they belonged, the things provide insights into their material lives, their tastes, and even their values. These insights are particularly surprising when they pertain to supposedly “poor” people about whom assumptions are made that do not turn out to be true. In addition to artifacts, the organization of the structural features on the lots that were excavated on the courthouse site—​privies, cisterns, foundations—​reveal the

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    447

Figure 23.1  Yard excavated by Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc. with features behind former brick tenements and frame structures facing Pearl, Chatham, and Baxter (later Orange) Streets. William Perris, Maps of the City of New York, 3rd ed. [1857], Block 160

crowded and unsanitary conditions for which the neighborhood was so widely known. What is particularly valuable about the archaeological evidence is the difference between the evidence of life indoors and the physical reality outside, the reality on which residents were judged. Practically all of the residents on the block were renters, and the maintenance of their properties, especially sanitary facilities, was not under their control. John Milner Associates, Inc., analyzed the recovered materials and produced a six-​ volume technical report, “Tales of Five Points, Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​ Century New York,”7 as well as a special issue of the journal Historical Archaeology.8 Additional publications including a doctoral dissertation,9 a master’s thesis,10 and numerous articles by members of the team11 paint a picture of a vibrant, multiethnic neighborhood where Irish immigrants fleeing famine and Eastern European Jews seeking relief from persecution struggled to get established in their chosen new homeland.12 They were poor but they were far from cultureless, and the material and primary documentary record are stunning testaments to the complexity of their hitherto overlooked lives. One side of the excavated area (Pearl Street) was predominantly Irish by mid-​century and the other side (Orange, eventually Baxter, Street)—​was occupied by Ashkenazy

448   REBECCA YAMIN Jews from Germany, Poland, and Holland. Much has been written about the Irish who began their climb to respectability in American society at the very bottom of the economic ladder at Five Points and in other comparable neighborhoods in other cities.13 Less attention has been given to the Eastern European Jews on Orange Street and elsewhere. The garment industry in this neighborhood provided a foundation for the eventual economic success of these Jewish immigrants and their emergence as an important component of New York City’s population. Jews make up about 12 percent of the city’s population today.

Jewish Immigration to New York City Jews began coming to New York in large numbers in the 1830s.14 By 1860 there were forty thousand Jews in New York City, most of whom had arrived after 1837.15 Jews were a significant part of the Five Points population by 1850. Two early synagogues were temporarily housed in tenements within the block that was excavated. Sharay Zedek at 472 Pearl Street and Beth Hamridash Livne Yisrael Yelide Polen at 8 Baxter Street were Polish and Polish-​Russian congregations respectively. These synagogues, along with many others, were expressions of the new freedom Jews found in America. They were no longer willing to be guided by a single umbrella organization, what was called a “kahul,” instead forming individual synagogues that drew selectively from the ancient practices.16 Not all synagogues demanded that members suspend work on the Sabbath, for instance, or marry only within the faith. Life was no longer guided by a strict set of practices, and individuals might even go so far as to absent themselves from the synagogue, although Hyman Grinstein claims that as long as they lived with other Jews, they were “still socially, if not culturally, within the fold.”17 From the inside it was their ethnicity as Jews, more than their religion, that distinguished them as a group, something that is still true today. The Jews at Five Points were mainly in the garment business as either clothiers, tailors, tailoresses, shoemakers, or secondhand clothing dealers. The far from objective nineteenth-​century journalist George Foster, described their shops as being situated in a row, in Orange Street, near the Points. One who has never seen the squalid under crust of a fine city would be at a loss to derive an adequate idea, even from the most graphic description, of the sort of building in which the great business of living and trafficking can be carried on. If the reader is a farmer, however, we shall succeed tolerably well in conveying some notion of what we mean. Let him imagine forty or fifty cow sheds got together in line, furnished with dismal looking little windows, half broken in and patched up with old newspapers—​let him imagine half a hundred of these establishments, we say, standing in a row, with a dark paved street and an uneven narrow brick sidewalk in front, and he will not be far behind the reality of the place where we now stand.18

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    449 Foster ignores the evidence of industry for the sake of drawing a dramatic portrait of the neighborhood from the outside. The archaeological and historical research conducted for the Courthouse Block project produced a different picture. Helped by detailed historical study of the rise of the Jewish community in New York,19 we were able to appreciate the foundation that immigrant Jewish families laid at Five Points for their own rise to respectability in American society.

The Goldbergs on Pearl Street In 1839, Sharey Zedek, a Polish congregation, broke off from Anshe Chesed, which itself had broken away from B’nai Jeshurun, New York’s second synagogue, in 1828. The first, Shearith Israel, had been founded by Sephardic (Spanish and Portuguese) Jews in the early eighteenth century. Sharey Zedek’s first home was the upper floor of 472 Pearl Street, apparently a frame structure that was replaced by a five-​story brick tenement built by an Irishman to receive his countrymen escaping the “great hunger” in 1848. This early Polish congregation, whose members distinguished themselves from both German Jews and Russian Jews, was mainly from the Prussian province of Posen. It is located today about halfway between the modern cities of Berlin and Warsaw. The congregation spoke German and kept their records in English. The 1840 federal census identifies H. L. Goldberg as a sexton living at 472 Pearl Street.20 His household included two females, presumably his wife and a daughter (or servant), and five males, unspecified as to their relationships to the head of the household. Other documentary sources describe Goldberg as a tailor/​sexton, and in 1852 he is identified as a rabbi living at 63 Mott Street. The Goldbergs were apparently displaced by the brick tenement, and Sharey Zedek moved elsewhere, first to another rental on City Hall Place, and finally to rooms above the New York Dispensary at the corner of White and Centre Streets that had been vacated by Anshe Chesad. A sexton’s duties, for which he was paid, may have differed depending on the synagogue, but at B’nai Jeshurun they “included keeping the synagogue yard clean, opening the synagogue ten minutes before services, caring for fires in winter, superintending funerals, keeping a list of mourners, and caring for the welfare of strangers entering the synagogue by seeing that they were supplied with prayer shawl and book, acting as a messenger, substituting for the reader, and in general, obeying all orders of the president.”21 Grinstein mentions Henry Goldberg as “one of the professional scribes in New York in the 1830s and 1840s,” and Harris L. Goldberg as carrying a letter to Frederickstown regarding a marital dispute in 1836.22 Henry and Harris were apparently one and the same. In later years Goldberg may have been the “chief rabbi” of Beth Abraham, another Polish congregation, although Grinstein qualifies the claim as unconfirmed since it came from a single source. The artifacts and faunal (food) remains recovered archaeologically from a privy deposit associated with 472 Pearl Street and dating to the 1830s suggest that the Goldbergs

450   REBECCA YAMIN were keeping kosher. The rules of kashrut, or keeping kosher, ban pork and shellfish from the diet and require that meat and milk never be combined in one meal. Separate dishes are designated for the consumption of milk and meat meals. Sixty eight percent (1,224) of the total number of bones recovered from the Goldberg privy were identified as the remains of meals.23 The household consumed mainly beef (35 percent of the mammal cuts identified), a small amount of lamb (18 percent), and practically no pork (5.9 percent).24 According to Claudia Milne and Pam Crabtree, who analyzed the faunal remains for the Courthouse project, few cuts came from the loin or hindshank of the cow, which would not have been considered kosher. Several lead seals marked with a Hebrew letter on one side and an Arabic number on the other were recovered from the privy fill (Figure 23.2). This kind of seal was used by the kosher butcher, called a shochet, who was elected when Sharey Zedek was formed.25 Shohets ritually slaughtered animals for non-​Jewish butchers who wanted to sell kosher meat in the market. The lead seal, which was attached by wire to each quarter, marked meat slaughtered and sold in this way.26 The Hebrew letter represented the day of the week the animal was slaughtered, and the number was the date. Most of the beef cuts identified were from the lower foreshank, and most were large roasts cut from the mid-​shaft of the radius, which was considered the best soup bone. Milne and Crabtree speculate that soup would have been an appropriate dish for shabbat

Figure 23.2  A lead seal from an animal slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law, found in the Goldberg privy at 472 Pearl Street. Photograph by Paul Reckner

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    451 (sabbath), the time from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, when Orthodox Jews were not allowed to turn on the stove. The household also consumed a good deal of fish, especially porgies, which were the least expensive and most readily available in New York at the time.27 Besides cost, fish was practical in a kosher kitchen since it could be combined with either meat or dairy. The Goldbergs had two sets of everyday dishes, presumably one for meat meals and one for milk meals. Many households, even at Five Points, had two sets of dishes, one for everyday and one for special occasions, but both of the Goldbergs’ sets were the least expensive available, one made of white earthenware with blue edge decoration and another printed in the classic willow pattern. Also notable in the Goldberg assemblage were the number of olive oil bottle seals (four), perhaps an indication that Mrs. Goldberg used oil rather than butter, especially when she was serving or cooking meat. There was plenty of wine, apparently drunk from tumblers rather than stemmed glasses. Twenty tumblers were recovered along with three decorative glass decanters that would have added a formal touch to the traditional Friday night dinners that began the sabbath. Those dinners, incidentally, would have taken place at the height of Five Points’ ignominy. There was clearly much more going on than the thieving and murdering upon which the neighborhood’s reputation rests. That the Goldbergs followed traditional Jewish practice including keeping kosher is consistent with the fact that Sharey Zedek initially kept to a strict interpretation of Jewish law.28 As time went on, however, various customs were relaxed. Although you could not be elected to office in the synagogue if you kept a store open on the sabbath in 1841, that was not the case a few years later. Sharey Zedek also allowed intermarriage with non-​Jews, a practice not allowed by other synagogues. While the Goldbergs on Pearl Street did not appear to have any Jewish neighbors, the situation around the corner on Orange Street was very different.

The Garment District on Orange Street According to some chroniclers, Orange Street was New York City’s first garment district or, at least, a part of it. In their monumental history of New York, Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace describe the early garment district as centered on Chatham and Baxter (originally called Orange) Streets.29 By the 1840s there were a few tailors, clothiers, and men in the clothing business on the stretch of Orange Street between the Five Points intersection and Chatham Street (within the courthouse project area), but by 1850, 30 percent of the occupations identified in the census related to the garment industry. People in the garment business were present at Nos. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 22 Orange Street. Table 23.1 should not be understood as a list of all heads of household and certainly not of all adults present on the street in 1850. It includes only the names of people whose occupations were listed. The total number of people listed in the 1850 census on the

452   REBECCA YAMIN Table 23.1 Occupations Identified by Address on Orange Street within the Project Area, 1850 No. 2

George Green, Polish, tailor

George Buchanan, New York, steward

Mark Levy, German, tailor

Adam Woolf, German, cane manufacturer

Thomas McNamara, Irish, shoemaker

James M’Laren, Scottish, laborer

Hiram Cohen, Prussian, scrimpmaker (?) Michael Connor, Irish, baker John Connor, Irish, laborer Charles E. Stutscour, German, carpenter No. 4

No. 10 Aaron Levi, Prussian, tailor

Julius Levy, German, tailor

No. 12 William Elsas, German, tailor James Sheweiner, German, tailor William Anderson, New York, victualler No. 14 Donald Kennedy, Irish, laborer

John Gill, Irish, bootmaker

John Kennedy, Irish, laborer

Michael McCormick, Irish, bootmaker

William Bundy, New York, victualler

Edward McDonald, Irish, bootmaker

Jeremiah Kevenah, Irish, laborer

Seaman Silverstone, Prussian, tailor

Patrick M’Guirk, Irish, newsman

Philip Schunch, Prussian, clothier

John S. Owen, New York, clerk

Philip Shafer, German, laborer

Denis Tiernan, Irish, newspaper folder

No. 6

Simon Webster, Polish, tailor

James Tiernan, Irish, laborer

No. 8

Abraham Harris, Polish, tailor

Woolf Walstein, Prussia, tailor

Henry Harris, Polish, tailor

John Frank, Prussia, tailor

Peter Madden, Polish, tailor

Edward Blackhall, Irish, tinsmith

Valentine Hall, Irish, brewer

Daniel Beevans, Irish, carpenter

Bernard M’Farlin, Irish, policeman

Thomas Boohan, Irish, laborer

Source: US Bureau of the Census, Population and Manufacturing for the Sixth Ward, 1850.

Orange Street side of the block within the project area was 259, including children. What the table does show is the high proportion of garment workers born in Germany, Prussia, or Poland who were most probably Jewish. It also shows that Jews did not live exclusively among themselves. The intermixture of ethnic groups at Five Points contributed to the vitality of the neighborhood. It was not stuck in some unchanging state of decrepitude and disorganization as suggested by the “slum” stereotype. Instead, immigrant groups entered the neighborhood in waves, made themselves at home, and eventually moved on. The early nineteenth-​century African American industrial workers were joined by Irish and Eastern Europeans at mid-​century, followed by Italians and Chinese in the later decades. While one group after another predominated, there was always a mixture, all striving to get a foothold in the burgeoning city. There was a synagogue at No. 8 Orange Street for a short time. A group of Russian Jews had founded Beth Hamidrash, an Orthodox synagogue, nearby at 83 Bayard Street in 1852, and a year later a splinter group led by a baker named Judah Middleman established Beth Hamidrash Livne Yisroel Yelide Polen, which by 1860 was located at 8 Baxter

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    453 Street. David Webster, a clothier who lived at No.4 Orange Street from the 1850s to 1870, served as sexton of that synagogue.30 Several artifact-​filled features associated with garment workers on Orange Street were excavated, including a privy at No. 8 where Beth Hamidrash was located, and two privies at No. 4 Orange Street, where Webster, the sexton, lived. A brick-​lined cistern, found at No. 22 Orange Street, also appeared to be associated with households of tailors, shoemakers, and/​or clothiers, most of them from Eastern European (Jewish) backgrounds. Feature AK, a large-​diameter stone-​lined privy, contained a deep layer of coal and ash that was mixed with household debris and remnants of the garment industry. Artifacts dated mainly to the middle of the nineteenth century, but a few were as recent as 1880. There were two Polish shoemakers and a shoe store kept by an Irishman on the lot in that year, but there had been other tailors and clothiers in the brick tenement at No. 4 Orange Street and nearby since 1850 (see Table 23.1). The materials in the fill probably represented an accumulation from more than one shop. Six households were listed in the tenement in 1855, four of them (including the Websters) born in Poland, one from Germany, and an Irish laundress and her daughter. Heather Griggs, who analyzed the sewing materials for the courthouse project, concluded that the eighty-​nine buttons and ninety-​six fragments of textile recovered from the upper fill in Feature AK came from tailoring.31 Among the ceramic, metal, and cloth-​covered buttons she identified, four were from New York State Militia uniforms and one each were from U.S. Army General Staff, Grand Army of the Republic, and New York City Municipal Police uniforms. The textiles found included some fancy twills and fragments of shoddy cloth that were used for military uniforms. Two Home Rule pipes (1870 or later) also found in the fill had presumably belonged to Irishman, John Linnott, who kept the shoe store on the lot in 1880. The Fenian movement (Irish nationalist demand for Irish rather than English government in the state of Ireland) gained popular support among Irish Americans in the 1860s and 1870s.32 Garment-​related artifacts found in the lower fill included lots of fasteners and shoe and boot parts. A much smaller privy (Feature AL) on the same lot included artifacts that may well have related to David Webster, the sexton for Beth Hamidrash Livne Yisroel Yelide Polen’s household. Webster, his wife, and son were there from the 1850s to at least 1870. The upper fill in the privy was very similar to the coal and ash fill in Feature AK and probably dated to after the Websters left the property, although there were two Polish-​ born shoemakers there as late as 1880. Notable sewing-​related materials recovered from the upper fill were eighty identical cloth-​covered buttons in three sizes, which, according to Griggs, resembled the black mohair-​covered buttons seen in the 1897 Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. There was also an Irish pipe, this one with Dublin written on it.33 Below the coal and ash was an intact layer of loamy clay, probably nightsoil (that is, human waste). The most recent artifact found in that layer dated to 1870 and many of the other artifacts dated to a decade or so earlier. While we cannot be absolutely sure that these artifacts came from a single household, they reflect a far from impoverished lifestyle. Vessels from sets of table and teaware in bone china and white granite were

454   REBECCA YAMIN recovered, there were lots of wine bottles and glass tumblers, and serving pieces including at least one platter and the lids from two tureens. Unlike the Goldbergs, the Websters do not appear to have had two sets of everyday dishes, which might have suggested a kosher-​keeping household. Their everyday set of molded white tableware, however, was fashionable and included matching teawares, not unlike the middle-​class households described by Diana Wall in her studies of middle-​class manners.34 There were also a variety of elegant tea sets, possibly used for entertaining company, another middle-​class custom. There were lamp parts and chandelier parts, pieces of a walking cane, combs, perfume bottles, and jewelry. Most unusual were the many pieces from children’s tea sets, possibly an adult’s collection. One set was made of Chinese export porcelain, another was made of whiteware with hand-​painted polychrome decoration, and a third was made of redware. Perhaps the slate board and pencils had belonged to the Webster’s son, and maybe the porcelain marbles were a remnant of his childhood on Orange Street. The pork in the food remains is another indication that this household was not keeping kosher. The largest assemblage of materials relating to the garment industry on Orange Street came from the top of Feature H, a privy associated with No. 8 Orange Street. The most recent artifact in that fill dated to 1880, but like the upper fills of Features AK and AL, it probably included an accumulation of materials from the many German and Polish tailors and clothiers who had worked on the lot and nearby from 1853 to 1880. After the Harris family lived at No. 8 in 1850, Mendel Myers, a Polish-​born clothier, his wife and two daughters were there with two German boarders, both tailors, and a Polish-​born servant named Sarah Jacobs. In 1855 there were more households in the building, two headed by Irishmen—​James Nicholson, a carman, and John Moore, a tailor—​and one headed by a Scotsman, Collan McKinsey, a painter. In 1860, there were six families including two shoemakers, one Irish and one German, a German glazier, and two Italian families, one headed by musician Joseph Costa, and the other by Joseph Segretti, a laborer. By the 1860s, Italians were becoming more prevalent in the neighborhood although Eastern European Jews continued to live among them. Two Polish bootmakers, J. L. Silverstein and Rapla Stella, headed households on the lot in 1880. Griggs interpreted the artifacts from the upper fill in Feature H as a commercial deposit. There were thousands of straight pins, both loose and in paper packets (Figure 23.3), open capped (tailor’s) and dome capped thimbles, hundreds of copper alloy hooks and eyes, twenty-​six rolls and over a hundred fragments of twill tape (used to strengthen hems and cuffs), trimming, thread, seam bindings, a large piece of turned twill damask dyed black, and matching sets of “jet” glass and copper alloy buttons. Mixed in with the commercial debris were a few personal items that Griggs interpreted in the context of how the German and Polish Jews organized their tailoring and clothing businesses. They worked as family units, mixing their private and public lives. A copper alloy thimble embossed “FORGET . . . [ME] . . . NOT” may have been given to a young woman in a tailoring household as an expression of friendship or romantic interest.35 A tambour hook made out of ivory and copper alloy that was found in a lower deposit of fill in this feature probably belonged to a woman who did the delicate embroidery

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    455

Figure 23.3  Papers-​of-​pins, thimble, and ivory tambour hook found in the privy at No. 8 Orange Street. Photograph by Paul Reckner

that a tambour hook was used for, while her husband carried on with the business of tailoring in the same room. A German-​style porcelain pipe, possibly manufactured between 1825 and 1850, was also found in this deposit.36 Perhaps the husband smoked the pipe as he worked. While Milne and Crabtree watched for potential indications of keeping kosher in the faunal remains from Feature H, the bones appeared to them to represent many different households. Pork was present in almost as great a proportion as beef and lamb. Ham steaks and beef steaks were the most common meat cuts identified. The beef soup bones favored by the Goldbergs were not present. The consumption of leg of mutton and mutton shoulder or chuck may have been an Eastern European choice, but it is impossible to know for certain. Lamb has elsewhere been attributed to Jewish taste. In general, the faunal and fish remains (20 different species) suggested economical choices made by frugal families.37 The bones of a New World Cebus monkey recovered here were clearly not food but probably the remains of one of the Italian musicians’ begging companions. The buildings at Nos. 4 and 8 Orange Street were apparently brick tenements near the corner of Chatham. These buildings did not conform to the image of the “cow sheds” portrayed by George Foster as lining Orange Street. Closer to the Five Points intersection (where Orange, Cross, and Anthony Streets met at the western end of the block), however, garment businesses of one kind or another were crowded into subdivided

456   REBECCA YAMIN wooden shanties. An artifact-​filled cistern (Feature AN) was excavated on one of those properties. The archaeological feature associated with the frame structure at 22 Baxter (formerly Orange) Street was a large cistern (Feature AN) with a more than two-​foot thick fill deposit at the bottom sealed by a layer of deconstruction debris. The fill had been deposited after 1860. In 1855 the house contained three households, one headed by Samuel Stone, another by Lambert Blower, and a third by Samuel Lubra. Stone, born in Germany, was a clothier; Blower, born in Holland, was a tailor; and Lubra, born in Germany, was also a tailor. It is likely that all three families were Jewish. By the time the 1860 federal census was taken, the Stone family, including two adults, six children, and a German servant girl, were the only recorded residents. The artifacts recovered from the fill (AS III) at the bottom of the cistern could not have come from a single household or even several households. A multitude of ceramic teawares and tablewares were identified including practically no matching pieces. Out of 113 vessels, fifty-​two were non-​matching in seven different styles (blue printed, flow blue, sepia printed, Chinese porcelain, painted floral, painted polychrome, miscellaneous). What was distinctive in the deposit was the amount of shoe and boot debris recovered (234 pieces out of a total of 560 items classified as small finds). Also related to the garment industry were textile fragments (44), fasteners (76), sewing items (17), and many outer garment buttons (45). Clothiers often tore buttons off old clothes in order to re-​work the materials into new garments. As was the case at the eastern end of the block, the cistern apparently served as a repository for debris for more than the household(s) at No. 22 Baxter Street. There was a large brick tenement next door at No. 20, and it is assumed that the many residents there (30 in 1860) contributed to the deposit. Of the sixteen adults in the tenement, half were either German or Polish. There were three German shoemakers in the building in 1855 and a Polish shoemaker, a Swiss shoemaker, and a German clothier in 1860 as well as numerous Italian musicians. The very large number of whiteball smoking-​pipe fragments recovered (304) from the cistern only makes sense if it is seen as the product of lots of individuals. The pipes were by far the most interesting artifacts found. Paul Reckner, who analyzed the clay pipes for the Courthouse project, identified 153 distinct pipe bowls in the feature.38 Twenty percent of the bowls were decorated with patriotic motifs, all presumably made in the United States. There were also pipes made in England, Holland, Germany, and France. According to Reckner, the most common motif on the American pipe bowls was the Federal eagle as it appears on the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States, and there were also variations on the thirteen-​ star motif surrounding the molded letters “TD” (Figure 23.4). “TD” may have originally stood for the eighteenth-​century pipe maker, Thomas Dormer, but by the nineteenth century it had become a generic mark. Reckner proposes rather elegantly that pipes decorated with patriotic motifs might reflect involvement with the mid-​nineteenth-​century labor struggles that included a strike by carpenters and tailors in 1850 in which “German tradesmen played a pivotal role.”39

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    457

Figure 23.4  Two clay pipes with patriotic symbols found in the privy at No. 22 Baxter Street. The federal eagle motif faces the bowl and was probably manufactured between 1820 and 1860. Photograph by Paul Reckner

Beginning as early as the 1780s, patriotic symbols were used to show “allegiance to the principles of Republicanism.”40 Early unionists displayed patriotic banners beside craft banners and many of the emblems incorporated explicitly American symbols.41 Though he does not claim to know whether the Dutch and German tailors who lived at 22 Baxter Street identified with the radicalism of the New York tailors’ unions, Reckner implies that they might have.42 What he leaves out is that most of the tailors on Baxter Street were probably Jewish. Jews tended to identify more with other Jews than with their transplanted European countrymen. Even in the immediate neighborhood (on the block) all the Jews did not come from the same country, but it is likely that they saw themselves as a group as opposed to non-​Jews on the block. Fredrik Barth’s view of ethnicity is relevant here. In Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, he argues that “the existence of ethnic groups depends less on the intrinsically shared common culture of an ethnic group than on the maintenance of social boundaries.”43 The German, Polish, and Russian Jews on the block may have spoken different languages and made different decisions about which practices of the religion to perpetuate, but they were the same in their agreed-​upon Jewishness. The Jewish garment workers on Orange Street probably did not identify with the non-​ Jewish, German-​led labor movement. The Jewish labor movement came later, beginning with the United Hebrew Trades in 1888.44 What then is another possible explanation

458   REBECCA YAMIN for choosing clay pipes with patriotic decorations? The first chapter of Grinstein’s book about the rise of the Jewish community in New York stresses the excitement immigrants felt for American ideals of democracy and freedom of thought. Here was an opportunity to escape Old World oppressions, to abandon some of the old customs and adopt new ones.45 According to Grinstein, the Jew rapidly adopted democracy, because of the laws of the state and because of the example of Christian societies and institutions whose constitutions and other instruments of democratic control he imitated, but even more because it was the logical culmination of his own traditional ideal of the equality of all men. He welcomed freedom of movement, of action, of thought, of religion because he had but recently left the scenes of persecution in Europe.46

It does not seem unreasonable that Jews on Baxter Street, who may well have strayed from certain old customs, like not working on Saturdays, for instance, would have embraced American symbols of freedom. In fact, some of those patriotic images described by Charles Dickens adorning the walls of “nearly every house” at Five Points may well have belonged to residents of Baxter Street who saw in their new homes opportunities to change and to rise out of poverty. Many of them eventually became owners of businesses. The huge influx of Eastern European Jews who arrived in the 1880s went to work for their countrymen, some of whom may well have begun on Baxter Street in the 1860s and 1870s.47 The garment district moved eastward and finally, along with the ballooning Jewish population, to the Lower East Side. Far from being a dead end, the Jewish occupation at Five Points was a stepping stone.

Ethnicity and Racialization at Five Points Charles Orser has applied the concept of racialization to the Irish at Five Points.48 Rather than attributing the prejudice against them to their ethnic identity alone, he contends that nativists saw Irish immigrants as inferior beings, unskilled brutes who were portrayed first as stupid oafs and after 1840 as ape-​like.49 They were being visually compared to Africans, who were already considered innately inferior. Unlike blacks, however, the Irish could eventually “become white,” a process that involved “pushing another group down.”50 Racialization is a powerful concept. It rests on the premise that there is a difference between outsiders imposing an identity on a group based on real or perceived physical differences and insiders claiming an identity based on ethnic affiliation. Racialized characteristics are perceived as biologically real and necessarily inferior, whereas ethnic characteristics are perceived as cultural. Although we have come to understand racial categories as also cultural, there is no question that racialization continues to affect immigrant groups.

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    459 Like the Irish, Jews were undoubtedly racialized at Five Points. There is no evidence that they were portrayed as apes, but they were surely attributed with characteristics believed to be distinctive of their “race.” For Foster, the “fences” on Orange Street were “of course kept entirely by Jews” as if there was something innate that made Jews traffic in stolen goods. Even Grinstein, the chronicler of the early Jewish community in New York, sounds as if he believed Jews possessed some innate quality that made them less violent than others: “At a time when other immigrant minorities, at the notorious Five Points and elsewhere, maimed and killed one another and their fellow Americans in the constant strife and struggle of the slums, the Jew, however poor and wretched he might be, steered clear of all crimes involving human life.”51 What Grinstein is absolutely clear about is the social nature of being Jewish. As long as they live with other Jews, he says, they are “socially if not culturally within the fold.”52 What does that mean? And what does it mean that all Jews, no matter how far away they have grown from any religious practice, will always say they are Jewish when asked?53 The best answer seems to be a strong sense of Jewish ethnic identity, an identity that does not preclude other identities but never goes away. Archaeologist Siân Jones defines ethnicity as “that aspect of a person’s self-​ conceptualization which results from identification with a broader group in opposition to others on the basis of perceived cultural differentiation and/​or common descent.”54 It is social and psychological; ethnic identity occurs at both the “conscious and unconscious level of similar habitual dispositions which are embodied in the cultural practices and social relations in which people are engaged.”55 What is particularly valuable about her relational approach is that it allows for situational variation and does not require specific material or even behavioral markers. It is what was happening to those tailors and clothiers on Orange (Baxter) Street in the middle of the nineteenth century. While Jewish identity may primarily be ethnic, it is also true (in the past and in the present) that race, when defined culturally, depends on historically (as opposed to biologically) specific forms of cultural connectedness and solidarity. In this sense, some scholars have suggested, the concepts of ethnicity and race seem to overlap.56 The Goldbergs and the Websters and the Stones came from different backgrounds; they were in a new situation, but they recognized each other. They were Jewish and they were being Jewish in new ways in their new homes. They lived among other ethnic groups in a neighborhood that was maligned as less than respectable, but they took advantage of the opportunity to use their Old World skills to get ahead—​and it paid off. The Jewish garment workers of Orange (Baxter) Street moved east to Chatham Square and eventually to the Lower East Side. Their role in the garment industry in the middle decades of the nineteenth century is not particularly well known. They were participants in New York City’s mid-​century nascent garment industry, but it was their participation in the turn-​of-​the-​twentieth century industry that is recognized more often. As is so often the case, an urban archaeological project uncovered a bit of the past that had otherwise been ignored. It also uncovered another piece of Five Points’ history that complicates the image of New York City’s most notorious slum.

460   REBECCA YAMIN

Notes 1. Charles Dickens, American Notes: A Journey (New York: Fromm International, [1842] 1985), 88. 2. Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1927). 3. Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19th-​Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: The Free Press, 2001), 3. 4. George G. Foster, New York by Gas Light and Other Urban Sketches (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, [1850] 1990), 127. 5. Thanks to Rob Schultz who prepared the figures for publication. 6. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Press, 1977). 7. Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York (West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, Inc., 2000). 8. Rebecca Yamin, ed., Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood, special issue of Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001). 9. Stephen A. Brighton, “An Archaeology of the Irish Proletarian Diaspora: The Material Manifestations of Irish Identity in America, 1850–​1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2005). 10. Paul F. Reckner, “Meaning, Identity, and Class Struggle: A Practice Approach to Interpreting Clay Tobacco Pipes from Urban Contexts in Late-​Nineteenth-​and Early-​Twentieth-​ Century North America” (MA diss., Binghamton State University of New York, 1999). 11. Paul F. Reckner and Stephen A. Brighton, “Free From All Vicious Habits, Archaeological Perspectives on Class Conflict and the Rhetoric of Temperance,” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 1 (1999): 63–​86; Heather J. Griggs, “‘By Virtue of Reason and Nature’: Competition and Economic Strategy in the Needle Trades at New York’s Five Points, 1855–​1880,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 76–​88; Paul F. Reckner, “Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 95–​112; Claudia Milne, “On the Grounds of the Fresh Water Pond: The Free-​Black Community at Five Points, 1810–​1834,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002):127–​142; Rebecca Yamin, “Alternative Narratives: Respectability at Five Points,” in Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 154–​170; Rebecca Yamin, “Children’s Strikes, Parents’ Rights: Paterson and Five Points,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 113–​126; Rebecca Yamin, “Wealthy, Free, and Female: Prostitution in 19th Century New York,” in SinCity, special issue of Historical Archaeology 39, no. 1 (2005): 4–​18; Rebecca Yamin, “From the Mythical to the Mundane: The Archaeological Angle on New York City’s Five Points,” in Adrian Green and Roger Leech, eds., Cities in the World, 1500–​2000 (Leeds: W. S. Maney & Son, 2006), 281–​297; Rebecca Yamin and Lauren Cook, “Five Points on Film: Myth, Urban Archaeology, and the Gangs of New York,” in Julie M. Schablitsky, ed., Box Office Archaeology: Refining Hollywood’s Portrayals of the Past (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007), 159–​178; Rebecca Yamin, “Working-​Class Childhood in Nineteenth-​Century New York City,” in Sally Crawford, Dawn M. Hadley, and Gillian Shepherd, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Archeology of Childhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 197–​210.

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    461 12. Heather Grigg’s article, “By Virtue of Reason and Nature,” compares the Irish needlewomen on Pearl Street with the Jewish garment workers on Orange (Baxter) Street, stressing the different contexts in which they worked. 13. Dennis Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia, Ten Generations of Urban Experience (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1973); Dennis P. Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish, 1845–​1975 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1979); Lyn H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979). 14. Hyman B. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–​ 1860 (Philadelphia, PA: Porcupine Press, 1976), 22. 15. Ibid., 29. 16. Ibid., 12. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Foster, New York by Gas Light, 126. 19. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York. 20. US Bureau of the Census, Population and Manufacturing for the Sixth Ward (New York Public Library, 1840, 1841, and 1842). 21. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 77. 22. Ibid., 283, 311. 23. Claudia Milne and Pamela Crabtree, “Revealing Meals: Ethnicity, Economic Status, and Diet at Five Points, 1800–​1860,” in Yamin, Tales of Five Points, vol. 2 (2000): 130–​196. 24. Claudia Milne and Pamela Crabtree, “Prostitutes, a Rabbi and a Carpenter: Dinner at the Five Points in the 1830s,” in Yamin, Becoming New York, Table 8, p. 41. 25. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 304. 26. Ibid., 299. 27. Milne and Crabtree, “Prostitutes, a Rabbi and a Carpenter,” 42. 28. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 341. 29. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 740. 30. Robert K. Fitts, “The Five Points Reformed,” in Yamin, Tales of Five Points, vol. 1, 42, citing Trow’s New York City Directory, 1850–​51. 31. Heather J. Griggs, “ ‘By Virtue of Reason and Nature:’ Competition and Economic Strategy in the Needletrades at New York’s Five Points, 1855–​1880,” in Yamin, Becoming New York, 82–​83. 32. Paul F. Reckner and Diane Dallal, The Long and the Short: Being a Compendium of Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​Century Clay Tobacco Pipes from the Five Points Site, Block 160, New York City, being vol. 6 of Yamin, Tales of Five Points, 215. 33. Griggs, “By Virtue of Reason and Nature,” 83. Reckner and Dallal, The Long and the Short, 228. 34. Diana D. Wall, “Sacred Dinners and Secular Teas: Constructing Domesticity in Mid-​19th-​ Century New York,” in Donna J. Seifert, ed., Gender in Historical Archaeology, special issue, Historical Archaeology 25, no. 4 (1991): 69–​81. 35. Griggs, “By Virtue of Reason and Nature.” 36. Reckner and Dallal, The Long and the Short, 31. 37. Milne and Crabtree, “Revealing Meals.” 38. Reckner and Dallal, The Long and the Short; Reckner, “Remembering Gotham,” 105. 39. Reckner, “Remembering Gotham,” 108.

462   REBECCA YAMIN 40. Ibid., 107, citing Sean Wilentz, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 91. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 109. 43. Barth quoted in Marcus Banks, Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions (New York: Routledge, 1996), 12. 44. Burrows and Wallace, A History of New York City, 1120. 45. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 13–​14. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. Hasia Diner, “American Jewish Identity and the Garment Industry,” in Gabirl M. Goldstein and Elizabeth E. Greenberg, eds., The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–​1960 (Lubbock, TX: Yeshiva University Press, 2012), 38. 48. Charles E. Orser, The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), chap. 4. 49. Ibid., 94. 50. Ibid., 181, drawing on David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). 51. Grinstein, The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 16. 52. Ibid., 18. 53. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963), 140. 54. Sian Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1997), xiii. 55. Ibid., 123. 56. Stephen Spencer, Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation (London: Routledge, 2006), 55.

Bibliography Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The 19th-​Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum. New York: Free Press, 2001. Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Garden City Publishing, 1927. Banks, Marcus. Ethnicity: Anthropological Constructions. New York: Routledge, 1996. Barth, Fredrik. Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. Brighton, Stephen A. “An Historical Archaeology of the Irish Proletarian Diaspora: The Material Manifestations of Irish Identity in America, 1850–​ 1910.” PhD diss., Boston University, 2005. Burrows, Edwin G., and Mike Wallace. Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Clark, Dennis. The Irish in Philadelphia, Ten Generations of Urban Experience. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973. Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Anchor Press, 1977.

Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods    463 Dickens, Charles. American Notes: A Journey (1842). New York: Fromm International, 1985. Diner, Hasia. “American Jewish Identity and the Garment Industry.” In Perfect Fit: The Garment Industry and American Jewry, 1860–​1960, edited by Gabriel M. Goldstein and Elizabeth E. Greenberg, 29–​40. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2012. Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825–​1863 (1949). Reprint, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994. Fitts, Robert K. “The Five Points Reformed.” In Tales of Five Points: Working Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York, edited by Rebecca Yamin, vol. 1, 67–​89. West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, Inc., 2000. Foster, George G. New York by Gas Light and Other Urban Sketches (1850). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Glazer, Nathan, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963. Griggs, Heather J. “‘By Virtue of Reason and Nature’: Competition and Economic Strategy in the Needletrades at New York’s Five Points, 1855–​1880.” In Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood, edited by Rebecca Yamin. Special issue, Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 76–​88. Grinstein, Hyman B. The Rise of the Jewish Community of New York, 1654–​1860 (1945). Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1976. Ignatiev, Noel. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge, 1995. Jones, Sian. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. London: Routledge, 1997. Lees, Lyn Hollen. Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Matthews, Christopher N. The Archaeology of American Capitalism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Mayne, Alan. The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​ 1914. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993. Milne, Claudia. “On the Grounds of the Fresh Water Pond: The Free-​Black Community at Five Points, 1810–​1834.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 127–​142. Milne, Claudia, and Pamela Crabtree. “Prostitutes, a Rabbi and a Carpenter: Dinner at the Five Points in the 1830s.” In Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood, edited by Rebecca Yamin. Special issue, Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 31–​48. Milne, Claudia, and Pamela Crabtree. “Revealing Meals: Ethnicity, Economic Status, and Diet at Five Points, 1800-​1860.” In Yamin, Tales of Five Points, vol. 2 (2000): 130–​196 West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, Inc. Orser, Charles E. The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. Reckner, Paul F. “Meaning, Identity, and Class Struggle: A Practice Approach to Interpreting Clay Tobacco Pipes from Urban Contexts in Late-​ Nineteenth-​ and Early-​ *Twentieth-​ Century North America.” MA diss., Binghamton State University of New York, 1999. Reckner, Paul F. “Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 95–​112. Reckner, Paul F., and Diane Dallal. 2000. The Long and the Short: Being a Compendium of Eighteenth-​and Nineteenth-​Century Clay Tobacco Pipes from the Five Points Site, Block 160, New York City, being vol. 6 of Yamin, Tales of Five Points.

464   REBECCA YAMIN Reckner, Paul F., and Stephen A. Brighton. “Free From All Vicious Habits: Archaeological Perspectives on Class Conflict and the Rhetoric of Temperance,” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 1 (1999): 63–​86. Roediger, David R. The Wages of Whiteness and the Making of the American Working Class. London: Verso, 1991. Ryan, Dennis P. Beyond the Ballot Box: A Social History of the Boston Irish 1845-​1975. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Spencer, Stephen. Race and Ethnicity: Culture, Identity and Representation. London: Routledge, 2006. Stott, Richard B. Workers in the Metropolis: Ethnicity and Youth in Antebellum New York City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Wall, Diana DiZerega. “Sacred Dinners and Secular Teas: Constructing Domesticity in Mid-​ 19th-​Century New York.” In Gender in Historical Archaeology, edited by Donna J. Seifert, 69–​81. Historical Archaeology 25, no. 4 (1991). Wilentz, Sean. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Yamin, Rebecca, ed. Tales of Five Points: Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York. West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, Inc., 2000. Yamin, Rebecca, ed. Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood. Special issue of Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001). Yamin, Rebecca. “Children’s Strikes, Parents’ Rights: Paterson and Five Points,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 2 (2002): 113–​126. Yamin, Rebecca. “Alternative Narratives: Respectability at Five Points.” In The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, edited by Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, 154–​ 170. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.I Yamin, Rebecca. “Wealthy, Free, and Female: Prostitution in 19th Century New York.” In Sin City, special issue of Historical Archaeology 39, no. 1 (2005): 4–​18. Yamin, Rebecca. “From the Mythical to the Mundane: The Archaeological Angle on New York City’s Five Points.” In Cities in the World, 1500-​2000, edited by Adrian Green and Roger Leech, 281–​297. Leeds: W. S. Maney & Son, 2006. Yamin, Rebecca. “Working-​Class Childhood in Nineteenth-​Century New York City.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood, edited by Sally Crawford, Dawn M. Hadley, and Gillian Shepherd, 197–​210. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Yamin, Rebecca, and Lauren Cook. “Five Points on Film: Myth, Urban Archaeology, and the Gangs of New York.” In Box Office Archaeology: Refining Hollywood’s Portrayals of the Past, edited by Julie M. Schablitsky, 159–​178. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 24

HISTORICAL ARC HA E OL O G Y AND THE EVOLU T I ON OF T W E NTIETH-​C ENT U RY SLUMS IN DETROI T KRYSTA RYZEWSKI

In 1910 Detroit, Michigan, was in the midst of an urban and industrial expansion that would have been unfathomable just two decades earlier. That year Henry Ford opened the Highland Park Plant and introduced assembly-​line automobile production to the world, supercharging the speed and scale of manufacturing and creating demand locally for a substantial workforce across all skill levels. Newcomers seeking employment in automobile manufacturing and supporting service industries poured into the city in staggering numbers. Between 1900 and 1910 the city’s population grew from 285,704 to 465,766. In the following decade, as Ford introduced the five-​dollar-​a-​day wage scheme, Detroit’s population more than doubled, reaching just shy of one million by 1920 (993,645).1 Within the space of twenty years Detroit ascended the ranks from the thirteenth to the fourth largest city in the United States, and in 1920 it was one of the fastest growing urban centers in all of North America.2 City officials and boosters reveled in the opportunities that sprang from Detroit’s newfound wealth, industrial strength, and international profile. In earnest, they launched civic beautification schemes, expanded city boundaries, employed planning strategies designed to accommodate future growth, and marketed Detroit to outside investors, visitors, and potential residents. In 1909 the city adopted an official slogan, borrowed from Edgar A. Guest’s poem “In Detroit”; it proclaimed, “In Detroit, Life is Worth Living.”3 Over the next two decades the slogan was effectively used to market the city to outsiders, promoting the vision of a beautiful and welcoming city filled with opportunities. The slogan was plastered on billboards atop prominent buildings, featured in tourist brochures and trade magazines, illustrated on postcards, and even spelled out in flowers on the grounds of Grand Circus Park. But it and the carefully

466   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI crafted civic landscape of Detroit, the “City Beautiful,” masked the consequences that its rapid, disproportionate population growth was simultaneously imposing on the housing and living conditions of the city’s working-​class and poor residents.4 In comparison with New York City’s Five Points or Boston’s North and West End neighborhoods, Detroit’s slum districts were late arrivals. Owing to the luxury of lateral space and the relatively later date of its industrialization, Detroit did not begin to grapple with issues of widespread overcrowding, sanitation, and vice until the 1860s. In contrasting Detroit’s experience with those of cities like New York and Boston, and in questioning some of the conclusions about slums that historians have drawn from other cities, it is useful to apply a long-​term, archaeological perspective to understanding the evolving media depictions and official treatments of three designated slum neighborhoods between 1880 and 1920: the Potomac Quarter, Tin Can Alley, and Corktown. Historical archaeological sources—​primary archival records, excavated artifacts, and land-​use data—​are enlisted to examine the evolution, depiction, and manipulation of slum neighborhoods in Detroit with particular attention, first, to how city officials and the media deployed rhetoric about slums to achieve particular opportunistic agendas, and, second, to how residents in targeted neighborhoods lived in ways that, at times, departed from stereotypes of slum dwellers. These sources demonstrate how the definitions of slum neighborhoods in Detroit were malleable and regularly contorted to deploy planning or political strategies that targeted for removal places or communities that were deemed “undesirable” in the name of civic improvement.

Slums in Detroit, 1880–​1920 In 1894 the US Congress commissioned the Bureau of Labor to investigate the conditions of slums in cities with populations of at least two hundred thousand residents. Sixteen cities, including Detroit, fell within the remit. The resulting report provided definitive language about slums that thereafter became enshrined in Detroit’s city planning vocabulary; it defined slums as “low and dangerous neighborhoods” comprised of “dirty back streets . . . inhabited by a squalid and criminal population.”5 Detroit officials readily accepted and expanded upon this notion of slums in the following years, blending issues of blight, poverty, and immorality in the process. In his plan for dwelling improvements, Luther E. Lovejoy, secretary of the Detroit Housing Commission, warned in 1910 that, if left unchecked, slums would become the “paramount curse” of Detroit.6 The Detroit neighborhoods designated as slums between 1880 and 1920 suffered from the same problems of sanitation, overcrowding, criminal activity, disease, and squalid housing conditions affecting other major cities. But in contrast to Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, where slums occupied discrete neighborhoods and grew vertically as residents packed into congested tenement apartment buildings, Detroit’s slums were sporadic, widely scattered, and opportunistically occupied preexisting domestic dwellings, outbuildings, and alleyways. Unlike other major peninsular cities such

Historical Archaeology   467 as Manhattan (23 sq. miles), San Francisco (46 sq. miles), or Boston (48.4 sq. miles), Detroit had the luxury of open space to the north, east, and west for outward expansion. During the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth century, as Detroit’s population growth accelerated the city rapidly expanded its physical boundaries and increased its area from 12 square miles in 1865 to 79 in 1921 (today Detroit occupies 139 sq. miles). The ability to spread out meant that the Detroit’s slum landscape was considerably different in terms of density and built environment than counterparts in other cities. Detroit’s crowded, unkempt settlements were typically composed of detached one-​or two-​story dwellings, and they existed in small clusters across the city. One journalist in 1905 described Detroit’s slums as “little patches . . . tucked away here and there.”7 Housing Commission Secretary Lovejoy commented in 1910 on how these scattered slum districts presented a unique problem because “no particular section of the city can be singled out as worse than some others that exist,” making the situation “a more serious matter than if the trouble was all together.”8 Detroit’s slum problem was exacerbated by the lack of available housing for the rapidly growing working-​class population. Likewise, living conditions within slum districts were further worsened by the absence of building codes, inflated rents, segregation of communities by ethnicity or race, and unsanitary living conditions (lack of sewage, improper waste disposal, and livestock living in close quarters to residents). Between 1880 and 1920 Detroit’s working-​class and immigrant populations radically transformed the configurations of dwelling within the city. New enclaves and neighborhoods emerged that were dominated by particular ethnic groups or multiethnic mixtures of low-​income residents. Initially, in the 1880s, Detroit’s newcomers settled in the downtown area, along the riverfront, where they lived in close proximity to the factories, wharves, and the merchants who employed them. As the east riverfront transformed into an industrial area during the second half of the nineteenth century, new arrivals to Detroit, mostly young men, required immediate housing. New boardinghouses and hotels were erected in the Potomac Quarter, and old homes and outbuildings within the previously respectable neighborhood were converted to accommodate renters. By the 1880s the Potomac Quarter had become well-​known by Detroiters as a problematic, crime-​ridden slum. The Potomac Quarter’s saloons, billiards and dance halls, brothels, and boardinghouses posed a public nuisance, particularly for unassuming visitors who found themselves the victims of crime there. But as a self-​contained vice quarter with a highly transient population, city officials were slow to curtail the neighborhood’s issues. Over the course of the next two decades, the influx of new arrivals to Detroit and the utter transformation of the city’s neighborhoods as a result would eventually make the Potomac Quarter (and its subsequent iterations) one among many recognized problem spots (Figure 24.1). By the turn of the twentieth century, working-​class and poor settlements expanded beyond the city’s historic core. New areas in Detroit’s downtown and immediate vicinity became home to majority Polish, Italian, Sicilian, Serbian, German, African American, Jewish, and Irish communities. Further afield, in southwest Detroit, a Hungarian

468   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI

Figure 24.1  Locations of the Potomac Quarter, Tin Can Alley, and Corktown indicated on the 1911 Map of Detroit Rand McNally and Company, modified by the author, 2018

quarter thrived. Gradually, these areas developed into multiethnic settlements defined more by inhabitants’ working-​class socioeconomic status than homogeneous cultural affiliations. Although housing conditions, occupants per dwelling, and financial resources varied, each of these neighborhoods was nonetheless painted as a slum by officials in the course of the city’s beautification and civic improvement initiatives of the 1900s and 1910s.9 Tin Can Alley was the most aggressively targeted slum area of the early 1900s. Located just north of the Potomac Quarter, Tin Can Alley was a narrow, twisting maze that contained rows of shacks in which a multiethnic population of impoverished residents resided. Like many of the poorest neighborhoods in turn-​of-​the-​century Detroit, Tin Can Alley occupied a marginal space that was invisible from the well-​maintained thoroughfares nearby. In fact, Detroit’s alleyway settlements of the early twentieth century were so well concealed that some residents and visitors vehemently disputed city officials’ claims about the city’s slum problem. One such visitor, in a 1907 letter to the Detroit Free Press, insisted, “there are no slums, as slums go . . . There is lacking in the squalor, the evidences of poverty that have come to be regarded as a matter of course in large centers.”10 Evidently, he did not explore the back alleyways of Detroit during his visit to the city. In response to heightened newspaper coverage of alleyway settlements and reform campaigns led by local religious groups and philanthropists, by 1910 city officials

Historical Archaeology   469 admitted that Detroit faced a serious housing problem. Housing Commission Secretary Lovejoy, in a pamphlet designed to raise awareness about the city’s incipient slum problem, warned the administration about how the proliferation of “unwholesome habitations” occurring across the city threatened to destroy its future. In his plan to improve housing conditions, Secretary Lovejoy noted a marked increase in the number of homes that are “unsanitary, damp, dark, unclean, unattractive, unventilated, overcrowded, and immoral.”11 The demolition of Tin Can Alley and other designated slums in the first decade of the 1900s set the stage in the 1910s for the city, with cooperation from the local media, to designate seemingly functional working-​class neighborhoods as slums when they stood in the way of their plans for civic beautification. One area to fall victim to the city’s slum-​ casting campaign was a six-​block area of Corktown on the city’s west side, which was demolished in the process of constructing the Michigan Central Railroad Station and Roosevelt Park. In contrast to Tin Can Alley, the demolished Corktown neighborhood was populated by a dynamic working-​class community, of both home-​owning families and transient laborers, who lived in fairly comfortable detached cottages with fenced backyards. At the time of the condemnation struggle, Corktown residents disputed the depiction of their neighborhood as a filthy, vice-​ridden slum in the local media, and both historical and archaeological evidence demonstrates strategies they employed to resist displacement.12

Potomac Quarter: Detroit’s Nineteenth-​C entury Vice District During the 1880s the Potomac Quarter was described as one of the “lowest and roughest” quarters in the city, housing “the worst classes of both sexes.”13 Within the approximately twenty-​block area nestled between the Detroit River to the south, Woodbridge Street to the north, Beaubien to the west, and Orleans to the east, the Potomac Quarter boasted the city’s densest concentration of boardinghouses, billiard halls, brothels, and saloons. Beginning in the 1860s (but peaking in the 1880s and 1890s), the Potomac Quarter attracted a “floating population” of transient bachelors, who sought work in the city’s factories, dockyards, and other industries. Preferring to live in close proximity to their workplaces, the influx of laborers transformed the area from a residential neighborhood with roots back to the French ribbon farms of the eighteenth century into a congested enclave of boardinghouses and entertainment venues.14 The boarders’ quest for amusements outside of their cramped, shared living arrangements spurned the proliferation of saloons, dance halls, billiard rooms, and brothels, which soon characterized the Potomac Quarter as the city’s red-​light and vice district.15 The brothels known as Slaughter Pen and House of Lords were two of the many dens of ill-​repute that formed the cornerstone of the Quarter’s bachelor society.16 In some cases, as at Bandemer’s

470   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI Hotel on the northeast corner of Franklin and Orleans streets, saloons also had an attached hotel for accommodating long-​term boarders (and probably also engagements with prostitutes).17 Boarders also resided in shared rooms within older houses or in outbuildings. One such outbuilding was located in an alley behind Atwater Street, where a two-​story barn known locally as Pete’s Place served as a lodging house for hundreds of boarders, who paid between five and ten cents for accommodations. One reporter detailed how, in 1905, Pete’s barn teemed with fetid odors and its interior space was lined with “tiers upon tiers of closely packed bunk beds made of crude boards from floor to ceiling, some without pillows and mattresses.”18 Alarmed by the eastward expansion of the Potomac Quarter during the 1880s, the city’s Common Council passed an ordinance in 1882 outlawing all manner of disorderly houses within the city limits. Included in the ordinance was the prohibition of brothels (including houses of ill-​fame, houses of assignation, resorts), saloons, taverns, beer halls, and any sort of house, building, or room where gaming took place (such as gambling and billiards).19 Despite frequent police crackdowns in response to criminal incidents, the ordinance had little effect on improving the Potomac’s widespread reputation as a vice quarter. In fact, the increased visibility of the Potomac Quarter in newspaper accounts and city governance apparently generated more curiosity than scorn among Detroiters, as evidenced by the fact that the neighborhood soon began to attract eccentric carnivals and high-​society tourists. In 1886, along the eastern edge of the Potomac Quarter, Beecher Hall hosted the wildly popular month-​long Japanese Village carnival and exhibit. In the first two weeks of Japanese Village’s opening, 96,730 people paid admission to witness a panoply of unnatural wonders on display, including a living mermaid, the Camel Child, Miss Millie Christine (the Double-​Headed Nightingale), and Miss Jennie Quigley (the Scottish Queen Midget and Prettiest of all the Lilliputians), all set against a backdrop of village life in Japan.20 Detroit’s high society also created their own forms of entertainment among the Potomac Quarter’s squalor. Copying fashionable society in New York and Boston, it became a popular practice among Detroit’s elite to organize tours of the city’s underworld, including police stations, jail cells, and slums. On one Saturday night in January 1885, one such “slumming” adventure included a party of fifteen married couples and newspaper men. The group embarked at eleven p.m., in a sleigh drawn by four horses and accompanied by a police escort, and ventured into the Potomac Quarter (among other places) to marvel at life among the underclass on a weekend evening. To their disappointment, on that occasion, they found the Potomac Quarter to be “unusually quiet and orderly.”21 On the surface, and as reported by local newspapers, the Potomac Quarter fit the general stereotype of vice, crime, and squalor associated with depictions of slums. It was overcrowded, filthy, and home to all manner of illegal and immoral activities. Saloons stood on the corners of its main intersections. Brothels and boardinghouses lined Franklin Street. Even along main thoroughfares, like Orleans and Atwater Streets, poorly maintained lean-​to buildings, with their back doors “only a step or two apart,” housed numerous “very poor” families.22 But the fact that it could be quiet and orderly

Historical Archaeology   471 within the neighborhood, as the high-​society visitors observed, indicates that life for the residents of the Potomac Quarter was more multidimensional than media accounts from the time suggest. In 2014 the Mannik and Smith Group conducted salvage excavations of thirteen former residential, industrial, and commercial properties within the former Potomac Quarter in advance of construction for the Orleans Landing housing development.23 The properties investigated included the Detroit Dry Dock Engine works, Bandemer’s Hotel, the Detroit Paper Stock Company, a scrap metal warehouse, junkyard, foundry, railroad signal house, restaurant, and three domestic lots. Excavations yielded 20,284 artifacts dating to the neighborhood’s occupancy from the late 1860s until the Prohibition era in the twentieth century.24 After excavations concluded, the Mannik and Smith Group transferred the artifacts from the Orleans Landing project to the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology at Wayne State University. Archaeological analyses of assemblages from the Bandemer’s Hotel site and three industrial sites have thus far revealed insightful details about life in the Potomac Quarter area during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Bandemer’s Hotel site, on the corner of Franklin and Orleans Streets, was the location of a hotel/​boardinghouse and saloon from at least 1878 until 1920. One of over two hundred boardinghouses in the city during the 1870s and 1880s, Bandemer’s Hotel and saloon would have attracted predominately young, male patrons and boarders who worked for one of the dozens of small manufacturers or merchants in the neighborhood. Ownership of the Bandemer’s Hotel, and its name, changed at least seven times between 1878 and 1920. But during the 1880s, when the Potomac Quarter was the city’s most notorious slum neighborhood, the two-​story, L-​shaped building was owned and operated by Adolph Bandemer. There, patrons enjoyed meals, drinks, music, private rooms, and, most likely, the intimate companionship of women. Like the other saloons in the area, Bandemer’s was associated with criminal activities, fights between patrons, and vagrancy. But passing mentions in city records suggest that the hotel was not simply a trouble spot; it was also a center for maintaining civic and social life among the city’s newer working-​class residents. Bandemer’s in fact played an important civic role in operating as the electoral registration station for the 7th Ward in 1885.25 During the 1880s city-​wide sanitation practices were still in their infancy, and the residents and owners of Bandemer’s Hotel disposed of their refuse in the property lot’s small backyard space. Over time, as the remains of broken objects and refuse from the saloon and lodging rooms accumulated, the occupants spread them evenly across the yard’s surface, creating a sheet midden (a thin trash deposit covering the backlot’s surface) in the process. Excavations of a portion of the sheet midden in 2014 uncovered 9,801 artifacts from three units, including 1,024 ceramic sherds and 2,418 fragments of glass containers, from soil deposits dating between 1880 and 1920.26 Bridget Bennane identified a minimum of 196 pottery vessels from the late nineteenth-​century ceramic assemblage. Forty percent of these pottery vessels were undecorated, low-​cost whiteware and ironstone plates or bowls. The remainder of the pottery was decorated with transfer-​printed, annular, and sponged designs, primarily on ironstone, whiteware,

472   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI and yellowware, durable, inexpensive varieties of pottery commonly used for restaurant food service. More expensive pottery, like porcelain, occurred less frequently, and matching sets of tableware were not common. The pottery assemblage from Bandemer’s Hotel illustrates how, during the heyday of the Potomac Quarter, proprietors relied upon low-​cost, durable, and readily available varieties of tableware for serving meals to their patrons. Interestingly, in the pottery assemblage, Bennane also identified a toy teacup and saucer, indicating that children were also present on the hotel property, and suggesting that the boardinghouse and/​or saloon was not strictly the domain of male patrons. Another ceramic object, an electrical insulator, confirmed that, despite the area’s squalid reputation, Bandemer’s Hotel was electrified during the 1880s, soon after electricity was introduced to the city. In addition to the ceramic assemblage, Bennane identified a minimum of 165 glass containers. Among the glassware were forty-​eight beverage containers and thirty-​ six medicinal or toiletry bottles from the late nineteenth-​century deposits. The latter are particularly interesting indicators of the boarders’ health concerns at the time. One bottle of Vegetable and Hemlock Oil, recovered from the midden and produced in Detroit in 1906, was reputed to cure asthma, colds, headaches, and hay fever. It was advertised in labor union magazines, including The American Federationist, and the patron who consumed this medicine may have sought relief from ailments associated with the polluted industrial environment of the Potomac Quarter. The fact that the Potomac Quarter residents suffered from poor environmental conditions is verified by archaeological analyses. John Anderson and Hannelore Willeck conducted x-​ray diffraction (XRD) and x-​ray fluorescence (XRF) analysis on artifacts and soil from three industrial sites in the Orleans Landing project area, the iron foundry at the Detroit Dry Dock Engine Works, a scrap-​metal processing plant, and a metal junkyard, all of which were occupied at the turn of the twentieth century.27 Their findings identified heavy metal pollutants in the excavated soils. These contaminants were once emitted as airborne particulates from the area’s industrial operations. Such pollutants would have posed serious health concerns for local residents and laborers, as evidenced by the remains of medicine bottles in the Bandemer’s Hotel midden. The Potomac Quarter continued to serve an itinerant working-​class population and patrons in search of illegal entertainments into the twentieth century, but its visibility decreased over time, as population growth spurred the emergence of many new problematic settlements across the city.

Tin Can Alley and Slum Reform By 1900 Detroit had grown into an industrialized city, home to successful manufacturers of stoves, freight cars, machinery, pharmaceuticals, and, increasingly, automobiles.28 The rapid increase in the city’s population, combined with the fact that more than a third (158,565) of the city’s 1910 residents were foreign born, stoked the anxieties of city

Historical Archaeology   473 officials and planners, who feared that newcomers would threaten Detroit’s future prosperity by introducing to the city slums that rivaled the magnitude of those in Chicago and New York City.29 In response, they took proactive measures to combat the incipient slum problem by enlisting the help of local clergy and philanthropists and by inviting high-​profile reformers to the city to raise awareness about the detrimental effects of slums on urban life. The first step in the city’s slum awareness campaign began around the turn of the twentieth century and involved enlisting local ministers and rabbis to tour run-​down neighborhoods and report back to their congregations on the conditions of squalor and poverty within them. Newspapers routinely reported on their tours and resulting sermons. One such “slumming tour” (as the practice was then called) involved a group of three preachers, the Rev. C. W. Blodgett, pastor of Simpson Methodist Church in Detroit, the Rev. D. J. Helm, pastor of Morgan Chapel in Boston, and the Rev. George W. Gray, who managed slum work in Chicago’s toughest ward. On a July evening in 1898, the group set out to visit the city’s slums and red-​light districts in Orleans Landing, along Gratiot Avenue, and in the vicinity of Tin Can Alley. They ventured into saloons, houses of ill-​repute, and dance halls, speaking with residents and patrons in the process. In the back of one saloon on Gratiot Avenue the ministers were horrified to encounter little pens, about six feet square, that were partitioned off from the rest of the room. There, they observed “sights that cannot be described in legitimate language” (most likely sex acts). According to the newspaper account of the slumming tour (entitled “Aroused!”), the preacher from Boston left the evening “petrified, pale, and speechless.” Based on what they witnessed firsthand, the ministers’ concluded that Detroit was a city of sin and, in 1898, was already home to “some pretty bad slums.”30 To further heighten public awareness about the dangerous threat that slums posed to civic welfare, Detroiters invited journalist and reformer Jacob Riis to the city no fewer than three times between 1901 and 1904 to lecture various civic and church groups about slum reform.31 Riis, who for the prior twenty-​five years served as a reporter for New York newspapers, gained an international reputation after publishing the photodocumentary, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890). His 1902 lecture in Detroit, “The Battle with the Slum” (also the title of his book published in the same year), offered suggestions from his perspective as a “practical reformer” for improving the living conditions for all people within the city.32 Some of these suggestions emphasized the importance of building public parks and playgrounds, and of improving overcrowded housing. Riis’s high-​profile visits to Detroit inspired targeted action among city officials and local groups alike. Reformers and philanthropists made routine missions to places like Tin Can Alley, accompanied by reporters, who afterward produced sensational news stories, many with graphic photographs of the impoverished neighborhoods, that were designed to underscore the urgency of the slum problem in the city.33 Defying the stereotype of early twentieth-​century slum settlements, some of Detroit’s poorest and most congested settlements were tucked away in twisting networks of alleyways, out of sight and mind from principal streets and from those who had no need

474   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI to visit them. Such was the case with Tin Can Alley, a narrow strip of settlements in the central area of the city, less than a mile north of the Potomac Quarter (Figure 24.1). The first mention of Tin Can Alley as a problematic area appears in newspapers in 1899, though the area was inhabited by the city’s poorer residents for several years beforehand. Owing to its location between the city’s bustling downtown commercial district and the Brush Park neighborhood, home to some of the city’s wealthiest residents at the time, Tin Can Alley was the prime target for slum reform during the first decade of the 1900s. Reformers and philanthropists frequently visited the alley and reported to the public on their findings in an effort to convince the city to mitigate its problems, or to eradicate it altogether. One 1906 newspaper report described Tin Can Alley as a “collection of tumbledown shacks, garbage, and refuse of all kinds . . . [with] rats as large as full-​grown cats . . . [where] the odors, like King Claudius’s offense, smell to heaven.”34 At the time, Tin Can Alley was inhabited principally by members of the city’s small African American population, along with lesser numbers of interracial families, and Polish and Italian immigrants. It had apparently been known to the police for years as a place where “trouble might be expected at any moment.”35 But one fact that reporters often overlooked was that the Tin Can Alley residents, whom they complained lived in “open defiance of common decency,” did not own the properties or dwellings where they lived. Instead, most of the structures in Tin Can Alley, and, indeed, other alleged slum neighborhoods, were owned by businessmen or companies (the Union Trust Company in the case of Tin Can Alley), who had the means to improve the properties and living conditions, if they chose to do so.36 They did not. Although any archaeological remains of Tin Can Alley would have been destroyed by the construction of the Chrysler Freeway in the mid-​twentieth century, it is possible to reconstruct the physical landscape and social setting of the alleyway from historical accounts. Contemporary descriptions detail how the entrance to Tin Can Alley was through a narrow passage that faced Hastings Street, north of Napoleon Street. The entrance was shielded by a church and other buildings, and thousands of pedestrians passed by daily without noticing it. Upon entering Tin Can Alley, one would encounter a secluded maze of about twenty-​one one-​to three-​room shacks constructed of scrapped lumber and drygoods boxes, and ten double homes, into which entire families crowded.37 Some newspaper reports depicted Tin Can Alley as “the filthiest spot in the city,” inhabited by people who had “lost the respect of the world” amid “surroundings and under conditions that to the average mortal would be unendurable.”38 Interestingly, others described the residents as the happiest class of residents in Detroit; they enjoyed the seclusion and were satisfied to have a dry place in which to eat and sleep. Eventually, in 1909, the city was convinced by media coverage and reformers’ campaigns to demolish Tin Can Alley. Following pressure from the Board of Health, the city demolished the district’s structures and emptied the alleyway of its inhabitants. Former residents were urged to inhabit dwellings in the vicinity of nearby Hastings Street, which itself boasted problematic living quarters and houses of ill-​repute, including the House of All Nations and Suicide Row.39 In the years during which Tin Can Alley was the focus of slum reformers, Hastings Street was the central artery of

Historical Archaeology   475 the fast-​growing, low-​income Black Bottom neighborhood, home to Italian, Eastern European, and Russian Jewish immigrants, and a rapidly growing African American population, who would soon take over the area.

Corktown and the City Beautiful In 1909, the same year that Tin Can Alley was demolished, the Detroit city government’s largest committee was the City Plan and Improvement Commission. Nicknamed the “Beauty Board,” the commission embraced the trendy City Beautiful movement that was sweeping through recently industrialized North American cities like Chicago and Buffalo. City Beautiful proponents prioritized civic beautification as a means for increasing economic value and social order through the construction of monumental public buildings and carefully designed public landscapes (such as parks, boulevards, and esplanades).40 One of the Detroit Beauty Board’s first accomplishments involved contracting architect and urban designer Daniel H. Burnham, the leading authority on city beautification in the United States, and Chicago-​based architect E. H. Bennett, to create a plan for improving Detroit.41 At the time Detroit covered an area of forty-​ one square miles; its reputation as the “City Beautiful” was already well developed because of recent efforts to construct its twenty-​nine parks and wide boulevards. But in the early 1910s the commission realized that manicured landscapes alone would do little to render less visible the encroaching sprawl and squalor—​“blotches on the fair face of Detroit,” as one newspaper reporter called them—​brought by the newcomers who were soon flooding into the city at an average of 175 people every day.42 The city, on the brink of housing and sanitation crises, decided to invest its energies into building major public buildings and open spaces in order to mediate the “raw spots” infecting the prominent central areas.43 Plans were soon accelerated to construct or improve the city’s most prominent twentieth-​century buildings and public spaces, including Michigan Central Station, the Detroit Museum of Art, the Public Library, and Belle Isle.44 In 1905 the city publicized its intention to construct a new passenger train station in the Corktown neighborhood, approximately two miles west of the downtown commercial center (Figure 24.1).45 In line with the principles of the City Beautiful movement, Michigan Central Station was constructed by Warren & Wetmore, architects of New York City’s Grand Central Station, in the Beaux-​Arts style. Construction took two years, and the station opened to passenger traffic on January 4, 1914.46 Michigan Central’s footprint spanned twenty-​one acres, and at 250 feet and eighteen stories high, was then the tallest building in the city. The plans for the new Michigan Central Train Station included, from the outset, an ornamental approach, or esplanade, designed by E. H. Bennett. The esplanade was to be substantially larger than the train station. Covering an area of almost twelve thousand acres, it was designed as an open, manicured park-​ space, “Detroit’s Portal of Welcome,” connecting the front entrance of the train station to Michigan Avenue, the main commercial thoroughfare, a block to the north.47

476   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI But there was one major obstacle to executing the train station plan: a working-​class neighborhood stood in the way. Between the train station site and Michigan Avenue stood a section of the Corktown neighborhood, comprising a mixture of small cottages, manufacturers, and merchant buildings. The train station and esplanade design required the removal of thousands of working-​class residents, three hundred inhabited structures, and countless outbuildings. The plans to build the train station were undertaken by Michigan Central Railroad, and the first wave of displacement that began in 1909 involved the removal of residents living in the depot’s footprint. Michigan Central offered the residents living in the station’s path a fair price for their homes, and most of them were able to relocate elsewhere within the city.48 Four years later, city officials were responsible for condemning buildings and removing the residents who lived in front of the train station, on the site of the esplanade. Officials justified the condemnations as part of a civic improvement and beautification scheme; the buildings were not deemed unsuitable according to building code or public health regulations. Their initial plan was to have the area cleared within a year of the station’s opening in 1914. Residents in the footprint of the esplanade (later called Roosevelt Park) had been aware of their impending displacement as early as 1911, but since the condemnation and clearing process was slowed by disagreements and legal battles, they largely ignored the situation. As a result, when the train station opened in 1914, exiting passengers were greeted by what reporters called “a sorry view of Detroit,” a congested neighborhood of “unsightly structures.”49 Residents living in the footprint of the esplanade were more reluctant to leave the area than their neighbors within the train station site had been a half-​decade earlier because, by the time the city enacted condemnation proceedings in June of 1913, the population was skyrocketing and working-​class housing was filled to capacity throughout the city. In 1915 the esplanade site was still occupied by at least seventy-​nine inhabited dwellings (Figure 24.2).50 The displacement process grew more contentious as residents appealed condemnations in a protracted legal battle. City officials responded to their resistance by enlisting local newspapers to publicize numerous articles that construed the neighborhood as a dangerous, unkempt slum. Their goal was to legitimize and gain popular support for its removal.51 Soon, the language of slums, emphasizing overcrowding, dilapidated buildings, and immorality was applied to Corktown. One article posed the question of whether Corktown residents were ogres.52 Another described the neighborhood as an area “where unlovliness reigns supreme” and “decrepit houses” teemed with inhabitants.53 As tensions over the displacement mounted, descriptions about the area became more dramatic, and by 1912, the area in front of the train station was publicized as welcoming visitors with the worst impression of the city.54 Archaeological sources, however, do not neatly corroborate these media portrayals. In some cases, findings reveal the difficult economic, health, environmental conditions that residents dealt with on a daily basis in the context of a rapidly industrializing city. In others, evidence illustrates the resiliency and determination of Corktown residents to maintain their domesticity, preserve respectability, and profit from the city’s growth during the displacement struggle.

Historical Archaeology   477

Figure 24.2 This section of the Corktown neighborhood was depicted as a slum by city officials during the construction of Michigan Central Station (background), and it was formally condemned in 1913 in order to create an esplanade approach (later called Roosevelt Park) between Michigan Avenue and the train station. This newspaper photograph, taken from the corner of Michigan Avenue and 14th Street, shows the extent to which inhabited dwellings remained on the esplanade site in 1915, a year after the train station opened to travelers. The buildings would eventually be evacuated and demolished by the city in 1918. Detroit Saturday Night, January 30, 1915

At the time of the train station and esplanade construction, Corktown was a densely settled neighborhood populated by working-​class residents, a mixture of immigrant or first-​generation families, and transient laborers. Beginning around 1880, the influx of laborers into Corktown transformed the area from a predominately Irish enclave, populated by all socioeconomic groups, to a multiethnic, working-​class neighborhood, home to residents with a variety of European and North American backgrounds, especially German, Irish, Canadian, American and Italian.55 Corktown residents lived in what their working-​class counterparts in Chicago or New York would have considered to be spacious, private cottages. At the turn of the century, Detroit had one of the highest home ownership rates in the country, even among its working class residents. In 1900, 34 percent of unskilled laborers owned or mortgaged homes and 66 percent were renters.56 These city-​wide numbers are consistent with the patterns of home occupations in Corktown, where about one-​third of the residents were home owners. There they resided in detached “ell-​cottages”—​one-​or one-​and-​a-​half-​ story wood-​framed dwellings, with a central structure at the front and an extension behind it (some ell-​cottages were made of brick). Although many residents built additions onto their ell extensions as needed, such haphazard variations were well-​concealed from

478   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI the street view, where the tightly packed cottage facades maintained visual consistency. The ell-​cottages were small, averaging between 16 × 20 and 20 × 40 feet, but their exterior wooden elements were embellished with decorative Italianate roof brackets, arched windows, and painted wood siding.57 All of the cottages in Corktown occupied narrow property lots nestled between the street and a back alleyway, and they were fenced off from neighbors, as required by city ordinances. In their private yard spaces, archaeological artifacts and historic insurance maps detail how Corktown residents hung laundry, planted gardens, disposed of trash, and constructed outbuildings to serve as sheds, animal pens, and privies. Between 2012 and 2016 the author conducted three seasons of excavations with Wayne State University students in Roosevelt Park, which since 1921 served as a manicured esplanade on the site of the former neighborhood.58 Excavations recovered traces of dwellings, outbuildings, alleyways, and over thirty thousand portable objects from sixteen different house lots within the area bounded by Michigan Avenue, 14th Street, 17th Street, and Michigan Central Station. Between 1880 and 1918, the dozens of families and boarders who occupied these sixteen dwellings typified the neighborhood as a community populated by a mixture of long-​term and itinerant residents who came to Detroit in search of new opportunities. Artifact analysis from the house lots details how residents of this purported “slum” neighborhood were more culturally, socially, and economically diverse than stereotypes of slum dwellers depict.59 From a midden associated with the Cooper family household at No. 306 15th Street, Samantha Ellens identified a minimum of thirty-​four medicine and toiletry bottles dating to the family’s occupancy between 1899 and 1905. In addition to providing information about turn-​of-​the-​century health and hygiene practices, nine of the thirty-​four bottles were embossed with labels associating them with local druggists, like William Dohany, Otto R. Kurz, and George W. Wiessenger, who operated pharmacies within two blocks of the Cooper residence and made up a thriving local commercial district that Corktown residents like the Coopers relied upon for their daily needs.60 From 1903 until they were removed by the city from their home in 1917, the Foy family lived around the block from the Cooper residents. Their household initially comprised the Foy parents and their three adult children. Census records indicate that the two Foy daughters worked as clerks and the son as an electrician at the time. As children their education was prioritized; records suggest that their parents enrolled them in local schools rather than putting them to work in local industries. Historical and archaeological evidence, however, suggests that despite their early education and later employment in respectable working-​class jobs, life for the Foy family during the time of their residency at No. 317 14th Street was difficult. Between 1907 and 1915 all three Foy children died. In 1907 daughter Sarah died at age twenty-​two from a lung disease, Marie suffered from rheumatism that triggered a fatal cardiac paralysis in 1912 at age thirty-​three, and son John was killed in an electrical accident at the age of thirty-​six while working at the Public Lighting Company.61 Since none of the Foy children worked in industrial settings where polluted air quality and equipment would have posed risks to their well-​being,

Historical Archaeology   479 their causes of death raise questions about the quality of life within the Corktown neighborhood. Geoarchaeological studies of soil from the Foy, Cooper, and other house-​lot excavations identified high quantities of airborne particulates, including cinders, slag particles, and other contaminants in their yard spaces that would have been emitted from nearby manufacturers.62 Although they enjoyed the relative comforts of private yards and detached homes, the Foys and other neighborhood residents lived in dangerous proximity to pollutants from nearby heavy industry and train traffic. These industrial conditions adversely affected their health, as is evident in the young deaths of the Foy daughters and the recovery of numerous medicinal products for treating respiratory concerns in the Foy and Cooper assemblages.63 Pottery assemblages excavated from the Foy house lot demonstrate the frugality of neighborhood residents, but also the wide variety of mass-​produced household wares available to them. Kailey McAlpin identified a minimum of twenty-​two vessels from a soil deposit associated with the Foy family’s occupation of No. 317 14th Street. Of these, only eight vessels were decorated, none were from matching sets, and only three had manufacturing dates that extended into the twentieth century.64 Since the Foy family were relatively recent immigrants to Detroit, it is unlikely that they carried most of these vessels with them to No. 317 14th Street. Instead, this pottery assemblage composed of older vessels suggests that the Foys likely purchased their household pottery piecemeal and secondhand. The preponderance of locally produced ironstone and whiteware vessels implies that income limitations affected their purchasing options, but the presence of a few decorated vessels also suggests how it was still possible within the confines these economic constraints to exercise degrees of personal taste and maintenance in selecting serving wares that conveyed Victorian ideals of respectability and domesticity. Neighborhood-​ scale archaeological investigations have also yielded fascinating insights about residents’ strategic responses and resistance to the city’s condemnation efforts. Although the city notified residents of their intent to remove them from the footprint of the esplanade as soon as construction on the train station was under way, historical maps and archaeological findings illustrate how some residents dug in their heels by building multi-​flat apartment buildings and a substantial hotel to profit from the opening of the train station and the population growth in the city. A 1911 Baist map of the area shows the new construction of a two-​story brick flat at No. 15–​17 Rose Street, and a two-​story, multi-​apartment flat at No. 327–​329 14th Street. Four years later, on the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of 1915, a new hotel/​boardinghouse appears at No. 300–​302 15th Street, which in the midst of the condemnation proceedings, Alfred Hoffman converted from a single-​story wooden ell-​cottage into a three-​ story brick hotel, called the Hoffman Boardinghouse (Figure 24.3, location A). Located directly across the street from the train station entrance, the Hoffman Boardinghouse would have been the first public building travelers encountered as they exited the building. Archaeological excavations at each of these three properties revealed how they were well-​constructed, with durable materials and facilities (for example, brick, plaster, indoor plumbing, concrete basement flooring); in other words, they were built to last. But city officials were unappreciative of these new working-​class enterprises,

480   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI

Figure 24.3  Section of the 1915 Sanborn map showing the location of four of the property lots excavated by Wayne State University archaeologists in the footprint of Roosevelt Park: Hoffman Boardinghouse/​Hotel (A), 306 15th street, where the Cooper family house stood prior to 1906 (B), Foy family house at 317 15th Street (C), and apartment flats at 327–​329 14th Street (D). The 14th Street apartment flats (D) were built during the planning for the Michigan Central Train Station (ca. 1910), and the Hoffman Boardinghouse (A) was built between 1911 and 1915. Property owners were aware of the impending condemnation proceedings at the time. One sign of the city’s commitment to removing the neighborhood is visible in the minimal care mapmakers took to update the map, simply pasting squares of paper onto an earlier map rather than creating a new version. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1915, Library of Congress

and they were subjected to the same treatment as the private dwellings in the area. Following the settlement of the condemnation suits in the courts, and various logistical disputes among the Beauty Board and other officials, city officials implemented aggressive actions to remove the remaining residents from the footprint of the esplanade—​ first auctioning homes for their hardware, and then, in June of 1918, inviting the British army tank Britannia, which was then on tour in Detroit, to drive through and demolish the remaining three homes on 15th Street that stood in the way of the esplanade’s construction.65

Historical Archaeology   481

Conclusion The case of Corktown, where a thriving working-​class community was demonized and then displaced in the name of beautification, demonstrates how as Detroit’s population multiplied during the 1910s, the city that promoted itself as the place where “life is worth living” prioritized civic pride over civic consciousness.66 Historical archaeological sources demonstrate how residents in these designated slum areas lived in ways that, in some cases, aligned with stereotypical poor qualities of life, and in others, departed from them. A long-​term archaeological perspective is particularly insightful for charting the development of slum stereotypes and associated management responses or displacement strategies over the course of Detroit’s twentieth-​century urban and industrial expansion. Regardless of actual living conditions within the Potomac Quarter, Tin Can Alley, or Corktown neighborhoods, during the period of Detroit’s unprecedented urban expansion between 1880 and 1920, city officials and the media increasingly depicted those areas they wished to eliminate as slums. The resulting acts of demolition in Tin Can Alley and Corktown erased communities and left them to their own devices to find new accommodations. By 1920 the city faced even more severe housing shortages and deteriorating conditions in its poorest and most congested neighborhoods, particularly in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom, the neighborhoods then populated by African American residents, who migrated in large numbers from the American South to the city during the initial decades of the Great Migration in the late 1910s and 1920s. Unfortunately, the city’s treatment of low-​income, minority, and immigrant “slum” communities at the turn of the twentieth century set the stage for more aggressive displacement programs, housing segregation practices, and public housing crises throughout the remainder of the century.

Notes 1. Ernest Parkins, The Historical Geography of Detroit (Lansing: Michigan Historical Commission, 1918). 2. Melvin G. Holli, “The Impact of Automobile Manufacturing upon Detroit,” Detroit in Perspective: A Journal of Regional History 2, no. 3 (1976): 176–​188, 176. 3. Milton Carmichael, Detroit, A City of Today. Places of Pleasure (Detroit: Parkinson, 1910). 4. Detroit Free Press (DFP), “The City Beautiful: Michigan State Federation of Women’s Clubs Has Taken Up Civic Improvement . . . ,” May 9, 1909. 5. Carroll Davidson Wright, The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia: Prepared in Compliance with a Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States, vol. 7. (Washington, D.C: US Government Printing Office, 1894). 6. Luther E. Lovejoy, “Civic Welfare and the Dwelling,” Detroit Housing Commission Pamphlet (December 9, 1910). 7. DFP, “Dark Spots of Detroit,” July 30, 1905.

482   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI 8. DFP, “Detroit’s Housing Problem is a Serious Matter,” November 6, 1910. 9. DFP, “Slums Need Cleaning Up,” December 8, 1906. 10. DFP, “Cosmopolitan Detroit,” September 22, 1907. 11. Lovejoy, “Civic Welfare,” n.p. 12. Krysta Ryzewski, “No Home for the ‘Ordinary Gamut’: A Historical Archaeology of Community Displacement and the Creation of Detroit, City Beautiful,” Journal of Social Archaeology 15, no. 3 (2015): 408–​431. 13. DFP, “A Midnight Round: Society Ladies Make Midnight Rounds from the Arbeiter to Gawk at the Potomac Conditions,” January 26, 1885; Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan (Detroit: Silas Farmer and Company, 1890). 14. Stephan Thernstrom and Peter R. Knights, “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-​ Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1970):7–​35. 15. John C. Schneider, “The Bachelor Subculture and Spatial Change in Mid-​Nineteenth-​ Century Detroit,” Detroit in Perspective 3, (1978): 19–​32, 21. 16. DFP, “A Midnight Round.” 17. Buildings advertised as hotels commonly operated as long-​stay boardinghouses during the period of this study. 18. DFP, “Dark Spots of Detroit.” 19. Detroit Common Council, The Compiled Ordinances of the City of Detroit, (Detroit: Thos. Smith Press, 1904), chap. 111, 172. 20. DFP, Advertisements for Japanese Village, May 31, 1886, and June 21, 1886. 21. DFP, “A Midnight Round.” 22. DFP, “Providing for the Very Poor,” December 22, 1901. 23. Robert C. Chidester, Kate J. Hayfield, and Colene Knaub, A Phase I Detailed Land Use History and Assessment of the Potential for Archaeological Resources within the East Project Area of the Orleans Landing Development, Detroit, Michigan. Report submitted to McCormack Baron Salazar, St. Louis, MO by The Mannik & Smith Group, Maumee, OH (2014); Robert C. Chidester, Kate J. Hayfield, and Colene Knaub, Executive Summary: Phase II/​III Archaeological Investigations, Orleans Landing Phase I Project Area, Detroit, Michigan. Report submitted to McCormack Baron Salazar, St. Louis, MO by The Mannik & Smith Group, Maumee, OH (2014). 24. Cory Taylor, Samantha Spolarich, Krysta Ryzewski, and Bridget Bennane, Orleans Landing Collections Summary Report. Report submitted to The Mannik & Smith Group, Maumee, OH (2019). 25. City of Detroit, Journal of the Board of Councilmen, January 13, 1885, to January 12, 1886 (Detroit: Post and Tribune Job Company, 1886), 104. 26. Bridget Bennane, The Red Light Life of Bandemer’s Hotel in 19th-​and 20th-​century Detroit, Presentation at the Society for Historical Archaeology Annual Meeting, 2018. 27. Hannelore Willeck, “Dirty Deeds Done for Science: An Archaeological Soil Analysis of Two Early 20th-​Century Light Industrial Sites in Detroit’s East Riverfront,” Michigan Archaeologist 60 ([2014] 2020): 7–​26; John Anderson and Cassandra L. Ward, “Metal Production at the Detroit Dry Dock Engine Works Site (1866–​1929): An Archaeometric Analysis,” Michigan Archaeologist 60 ([2014] 2020): 27–​38. 28. Holli, “Impact of Automobile Manufacturing,” 179. 29. Parkins, “Historical Geography of Detroit,” 196. 30. DFP, “Aroused! Detroit Ministers Go on Slumming Tour on a Saturday Night,” November 21, 1898.

Historical Archaeology   483 31. DFP, “Jacob Riis Give Lecture about Slums,” January 25, 1901; DFP, “Battle with the Slum,” October 26, 1902; DFP, “Jacob A. Riis Back in Detroit to Give Lecture on Slums at Church of Our Father,” April 2, 1904. 32. DFP, “Battle with the Slum.” 33. DFP, “Slums Need Cleaning Up.” 34. Ibid. 35. DFP, “Famous Collection of Hovels Where Many Criminals are Caught,” March 20, 1903. 36. DFP, “Blotches on the Fair Face of Detroit,” June 20, 1909; “Tin Can Alley Demolished,” August 1, 1909. 37. DFP, “Tin Can Alley Demolished.” 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. DFP, “The City Beautiful.” 41. Detroit Times (DT), “Barcroft Talks of ‘Scandals’ of Beauty Board,” January 1, 1913. 42. Ibid.; DFP, “Blotches on the Fair Face of Detroit”; Detroit Convention and Tourist Bureau, Detroit, A City of Today (Detroit: Richmond and Backus Co, 1912). 43. DFP, “Blotches on the Fair Face of Detroit.” 44. Daniel M. Bluestone, “Detroit’s City Beautiful and the Problem of Commerce,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47, no. 3 (1988): 245–​262. 45. DFP, “Union Station: Will Probably be Built in Neighborhood of Twentieth St. and Michigan Ave,” October 25, 1905. 46. Michigan Central Station was closed in January 1988 and fell into ruination. It remained abandoned until June 2018, when Ford Motor Company announced plans to rehabilitate it by 2022. 47. DT, “Beautifier Would Raze Ford Building,” December 13, 1912; Detroit Parks & Boulevard Commission, Minutes Book, February-​March 1919, Burton Historical Library Collections, M6, V.22, 272. 48. DFP, “Railroad Now Large Landlord: Some 200 Families on Site of Proposed Depot Tenants of Michigan Central,” May 2, 1909. 49. DFP, “Michigan Central Railway Depot will Rank High among Detroit’s Finest Modern Buildings,” December 17, 1911; DFP, “City Plan and Improvement Association Plans Beautiful Approach to New Station: Station Will Be Fine Structure,” July 14, 1912; DFP, “M.C. Station is Nearly Complete: Railroad Company Rushes Work but City Delays Improvements,” November 16, 1913. 50. DFP, “Condemnation Begun for M.C. Depot Approach. 300 Property Owners Named in Suit,” June 11, 1913. 51. Ryzewski, “No Home for the ‘Ordinary Gamut’ ”; Kate. E. Korth, “Rethinking Standard Narratives: A Documentary Archaeology of Detroit’s Roosevelt Park in the Early 20th Century” (Master’s diss., Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, 2015). 52. DFP, “Corktown Full of Ogres? Naw!,” December 16, 1909. 53. DFP, “Blotches on the Fair Face of Detroit.” 54. DFP, “Lock Horns on New Station Plan: City Beautifiers and Michigan Central Interests Cannot Agree on Ideas,” August 8, 1912. 55. Olivier Zunz, The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–​1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Ryzewski, “No Home for the ‘Ordinary Gamut.’ ” 56. Zunz, Changing Face of Inequality, 153. 57. C. Stephan Demeter, “John Gibson’s Ell-​Cottage: A Contribution to Detroit Working Class Housing,” Paper on file in the Gordon L. Grosscup Museum of Anthropology

484   KRYSTA RYZEWSKI Archives (11W2530), Wayne State University (1995), 17, 23; Samuel B. Reed, House-​Plans for Everybody (Orange Judd Company, 1898), 23. 58. Krysta Ryzewski, Roosevelt Park Archaeological Excavation Reports, on file at the Grosscup Museum of Anthropology, Wayne State University (2012, 2014, and 2016). 59. Samantha Malette (Ellens), “At the Nexus of Help and Harm: Identifying Consumption Patterns in Corktown Through a 19th-​to 20th-​Century Household Medicine Bottle Assemblage” (Master’s diss., Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, 2015); Tim Murray and Alan Mayne. “(Re) Constructing a Lost Community: ‘Little Lon,’ Melbourne, Australia,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2003): 87–​101; Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rebecca Yamin, “Alternative Narratives: Respectability at New York’s Five Points,” in ibid., 154–​170. 60. Malette (Ellens), “At the Nexus of Help and Harm.” 61. Kailey McAlpin, “The Foy Family Household at 317 14th Street: Examining the Impact of the Second Industrial Revolution, c. 1870–​1914, on the Consumer Behaviors of an Irish-​ American Family in Corktown, Detroit” (Master’s diss., Department of Anthropology, Wayne State University, 2017), 38. 62. Jeffrey L. Howard, Krysta Ryzewski, Brian R. Dubay, and Thomas W. Killion, “Artifact Preservation and Post-​depositional Site-​Formation Processes in an Urban Setting: A Geoarchaeological Study of a 19th-​century Neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, USA,” Journal of Archaeological Science 53 (2015): 178–​189. 63. McAlpin, “The Foy Family Household,” 100. 64. Ibid., 60. 65. DFP, “City Will Raze Site Buildings: Michigan Central Depot ‘Good Thing’ to Terminate, Officials Assert. Up to City Treasurer Koch to Demolish Structures, Associates Agree,” May 27, 1918; DFP, “Britannia Crashes Through 3 Houses: 35,000 See Land Boat Demolish Structures on M. C. Esplanade,” June 24, 1918. 66. Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., The Book of Detroiters: A Biographical Dictionary of the Leading Living Men of the City of Detroit (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Company, 1908), 22.

Bibliography Bluestone, Daniel M. “Detroit’s City Beautiful and the Problem of Commerce.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 47, no. 3 (1988): 245–​262. Branstner, Mark C., and Terrance J. Martin. “Working-​Class Detroit.” In Consumer Choice in Historical Archaeology, edited by Suzanne Spencer-​Wood, 301–​320. Boston: Springer, 1987. Demeter, C. Stephan. “Nineteenth-​Century Sanitation Technology in Urban Detroit.” The Michigan Archaeologist 40 (1994): 1–​24. Holli, Melvin G. “The Impact of Automobile Manufacturing upon Detroit.” Detroit in Perspective 2, no. 3 (1976): 176–​188. Holli, Melvin G. Reform in Detroit: Hazen S. Pingree and Urban Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Howard, Jeffrey L., Krysta Ryzewski, Brian R. Dubay, and Thomas W. Killion. “Artifact Preservation and Post-​depositional Site-​Formation Processes in an Urban Setting: A Geoarchaeological Study of a 19th-​century Neighborhood in Detroit, Michigan, USA.” Journal of Archaeological Science 53 (2015): 178–​189. Pilling, Arnold R. “Detroit: Urbanism Moves West: Palisaded Fur-​Trade Center to Diversified Manufacturing City.” North American Archaeologist 3, no. 3 (1983): 225–​242.

Historical Archaeology   485 Ryzewski, Krysta. Detroit Remains: Archaeology and Community Histories of Six Legendary Sites. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2022. Ryzewski, Krysta, ed. “Historical Archaeology in Detroit.” Special issue of The Michigan Archaeologist 60 ([2014] 2020). Ryzewski, Krysta. “No Home for the ‘Ordinary Gamut’: A Historical Archaeology of Community Displacement and the Creation of Detroit, City Beautiful.” Journal of Social Archaeology 15, no. 3 (2015): 408–​431. Schneider, John C. “Public Order and the Geography of the City: Crime, Violence, and the Police in Detroit, 1845–​1875.” Journal of Urban History 4, no. 2 (1978): 183–​208. Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Updated ed. Vol. 6. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Zunz, Olivier. The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–​1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

CHAPTER 25

A RCHAEOL O G I E S OF DI SADVANTAG E I N T H E MODERN C I T Y Sydney and Melbourne Compared TIM MURRAY

In the 1990s historian Alan Mayne and I became interested in finding ways in which we could tell the stories that were locked up in the many boxes of artifacts derived from the excavation of the “Little Lon” (also known as the “Commonwealth Block” and “Casselden Place”) site in Melbourne, Australia.1 “Little Lon” (so named because Little Lonsdale Street ran through the neighborhood) had been one of Australia’s most notorious slums; it was resumed by the federal government in the late 1940s and much of the area was demolished to make way for a massive federal government office block (hence the tag “Commonwealth Block”). Casselden Place was an alleyway in the heart of “Little Lon,” in which one tiny worker’s cottage still stands. We wanted to develop fresh and more revealing ways of analyzing urban disadvantage in the past, of delving through the slum stereotypes in order to probe the lives of those who had lived in that Casselden Place cottage, and in the surrounding community. Following the work of archaeologists at “The Rocks” in Sydney (another supposed slum, targeted for redevelopment after the outbreak of bubonic plague there in 1900),2 as well as earlier work in New York City3 and San Francisco,4 we believed that the best way forward was to work toward models integrating archaeological and other historical data in ways that did not sacrifice the integrity of either. It has proved to be a lot more time consuming, challenging, and interesting than we had originally thought. Our early ideas collided with massive and complex archaeological records that frequently proved difficult to unambiguously integrate with very rich documentary records. The new histories we sought to write have been slow to surface, but after two decades of analysis we are now in a position to add further to the vibrant histories of both places already

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    487 published,5 while simultaneously adding to the historical archaeology of the modern city on a global scale.6 Reflecting on the need to correct the use of slum stereotypes in writing new histories of urban disadvantage, Mayne observed: An important historical problem remains: how does one obtain an “inside” appreciation of the communities that were swept away when seemingly only the misleading “outside” stereotypes, which justified their destruction in the first place, remain? Analysis . . . has produced vignettes of working-​class households that are grounded in the ignored material residues of inequality that were left by those who actually lived in the neighbourhood. It is thereby possible to puncture outside slum myths and reveal everyday life inside such maligned communities.7

Mayne’s observations are supported by recent urban archaeologies of the lives of the poorer inhabitants of both Sydney and Melbourne since first British settlement in Sydney in 1788 and, some fifty years later, Melbourne in 1835. The original vision of this research, echoing Mayne, has broadened to a more encompassing search for an understanding of the origins and histories of modern cities (particularly through the analysis of migration and of the production and consumption of material culture) in the colonial and imperial worlds of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This has involved the development of frameworks of comparison with sites scattered across Europe, the Americas, and Australasia. This development has also benefitted from an intensified interest in the archaeology of disadvantage in the modern city at a global scale.8 Thus what was originally a focus on one major site in Melbourne has gradually transformed into an inquiry into the place of modern cities in the transnational archaeologies of the modern world. At a more local scale we have also come to better understand the similarities and differences in the histories of both Sydney and Melbourne, both the outcomes of complex processes of migration, and social and cultural transformations marked by material culture and the diverse occupational histories of urban landscapes.9 Our first project was the excavation of Little Lon, a site in the center of Melbourne that was part of a city block generally known as the Commonwealth Block. Our original goals were first, to develop an integrated analytical framework for urban society and its embedded material culture in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​century Australia; and second, to analyze within this framework material culture recovered from the site. We saw our approach as seeking to achieve more for urban archaeology in Australia than its traditional role of providing artefacts and contexts to “illustrate” historical narratives fundamentally based on written historical documents, rather than being the outcome of a meaningful interaction between distinct but related data sets, linked by space. We understood that this approach also required historians (and archaeologists) to engage in a different way with classes of written documents that had often been used by urban historians to pursue inquiries into more general histories of the city or social and cultural issues such as crime, poverty, and economic development. Our approach

488   TIM MURRAY required these documentary sources to be used to provide fundamental historical contexts to the rather more limited spaces and rather more diverse material culture that are the essence of urban archaeology. Frequently these documents proved to be the raw materials for micro-​histories of individual places and streets—​police records, fire insurance records, land titles, probate, census, and rate records, as well as the activities of a wide range of government and non-​government instrumentalities (such as immigration, sanitation, and private and public welfare agencies). Through them we were able to piece together detailed lot and block histories that provided the framework for integrating specific archaeological deposits with the lives of the people who were the most likely to have been involved in their creation. Improving regimes of analysis was obviously one way to promote the difficult business of meaningfully integrating quite disparate data sets, thus using archaeological data to seriously engage with (and possibly revise) conventional readings of social processes or sociocultural categories over the last two hundred years. Another way was to expand our interpretive repertoire and seek ways to engage with conceptions of the city that moved the field of urban historical archaeology into new areas, extending our engagement with history, sociology, and geography, and thus moving beyond the revisionist history of the slums that has been linked to Mayne’s research.10 We soon discovered that significant tensions and oppositions lurked just below that fairly superficial understanding. The initial results from the work at “Little Lon” have been widely published and there is no need to discuss them again.11 Put simply, we were able to demonstrate that the classic stereotypes of slum life that had previously come to define “Little Lon” masked significant social, cultural, and economic diversity that included criminality and poverty, but was not defined by it. Significantly, we were also able to reinforce a conception of places like “Little Lon” as having complex histories of land ownership and land use that continued to the recent past, when the vast bulk of the physical remains of the nineteenth century precinct were erased by development. We found abundant historical and archaeological evidence to support the diverse histories of places such as “Little Lon” that had been stigmatized in previous histories (and popular accounts) as places where economic disadvantage (and the criminality and fecklessness that was assumed to attend it) was rife and completely dominant. We were able to envision more complex stories that (among other things) directly connected “Little Lon” with the changing history of Melbourne—​if only because the residents of the place, or their descendants, moved out to the suburbs to establish different lives. Work at “Little Lon” and the rest of the “Commonwealth Block,” though far from complete, has continued and this, when set alongside the outcomes of a developing comparative agendum, has enabled a more nuanced and developed historical archaeology of disadvantage (and indeed opportunity) to surface. Much of this continuing research now occurs under the rubric of “e-​research” or “digital humanities,” but the issues are more than methodological—​given that they go to the heart of more abstract inquiries into what we wish to know about the archaeology of the modern city. But there are also fascinating and vexing matters related to comprehending the formation processes of urban archaeological records, and linking such perceptions

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    489 to strategies that can help us assess the usefulness or otherwise of the questions we routinely ask, to set the tolerance limits of interpretations, and to describe the kinds of integrations between archaeological and historical data that might occur. We reflected on the disjunction between the great precision of historical documentation at “Little Lon” and the much less precise archaeological data from the houses in the Casselden Place section of the original “Little Lon” site. We now understand this disjunction to be a common-​enough occurrence in urban historical archaeology. It is important to establish how we can pursue our conventional desire to explore domesticity, community, family life, issues of residence and mobility, and still larger issues of migration and community formation, and how and what people produce and consume in those places, but it is equally important for us to try to understand how data and questions can give rise to different agendas. The different resolving powers of different kinds of data remains a significant issue for research in this field. In this case the richness of documentary data can create an illusion of archaeological riches, where we find that finer scales of chronological resolution (down to the single year) can lead to a pixilation or loss of resolution in archaeological information, which does not occur so obviously at chronologically coarser scales of analysis. In essence the integration of what we now understand to be quite disparate data sets has become a focus of research in itself.12 Murray and Crook responded to these broad challenges in a series of five linked research projects, beginning with the Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City (EAMC).13 The fundamental idea was that increasing both temporal and spatial scale could bring new patterns into focus, which might overcome the disparity in resolving powers that Mayne and Murray had noted in the material from the cottages in Casselden Place (the core of our original analysis). They were also struck by the essential ambiguity of assumptions about what might be considered to be assemblages of material culture that could be interpreted as evidence of “poverty” or of the “working class,” when the definition of both was logically circular, there being no clearly established empirical content for either in the material culture and archaeological record of sites in the Australian context.14 During the course of the nineteenth century patterns of production, consumption, work, and residence changed across the western world, and Murray and Crook recognized the necessity of comparison between sites in Sydney and Melbourne (and later in London, the metropolitan center of the colonial world to which Sydney and Melbourne belonged) to gain a clearer understanding of the genesis and development of urban communities (and, at a more pragmatic level, to see whether it was possible to generalize about the composition of “working-​class” or indeed “middle-​class” assemblages). The structure of these comparisons (which occur in local, national, and international settings) has been described in Figure 25.1. The EAMC project was established in 2001. Our goal was to comprehensively analyze and interpret the large assemblages excavated from historical archaeological sites held in storehouses across Sydney. The primary aim was to develop a clearer and more precise understanding of Sydney’s past material, personal, and working worlds from its archaeological remains than had previously been attempted. The archaeological

490   TIM MURRAY

GLOBAL MATERIAL CULTURE IN URBAN SETTINGS 1830–1950 Material culture found on sites in low income districts in Melbourne

Material culture found on all sites in Melbourne

Material culture found in other colonial cities in Australia

Global generalisation on cities

Material culture found in other cities elsewhere

Material culture found in other cities in Western World

Figure 25.1  Schematic of Global Material Culture in Urban Settings, 1830–​1959. First published in Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, eds., The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001], 104. Prepared by Wei Ming, La Trobe University

collections from major Sydney sites (Hyde Park Barracks, First Government House, the Royal Mint, Susannah Place, the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets site, the Paddy’s Market site and Lilyvale) were selected as the foundation group for a city-​wide analysis. The Cumberland and Gloucester Streets site was the focus of intensive research and publication and has been the source of new stories about life in “The Rocks.”15 Detailed assemblage analysis was carried out for all of the target sites.16 Follow-​up projects at the Hyde Park Barracks and further work on the assemblages from the Commonwealth Block in Melbourne (projects 2 and 4) built on close links with the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (later Sydney’s Living Museums) at the Barracks, and the Museum of Victoria—​the repository of the “Little Lon” collection.17 Crook’s doctoral dissertation (comparing the Cumberland and Gloucester Street assemblages with contemporaneous sites in London) took this research still further in search of a clearer archaeological understanding of consumption.18 New research projects into the archaeology of the middle class in Melbourne (project 5) have built on this.19 Pamela Riccardi’s doctoral research, focused on a comparison between “Little Lon” and San Telmo (a poorer district of central Buenos Aires), has underwritten a further expansion of our comparative agenda,20 which has developed in parallel with research in the northern hemisphere particularly related to the archaeologies of diaspora and ethnogenesis.21

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    491 Research by Murray and Crook in Sydney has followed both global and local concerns, but we have also been working up our data at the level of the household. However, a minimal requirement for comparative analysis at this level is a reliable dataset. The creation and manipulation of these comparable datasets is providing a firmer foundation for our work in urban archaeology in Australia and overseas.

The Framework of Comparison The EAMC project spawned two relational databases: the EAMC Archaeology Database and the People +​Place database (project 3).22 Both were designed by Crook in Microsoft Access. People +​Place was designed from scratch in collaboration with historian Laila Ellmoos, who completed all data input, while the EAMC Archaeology Database was created by Crook. Both were published and remain in use, having subsequently attracted users throughout Australasia. The databases present a concrete contribution to both of our central themes of integration, and of creating and exploring patterns, in the historical and archaeological data. The EAMC Archaeology Database is a customized relational database designed to store, display, search, and analyze archaeological data. For the first time we were able to draw together artifact data from several of Sydney’s major urban excavations: the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets site, the Lilyvale site, the site of First Government House and Paddy’s Market. A total of 697,926 sherds, captured in 149,838 records and accompanied by more than five thousand images, were collated in the database at the time of its public release. Parallel to this, the People +​Place database was designed to store, display, search, and analyze historical data about individuals and buildings or places. Its primary intention is to link archaeological assemblages with the houses, shops, and public houses from which they were excavated and the people who lived and worked there. The two key organizing principles of the database were People and Place, and Individuals and Structures. By allocating specific historical data to unique identifiers for individuals and structures, the People +​Place database allowed us weave these elaborate chains of evidence into a holistic account of individuals and the places they were connected to. We established the links at the smaller end of the scale, by linking all artifacts to their unique building number, and consequently the individuals known to occupy the places. We developed screens in the database to tally all artifacts recovered from each building (by function groupings), and—​for those rare cases—​to connect individuals to artifacts found at a particular address. People +​Place also allowed the interrogation of broader patterns of occupation: how long people lived at a particular address, and whether they moved around the area or out of it (in other words, were they long-​term tenants or transient?), were they owner-​occupiers, did they live close to family members? The database could reveal trends in the relationships between landlords and tenants, and between individuals within households or across family groups.

492   TIM MURRAY The transnational comparative agendum that was first modeled in 2001 began to bear fruit in 2004 with the establishment of a collaborative research project with the Museum of London’s London Archaeological Archive and Resource Centre (LAARC) that lay at the heart of Crook’s doctoral research. While comparisons between the sites in Melbourne and Sydney continued, Crook conducted analyses of archaeological material in London, to compare mid-​nineteenth-​century patterns of consumption between Sydney and London. The results of Crook’s approach to the archaeological vectors of quality, cost, and value first appeared in 2005 but was significantly expanded in her doctoral dissertation.23 Crook’s approach to understanding the nexus between quality, cost, and value to the analysis of nineteenth-​century domestic ceramics has improved our capacity to “read” consumption from an archaeological perspective. One of the primary reasons for this is the clear potential for a more sophisticated integration of written documentary evidence with assemblages of material culture recovered by archaeologists. Our most recent project (project 5) has sought to extend these insights by applying them to a key issue in Australian urban history, the emergence of the suburban middle class.24

Methodologies of Comparison Any attempt to reconstruct a social landscape from archaeological and documentary remains is both difficult and challenging. Archaeological data do not give up their secrets easily, and they tend to provoke more questions than they answer. What can we really learn from piles and scatters of artefacts, smashed, discarded, or lost at random times through the lifecycles of large and small families, shopkeepers, pub owners, and unknown tenants? Do these ten sherds represent one, five, or ten vessels? How old was the vessel before it was discarded or lost? Is this likely to have been expensive? Was it bought piecemeal or as part of a service? Were these imperfections unusual? Would they also appear in the domestic assemblages of households with larger or more reliable incomes? We do not presume to be able to answer all of these questions with the data we had to hand. Rather our intention has been to set aside that which is not yet knowable (the nature of working-​class or middle-​class assemblages in Australia, for example) and concentrate our efforts on what we now can know and on what we can learn from the vast assemblages already conserved in museums and storehouses. Well-​ excavated collections of the size and complexity of “Little Lon” and the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets sites offer numerous avenues for assemblage-​based research—​focusing on one house or place, or one artifact class, to reveal specific information about the people who lived in those places. We chose a different tack, seeking out the most archaeologically reliable datasets as our basis for comparison, regardless of their association with a particular family or occupation phase, or the kinds of research questions they were likely to address. We then extended that dataset, cataloging previously bulk-​bagged material and calculating

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    493 minimum vessel counts for recorded artifacts. In doing so we created a dataset that is essentially very different to that which was available to the first excavators at both sites. Consequently we have been able to expand our understanding of both people and the places they occupied well beyond the quite limited characterizations given in the earliest reports.25 Assemblage-​based analysis is large scale and is best supported by numerous comparable datasets. When analyzing material at the city scale, more comprehensive data can be ascertained by comparing a greater number of smaller, contained deposits from different households, rather than a handful of very large deposits from one or two households—​although these too can be interesting. At both the “Little Lon” and the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets sites most of the material required additional cataloging, and the resulting time constraints meant that we had to be selective in our detailed analyses. Thus we have confined the first phase of analysis to ten post-​1860s cesspit backfills from both “Little Lon” and the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets sites, with minimum vessel counts being prepared, and specific cases of matching sets being recorded.26 Significant work remains to be done at both sites, but this will be very much easier to accomplish as a result of the systems of recording and analysis we have already developed. It is difficult to begin the process of teasing out the meanings of ceramic vessels, designs, and materials in relation to socioeconomic or other measures, when very few studies have sought to rigorously characterize multiple assemblages.27 Our aim has been to establish some of these characteristics and to quantify rather than speculate about the relative proportion of various vessel styles, and furthermore, the correspondence of those styles to particular vessel forms. Our aim has been to prepare rigorous comparative datasets, each with the capacity to remain useful and relevant for long periods, to sketch out just how many Spode plates, wine glasses, and matching sets you can expect to find in a working-​class household. Our approach to the documentary research shares a similar aim. We developed the People +​Place database so that we could manage and store large volumes of occupancy data, not just from the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets site. While this is it still only a small segment of “The Rocks,” and an even smaller sample of Sydney’s urban landscape, it is a rigorous dataset with potentially multiple uses beyond the life of the EAMC project. The system of recording has also enabled us to integrate documentary and archaeological data by creating relational links in the database. The far more meaningful, challenging, and successful levels of integration between historical documents and archaeological material occurred when comparing the results and consequent interpretations of each suite of data. These were, too, often based on additional, detailed historical data gathered for individual families. Nonetheless, the particular stories we have created were given added weight when told against the backdrop of more general patterns identified in the material culture and documentary records. Our recent and forthcoming publications will add significantly to the store of stories already published.28

494   TIM MURRAY

Changing Perceptions? Two key historians of urban disadvantage in Australia, Alan Mayne and Grace Karskens, have sought to engage with archaeological data and contexts to create alternative narratives of life in liminal urban zones such as “Little Lon” and “The Rocks.” It is useful to contrast the contemporary public experience of both places to begin to capture a sense of how successful they and their archaeological collaborators have been. Karskens has published detailed studies of life in “The Rocks” that are firmly anchored in archaeology. This revisionist history is strongly supported by the public programs of Sydney’s Living Museums at Susannah Place, which has been restored as a corner shop dating to the mid-​nineteenth century,29 and the Big Dig Archaeology Education Centre located at the Cumberland/​Gloucester Street site.30 The public programs of both places, which are funded by the New South Wales government, stress the importance of material culture and the detailed analysis of archaeological sites to support a well-​thought-​ through alternative history of an iconic space. Visitors are able to access a major site and to connect directly with the material culture recovered from there. The story at “Little Lon” is somewhat different. Although the existence of a landscape preceding the current array of office towers on the “Commonwealth Block” is materialized in and around John Wardle’s skyscraper The Urban Workshop I at 50 Lonsdale Street, there is no public space where visitors can engage with the archaeological space and associated material culture as they can in “The Rocks.”31 Currently, whatever onsite engagement occurs in the lobby of the building is through a display of artifacts drawn from the site. Interpretation (and the history of the excavations themselves) is limited to some text and images. A deeper connection is made possible some distance away at the Museum of Victoria, where artifacts are displayed next to a reconstructed cottage from Casselden Place and further contextualized via a video interview with the senior archaeologist from the government management authority, Heritage Victoria. Curators have also linked stories with online images of artifacts from the site to tell stories about such inhabitants as Irish immigrant John Moloney.32 Perhaps as a result of this separation, the power of the slum narratives for “Little Lon” have continued with only the briefest of nods to research by historians and archaeologists.33 The links between the precinct and criminality are especially enduring, with tales of violence and bad behavior in the underbelly of Melbourne becoming the stock in trade of entrepreneurial historians keeping the spirit of C. J. Dennis, the great Melbourne poet of “life on the margins” in the early twentieth century, well and truly alive. The most successful examples have managed to monetize Mayne’s original observation: “Melbourne’s slum genre endured because the exaggerated stereotypes entertained. Respectable households enjoyed reading about the surreal environments and immoral behaviour precisely because the descriptions were so foreign to their own lives. Slums were an expected and titillating part of the imaginary landscape of bustling cities.”34

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    495 Commercialization of a particular reading of the history of “Little Lon” does not stop there. Most recently No. 17 Casselden Place (the one surviving cottage in the original row) has become the Little Lon Distillery, and a newspaper story by Carolyn Webb argues that its new use represents a return to its previous incarnations of a shop where alcohol was sold illegally and a brothel, providing historical authenticity to the new venture, which is very much stretching the documentary information we have collected. Today it’s a cute cottage dwarfed by skyscrapers, but 100 years ago, 17 Casselden Place was a thriving brothel and sly grog shop at the heart of Little Lon, Melbourne’s red-​ light district. The cottage, built in 1877, has somehow survived rampant development—​five sister cottages were demolished in the 1960s. And in a blast from the past, today “grog” is again being sold there. Legally. Under the brand Little Lon Distilling Co, brothers Brad and Jarrod Wilson will produce 220 500ml bottles of gin a week in the copper still they have installed. They will open a cocktail bar on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights . . . They will also run master classes and tastings. Mr Wilson reckons about 50 small distilleries have recently sprung up around Melbourne, but the Little Lon connection with its intriguing stories is a great point of difference. His gin flavours will be named, for example, Little Miss Yoko (a lychee gin) after Yokohama (a prostitute); Ginger Mick (citrus and ginger), after a Little Lon larrikin character by author CJ Dennis; and Constable Proudfoot (a London dry gin with rosemary) after a real-​life Little Lon policeman.35

The publication of more comprehensive accounts of “Little Lon” will support attempts by historians and archaeologists to tell a less sensationalized story, but there is little doubt that the current approach to marketing the precinct is likely to continue. However, it will be more vigorously contested by the continuing publication of alternative narratives based on the research we have undertaken.

Concluding Remarks Our original goal of seeking ways to tell stories about the literally millions of artifacts locked away in museum basements all over Australia provided the impetus for more than twenty years of excavation and analysis, and led to both methodological and theoretical developments in Australian historical archaeology. That journey has also involved a change of focus: from deploying the evidence of archaeology to further explore the content of concepts such as the “slum,” to considering how historical archaeologists might engage more broadly with social histories of the modern city. The analysis of assemblages derived from the earlier research at “Little Lon,” more recent work on the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets sites,36 and on other sites in Sydney and Melbourne,37 has allowed archaeologists and historians to establish whether there were similar patterns of residence, occupancy, ethnicity, and community life, in

496   TIM MURRAY two different cities on the edge of the modern world. It has also resonated with new urban archaeologies produced elsewhere in the Anglophone world. However, in doing this archaeologists have come to understand the complex and ambiguous nature of urban archaeological deposits from the mid-​to-​late nineteenth century, and to more fully appreciate that the act of comparison between sites, cities, and continents is neither straightforward nor innocent. Although Murray and Crook have not felt it possible at this point to draw definitive conclusions about “life at the social and geographical margins,” we have greatly expanded our understanding of the historical archaeology of specific sites within those cities and contributed to the construction of new stories about people and places. At a more general level we have also further developed some of the major questions that will continue to drive our research in Australia and elsewhere, and further characterize comparisons between contemporaneous sites in Australia, England, and the Americas. For us these currently resolve into three inquiries. The first inquiry focuses on strategies for understanding domestic urban assemblages. This implies a great many subsidiary questions such as: What are the vectors of assemblage formation in nineteenth-​century cities? How did people acquire goods, what did they cost, and what was the nature of consumer demand? Was social emulation a dominant force in the creation of demand? Is there such a thing as a typical poor, working-​ class, middle-​class, or artisan domestic assemblage? The second inquiry focuses on establishing the roles cities have played in the movement of goods from center to periphery and vice versa, and then in the distribution of those goods to other population centers. In this inquiry both center and periphery exist at regional, national, and global scales. The operation of Sydney, Melbourne (or indeed London) in terms of their hinterlands is one matter, but the interaction of cities within countries and between cities around the globe is a developing part of the agenda of urban historical archaeology. The third inquiry focuses on the roles cities have played in the movements of people, either from the metropolitan core to the global periphery, or from the countryside into cites. This inquiry has itself become the inspiration for new research into the consequences of immigration, both in Australia and in source countries such as North America, England, and Ireland. This is not only about exploring conventional issues of how colonies become nations and English people (for example) become Australians. It also requires us to consider the consequences of immigration for sundered families and sundered communities, especially through the complex processes of identity formation and ethnogenesis. Historical archaeologies of diasporas are an important outcome of this inquiry, through investigation of memory, through written and oral documentary sources and, of course, through material culture at both ends of the immigration process.38 To develop the kinds of methodologies necessary to exploit this broader comparative agenda, we must acknowledge and respond to the complexity of the landscape we are trying to interpret. The integration of history and archaeology occurs at many levels, and in some cases, rigorous analytical comparison is best teamed with individual stories drawn from the lives of the inhabitants—​speculative though they may be—​to fully

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    497 explore the archaeology of the modern city. Conversely, analyses of historical data (such as the mean value of building stock in a given area) and individual artifacts may be a more appropriate level at which to integrate archaeologically derived information—​be it at the household, site, or other scale. We must employ all the armory of archaeological enquiry—​both deductive and inductive reasoning, attention to the detail of both documentary and archaeological datasets, and a commitment to their effective integration—​ to make a significant contribution to the histories of modern cities. It is that capacity to simultaneously capture complexity and simplicity that provides us with an interpretive landscape where we can pursue the tangled web of local and transnational variables that create both the specificity of place and their generalization through comparison and contrast.

Notes 1. I thank the Australian Research Council for long-​term funding and support of our research in Sydney and Melbourne. 2. See Godden Mackay Heritage Consultants, The Cumberland/​Gloucester Streets Site, The Rocks: Archaeological Investigation Report, volumes 1, 3–​5, prepared for the Sydney Cove Authority (Sydney: Godden Mackay Logan Pty Ltd, 1999); Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997); Grace Karskens, Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999); Grace Karskens, The Cumberland/​Gloucester Streets Site, The Rocks: Archaeological Investigation Report, vol. 2: “Main Report: New Perspectives from The Rocks,” prepared for the Sydney Cove Authority and the Heritage Council of New South Wales (Sydney: Godden Mackay Logan Pty Ltd, 1999); Grace Karskens, “Small Things, Big Pictures: New Perspectives from the Archaeology of Sydney’s Rocks Neighbourhood,” in The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland, ed. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69–​85. 3. See Diana Wall, “Sacred Dinners and Secular Teas: Constructing Domesticity in Mid-​ 19th-​Century New York,” Historical Archaeology 25, no. 4 (1991): 69–​81; Rebecca Yamin, ed., Tales of Five Points: Working-​Class Life in Nineteenth-​Century New York (West Chester, PA: John Milner Associates, Inc., 2000); Rebecca Yamin, ed., “Becoming New York: The Five Points Neighborhood,” Historical Archaeology 35, no. 3 (2001): 1–​135; Rebecca Yamin, “Alternative Narratives: Respectability at Five Points,” in Mayne and Murray, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes, 154–​170. 4. See Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis, “Becoming Jewish Americans,” in Putting the “There” There: Historical Archaeologies of West Oakland, ed. Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis (Rohnert Park: Anthropological Studies Centre, Sonoma State University, 2004), 68–​7 1. Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis, South of the Market: Historical Archaeology of 3 San Francisco Neighborhoods, vol. 2 (Rohnert Park: Anthropological Studies Centre, Sonoma State University, 2009). 5. See Karskens, The Rocks; Karskens, Inside the Rocks; Tim Murray and Alan Mayne, “Imaginary Landscapes: Reading Melbourne’s ‘Little Lon,’ ” in Mayne and Murray, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes, 89–​105; Tim Murray and Alan Mayne, “(Re) Constructing a Lost Community: ‘Little Lon,’ Melbourne, Australia,” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2003): 87–​101.

498   TIM MURRAY 6. See Tim Murray and Penny Crook, Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City in Nineteenth-​Century Australia (New York: Springer, 2019); Tim Murray et al., The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne: A Historical Archaeology (Sydney: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2019). 7. Alan Mayne, “On the Edges of History: Reflections on Historical Archaeology,” American Historical Review 113, no. 1 (2008): 93–​118. 8. See Mayne, “On the Edges of History”; Alan Mayne, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice (London: Reaktion Press, 2017); Nigel Jeffries, Alastair Owens, Dan Hicks, Rupert Featherby, and Kim Bellinger, “Rematerialising Metropolitan Histories? People, Places and Things in Modern London,” in Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks? Future Directions in the Archaeological Study of Post-​1550 Britain and Ireland, ed. Audrey Horning and Marilyn Palmer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 323–​350; Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries, “People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20, no. 4 (2016): 804–​ 827; James Symonds, “Poverty and Progress in the Age of Improvement: Evidence from the Isle of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides,” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 3 (2011): 106–​ 120; James Symonds, “The Poverty Trap: Or, Why Poverty Is Not About the Individual,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15, no. 4 (2011): 563–​571; Suzanne M. Spencer-​Wood and Christopher N. Matthews, “Impoverishment, Criminalization, and the Culture of Poverty,” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 3 (2011): 1–​10; François G. Richard, “Materializing Poverty: Archaeological Reflections from the Post Colony,” Historical Archaeology 45, no. 3 (2011): 166–​182; Jayne Rimmer, Peter Connelly, Sarah Rees Jones and John Walker, eds., special collection, “Poverty in Depth: New International Perspectives,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15, no. 4 (2011): 533–​636; Charles Orser Jr., “The Archaeology of Poverty and the Poverty of Archaeology,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15, no. 4 (2011): 533–​543. 9. See Shirley Fitzgerald, Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–​1890 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987); Lionel Frost and Seamus O’Hanlon, “Urban History and the Future of Australian Cities,” Australian Economic History Review 49, no. 1 (2009): 1–​18. 10. Alan Mayne, The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–​1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1993). 11. Alan Mayne, “A Road to Nowhere?” in Exploring the Modern City: Recent Approaches to Urban History and Archaeology, ed. Tim Murray (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2003), 169–​173; Alan Mayne, “Slums,” eMelbourne: The City Past & Present (2008). https://​www.eme​lbou​rne.net.au/​biogs/​EM013​84b.htm; Murray and Mayne, “Imaginary Landscapes”; Tim Murray, “Images of ‘Little Lon’: Making History, Changing Perceptions,” in Object Lessons, ed. Jane Lydon and Tracy Ireland (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005), 166–​185; Tim Murray, “Introduction,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, no. 4 (2006): 291–​298; Tim Murray, “Integrating Archaeology and History at the Commonwealth Block: ‘Little Lon’ and Casselden Place,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10, no. 4 (2006): 385–​403. 12. Murray and Mayne, “Imaginary Landscapes”; Murray and Mayne, “(Re) Constructing a Lost Community.” 13. See Tim Murray, “Expanding Horizons in the Archaeology of the Modern City: A Tale in Six Projects,” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 5 (2013): 848–​863. 14. See also Andrew Sneddon, “Seeing Slums Through Rose-​Coloured Glasses: The Mountain Street Site, Sydney and its Limitations in the Search for Vanished Slum Communities,” Australian Archaeology 63 (2006): 1–​8.

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    499 15. Penny Crook, Laila Ellmoos, and Tim Murray, Keeping Up with the McNamaras: A Historical Archaeological Study of the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets Site, the Rocks, Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2005). 16. Penny Crook and Tim Murray, An Historical Archaeology of Institutional Refuge: Life at the Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2006); Penny Crook and Tim Murray, The Historical Archaeology of the First Government House Site, Sydney: Further Research (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2006); Peter Davies, Penny Crook, and Tim Murray, Archaeological Research at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney (Sydney: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2013). 17. See Sarah Hayes and Barbara Minchinton, “Cesspit Formation Processes and Waste Management History in Melbourne,” Australian Archaeology 82, no. 1 (2016): 12–​2 4; Murray, “Expanding Horizons”; Murray and Crook, “Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City”; Tim Murray et al., The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne: A Historical Archaeology (Sydney: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2019). 18. Penny Crook, “‘Superior Quality’: Exploring the Nature of Cost, Quality and Value in Historical Archaeology” (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2008). See also Penny Crook, “Quality, Cost and Value: Key Concepts for an Interpretive Assemblage Analysis,” Australasian Historical Archaeology 23 (2005): 15–​ 24; Penny Crook, “Rethinking Assemblage Analysis: New Approaches to the Archaeology of Working-​ Class Neighborhoods,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15 (2011): 582–​593. 19. Sarah Hayes, Good Taste, Fashion and Luxury: A Genteel Melbourne Family and their Rubbish (Sydney: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2014). 20. Pamela Riccardi, “A Tale of Two Cities: Nineteenth Century Consumer Behaviour in Melbourne and Buenos Aires” (PhD diss., La Trobe University, 2015). 21. See Mary Beaudry and Travis G. Parno, eds., Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement (New York: Springer, 2013); Stephen. A. Brighton, Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora: A Transnational Approach (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009); Stephen A. Brighton, “Middle-​Class Ideologies and American Respectability: Archaeology and the Irish Immigrant Experience,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15, no. 1 (2011): 30–​50; Karen D. Butler, “Defining Diasporas: Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora 10, no. 2 (2001): 189–​219; Shannon L. Dawdy, ed., “Creolization,” Historical Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2000): 1–​133; Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-​Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Considered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992); Nigel Jeffries et al., “Rematerialising Metropolitan Histories? People, Places and Things in Modern London,” in Crossing Paths or Sharing Tracks? Future Directions in the Archaeological Study of Post-​1550 Britain and Ireland, ed. Audrey Horning and Marilyn Palmer (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), 323–​350; James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Paul Mullins and Mark S. Warner, eds., “Living in Cities Revisited: Trends in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Urban Archaeology,” Historical Archaeology 42, no. 1 (2008): 1–​ 137; Charles Orser Jr., “Twenty-​ First-​ Century Historical Archaeology,” Journal of Archaeological Research 18, no. 2 (2010): 111–​150; Alastair Owens and Nigel Jeffries “People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture, Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 20, no. 4 (2016): 804–​827; Barbara Voss, “What’s New? Rethinking Ethnogenesis in the Archaeology of Colonialism,” American Antiquity 80, no. 4 (2015): 655–​670.

500   TIM MURRAY 22. Penny Crook, Laila Ellmoos, and Tim Murray, People +​Place: A Guide to the Database (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2006); P. Crook and T. Murray, The EAMC Artefacts Database: A Guide (Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2006). 23. Crook, “Quality, Cost and Value.” 24. See Murray, “Expanding Horizons.” 25. See Justin McCarthy, Archaeological Investigation: Commonwealth Offices and Telecom Corporate Building Sites, The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne, Victoria, vol. 1: Historical and Archaeological Report (Melbourne: Department of Administrative Services and Telecom Australia, 1989); Godden Mackay Heritage Consultants, The Cumberland/​Gloucester Streets Site, The Rocks: Archaeological Investigation Report, vols. 1, 3–​5, prepared for the Sydney Cove Authority (Sydney: Godden Mackay Logan Pty Ltd, 1999); Grace Karskens, The Cumberland/​Gloucester Streets Site, The Rocks: Archaeological Investigation Report, vol. 2: Main Report: New Perspectives from The Rocks, prepared for the Sydney Cove Authority and the Heritage Council of New South Wales (Sydney: Godden Mackay Logan Pty Ltd, 1999). 26. Murray and Crook, “Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City”; Murray et al., The Commonwealth Block. 27. For exceptions, see Praetzellis and Praetzellis, Putting the “There” There; Robert Fitts, “The Archaeology of Middle-​Class Domesticity and Gentility in Victorian Brooklyn,” Historical Archaeology 33, no. 1 (1999): 39–​62. 28. See Murray and Crook, “Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City”; Murray et al., The Commonwealth Block. 29. See Sydney Living Museums, https://​sydn​eyli​ving​muse​ums.com.au/​educat​ion/​progr​ams/​ arch​aeol​ogy-​rocks. 30. See The Big Dig Archaeology Education Centre, https://​thebig​dig.com.au. 31. See 50 Lonsdale Street, https://​50lon​sdal​estr​eet.com.au. See also Karen Burns, “The Urban Workshop,” July 1, 2006, ArchitectureAU. https://​arc​hite​ctur​eau.com/​artic​les/​the-​urban-​ works​hop. 32. Museum Victoria, “An Archaeological Time Capsule: Casselden Place,” https://​coll​ecti​ ons.muse​umsv​icto​ria.com.au/​artic​les/​3590. 33. Murray, “Images of ‘Little Lon.’ ” 34. Mayne, “Slums.” 35. Carolyn Webb, “Lon Way Back: New Distillery Raises Spirits in an Old Brothel,” Melbourne Age, July 20, 2018, https://​www.the​age.com.au/​natio​nal/​victo​ria/​ Lon-​way-​back-​New-​ distillery-​raises-​spirits-​in-​an-​old-​ brothel-​20180719-​p4zshh.html. 36. Murray and Crook, “Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City”; Murray et al., The Commonwealth Block. 37. See Susan Lawrence, Peter Davies, and Jeremy Smith, eds., “The Archaeology of ‘Marvelous Melbourne,’” special issue, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 22, no. 1 (2018); Sneddon, “Seeing Slums Through Rose-​Coloured Glasses.” 38. See especially Beaudry and Parno, Archaeologies of Mobility and Movement; Brighton, Historical Archaeology of the Irish Diaspora; Brighton, “Middle-​Class Ideologies and American Respectability”; Dawdy, “Creolization”; Glick Schiller et al., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration; Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera; Mullins and Warner, “Living in Cities Revisited”; Voss, “What’s New? Rethinking Ethnogenesis.”

Archaeologies of Disadvantage    501

Bibliography Crook, Penny, Laila Ellmoos, and Tim Murray. Keeping up with the McNamaras: A Historical Archaeological Study of the Cumberland and Gloucester Streets Site, the Rocks, Sydney. Sydney: Historic Houses Trust of NSW, 2005. Fitzgerald, Shirley. Rising Damp: Sydney 1870–​1890. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987. Frost, Lionel, and Seamus O’Hanlon. “Urban History and the Future of Australian Cities.” Australian Economic History Review 49, no. 1 (2009): 1–​18. Jupp, James. From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Karskens, Grace. Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1999. Karskens, Grace. The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997. Lydon, Jane. Many Inventions: Historical Archaeology and the Chinese in the Rocks, Sydney, 1890–​1930. Melbourne: Monash Publications in History, 1999. Mayne, Alan, and Tim Murray, eds. The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Murray, Tim. “Expanding Horizons in the Archaeology of the Modern City: A Tale in Six Projects.” Journal of Urban History 39, no. 5 (2013): 848–​863. Murray, Tim, Kristal Buckley, Sarah Hayes, Geoff Hewitt, Justin McCarthy, Richard Mackay, Barbara Minchinton, Charlotte Smith, Jeremy Smith, and Bronwyn Woff. The Commonwealth Block, Melbourne: A Historical Archaeology. Sydney: Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology, 2019. Murray, Tim, and Penny Crook. Exploring the Archaeology of Immigration and the Modern City in Nineteenth-​Century Australia. New York: Springer, 2019. Murray, Tim, and Alan Mayne. “(Re) Constructing a Lost Community: ‘Little Lon,’ Melbourne, Australia.” Historical Archaeology 37, no. 1 (2003): 87–​101. Rimmer, Jayne, Peter Connelly, Sarah Rees Jones, and John Walker, eds. Special collection: “Poverty in Depth: New International Perspectives.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 15, no. 4 (2011): 533–​636.

CHAPTER 26

P OPUL AR H OU SI NG PRO CESSES IN C A RI BBE A N C OL OMBIA PETER KELLETT

In 1986, I interviewed Manuela Castaño about an illegal land occupation in the Colombian city of Santa Marta in which she had participated less than two years earlier: I was in right at the beginning. We invaded here in the struggle to have a little piece of land, but the landowners retaliated and we were badly treated by the police and I was even arrested. . . . The children were very frightened, but the majority of us didn’t have a house and we took a risk without knowing if we were going to win or lose. I don’t know how, but I always live with my faith in God. I put my trust in God . . . . We didn’t want to steal the land, but only to have it, to have a plot so we could build a house . . . I made my first little hut out of cardboard but they demolished it. Then I made another from wooden poles but we didn’t have time to finish it before [the police] returned. Later I made this little house from cardboard, wood and poles.1

On subsequent visits to Manuela over the next thirty years I have seen her tiny, one-​ room, temporary hut gradually transform into a multi-​roomed, well-​decorated house, similar to most of her neighbors in this informal settlement on the edge of the city. The colorfully painted dwellings follow a regular orthogonal street pattern with open spaces, shops, and churches. The residents vote in elections, the children (and now the grandchildren) go to state schools nearby,2 and the neighborhood health center that was begun by the community is now incorporated into the regional health system. But none of the residents legally own the land where they have lived for decades. Informal settlements can be characterized as building sites where life is dominated by house construction and furnishing. Everyday life takes place in and around buildings that are partially completed; few households live in dwellings that can be considered finished—​indeed the continuous process of change is a constant. Even in dwellings that

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    503 appear to be largely complete, further improvements are planned as finance becomes available in response to changing tastes, aspirations, and opportunities. Despite undeniable structural constraints of land, legality, and resources, the agency of dwellers is apparent as they accumulate symbolic capital through the construction of dwellings and settlements. Although informal settlements are by definition unfinished projects in which the agency and creativity of the occupant-​builders are central, the ethnographic literature on informal settlements includes only a limited number of studies into the relationship of social practices to the material form of the dwelling.3 Likewise, anthropologists have identified a continuing neglect of architecture, particularly of housing.4 Marcel Vellinga, for example, argues for “an anthropological approach to architecture that focuses on the dynamic interrelationship of its material, social, and symbolic aspects.”5 Such an approach would emphasize architecture as a key constituent of culture and processes of cultural identification. With particular reference to meaning in housing, Vellinga explains the importance of considering both the dwelling and its inhabitants within the same analytical framework, with attention given to material aspects and how these interrelate dialectically to social and symbolic dimensions. He also argues for “an approach to the house not as a ‘way in’ to society but, instead, as an integral part of it [;]‌to treat architecture not as a mere communicator of meaning but as a meaningful process in itself.”6 How does this relate to housing processes in informal settlements? In his research among the “new poor” during the 2000–​2003 economic crisis in Argentina, Daniel Ozarow found that despite a desperate need for food and basic survival, middle-​class homeowners refused to contemplate selling their houses.7 For them their dwellings embodied their social position and personal dignity, which became increasingly precious to them as other aspects of their world imploded. They explained that it was the only thing that separated them from the “structural poor” who lived in the shanties and informal settlements. However, the “structural poor” in informal settlements throughout the continent are themselves conscious of the (incomplete) house in reinforcing negative perceptions but are also conscious of its powerful potential to help them move toward more positive social identities. Through the construction of their dwellings they can aspire to re-​ construct aspects of their social position and identity. This consciousness is manifest in multiple ways—​perhaps the most obvious being the prodigious energy that goes into establishing and improving settlements and dwellings over long time periods, efforts that not only lead to improved housing conditions but that collectively are leading to the massive growth of cities throughout the continent. Such energy expenditure and capital accumulation in the form of solid, well-​built dwellings appears to confirm that the motivation behind such actions goes well beyond the resolution of basic shelter needs and engages with more fundamental issues of identity construction and consolidation.8 Although the overall impact of these large-​scale construction processes is well documented and debated,9 the detail of how it happens at the micro level of individual

504   PETER KELLETT households is less well understood. Longitudinal studies of particular settlements and households are an effective method to explore the changing trajectories of communities and individuals, but there are few such studies.10 Perhaps the most significant is Caroline Moser’s study of a community in Guayaquil over a thirty-​year period.11 Her research engages with urban poverty and the survival strategies of households as they adapt to changing economic conditions through the generations. Economic improvements are reflected in dramatically improved housing conditions—​ changing from flimsy stilted bamboo structures balanced over the mangrove swamps to solid masonry dwellings with infrastructure services. She uses an asset accumulation framework to show how low-​income urban households utilize complementary types of capital assets (physical, financial, human, and social), and explains how through time these change in scale and importance impact on levels of poverty and well-​being. Moser’s ideas on capital accumulation12 link well to the sustainable livelihoods framework.13 They complement Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of social, cultural, and symbolic capital,14 which he expanded from Marx’s theories of economic capital. Explaining Bourdieu’s concepts, Joe Painter wrote that social capital can be understood as “the power and resources that accrue to individuals or groups by virtue of their social networks and contacts,” and that cultural capital refers to the “knowledge and skills acquired through early socialisation and education.”15 Symbolic capital refers to prestige and social honor, and in this context can be understood as a potential dimension of the dwelling itself. Significantly each type of capital can be converted into another, and households can consolidate and change their social position through the selective application, accumulation, and conversion of capital in its various forms. The dwelling plays a pivotal role in these processes.

House as Journey A distinctive characteristic of informal settlements is that the dwellings are built by the inhabitants at the same time as the space is inhabited. This finds immediate echo in the ideas of Martin Heidegger, who emphasized the inseparability of construction and habitation, of building and dwelling. He argued that “building isn’t merely a means and a way towards dwelling—​to build is in itself already to dwell.”16 He explains that in both German and English the words have a shared etymology that confirms the existential importance of building to help ground and center us in the world. Such an approach also challenges the assumed “dichotomy between design and execution,” which as anthropologist Tim Ingold explains, both emanate from a dwelling perspective.17 Hence the creation and construction of dwellings is a lifetime project of change and improvement that is highly responsive to changing domestic circumstances, budgets, and opportunities. This emphasizes the idea of the house project as a process of change through time, a process in which the changing dwelling can be seen as a symbolic

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    505 vehicle of transformation toward different circumstances. This can be interpreted as an aspirational life journey from poverty toward prosperity involving various types of capital and interrelated social practices. Such an analysis sees the house and house project as a classic “model of the world” (cosmos) that is understood as an ongoing journey rather than a static cultural model. It also reinforces the idea of the dwelling as never complete but “continually under construction” or re-​construction, just as life itself is continually moving forward.18 In addition, Bourdieu has shown how the dwelling and the body are intimately intertwined physically and conceptually through complex dialectical interrelationships in which our understanding of ourselves and the world is constructed through the habits of daily life and processes of habitation.19 The creation of the habitus is thus an active process in which the dwelling is central.20 This reinforces the idea that as “people construct houses and make them in their own image, so also do they use these houses and house images to construct themselves as individuals and groups.”21 These theoretical insights are exemplified by data from a longitudinal ethnographic study into the growth and development of popular housing in the coastal city of Santa Marta in Colombia. The city is the regional capital, with a population of some five hundred thousand people.22 The director of urban planning estimates that 74 percent of the city’s population live in settlements with informal origins, with the oldest settlements dating back to the early twentieth century. I first collected data in January 1986 and have returned eight times over the next three decades, each time living with the Ortiz family in their home in one of the illegal squatter settlements on the periphery of the city. Most field visits lasted between one and two months. The core of the study is an analysis of the changing dwelling processes and practices of forty households in two adjacent settlements. From my vantage point as a participant-​observer living in the settlement I collected a range of data including long transcribed interviews with householders and detailed plans of their changing dwellings, accompanied by photographs and copious fieldnotes.23 The two settlements both began as a collection of flimsy huts hastily erected following illegal land occupations (often called “invasions”) in 1979 and 1984. Today there are an estimated ten thousand people living here in approximately 1,500 dwellings,24 many of which have gradually consolidated into substantial, multi-​room houses of brick and blockwork with solid floors and fiber-​cement roofs. Despite continuing illegality, the settlements now have full infrastructure services of water, electricity, drainage, and natural gas—​a testament to the progressive policies of the local authority and service agencies. Perhaps predictably there is considerable variation between the rates at which households consolidate, and through time the differences between them are becoming more marked. There is a close correlation between the visible appearance of the dwelling and the situation of the household. With few exceptions all well-​ consolidated dwellings belong to households that are also prospering in other ways. We can see this as a process of differential capital accumulation, with some households being much more successful than others at obtaining and consolidating different types of capital and assets.

506   PETER KELLETT

Two Families: Quinteros and Garcías Consider the contrasting cases of two families who were involved in the land invasion in 1984: Elena and Lorenzo Quintero and Alma and Emiliano García. At this time their circumstances were apparently similar, although the Quintero couple had more cultural capital in the form of secondary education whereas neither of the Garcías had completed primary education. However, during the following thirty years the socioeconomic contrasts between them have become increasingly pronounced. Both began with simple improvised shelters, but within a short time Lorenzo managed to construct a single room in blockwork using savings from his work at a petrol station. By 1991 he had added more rooms with solid floors. The Garcías, by contrast, were still living in a small dwelling of corrugated iron sheets with earthen floor and had only just begun building a room in brickwork. By 2008 their dwellings, lifestyles, and prospects were dramatically different. The Quintero house now had three bedrooms and shiny tile floors and was well furnished with new furniture and household goods. This had been financed by a reliable flow of financial capital in the form of Lorenzo’s regular wage—​which although low is steady—​ and from Elena’s work as a maid. Let us compare their situation with the Garcías. Here is an extract from my fieldnotes in June 2008: I spent today with Emiliano and Alma and their family who I know well from previous visits. In the past they have had serious setbacks, including their son’s debilitating eye problem which required expensive treatment and multiple hospital visits. Their problems have continued. Emiliano has developed diabetes. Their son (now almost 30) got mixed up with “bad company” and received death threats so had to move away (with his partner and two young children).25 Their daughter (early 20s) had been living in a rural area, but paramilitary gunmen came and her partner disappeared (presumed killed). She managed to get back to Santa Marta with their two children (and since has had another child). She and the children live and work together with her parents making a household of six. They continue to make a precarious living preparing meals and drinks to sell, but last week Alma had a serious accident. She tripped when moving a large cauldron of boiling chicha and her head and face were badly scalded. Her face was a mess, but she reassured me that it is healing well. I was made to feel very welcome and spent the day chatting and observing them working intensively to prepare a series of dishes and drinks over a large and smoky open fire. Late in the afternoon they finished loading the rickety cart and Emiliano set off across the railway line to the main road to sell the food to passengers on the long-​distance buses. He expected to be back about 11.00 p.m., but will be up at dawn to catch the bus into town to buy ingredients in the market for another day’s cooking. It is a relentless cycle of work. They have managed to build three rooms and a bathroom in solid materials, but there are no finishes, part of the roof is improvised and there is only the bare minimum of furniture, all of it old and in poor condition. The house appears to be

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    507 used only for sleeping and storing their meagre possessions. They spend all day in the patio where they work, cook and eat under a precarious thatched shelter which provides some shade. A tiny cat and scraggy dog complete the household.26

Despite their hard work and resourcefulness the Garcías are a household on the edge of subsistence and unable to generate sufficient surplus—​either in human capital (labor) or financial capital—​to take the construction of their dwelling further. They are particularly vulnerable to setbacks such as illness, accidents, and small fluctuations in the economic situation, and are in danger of slipping back into worse poverty. Unlike some other households with limited economic or cultural capital, they have not been able to mobilize social capital in the form of kinship linkages or social networks. It is noticeable that improved dwellings are often in close proximity, which usually reflects kinship clustering. Strong social networks of kin and neighbors are valuable and reliable sources of social capital.

Houses are Good to Think With Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-​Jones have argued that both the body and the house are “loci for dense webs of signification and affect and serve as basic cognitive models used to structure, think and experience the world.”27 How does this relate to the cases of the Quintero and García families? After work, when sitting in their well-​appointed living area, Elena and Lorenzo Quintero can be justifiably proud of their constructional achievement. As they explained, “It’s a privilege to have a house of your own. In your house you are calm and relaxed. It’s been such a lot of effort but we are content, yes very content.”28 Their achievement is tangible, visible, and concrete evidence of a world view that sees the world as a place of opportunity and where initiative, effort and hard work are rewarded.29 They started with almost nothing, coped with the violence and deprivations of the land invasion and early years without infrastructure services, but through their own efforts have managed to create a place which not only provides the fundamental shelter, security, and affective aspects of home,30 but demonstrates their success at improving and consolidating their relative position in the social hierarchy. When they go out from their clean, shiny, and painted home they are conscious of the unpaved and dusty (or muddy) street, but more significantly the dwellings of their neighbors. Around them they see evidence of how the world is “structured” as a place of difference and inequality—​where it is possible for some to succeed and move forward but also where others suffer and remain in poverty. Comparison with their immediate neighbors underlines that they can never rest in this project. Although on their left their neighbor occupies a small cramped dwelling of wood and corrugated iron, to their right is a row of four houses that are further advanced than their own. This no doubt helps explain why “we’re planning to do the front

508   PETER KELLETT terrace and the fascia. Yes a terrace in ‘material’ . . . in this street lots of people have done it.”31 Such fascias with cantilevered concrete overhangs and railings are expensive but in recent years have become the expected way to resolve the front façade. The façade is ideal for competitive displays of social prestige and to indicate upward mobility.32 The rigid geometry, bright colors, and textures are key signifiers of modernity through the appropriation of the values associated with the power, success, influence, and affluence of the urban middle classes.33 In other words the house is converted into high-​value symbolic capital. What about the García family, who live close by in the next street? For them their home is a place of toil and where the body is heated by the sun and the open fire. It is not a place of rest, but to the contrary—​they are surrounded by evidence of an incomplete project: unrendered bricks, unpainted walls, broken furniture. There are few reminders of achievement or mnemonics of success, but rather of struggle and thwarted hopes (and dreams?) and of so much work still to be done. Their experience of the world is one of unfairness, violence, illness, and continuous struggle. The dwelling both embodies and reinforces these perceptions, but simultaneously provides a haven of security in which they have control but from which they must go out to seek resources and sustenance. With the Quintero household the dwelling seems to act as centrifugal focus, a symbolic center of increasing capital accumulation and a catalyst for further action. It expresses family unity, focus, and realized ambition as well as indicating and pointing toward a future that will be better than the past. It speaks of problems overcome and troubles conquered, effort and tenacity rewarded, and seems to confirm Vellinga’s assertion that material objects—​in this case houses—​can actively help to define people rather than passively represent them: “People and things create one another in a continuous process of objectification.”34 However in some ways we might argue that the García house is more important to them, for in addition to its role as shelter, the house and especially its open plot is essential for them to prepare the food to sell. In this sense it is a key asset. Conversely the incomplete house may also be interpreted as an additional burden, a worry and weight on top of their daily efforts for survival and sustenance. Emiliano explains: This year things haven’t gone well for us. This year ‘se nos ha volteado la totuma.’35 Let’s see if we can complete the house. We have to work with . . . what God sends us. We will manage to cope until the situation gets better [but] I am old already, I’m 60 now and not like before. I’ve got problems with the sugar (diabetes) and we get no help. There is a note of resignation here, which contrasts with later parts of the discussion, when Alma remarked: “Yes we are content, yes content because if you come here you never find us bitter (amargados). No, we have to live life well . . . So that’s how I’ve taught my children, that although you may be poor you can live happy.”36

Although they clearly have difficulties, and compared with the Quintero household they are doing badly, they are conscious that compared with the current situation of some households and their own situation in the past, they have indeed plenty to be thankful

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    509 about.37 Alma recalled a particularly difficult time before the land invasion: “You can’t imagine what it’s like to have nowhere to live. It’s hard, very hard.” Returning to the idea of journey, it is clear that they have made progress and movement, even though they recognize they have much further to go. Here is Emiliano again: Some people do better than us . . . [T]‌hose that live better is because they’ve had opportunities, that’s all. It’s that we haven’t been lucky . . . but there are others who are [lucky] . . . They have good jobs and if you’ve got a good job then you can build but we haven’t managed to get a job like that . . . But there are people who are just so much poorer than me. I am poor, yes, but with this little work (trabajito), then each day I wake up and say Thank God that I’ve got enough to buy. And if I’ve not got enough for 10 pounds [of rice] I buy eight; and if I can’t buy eight I buy six and this will be enough to produce [income] to buy the next day. But there are people who go out in the morning to look [for work] and come back in the evening and don’t bring anything for the family. This happened to me when the children were small, even the last time you came it was like that. I would go out in the morning to look for work but not find anything to do. I would arrive home without money and without finding work. It’s really serious with the little ones waiting for me. Each time that you come back and you arrive without even a penny to buy food and you find them crying and pleading with their mother, and the mother can’t give them anything because there isn’t anything. Over there [indicating] there are people who are living like that.38

Sadly, on my return visit in 2015 the family’s situation had become more critical. Emiliano’s diabetes had worsened, and he died in 2013. Both Alma and her daughter continued preparing food and also tried a number of ways to earn money for daily subsistence, including taking in washing for neighbors, but this was becoming less feasible because of the increased availability of imported cold-​water washing machines from China. A number of families had purchased their own and others hired them by the hour from small enterprises; it was common to see them being wheeled around the streets by teenage boys.

The Next Generation: The Future? Although the dwelling itself is the most tangible proof of social position, the interiors of dwellings also provide multiple opportunities for display of cultural and symbolic capital.39 For example, it is common to frame and display certificates of educational achievement. In one house I counted sixteen framed educational certificates and graduation-​style photographs of just three children. Despite the elaborate academic garments in some pictures these achievements do not go beyond secondary education. Their children are nonetheless successful in educational terms and the household has thereby accumulated significant cultural capital of which they are all proud. There is

510   PETER KELLETT a noticeable contrast between the bare unplastered block walls and the shiny frames, but the message of achievement is visible to all. The certificates are distributed around the main living space and placed to ensure maximum visibility. Currently two of the children are doing technical training courses with the ambition of getting better-​paid skilled jobs, in other words converting their cultural capital into economic capital. This is the same in the Quintero house. As you enter, to your immediate right is a coffee table with artificial flowers and a suite of good-​quality upholstered chairs. On the wall behind are three framed pictures: one of the Virgin, one of the family in their home, and between them a university-​degree certificate. This trio of images is particularly significant as it places their core values on display: the unity of the family, belief in the power of the Virgin, and the transformative power of education. The certificate says: “La Universidad del Magdalena confiere el Titulo de Licenciado en Ciencias Naturales, Juan Alberto Quintero Moreno.” The prominent position of the certificate is no accident: their eldest son’s success is emblematic of their collective family achievement and is a source of great pride. It makes visible their improving social position from unskilled manual work in the parents’ generation to higher status white-​collar employment in the next. Juan Alberto went on to do a master’s degree and is now working as a teacher. This again contrasts markedly with the García family.40 The García children both dropped out of secondary education and have no academic or technical qualifications. The daughter is now a single parent of three school-​age children and is reliant on increasingly precarious and improvised income now that the household’s home-​based enterprise is barely functioning. Although the dwelling is not well advanced it does represent a significant accumulation of physical capital, but their collective inability to generate other types of capital is directly limiting their current and future prospects. Unless the situation improves they may have little alternative but to sell the dwelling.41 A final example indicates the range of possibilities that are opening up within the settlement, and particularly how through the generations the social and economic profile of residents is changing. Gloria Torres is one of five siblings who live in three separate households on “my” street. She and her husband Alfonso joined the initial invasion in 1979, along with their small baby. After putting up with many years of infidelity and other problems she eventually kicked Alfonso out and says she “is so much better off without such a pathetic and useless man.”42 Indeed she is better off. Alfonso made a sporadic living as a coffee merchant and spent long periods away. He drank heavily (not just coffee), and their house improved only slowly despite his promises. The incomplete house was perhaps emblematic of their deteriorating relationship. Meanwhile Gloria focused all her attention on their four children, in particular encouraging and supporting them through school. They have been remarkably successful. The youngest is studying law and supporting herself by working at weekends; the next works in an accountant’s office during the day and has recently completed his accountancy degree through evening study; another is in Bogotá working as a multilingual secretary for a multinational corporation. The eldest completed his engineering degree and has set up his own company installing computer-​controlled security cameras. With his first profits he began improving the house for his mother, and

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    511 while I was there he received news of another large contract. The following week the builders were in remodeling the kitchen (and he asked me to help with designs for the front façade). Gloria did not complete secondary school, but all her children are rapidly accumulating cultural capital through their education. This is providing them with the qualifications, skill, contacts, and confidence to enter high-​paid employment and business.43 The eldest is already successfully converting this cultural capital into economic capital, which is being invested directly into the family home. He plans to marry next year (his fiance is a dentist) and live independently, but he will continue to support his mother (and siblings as necessary) and is determined to improve the house. A well-​ finished house will demonstrate his success in a very tangible way.44 His father Alfonso in contrast was unable to increase his supply of capital or to convert one type of capital into another. The incomplete house was a clear indicator of this.

Constructing Symbolic Capital Using a longitudinal ethnographic methodology, this chapter has explored the interrelationship between dwelling consolidation and processes of capital accumulation, drawing on the detailed evidence of several households over a long time period. The focus on a range of capital assets is appropriate as it encourages us to explore beyond visible manifestations of poverty so as to validate all the potential resources present in low-​ income communities—​and to see the protagonists as active agents in processes of social and economic change. It seems clear, especially for the more successful households, that the process of continuous dwelling construction and improvement can go beyond the resolution of shelter needs to play a part in the construction of positive new identities and social mobility. Different types of capital come together in the consolidation process and a well-​consolidated dwelling represents highly visible and highly valued symbolic capital. This study has sought empirical evidence to demonstrate how the dwelling can play a key role in the accumulation of capital—​which is essential both for physical construction and for achieving upward mobility. However further work is needed to tease out the interrelationship between different types of capital, particularly the role of cultural capital (education) in leading to intergenerational changes, and to record other less tangible resources such as motivation and aspiration. Alongside the energy and resilience of the dwellers we may see the dwellings themselves as active in dynamic processes of social consolidation and transformation, and hence, as Vellinga contends, “directly and actively implicated in creating and defining a range of social identities and relationships.”45 This confirms that our material and social worlds are inextricably intertwined, with the material playing a complex but integral role in the production and reproduction of social systems—​as well as in their transformation and consolidation.

512   PETER KELLETT

Notes 1. Translated transcription of author’s field recording, Santa Marta, January 1986 (personal archive). The transcriptions and translations from the Spanish are by the author. The names of residents have been anonymized. 2. One of the schools was financed and built by the community and is now staffed by teachers from the education authority. 3. See for example Caroline O. N. Moser, Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives: Assets and Poverty Reduction in Guayaquil, 1978–​2004 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009);Christien Klaufus, “Dwelling as Representation: Values of Architecture in an Ecuadorian Squatter Settlement,” Journal of Housing and Built Environment 15 (2001): 341–​365; Christien Klaufus, Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformation in Globalizing Ecuador (Oxford: Berghahn, 2012); Rudi Colloredo-​Mansfeld, “Introduction: Matter Unbound,” Journal of Material Culture 8 (2003): 245–​254; Peter Kellett, “Towards Belonging: Informal Design and Dwelling Practices in Northern Colombia,” in Housing and Belonging in Latin American Cities, ed. Christien Klaufus and Arij Ouweneel (Amsterdam: CEDLA/​Berghahn, 2015), 223–​240; James Holston, “Autoconstruction in Working-​Class Brazil,” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1991): 447–​465. 4. Caroline Humphrey, “No Place like Home in Anthropology: The Neglect of Architecture,” Anthropology Today 4, no. 1 (February 1988): 16–​18; Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-​ Jones, eds., About the House: Levi-​Strauss and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. Marcel Vellinga, “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 4 (2007): 756. 6. Vellinga, “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture,” 760. 7. Daniel Ozarow, “When All They Thought Was Solid Melted into Air: Resisting Pauperisation in Argentina during the 2002 Economic Crisis,” Latin American Research Review 49, no. 1 (2014): 178–​202 8. Peter Kellett, “Towards Belonging: Informal Design and Dwelling Practices in Northern Colombia,” in Housing and Belonging in Latin American Cities, ed. Christien Klaufus and Arij Ouweneel (Amsterdam: CEDLA/​Berghahn, 2015), 223–​240. 9. See for example Colin McFarlane, “The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 649–​671; Alexander Vasudevan, “The Makeshift City: Towards a Global Geography of Squatting,” Progress in Human Geography 39, no. 3 (2015): 338–​359. 10. There are a number of valuable follow-​up studies, for example: Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 11. Moser, Ordinary Families. 12. Ibid. In additional to the usual five capital assets Moser recognizes “intangible assets” such as aspirational, psychological, and political assets. 13. Carol Rakodi and Tony Lloyd-​Jones, eds., Urban Livelihoods: A People-​Centred Approach to Reducing Poverty (London: Earthscan, 2002). 14. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 15. Joe Painter, “Pierre Bourdieu,” in Thinking Space, ed. Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift (London: Routledge, 2000), 243.

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    513 16. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (London: Harper & Row, 1971), 144. 17. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), 186. 18. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 172. 19. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Pierre Bourdieu, “Habitus,” in Habitus: A Sense of Place, ed. Jean Hillier and Elizabeth Rooksby, 2nd ed. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 20. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus can be understood as a mediating link between objective social structures and individual actions. It includes individual habits and dispositions acquired through social processes of engagement and imitation, and thus helps explain the shared values and belief systems of cultural groups. 21. Carsten and Hugh-​Jones, About the House, 3. 22. DANE, Censo Nacional de Población y de Vivienda (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística, Republica de Colombia, Bogotá, 2017). 23. Peter Kellett, “Living in the Field: Ethnographic Experience of Place,” Architectural Review Quarterly 15, no. 4 (2012): 341–​346. 24. These are low estimates. The decades-​long armed conflict in Colombia has created an estimated 7.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). See UNCHR: United Nations Refugee Agency, Forced Displacement, July 23, 2018, https://​data.colo​mbia​repo​rts.com/​ colom​bia-​for​ced-​displ​acem​ent-​sta​tist​ics/​. Santa Marta has received 174,000 IDPs according to Nelson Caballero, “El fenomeno del desplazamiento en Santa Marta; entre la ruptura del desarrollo humano y el enfoque de las capacidades,” (Disertación, Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá, 2015), http://​rep​osit​ory.lasa​lle.edu.co/​bitstr​eam/​han​dle/​10185/​17368/​ 721112​20_​2​015.pdf. Many new arrivals have squatted land on the steep edges of existing informal settlements—​including the two settlements discussed in this chapter. 25. At this time there were high levels of violence, mostly linked to drugs, paramilitary groups, guerrillas, and government forces. Over half of the households I interviewed had experienced the violent death of family members or close relatives. One murder occurred a few streets away during one of my stays. Three community leaders in the settlement have been murdered and one forced into exile. 26. Author’s fieldnotes, Santa Marta, June 2008 (personal archive). 27. Carsten and Hugh-​Jones, About the House, 3. 28. Author’s field recording, Santa Marta, July 2008 (personal archive). 29. Lisa R. Peattie, “Aesthetic Politics: Shantytown Architecture or New Vernacular?,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 3, no. 2 (1992): 23–​32. 30. Kim Dovey, “Home and Homelessness,” in Home Environments, ed. Irwin Altman and Carol M. Werner (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1985), 33–​64. 31. Author’s field recording, Santa Marta, July 2008 (personal archive). Seven years later on my visit in 2015 they had not constructed the fascia and railings, but the whole house had been redecorated and much of the furniture replaced. 32. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 33. Peter Kellett, “Towards Belonging: Informal Design and Dwelling Practices in Northern Colombia,” in Housing and Belonging in Latin American Cities, ed. Christien Klaufus and Arij Ouweneel (Amsterdam: CEDLA/​Berghahn, 2015), 223–​240. 34. Vellinga, “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture,” 761.

514   PETER KELLETT 35. Literally translated “our gourd has turned over”—​meaning everything is spilt, i.e., gone badly. This was a new expression for me and there was much hilarity when I asked them to explain it to me. 36. Author’s field recording, Santa Marta, June 2008 (personal archive). 37. For example their de facto ownership of the plot means that they are better off than renters who need to generate income for regular rent payments. The settlement remains illegal so no one has legal papers for their plots, but most have a document that confirms their ownership of the mejora (literally, the “improvement,” i.e., the dwelling). This means houses can be bought and sold without difficulty. 38. Author’s field recording, Santa Marta, June 2008 (personal archive). 39. Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 40. The contrast between the situation of the Quintero and García households is remarkably similar to that described in two case studies in Moser, Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives, 34–​35. 41. In 2008 Emiliano said he would even consider selling the house and plot if he could get a good price. One of my respondents sold his plot (and incomplete house) to raise money and started again on a plot on the steep slopes above the main settlement. Many said they would never consider selling as they had built their house themselves with considerable sacrifice. 42. Author’s field recording, Santa Marta, August 2015 (personal archive). 43. They were not the only ones. In my street there were two teachers and another studying accountancy. Others were doing degrees in business administration, psychology, and nursing. Few of their parents had completed secondary school and none had been to university. However qualifications do not automatically translate into equivalent employment, as there is a growing problem of graduate unemployment. 44. He was keen to demonstrate his social capital too. One evening he invited his mother and me to an exclusive restaurant overlooking the sea. This was a high-​status place where he could display his confidence and familiarity with exotic menus, fine wines, and credit cards. It was the sort of place where others from the settlement might only be found in the kitchens. 45. Vellinga, “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture,” 762.

Bibliography Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Habitus.” In Habitus: A Sense of Place, edited by Jean Hillier and Elizabeth Rooksby, 43–​49. 2nd ed., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Caballero, Nelson J. “El Fenomeno del Desplazamiento en Santa Marta; Entre la Ruptura del Desarrollo Humano y el Enfoque de las Capacidades.” M.A. thesis, Universidad de La Salle, Bogotá, 2015. http://​rep​osit​ory.lasa​lle.edu.co/​bitstr​eam/​han​dle/​10185/​17368/​721112​20_​2​ 015.pdf. Carsten, Janet, and Stephen Hugh-​Jones, eds. About the House: Levi-​Strauss and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia    515 Colloredo-​Mansfield, Rudi. “Introduction: Matter Unbound.” Journal of Material Culture 8 (2003): 245–​254. DANE. Censo Nacional de Población y de Vivienda. Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística, Republica de Colombia, Bogotá, 2017. Dovey, Kim. “Home and Homelessness.” In Home Environments, edited by Irwin Altman and Carol M. Werner, 33–​64. New York: Plenum Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, 141–​159. London: Harper & Row, 1971. Holston, James. “Autoconstruction in Working-​Class Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 6, no. 4 (1991): 447–​465. Humphrey, Caroline. “No Place like Home in Anthropology: The Neglect of Architecture.” Anthropology Today 4, no.1 (February 1988): 16–​18. Ingold, Tim. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 2000. Kellett, Peter. “Living in the Field: Ethnographic Experience of Place.” Architectural Review Quarterly 15, no.4 (2012): 341–​346. Kellett, Peter. “Towards Belonging: Informal Design and Dwelling Practices in Northern Colombia.” In Housing and Belonging in Latin American Cities, edited by Christien Klaufus and Arij Ouweneel, 223–​240. Amsterdam: CEDLA/​Berghahn, 2015. Klaufus, Christien. “Dwelling as Representation: Values of Architecture in an Ecuadorian Squatter Settlement.” Journal of Housing and Built Environment 15 (2001): 341–​365. Klaufus, Christien. Urban Residence: Housing and Social Transformation in Globalizing Ecuador. CEDLA Latin America Studies. Oxford: Berghahn, 2012. McFarlane, Colin. “The City as Assemblage: Dwelling and Urban Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 649–​671. Miller, Daniel. The Comfort of Things. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005. Moser, Caroline. Ordinary Families, Extraordinary Lives: Assets and Poverty Reduction in Guayaquil, 1978–​2004. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2009. Ozarow, Daniel. “When All They Thought Was Solid Melted into Air: Resisting Pauperisation in Argentina during the 2002 Economic Crisis.” Latin American Research Review 49, no. 1 (2014): 178–​202. Painter, Joe. “Pierre Bourdieu.” In Thinking Space, edited by Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, 239–​ 259. London: Routledge, 2000. Peattie, Lisa R. “Aesthetic Politics: Shantytown Architecture or New Vernacular?” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 3, no. 2 (1992): 23–​32. Perlman, Janice. Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Rakodi, Carol, and Tony Lloyd-​Jones, eds. Urban Livelihoods: A People-​Centred Approach to Reducing Poverty. London: Earthscan, 2002. UNCHR United Nations Refugee Agency, Colombia Reports: Forced Displacement, 2018. https://​data.colo​mbia​repo​rts.com/​colom​bia-​for​ced-​displ​acem​ent-​sta​tist​ics/​ Vasudevan, Alexander. “The Makeshift City: Towards a Global Geography of Squatting.” Progress in Human Geography 39, no.3 (2015): 338–​359. Vellinga, Marcel. “Anthropology and the Materiality of Architecture,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 4 (2007): 756–​766.

CHAPTER 27

L A PERL A, PU E RTO RI C O Beyond Formal and Informal FLORIAN URBAN

La Perla is Puerto Rico’s best known “slum.” It covers five hectares of coastland outside the seventeenth-​century walls of Old San Juan, the historic Old Town of the Puerto Rican capital, which in 1983 was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site (Figure 27.1). The picturesque location and the decades-​long activities of planners and sociologists have earned La Perla a worldwide reputation. The neighborhood is famously portrayed in Oscar Lewis’s 1965 book La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (where it appears under the alias “La Esmeralda”), as well as in later studies by Helen Safa, Lucilla Marvel, and many others.1 It became integrated into US development policies, which in the mid-​twentieth century attempted to convert Puerto Rico from a “backward Third World” country into a blooming capitalist economy. La Perla is also emblematic of Puerto Rico’s border situation at the interstices of the developed and the developing worlds, colonial and post-​colonial governance, English-​and Spanish-​ speaking cultures, and American and European influences. Puerto Rico is the third largest Caribbean island, with a population of approximately 3.7 million people (2010 census). From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries it was a Spanish colony, and the island is still Spanish speaking. In 1898 it became a US territory and its inhabitants were granted US citizenship in 1917. In 1947 it was given a certain degree of autonomy as the Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico (translated as “Commonwealth of Puerto Rico”). La Perla is a Latin American “slum” that is both typical and untypical. In terms of architecture, planning, and legal situation, the neighborhood has always been characterized by a combination of formal and informal elements. There was both self-​ help construction and profit-​driven development, stable and improvised buildings, unequal power relations, and strong economic ties to the rest of the city. The analysis will thus question the validity of the formal-​informal distinction that is fundamental in recent literature on “slums” and is at the same time deeply engrained in mid-​twentieth-​ century development and modernization ideologies.2

La Perla, Puerto Rico    517

Figure 27.1  La Perla from the walls of Old San Juan, looking east, in 2013. Photograph by author

La Perla is unusual in many respects. First, it has a century-​old history harking back to the 1910s, unlike most other Latin American “slums” that evolved first and foremost in the post-​1945 period. Second, it had an atypical demographic development, since it shrank rather than grew over the course of the mid-​twentieth century, from its all-​ time population high of about four thousand people in 1937 to less than 150 in the early 2000s. Third, it only partially originated as a “squat,” as the main portions around the old slaughterhouse were originally built with the landowners’ consent.3 And fourth, given its prominence in generously funded US development programs, it is unusually well documented. This stands in contrast to most other informal neighborhoods in Puerto Rico and elsewhere and is related to La Perla’s conspicuous location. There are tax records and municipal surveys, there are several scholarly studies, and there is detailed documentation of the “upgrading” efforts. There is also a substantial body of photographs and newspaper articles. Most of these materials are kept in the Archivo General de Puerto Rico. La Perla nonetheless exemplifies many themes that are connected to “slums” all over the world. Recent studies at a global level either echoed apocalyptic visions of a planet drowning in misery (for example, Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums) or focused on slum dwellers’ energy and entrepreneurialism (exemplified by Robert Neuwirth’s Shadow

518   FLORIAN URBAN Cities). The numerous case studies done since the 1970s have tended to take the latter perspective, not denying misery and deprivation, but focusing on the solutions that slum dwellers found for their situation.4 Likewise La Perla over the course of the twentieth century was interpreted very differently in relation to the rest of the city. In the early 1900s it was a modest neighborhood, poorer than the adjacent Old San Juan, but not categorically different. In the mid-​twentieth century it was increasingly seen as a slum/​informal neighborhood and regularly compared unfavorably with the “formal city” of Old San Juan; unlike the latter the municipal authorities deemed it an eyesore, a den of crime, and in need of clearance and rebuilding. In the late-​twentieth century La Perla’s public image, once again, became more similar to that of the adjacent formal neighborhoods, as the area was transformed by upgrading and the beginning of gentrification.

A Modest Neighborhood La Perla, in the early twenty-​first century, reveals both peace and decay. Descending from the stately fortifications overlooking a deep blue sea and wandering through the winding and only partially paved roads of La Perla, one feels in a village rather than in the center of Puerto Rico’s largest urban agglomeration of approximately 1.5 million people. The houses are built from brick and concrete; they are plastered and painted in bright colors; most have porches or balconies. The majority have been rebuilt and extended over time. There is rubbish on the streets and in the gardens, and several houses are in ruins. Others are very well kept, carefully decorated, and adorned with flowerpots or murals. There are chatting neighbors; children are running around; there are chickens picking on the streets. One can go shopping in a few mom-​and-​pop stores, and there are several makeshift bars and car workshops. La Perla gives the impression of poverty and need, but also of an attractively humane neighborhood inhabited by a tightly knit community. La Perla’s origins were not that different from that of poor formal neighborhoods in other countries. It first grew up around a slaughterhouse, which for hygienic reasons was originally situated outside the city borders, like those in Paris-​Belleville, Berlin-​ Friedrichshain, or Chicago’s Union Stockyards. The first inhabitants, who had to endure this dirty and smelly environment, belonged to the poorest classes. They were mostly country-​to-​city migrants who had to leave their villages for economic reasons, including the modernization of agriculture after the American invasion of 1898 and the crisis of the sugar industry during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their buildings were of a low standard, but not significantly different to those in the poor formal areas of Old San Juan. At the same time they paid property tax, their abodes were assessed by state authorities, and buildings were lined up along orderly streets that reflected the grid of Old San Juan.

La Perla, Puerto Rico    519 In La Perla, as in the adjacent Old San Juan, buildings were gradually upgraded and modernized over the course of the twentieth century; overcrowding decreased, and there was a modest rise in wealth. While the crumbling brick and sheet-​metal buildings of La Perla might still jar in comparison with the colorful eighteenth-​century buildings in the renovated Old Town, the forces that motivated their change over the course of the twentieth century were in principle the same, and their development evidences many commonalities. In this respect La Perla is neither a contrast nor a disturbance, but a neighborhood with both planned and unplanned elements like the Old Town. La Perla developed over three distinct periods. During the foundation period, circa 1900–​1940, the neighborhood grew as an agglomeration of wooden one-​or two-​story structures with pitched roofs, interspersed by some professionally built two-​story tenements. During the modernization period, approximately 1940–​1980, the tenements disappeared, the share of self-​built housing increased, and the wooden buildings were extended, equipped with additional stories, and sometimes replaced by brick or concrete portions. At the same time the population started to decline, from approximately four thousand inhabitants around 1940 to about 1,500 in 1978. During this period La Perla became subject to clearance and modernization plans, and the area was under constant threat of forced removal. Since 1980, in line with new ideas that had been promoted since the 1960s, official policy goals changed from removal to upgrading. La Perla experienced increasingly solid brick and concrete construction (both upgrades and new buildings) and improved infrastructure. Community organization also increased, and ownership of buildings and land was transferred to some of the residents. At the same time the number of residents continued to shrink.

Foundation and Growth (ca. 1900–​1940) La Perla had been the location of a slaughterhouse since the eighteenth century due to its geographic specificities. Old San Juan, founded by the Spaniards in the early sixteenth century (and the colonial capital for almost four hundred years), is situated on the western tip of an island (almost a peninsula), separated from the mainland by a small bay that provides a splendid natural harbor. The slaughterhouse—​the late-​ eighteenth-​century structure is still standing and now houses a community center—​lies on the northern coast at the bottom of a hill, where the open sea would wash away the garbage, and where the hill would protect the adjacent Old San Juan from bad odors. It is thus a typical example of premodern sanitary regulation. In 1900 there was a handful of wooden houses with pitched roofs, possibly inhabited by slaughterhouse workers.5 Their number grew, and by 1913 the area was being built up more or less solidly by wooden houses.6 La Perla at the time was by no means an unauthorized encroachment. The tax roll for 1913 lists twenty-​three single-​story houses for which property tax was paid. Six were owned by the landowner José D. Riera, the others by individuals who paid rent to Riera

520   FLORIAN URBAN for the right to build on his land. In addition, Riera had a two-​story ranchón (a tenement for several families) near the slaughterhouse, which can be seen in a1925 aerial photograph (Figure 27.2). The houses had street addresses and house numbers. The tax value of the buildings was significantly lower than that of Old Town properties, but comparable to that of houses in the other extramural areas.7 Riera was a typical slumlord who profited from the dire housing shortage by renting—​ not selling—​his land for building construction. Next to the La Perla lands, which he acquired around 1910, he also owned the land on which the Miranda slum was built, situated in the Puerta de Tierra area about one kilometer east of La Perla (it was cleared in the 1950s). Such land rentals were as profitable for the owners as they were oppressive for the tenants. A civil servant at the time scorned them as “abnormal” and “worse than exorbitant house rents,” because they gave the landlord extraordinary power.8 Landlords could and frequently did unilaterally end the contract at the end of the month, or simply raised the rent to a level the tenants were unable to pay. In that case, the tenants were forced to remove their houses—​often their only material good—​at their own cost or sell them to the landlord at a fraction of their value. The state profited from this system since it taxed both landowners and house owners, at the same rate. In the 2010s the land rent system was still in place, although no longer widely practiced. Since the 1960s, several laws have been passed to protect long-​term occupants, and courts have increasingly ruled in their favor when they were threatened with eviction by landowners. Riera’s two types of houses, the private house and the ranchón, exemplified the most common typologies for poor housing that could be found in San Juan. The private house

Figure 27.2  Aerial view of La Perla, undated, ca. 1925. The area is still significantly less dense than in the 1933 plan. Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Fondo Obras Públicas, Serie Propiedad Pública, Caja 256 “La Perla” 1933

La Perla, Puerto Rico    521

Figure 27.3  A private house of a laborer in the “Sal si puedes” neighborhood in Puerta de Tierra, one kilometer east of La Perla, ca. 1913. Puerto Rico Departamento del Trabajo, Report on the Housing Conditions of Laborers in Porto Rico. San Juan, P. R., Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1914, text by J. C. Bills Jr., p. 12

was a rectangular shack of wooden boards, divided inside into two to four rooms. It had a tile or tin roof; the boards were commonly reused. It had a raised floor to protect the inhabitants against moisture, but no insulation against heat, which was particularly noticeable in houses with tin roofs (Figure 27.3). The ranchón was a more stable, longitudinal one-​story tenement of wood or brick (Figure 27.4). In these buildings, three-​room apartments—​comprising a living room, bedroom, and kitchen—​were placed next to each other. Each apartment had a front door to the living room and a back door to the kitchen on the long sides of the building. These doors were also the only sources of light and ventilation, as the buildings had no windows. The bedroom in the middle thus tended to be particularly dark and airless. Latrines were on the patio. Apartments were hot and stuffy and were usually shared by several families. The ranchón was the equivalent of the tenement in Europe and North America: the housing type for the impoverished urban working classes, who suffered from overcrowding and deficient sanitary conditions.9 La Perla’s ownership structure began to change during the 1920s. By then Riera had sold all but one of his houses.10 The owners of the houses usually did not live in them. They paid rent to Riera for the land, but at the same time profited from renting out the houses. By that time also the formerly unbuilt land outside Riera’s property had been built upon. These comprised two areas: Guaypao, immediately to the west of Riera’s lands, and the beach zone. The buildings on these lands were squats, as both Guaypao and the beach were public land owned by the Puerto Rican government, which did not authorize

522   FLORIAN URBAN

Figure 27.4 A ranchón in Puerta de Tierra, one kilometer east of La Perla, ca. 1913. Each of the doors on the left leads to an apartment. One enters the living room through that door, the windowless bedroom is behind, and usually there is a third room (kitchen) with a back door. Puerto Rico Departamento del Trabajo, Report on the Housing Conditions of Laborers in Porto Rico. San Juan, P. R., Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1914, text by J. C. Bills Jr., p. 52

construction. The buildings here were simpler than those on Riera’s lands, mostly smaller, and containing only one room. They were built and inhabited by the residents and their families.11 The differences are clearly visible in the 1925 picture.12 The closer to the beach, the smaller, more unstable, and less desired were the buildings. Exposed to high waves and sewage running down from the upper parts of the settlement, they were precarious abodes and not, as one might see them today, desirable sea-​view residences. Such buildings are documented in a 1962 photograph (Figure 27.5). The quality difference corresponded to both geography and legal situation. With growth came higher densities of settlement. In the more formal parts closer to the walls of Old San Juan, additional ranchones were built during the 1920s and 1930s by other slumlords, who might have acquired portions of the land from Riera. For example, Federico Vázquez was registered as the owner of a ranchón with seventy-​two inhabitants, situated next to Riera’s land. In addition to his La Perla property, he owned three smaller houses in Puerta de Tierra.13 Another ranchón, the two-​story Miró building, was owned by a certain Mercedes Fernández and occupied by 128 people. It was the largest building in La Perla after the slaughterhouse, valued at the considerable sum of $12,000.14 The more formal portions thus had significant value: at the time a small wooden house was

La Perla, Puerto Rico    523

Figure 27.5  Houses on stilts on the beachfront of La Perla in 1962. Teodoro Torres in Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, Colección de Fotos del Periódico El Mundo, call number 1039655

worth $300 and the monthly rent for a one-​room family space was between three and five dollars.15 However, the illegally built small houses in Guaypao and in the beach zone were rented out for profit as well. In the mid-​1930s, La Perla’s population reached its all-​time high of 3,900 inhabitants. There was a large number of recent migrants, and house moves were frequent.16 The physical structure of the neighborhood at the time is well documented on a 1933 plan, showing that La Perla had approximately five hundred houses.17 Nearly half of them stood on Riera lands, with others (mostly smaller buildings) on lands owned by the Puerto Rican government, which included the maritime zone. Other landowners were the municipality of San Juan, which owned the slaughterhouse, and two private individuals, who had smaller holdings.18 La Perla’s houses at the time had a significant value, which the tax authorities in 1933 estimated at $250,000.19 Landowners also profited from the fact that rents were rising, but property tax remained stable: for example, Riera’s lands were valued at the same price in the 1920s and the 1950s.20 There is nonetheless evidence of a thriving real estate market. Many house owners owned several buildings. Some had property not only in La Perla but also in the Old Town, and all profited well from the endemic housing shortage. A certain Amador

524   FLORIAN URBAN Infanzón rented a large wooden house south of the slaughterhouse (approximately 100 square meters) to forty-​five tenants, and a smaller one next to it (approximately 50 square meters) to twenty-​three tenants. He also owned property in Puerta de Tierra and in Old San Juan.21 Some owners also bought and sold plots of land. Only Riera’s lands remained in the hands of his family until expropriated in 1980. Hence, La Perla only partially corresponded to the conventional idea of the informal neighborhood as a squat. The idea of the pioneer who built and subsequently defended his or her own house could be applied only to a minority of owner-​occupiers who had invaded the areas beyond the Riera lands. Squatters on the government land (the maritime zone and the areas along the walls) did not pay property tax, but also had to live in the least desirable zones. But even here only a portion lived in their own buildings; the others had to rent. Yet all the same, on this small-​scale level there was a real estate economy; people invested in construction and rented out for profit.22 The informal element—​squatting on wasteland—​was thus intertwined with the logic of investment and rental income, which was essentially the same in formal and informal neighborhoods of La Perla. Living conditions everywhere were harsh. The buildings were not only primitive, but also overcrowded. A 1933 report reveals that most huts were shared by multiple families, and most ranchones by 60 to 120 people.23 Most families had many children. For La Perla at the time there are no data on social structure and employment, but it is likely that they were similar to the Miranda slum one kilometer east in the Puerta de Tierra area, which is documented in a 1933 municipal survey.24 Here the heads of households had typical working-​class occupations: dockworkers, longshoremen, factory workers, domestic employees, washerwomen, as well as lorry drivers, carpenters, construction workers, butchers, and bakers. Many were categorized as unemployed. It is likely that many were also forced to make their living as prostitutes, although direct evidence for this dates only from the 1960s, when it was found that about a third of La Perla families had some history of prostitution.25 On the other hand, a small number of La Perlans were better off, operating small business such as shops and bars. These services were concentrated in the more formal areas on Riera’s lands close to the city walls. La Perla’s social structure in the 1930s was thus not significantly different from the poor areas of the formal city.

Modernization and the Threat of Clearance (1940–​1980) The period during which La Perla was seen as a typical “Third World slum,” and threatened by clearance and forced relocation, coincided with the partially successful attempts by the US government to modernize and develop Puerto Rico. They started with President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, when Puerto Rico was included in various development projects. Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor visited La Perla in

La Perla, Puerto Rico    525 1934. The neighborhood she saw most likely corresponded to that documented in a 1943 picture (Figure 27.6). In the words of a reporter she was “followed by members of the populace clad in rags, naked children and barking dogs [; she was] deeply touched by the desolate scene.”26 As elsewhere in the world the paternalistic policies aimed at improving such conditions resulted in forced relocation. Government-​sponsored destruction of poor areas that were classified as “slums” (later “informal neighborhoods”) was particularly comprehensive in San Juan. The government agencies in charge of development and modernization (including slum clearance) were the Resettlement Administration and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (both founded in 1935), the Puerto Rico Housing Association (PRHA, founded in 1938), and the Junta de Planificación (Planning Department, founded in 1942). The best known and most comprehensive development initiative in Puerto Rico was Operation Bootstrap (Operación Manos a la Obra), started in 1949 under the newly formed Puerto Rican autonomous government. There were also continuing New Deal programs with generous funding by federal US authorities.27 Forty years after Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit, all marginal settlements in the city center with the exception of La Perla had been removed. At the same time, in absolute terms, average living standards in the San Juan area as well as in the whole of Puerto Rico had increased significantly. Many forcibly relocated “slum dwellers” found formal abodes in public housing schemes: Puerto Rico’s public housing program was the largest in the United States outside New York City.

Figure 27.6  The main street (now Calle Tiburcio Reyes), looking west, in 1943. Collection Lucilla and Tom Marvel

526   FLORIAN URBAN At the time, US planners foresaw a similar path for Puerto Rico’s urban poor as for “slum dwellers” in New York or Chicago: clearance of substandard dwellings, relocation of the inhabitants to a housing project where they would live as tenants and be familiarized with modern standards of living, a gradual improvement of their economic situation through the creation of industrial employment, and their eventual acquisition of a suburban home.28 La Perla was first scheduled for demolition in the 1940s. Unlike other countries at the time the United States remained a guarantor of private property ownership, even at the height of interventionist policy in the mid-​twentieth century. Only in rare occasions was compulsory purchase (eminent domain) used as a means to speed up slum clearance. In La Perla local government started its clearance policies by gradually buying up private houses, a very slow process. Clearances eventually began in 1947, in an area southeast of the slaughterhouse that comprised approximately one-​fifth of La Perla and was owned by landowners other than the Riera family (Figure 27.7).29 The plan was to clear all of La Perla and build a park and two-​story concrete houses for six hundred residents, representing approximately 20 percent of the total inhabitants. The others would have to be distributed to other housing projects in San Juan. The demolition of the entire neighborhood was nonetheless never completed, either because Riera and later his widow resisted government pressure to sell their land, or simply because of bureaucratic inefficiency. Moreover, the construction of substitute housing was delayed time and again. The whole project was eventually scrapped in 1964, when, after almost twenty years, the officials recognized what any experienced construction professional would have been able to tell them right away: that the construction of formal houses on the steep cliffs of La Perla would have been extremely costly.30 Plans to relocate La Perlans to the La Puntilla area on the southern shores of Old San Juan also failed because of the cumbersome bureaucracy.31 Moreover, La Perlans were becoming more and more vocal in expressing their desire to remain.32 During the modernization period the “slum discourse” that focused on misery and crime was particularly strong. This is evidenced in newspaper headlines such as “La Perla, Focus of Dirt and Misery” (1944),33 “Slum Elimination Program being Started” (1944),34 “La Perla, the Gloomy Slum, is Swept Away by the Wave of Progress” (1947),35 “Plan to Move La Perla Residents into Social Housing” (1957),36 “Slum Clearance Intensified” (1961),37 and “Fight Against Illegal Construction” (1968).38 The “slum discourse” promoted a paternalistic narrative that focused on misery, dirt, and an immoral lifestyle evidenced by free unions and early sexual relations; it dwelt as well on criminality, focusing on violence, theft, and drug use. At the same time La Perla began to be analyzed by social scientists. The best known study, La Vida by the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis (1965), described La Perlans as being trapped in a “culture of poverty,” a subculture of marginalized people within a comparatively wealthy society, which was being transmitted over the generations and that tended to resist development and change.39 Arguably this diagnosis of entrenched non-​development was influential in the discontinuation of state-​sponsored modernization programs and the status of Puerto Rico as a “social laboratory.”40 However Lewis himself was anything but deprecating about La Perlans and stressed their networks of

La Perla, Puerto Rico    527

Figure 27.7  Aerial view of La Perla with cleared area, looking southeast. The slaughterhouse is the large structure in the middle. On the left of it one can see the Miró building. Charles Rotkin, 1948, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Archivo Fotográfico, Cc45-​X6570

mutual help and support. Rather, his concept of persistent social marginalization went with a fundamental criticism of the capitalist system that provoked this situation in the first place. But his diagnosis was unpopular both among development scholars and La Perlans themselves, who felt that they were being misrepresented as somewhat less-​ worthy citizens. A more positive vision—​and at the same time more in line with the capitalist ideal of entrepreneurialism—​was developed by the anthropologist Helen Safa, who had studied two other San Juan neighborhoods since the late 1950s, and in her 1974 book The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico she stressed the inhabitants’ resourcefulness, cooperation, and self-​ reliance.41 These aspects were celebrated at the same time by the British architect John Turner, and subsequently throughout the world, leading to new ways of viewing informal architecture.42 During the “modernization period” La Perla also experienced gradual upgrading. The social structure was still similar to that in the 1930s: dockworkers, longshoremen, washerwomen, and domestic workers, but now also a high percentage of restaurant workers (more than half of all employed men and women in the neighborhood), and, as in all poor neighborhoods, the drug trade and prostitution. There were more and more

528   FLORIAN URBAN formal elements. There was an electricity supply since at least the 1940s.43 A Catholic chapel and a Pentecostal church opened in the 1950s. In 1953, there was a post office and a school on the main street, which at the time was already paved. At least twenty-​seven shops and bars in La Perla were formal in the sense that their owners were registered in the tax rolls and paid property tax (among them fourteen small cafés, eleven general stores, and a jukebox spot).44 Buildings tended to be more solid than they had been a few decades earlier. The slaughterhouse closed in the 1950s, diminishing the noise and bad smell. In the early 1960s, a library (1963), nursery school (1964), community center, and health clinic opened. A basketball court was built near the walls on the plots cleared in 1947. As with the local economy, the changes in ownership structure are hard to capture in terms of a formal-​informal distinction. There was a clear trend toward modern dwelling arrangements, that is, one family per self-​contained apartment or house, and toward owner-​occupation without tenancy liabilities to the landowner. The share of homeowner households increased from 35 percent in 1938 to 42 percent in 1977.45 The number of ranchones shrank progressively. The largest, the Miro building, was vacated in the 1950s and torn down soon after. The last, situated in the Guaypao sector, was demolished in the late 1970s (Figure 27.8).

Figure 27.8  Calle Tiburcio Reyes from the city walls, looking east, in 1978. The street was prolonged toward the slaughterhouse in the following years. The diagonal structure on the right side is the ruined last ranchón in La Perla. Collection Lucilla and Tom Marvel

La Perla, Puerto Rico    529 The most significant change in legal terms occurred during the 1950s and 1960s, but unfortunately left few detailed records. In the early 1950s, Riera’s widow Josefina Bengoechea still paid full property tax, which suggests that she received a substantial amount of rent income. In 1980, however, her land was expropriated due to accumulated property tax debts, apparently with no resistance, and the land was given to La Perla homeowners.46 The most likely explanation is that Bengoechea had died without heirs, so that there was no one left to collect the rent, and the default in property tax over many years strengthened the case for expropriation. That means that at some point after the mid-​1950s La Perlans became “informal” in the sense that they turned from slumlord tenants into squatters and squatters’ tenants, an unclear legal situation that was further complicated by the continuous threat of clearance. On the other hand they became increasingly “formal” in the sense of enjoying stable buildings, a breadth of services, and integration into the wider economy of the city.

Consolidation and Gentrification (1980–​P resent) In the 1970s the official long-​term “slum” goal for La Perla changed from eradication to upgrading and consolidation. It was the time when planning all over the world shifted from demolition to on-​site rehabilitation. La Perla was no exception. The main actors in the new policy were regional authorities—​the Puerto Rican Department of Housing and the Puerto Rican Architects’ Association—​who in 1978 sponsored an “integrated development competition” to determine a master plan.47 The competition was supported by Governor Carlos Romero-​Barceló of the center-​right Progressive Democratic Party, who had been mayor of San Juan for eight years before becoming governor in 1977, and who was familiar with La Perla, as it is situated only about two hundred meters from City Hall. A first prize was not awarded, but the plan by runner-​up Tom Marvel was largely implemented.48 Marvel’s scheme was based on close collaboration with the residents, conservation of existing structures, and infrastructural improvements. The Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda (CRUV), now a branch of the Housing Department and in previous decades a municipal institution that directed slum clearance programs, set up an office in La Perla in the same year, and Marvel and his wife (the urban planner Lucilla Marvel) were hired as consultants. The somewhat surprising fact that a center-​right governor rather than a leftist one promoted participation and upgrading, paralleled the political maneuvering in Britain, France, and Germany, for example, where tabula rasa (blank slate) programs had been promoted by socialists/​social democrats in the 1960s, and were a decade later stopped by unlikely coalitions between radical activists and conservatives.49 In the La Perla case

530   FLORIAN URBAN there was also a great deal of pragmatism. Since the tabula rasa plans had not yielded any visible effect on the La Perla neighborhood in two decades (aside from the small area cleared in 1947 that in the 1960s was used for a basketball court), Puerto Rican politicians tried an architectural competition. Given a generation of John Turner–​and John Habraken–​inspired architects and planners, there was no entry that proposed large-​scale demolitions. Puerto Rico at the time also boasted other voices favorable to informal neighborhoods, such as the writers René Marqués and José Luis González and the Austrian-​born scholar Leopold Kohr.50 Over the following years the Housing Department fi ​ nanced measures including the demolition of the precarious beachfront houses and the relocation of their inhabitants to other La Perla houses, the construction of a road along the coast, and sewers and streetlights. These different interventions contributed to an overall improvement. It was generally held that these improvements were undertaken with the close participation of “the community,” but given the ongoing decrease in La Perla’s population (particularly its tenant population), one can assume that such participation was largely limited to the home-​owning portion of La Perla residents. Most importantly, land ownership was transferred to the inhabitants. In 1980, the estate of José Riera was expropriated (the rest of the land was already owned by the state).51 In the same year the government issued the first land deeds to local homeowners, based on a plot-​plan worked out by the Marvels. There was a total of about 350 homeowners in La Perla at the time; over the following years these were granted land ownership. This process took several decades and was not entirely completed by the early 2010s.52 The land transfer was designed to support the self-​determination of a marginalized community, carried out on the basis of a law that secured the squatters’ right to remain in their homes.53 At the same time, like many such measures worldwide, it raised significant questions about social justice. La Perla’s “bottom-​up” renovation was far from being egalitarian, however, as it represented a significant subsidy to the most privileged third of its residents: the homeowners. These were the ones who inhabited and owned a house (although not the land on which it was built) and rented out to the other two-​thirds of La Perla residents, whose rental contracts were mostly informal and had no legal protection. The renovation legalized La Perla as a community but protected only this minority from eviction. The legalization also set the course for future gentrification. As there were no conditions on the land titles they could be sold at will to anyone ready to invest into a favorably located neighborhood with an improving reputation and development potential. Several large houses were built in the early 2000s on combined plots bought up from different owners (Figure 27.9). These had presumably been owned by long-​ term La Perla residents, which also shows that by that time some La Perlans—​through legal or illegal activities—​had acquired a level of wealth that allowed them to build multi-​story structures similar in size to suburban villas or houses in the Old Town. The “slum upgrading” thus did not, in any clear-​cut way, promote the rights of the poor against those of the rich. Rather, it allowed some more-​and some less-​wealthy

La Perla, Puerto Rico    531

Figure 27.9  Playground and renovated houses on Calle Tiburcio Reyes, 2013. Photograph by author

residents to stay, and some more-​and some less-​wealthy to profit from a developing real estate market. At the same time the resident population of La Perla shrank to a bare minimum. While the authorities in theory accepted La Perla’s right to exist they still followed a carrot-​and-​stick policy. Talk was often supportive and action dismissive.54 The final crackdown against the drug traffic was carried out in 2011. In a carefully concerted police raid combined with a water and power shutdown, 114 La Perlans were arrested on drug and weapons charges—​almost half of the population at the time. Among those arrested was community leader Jorge Gómez, locally known as “Truck Face,” who was sentenced to thirty years in prison for drug trafficking.55 Gómez had been the elected president of the Junta de Vecinos (Residents Council) since 2007 and was assisted by pro bono lawyers in his fight for permanence for the La Perla community.56 Activists thus saw the police action as a pretext to break their resistance, and the drug charges as an excuse to malign the neighborhood and expel its residents. The raid was the culmination of a clean-​up policy all over Old San Juan, which was directed against drug crime and petty theft, and that had over the years gradually increased police presence in the community. With the Old Town façades shining in bright colors since the turn of the millennium, and both tourists and better-​off locals

532   FLORIAN URBAN enjoying a greater feeling of safety, La Perla was the last reminder of the rough-​and-​ run-​down Old San Juan. Now this portion was being cleaned as well, and the authorities were committed to using the full force of the law.

Conclusion: La Perla in the Early Twenty-​First Century The century-​long development of La Perla in both formal and informal ways shows the inadequacy of the conventional formal-​informal dichotomy. The La Perla “slum” developed in close relation with, and largely along the same principles as, the adjacent formal neighborhoods of Old San Juan. La Perla’s urban development also evidences strong continuities. The comparison of the maps of 1933, 1978, and 2013 shows the process of steady consolidation.57 At the same time the population had shrunk to about 150 in 2013, compared to close on four thousand people in the 1930s. Between 1933 and 1978, the number of houses remained stable, at approximately five hundred, despite the fact that the population shrank to a sixth of its original size. This suggests a rise in quality of life because of less overcrowding. By 2013, the most precarious houses on the beachfront had disappeared. Additional houses were demolished for infrastructural improvements and the paving of connector streets, leaving a total of only 378 houses. The 2013 plan shows that in the areas on the upper slope—​the former Riera lands—​the ground plan remained almost unchanged over the last century. In its different sectors, La Perla continued to develop in ways that were already discernable in the 1920s. The Riera lands, which already in 1933 were the most “formal,” continued to be the best-​kept areas. Guaypao in the west and the beachfront areas (which in the 1930s, with their large numbers of self-​built structures erected without permission on state-​owned land, were the most “informal” elements in the community) continued to be the least stable. They contained the most ruins in 1978, and they tended to be left out of the legalization procedures from 1981 onward. La Perla in the early 2010s looked very different than it had in previous decades. New amenities had opened in the 1980s and 1990s. They include a Head Start Center (an educational program for young children), a medical clinic, a senior citizens center, and a playground.58 The shops and bars, some of them existing for decades, are well kept and look like those in other lower-​class neighborhoods in San Juan. On Saturday nights some of them attract youth from all over the city. Most houses are made of brick and concrete. Streets are paved, and instead of the previous chaotic mesh of electric wires one finds orderly posts and cables. There are ruins and structures with boarded-​up doors and windows, but in between these stand renovated and well-​kept buildings. There are still children in worn-​out clothes running in the streets, but significantly fewer than in historic photographs. The image of La Perla as a place of danger and crime is slowly crumbling. Near one of the access roads there is a shiny sign that reads “Bienvenidos

La Perla, Puerto Rico    533 –​Comunidad La Perla –​Comunidad Histórica,” and street vendors in Old San Juan now sell self-​dyed shirts that read “La Perla” and “Made in Guaypao.”59 La Perla is still a tight-​knit community ready to defend its homes against the onslaught of government officials and foreign investors, but the number of residents has shrunk to less than a tenth of its 1930s population, and its most vocal leaders are in jail. Most residents who were not homeowners are gone. Somewhat surprisingly, those who remain do not seem too worried about gentrification. During a community meeting in August 2013, several inhabitants embraced the idea of bringing more tourists to their neighborhood.60 The external appearance of La Perla is far from that of gentrifying areas in New York or London, but the course toward upgrading, embellishment, and aestheticization, and the influx of different and more affluent residents, is set to continue. La Perla demonstrates how difficult it is to uphold the distinction between “formal” and “informal” neighborhoods. La Perla has always been poorer than the adjacent “formal” Old San Juan. But in both architectural and social terms there is little categorical distinction. Architectural forms were similar, economic relations close, and the population in both areas evolved according to the same parameters. As a category of analysis, “informal neighborhood” thus seems to be riddled by similar inadequacies as the derogatory term “slum” that it had once replaced. Rather than a description of a socio-​architectural reality, “informal” has to be considered a time-​specific idea, which can effectively be used in the framework of mid-​twentieth-​century modernization, but which in more recent contexts loses much of its explanatory power. The upgrading and consolidation of La Perla, as patchy and selective as it has been, had the positive effect that it followed a “postmodern” approach to planning rather than the dominant Puerto Rican and US model of the car-​oriented and low-​density suburb. The poverty and marginalization of its inhabitants notwithstanding, La Perla shows many aspects of twenty-​first-​century-​style sustainable urbanism. It is a dense, largely pedestrianized, family-​oriented neighborhood, small, but with a strong sense of community, active neighborhood organizations, and hybrid spaces for gardening and small-​ animal keeping, children’s play, and combined workshops/​residences. In this sense La Perla hardly corresponds to the stereotypes of a “slum,” but rather embodies many characteristics promoted by contemporary planners and activists.

Notes 1. For example, Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Random House, 1965); Helen Safa, The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974); Lucilla Marvel, Listen to What They Say: Planning and Community Development in Puerto Rico (San Juan, Puerto Rico: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2008). 2. See Florian Urban, “La Perla: 100 Years of Informal Architecture in San Juan, Puerto Rico,” Planning Perspectives 30, no. 4 (October 2015): 495–​536. 3. Squats or rescates (“rescues” of land) occurred since the late 1960s in Puerto Rico and were highly politicized acts. Many of these squats were later legalized. See Liliana Cotto,

534   FLORIAN URBAN Desalambrar: Orígenes de los Rescates de Terreno en Puerto Rico y su Pertinencia en los Movimientos Sociales Contemporáneos (San Juan: Tal Cual, 2006). 4. See, for example, John F. C. Turner, “Dwelling Resources in South America,” Architectural Design 33, no. 8 (1963): 360–​393; Lisa Redfield Peattie, The View from a Barrio (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968); John Habraken, Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing (London: The Architectural Press, 1972); Peter Lloyd, Slums of Hope? Shantytowns of the Third World (London: Penguin, 1979); Marvel, Listen to What They Say. 5. See photograph by William Sanger, 1900, reprinted in Marvel, Listen to What They Say, 5. 6. La Perla in 1913, photograph in Bearss, San Juan Fortifications, reprinted in Marvel, Listen to What They Say, 5. 7. Tax Rolls 1912/​13, in San Juan Municipality, Departamento de la Hacienda [Revenue Office], Reparto de Contribuciones (Tax Rolls) Fiscal Year 1912–​1951, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Fondo ‘Hacienda.” 8. Puerto Rico Administration, Departamento del Trabajo [Employment Office], Report on the Housing Conditions of Laborers in Porto Rico (San Juan, P. R., Bureau of Supplies, Printing, and Transportation, 1914), 52. 9. There is an extensive literature on nineteenth-​century tenements: see for example Miles Horsey, Tenements and Towers: Glasgow Working Class Housing, 1890–​1990 (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1990); Johann Friedrich Geist and Klaus Kürvers, Das Berliner Mietshaus: vol. 2, 1862–​1945 (Munich: Prestel, 1984); Diana Linden, “Lower East Side Tenement Museum, New York City,” Antiques, no. 8 (2001). 10. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1924/​25 (see entry “José Riera”). 11. List of owners and tenants of La Perla, compiled by Departamento del Interior, División de Terrenos Públicos y Archivo, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Departamento de Obras Públicas, Serie Propiedad Pública, Caja 256 “La Perla” 1933. 12. The picture is kept at Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Fondo Obras Públicas, Serie Propiedad Pública, Caja 256 “La Perla” 1933. The date 1925 is an approximation based on the fact that most, but not all, structures mentioned in the 1933 plan are visible. The area is still slightly less dense; most ranchones are not yet there. 13. The house was valued at $2,400 in 1924 and $1,500 in 1933. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1924/​25; and Departamento del Interior, List of owners and tenants of La Perla, 1933. 14. Ibid. 15. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1924/​25, entry “José Riera.” For inhabitants and rents in Puerta de Tierra, see list “Relación de las casas existentes en los sitios denominados ‘Riera,’ ‘Vista Alegre’ y ‘Miranda,’ Puerta de Tierra” [probably 1933], Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Departamento de Obras Públicas, Serie Propiedad Pública, Caja 256 “La Perla” 1933. 16. 1935 census data in Manuel Pérez, Estudio Preliminar de Vida en los Arrabales de San Juan (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, Rural Rehabilitation Division, 1939), 4. Fifty percent of the inhabitants had lived one year or less in their house when interviewed. About a quarter of the population had lived in the community for less than a year. Ibid., 11. 17. Puerto Rico Administration, Departamento del Interior, “Plano de las Barriadas Guaypao, La Perla, Nueva Perla y San Miguel,” Archivo General de Puerto Rico, 1933. 18. There are 219 houses on Riera land and 261 on state land. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1925 and 1950, entry “Josefina Bengoechea, viuda de Riera.”

La Perla, Puerto Rico    535 21. Departamento del Interior, List of owners and tenants of La Perla; San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1932/​33, and 1950/​51, entry “Infanzón, Amador.” 22. For example, Pedro Torres owned house no. 23 on the 1933 plan, which he inhabited himself. He also owned an adjacent hut of the same size, which he rented out. Isidra Meléndez, owner of a 32-​square meter house, no. 28 on the 1933 plan, did not live in the building but rented it out to thirteen people. Both structures were built against the city walls. Departamento del Interior, List of owners and tenants of La Perla, 1933; and Puerto Rico Administration, “Plano de las Barriadas.” 23. Departamento del Interior, List of owners and tenants of La Perla, 1933. 24. “Relación de las casas existentes.” 25. Lewis, La Vida, xxxiv–​xxxv. 26. Caption of a photograph dated March 15, 1934, from the Bettmann-​Corbis collection, showing Eleanor Roosevelt in La Perla. http://​www.corbi​sima​ges.com/​stock-​photo/​rig​ hts-​mana​ged/​BE061​831/​elea​nor-​roosev​elt-​tour​ing-​poor-​area-​of-​san. 27. Andrés Mignucci, “Modern Urbanism in Puerto Rico: From Abstract Doctrines to Concrete Landscapes,” and Luz Marie Rodríguez, “[Re]visión de la vivienda social en San Juan: notas sobre la arquitectura para el obrero 1930s–​1950s,” both in Espacios Ambivalentes: historias y olvidos en la arquitectura social moderna, ed. Jorge Lizardi and Martin Schwegmann (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2012), 134–​135, 167–​168. 28. This is outlined in Marjorie Clark, “Our Own Puerto Rico,” Antioch Review 4, no. 3 (autumn 1944), 389. See also Rodríguez, “[Re]visión de la Vivienda Social en San Juan,” 176. 29. Charles Rotkin, “Sector of La Perla Slum Cleared in Preparation for Insular Housing Project,” 1947, Archivo General de Puerto Rico, Archivo Fotográfico, Cb22-​6302. See also “Un Parque en La Perla,” El Mundo, November 22, 1956 and “Hogares Continúa Gestión para Compra Propiedades en La Perla,” El Mundo, October 29, 1947. 30. Alfredo Margenat, “Gobierno Descarta Renovar Sector Residencial de La Perla,” El Mundo, June 26, 1964. 31. David Ahlers, “La Perla Residents Say ‘La Puntilla or Rebuild Here’—​Scrapped Puntilla Plan Draws Ire,” San Juan Star, October 27, 1969; Rubén Arrieta, “La Perla: Se Niegen a que le Cambien la Cara,” El Nuevo Día, November 26, 1978; “San Juan necesita a La Perla para vivir,” El Nuevo Día, December 11, 1978. 32. See demonstration against demolitions, photographed by Mandín Rodríguez. Collection from the newspaper El Mundo, Biblioteca Digital Puertorriqueña of the University of Puerto Rico, call number 103971. 33. A. Cruz, “La Perla Foco de Suciedad, Miseria,” El Mundo, July 9, 1944. 34. “Activan el programa para la eliminación de los arrabales,” El Mundo, May 18, 1944. 35. José Babosa, “La Perla, sombrío arrabal, cae al embate del progreso,” El Universal, November 8, 1947. 36. P. Hernández, “Habitantes de La Perla Plan es llevarlos a caseríos,” El Mundo, March 13, 1957. 37. “CRUV intensifica saneamiento arrabal,” El Mundo, October 20, 1961. 38. A. Miranda, “Combatirá obras clandestinas,” El Mundo, November 27, 1968. 39. Lewis, La Vida. Lewis received much criticism for his book. This may be explained by the moral standards at the time. Many regarded it as offensive that Lewis was not bothered by what he described as the norm in La Perla: sex with different partners and couples in free union.

536   FLORIAN URBAN 40. Michael Lapp, “The Rise and Fall of Puerto Rico as a Social Laboratory, 1945–​65,” Social Science History 19, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 171. 41. Safa, Urban Poor of Puerto Rico. 42. John F. C. Turner, “The Squatter Settlement: Architecture That Works,” Architectural Design 38, no. 3 (1968): 355. Other authors who pioneered the new view on informal neighborhoods include Charles Stokes, “A Theory of Slums,” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187–​197; Charles Abrams, Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964); as well as the authors mentioned in the first paragraph. 43. Power poles are clearly visible on a postcard titled “Barriada La Perla in San Juan, 1943,” Collection Lucilla and Tom Marvel. Cables to many individual houses are visible in the photograph by Rotkin, “Sector of La Perla Slum Cleared in Preparation for Insular Housing Project.” 44. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1950/​51. 45. In some other informal settlements in San Juan in 1938, the number was over 80 percent. See, for example, Pérez, Estudio Preliminar, 26. For La Perla numbers, see Departamento de Vivienda, Study on La Perla, 1977, quoted in Puerto Rico Administration, Departamento de la Vivienda [Housing Department], Concurso para el Desarrollo del Vecindario La Perla, 11. 46. In 1951, the Riera widow still paid $930 property tax. San Juan Municipality, Tax Rolls 1950/​ 51 (the last year available at the archive). After that there is no mention of land rent in any report. 47. Puerto Rico Administration, Concurso para el Desarrollo del Vecindario La Perla. 48. Thomas Marvel et al., La Perla (San Juan, 1978) [competition entry by Thomas Marvel and Pedro Miranda Corrada, each in combination with engineers and consultants, which included Rafael Pumarada, Antonio Cobian, Lucilla Marvel, and José Villamil], collection Lucilla and Tom Marvel. 49. For Berlin see for example Florian Urban, Tower and Slab: A Global History of Mass Housing (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), 66–​68; for Glasgow, Florian Urban, The New Tenement: Residences in the Inner City since 1970 (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2018), 106–​108. 50. Manuel Bermúdez, “De la tábula rasa a la rehabilitación del barrio: puesta en escena de un nuevo modelo de la vivienda social,” in Espacios Ambivalentes: historias y olvidos en la arquitectura social moderna, ed. Jorge Lizardi and Martin Schwegmann (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2012), 202–​227. 51. Lucilla Marvel, conversation with the author, November 22, 2013; see also Marvel, Listen to What They Say, 153. 52. Out of an estimated 350 homeowners, 120 received land titles by 2000. Ibid., 159. 53. The land titles were awarded under Law 132 of 1975, which legalized squats if they had occurred before 1973. 54. María Vera, “Bajo Amenaza,” El Vocero, September 14, 2007; María Miranda, “La Perla Residents face Specter of Eviction,” Puerto Rico Daily Sun, July 13, 2011. 55. Cynthia López, “Denuncian un plan articulado para desalojar La Perla,” El Nuevo Día, July 13, 2011; Rut Tellado, “Residentes defienden a la Perla,” El Nuevo Día, July 11, 2011; Limarys Suárez, “Fallo de culpabilidad para Cara de Truck,” El Nuevo Día, October 18, 2012. 56. “Organizan junta vecinos La Perla,” El Vocero, September 21, 2007. 57. Puerto Rico Administration, “Plano de las Barriadas.” La Perla Building Map with state of building and number of floors, 1978, Collection Lucilla and Tom Marvel. La Perla Building Map, 2013, Taller de Estudios Graduados “Arquitectura y Communidad,” Universidad de Puerto Rico.

La Perla, Puerto Rico    537 58. Michael Martinez, “La Perla: Poor but Still Beautiful to Residents,” The San Juan Star, September 6, 1998; Yaritza Rivas, “Estreno entre brincos y risas infantiles,” El Nuevo Mundo, December 14, 2008. 59. Author’s observations, October 2013. 60. Author’s notes, community meeting on August 23, 2013, at the former slaughterhouse.

Bibliography Abrams, Charles. Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. Almandoz, Arturo, ed. Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities 1850–​ 1950. London: Routledge, 2002. Cotto, Liliana. Desalambrar: Orígenes de los rescates de terreno en Puerto Rico y su pertinencia en los movimientos sociales contemporáneos. San Juan: Tal Cual, 2006. Davis, Mike. Planet of Slums. London: Verso, 2007. Habraken, John. Supports: An Alternative to Mass Housing. London: The Architectural Press, 1972. Lewis, Oscar. La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Random House, 1965. Lizardi, Jorge, and Martin Schwegmann, eds. Espacios Ambivalentes: historias y olvidos en la arquitectura social moderna. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejón, 2012. Lloyd, Peter. Slums of Hope? Shantytowns of the Third World. London: Penguin, 1979. Marvel, Lucilla. Listen to What They Say: Planning and Community Development in Puerto Rico. San Juan, Puerto Rico: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2008. Neuwirth, Robert. Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World. New York: Routledge, 2005. Peattie, Lisa Redfield. The View from a Barrio. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Pérez, Manuel. Estudio Preliminar de Vida en los Arrabales de San Juan. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, Rural Rehabilitation Division, 1939. Perlman, Janice. The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Quiles, Edwin. La Ciudad de los Balcones. San Juan: La Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 2009. Safa, Helen. The Urban Poor of Puerto Rico: A Study in Development and Inequality. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. Sepúlveda, Anibal. San Juan—​historia ilustrada de su desarrollo urbano 1508–​1898. San Juan: CARIMAR, 1989. Stokes, Charles. “A Theory of Slums.” Land Economics 38, no. 3 (1962): 187–​197. Turner, John F. C. “Dwelling Resources in South America,” Architectural Design 33, no. 8 (1963): 360–​393. Turner, John F. C. “The Squatter Settlement: Architecture That Works.” Architectural Design 38 no. 3 (1968): 355–​360. Urban, Florian. Tower and Slab: A Global History of Mass Housing. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Urban, Florian. “La Perla: 100 Years of Informal Architecture in San Juan, Puerto Rico.” Planning Perspectives 30, no. 4 (October 2015): 495–​536.

CHAPTER 28

L IVING AT TH E C E NT E R, PU SHED TO T H E E D G E KALPANA SHARMA

In the year 2004, the residents of one of the largest urban poor settlements in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, were sold a dream by the government. The “slum-​like” conditions in which this population of anywhere between six hundred thousand to a million1 has subsisted for scores of years would be transformed into a “middle-​class suburb.” Many bought it; many more were skeptical. By 2018, the promise had vanished; the skeptics were proven right. The story of that broken promise exemplifies the multilayered and problem-​ridden story of urban development when it concerns addressing the needs of the urban poor. Although this is a particular story of an urban poor settlement in Mumbai, the lessons are possibly applicable to similar situations around India, and beyond.

History Dharavi, as this vast settlement that stretches over 535 acres or 2.1 square kilometers is known, has emerged over time. This in itself tells us how the commercial value of land determines where the city permits poor people to reside. Dharavi was once a fishing village or koliwada, one of the six that eventually came to form the island city of Mumbai, as noted in the Gazetter of Bombay City and Island (1909).2 But over the course of several decades, and especially after Independence and the spurt in the growth of the city’s population, the swampy land around the fishing village was reclaimed, and poor communities pushed out from the better-​serviced areas south of Dharavi came to live there initially in temporary settlements that coalesced by the 1960s to form one large urban “slum.” Within this history of settlement and expansion lie multiple threads. They include individual stories of the search for a place to work, and to live, in a city that continues

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    539 to hold out the promise of both. It still provides work, as is evidenced by the extent to which its population finds formal and informal ways to earn a living, but it fails often to provide a place to live, especially for the poor. Mumbai’s development is inextricably linked with that search by the poor for a place to live. And Dharavi is only one of the more striking illustrations of this process. While the original fishing village of Dharavi was situated on the western edge of today’s Dharavi, close to the Arabian Sea and the mouth of the Mithi River, another early settlement at its northeastern end is now also part of modern-​day Dharavi. This began as a colony of potters. They had migrated to Bombay (now Mumbai) around 1870 from the drought-​hit region in Gujarat called Saurashtra. They were traditional potters, making water pots, oil lamps, and planters from clay, using a traditional hand-​operated potter’s wheel and a kiln fired by cotton waste. City authorities demolished their original colony, located in south Bombay probably around the end of the nineteenth century, as the land on which they had squatted was needed for other purposes. This compelled them to look for vacant land farther north. The land they found, and on which 319 families settled, was once again needed for another purpose, this time for an army camp. And so they moved again, to the edge of a swamp across which lay the original fishing village of Dharavi. The year was 1932. The breadth of the swamp separated these two early settlements. The potters called the land on which they settled, for which they got the requisite permissions from the municipality, Kumbharwada (or a colony of potters). Today, Kumbharwada continues to occupy the same piece of land, and the people who live there still make pots, baking them in common kilns, even though a younger generation has moved on to find other jobs and professions.3 According to a study conducted by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and the Rotary Club of Bombay in 1944,4 Dharavi was divided into five districts—​Koliwada, Kumbharwada, Kala Killa, Matunga Labour Camp, and Dharavi. These areas were distinct because of the way they developed over the course of several decades. Kala Killa, for instance, also known as Riwa Fort, is at one end of Dharavi. It was built by Bombay’s first governor, Gerard Aungier (served 1669–​1677). Today, you can barely see anything of the dilapidated fort, but the settlement that has grown around it is known by that name. Similarly, Matunga Labour Camp has a very specific history that reflects the way communities of poor migrants flock together and create settlements that have a distinctive stamp. This began as a colony of Valmikis, a Dalit5 community from the state of Haryana, who came to work in Bombay post-​Independence as municipal sweepers. What started as a small settlement at the northern end of Matunga soon spread and merged into Dharavi. The colony had a distinctive feel to it because this north-​Indian community retained many of the features of its culture. When I visited the colony in 1999, I found women cooking on coal stoves outside their homes even though they had an LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) cylinder inside the house. When asked why this was so, a woman told me that the men did not like their rotis (Indian bread) cooked on gas; they preferred it on coal.6 Koliwada is so called because this is where the original fishing community that gave Dharavi its name continues to live.7 Unlike the rest of Dharavi, Koliwada consists of fairly large houses owned by the Kolis, a community of fisherfolk who do not fish any

540   KALPANA SHARMA more. Most of them have entered other professions but still follow a traditional form of self-​governance. The main feature of all these early settlements, and the later ones that emerged and meshed into what is now called Dharavi, is that each was marked with industriousness and the efforts of the people who lived there to literally “build” the swampy land on which they were living. In the 1960s, in the areas closest to what was then a swamp, residents recounted how they actually carried mud and construction debris to fill up the land.8 Today, you would not know that the older settlements, or the newer buildings in Dharavi, have been built on a swamp. Apart from these five settlements that were identified in the TISS study, there are many smaller “nagars” (towns or suburbs), “wadis” (hamlets), or enclaves in Dharavi. Named variously as Muslim Nagar, Social Nagar, AKG Nagar, Mukund Nagar, Ambedkar Nagar, Rajiv Gandhi Nagar, and so on, each has a distinctive history of how it emerged and often has a particular trade or skill attached to it. Thus the area called Kalyanwadi, for instance, was the hub of all the tanneries and leather works that flourished in Dharavi until the 1980s. Animal hides were transported from an abattoir in Bandra, north of the Mithi River. The hides were then cleaned and treated with sodium sulphide by hand, and then sent to tanneries. The larger tanneries used machines to process the leather. But interspersed around Kalyanwadi were small artisanal tanneries that treated the cleaned animal skins with chemicals in large wooden barrels. The “processed” leather hides, mostly goatskin, were then hung out to dry on clotheslines before being sent to leather manufacturers, most of whom were local. The larger tanneries sent out their hides to leather manufacturers further afield. Some of these “industries” have disappeared. Tanneries, for instance, had found Dharavi an ideal location as there was plenty of water available in the swamp for the tanning process. But once water pollution laws were introduced in the 1980s, it was inevitable that this polluting industry would be affected. By the end of the 1990s, only a handful of tanneries remained in Dharavi, mostly the smaller ones. Today, it would be hard to find even one. Those who set out to plan for Dharavi’s redevelopment overlooked these natural divisions and specific histories, which divided the sprawling settlement into a galaxy of areas that each represented a trade, a profession, or an enclave of people from a particular part of India. Instead, lines were drawn on a map to create “sectors” that had no bearing on the natural cohesiveness of Dharavi’s many and diverse communities. This, amongst other factors, contributed to the failure of the government’s plan to redevelop Dharavi.

Legality and Illegality The attitude of the central and state governments toward the urban poor has changed in the years after India gained independence from British rule in 1947. Cities like Bombay

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    541 saw a large influx of refugees from what became Pakistan in the immediate aftermath of the partition of India. Thereafter, it grew because it attracted people from the hinterland and from other parts of the country. Bombay was an industrial hub. It provided jobs. But the internal refugees, often escaping drought or abject poverty in their home states, had to contend with impermanent housing wherever they could find vacant land. Affordable housing was inadequate to absorb this growing population of workers. As a result, as the city’s population grew, so did the “slums.” By the 1960s, as far as Bombay was concerned, this reality could not be avoided by the Maharashtra state government, which till then had chosen to look the other way. Initially, its only policy was to declare such urban poor settlements as “illegal,” and to set out to clear the land on which the poor had settled. People were forced to leave, and the government took no responsibility for offering them an alternative. Thus, in waves following demolitions of slum settlements, communities of the urban poor moved farther north of the city and parked themselves wherever they found vacant land. The solution, they knew, was temporary. It would last only until the authorities, either the state government or the municipal corporation, decided it wanted the land on which they settled for an ostensible “public” purpose. The history of such demolitions in Bombay is a sordid story of the state’s indifference and brutality on the one hand, and the resilience of urban poor communities on the other. There was a shift in the state government’s policy toward slums in the mid-​1970s, partly owing to a populist pro-​poor stance taken by the government of the day, presided over at the national level by Indira Gandhi. In 1976, the state government conducted a slum “census” that attempted to document exactly how many people lived in the slums of Mumbai. The process was patchy; it did not, for instance, include those who had lived on pavements or along the railway tracks for decades. But people living in the larger settlements were counted. And those who had some proof of residence, such as a ration card, were issued a document, popularly called a “photo-​pass.” This guaranteed the owners of such a document that even if the area where they lived was cleared, they would be given adequate notice to gather their belongings and look for an alternative. The government took no responsibility for finding such an alternative. Having thus “recognized” some slums, the government then launched a “slum improvement” plan followed by a “slum upgradation” policy. Slum improvement meant the municipality provided water through community standposts, constructed common toilets, built open drains, and provided electricity. It was the very least that could be done. The latter policy permitted people living in such settlements to upgrade their own structures at their own cost. In the 1980s, the World Bank also extended assistance for a program that provided plots with water and electricity connections for slum residents, leaving them to construct their own houses according to their means. Dharavi benefited from some of these schemes. But the first concerted effort to improve Dharavi came in 1985 as part of what was called the Prime Minister’s Grant Project (PMGP).9 The significance of this trajectory of official policy toward urban poor settlements is the manner in which what is legal and illegal came to be defined. Thus, people with the documents issued after the 1976 census were legal. The rest were not. This meant that

542   KALPANA SHARMA around half of all slum residents were “illegal” in the eyes of the state. These included the pavement dwellers. It gave the state the right to demolish their settlements whenever it chose to do so. So the change of policy in 1976 was partial and ineffective because it failed to address the larger question of dealing with affordable housing for the poor in the city. Rather than addressing this issue, the state chose to fend off the real problem by gradually changing the so-​called “cut-​off ” year for proving that you were “legal.” So from 1976, the year the slum census was held, the “cut-​off ” moved to 1980, 1985, and then 1995. It is now 2022. All these changes were made on political compulsions, to ensure that the vote of the urban poor came to the party in power at that time. The changes in the “cut-​ off ” years did little or nothing to actually deal with the question of housing and basic facilities for the urban poor in the city. Instead, a large number of poor people remained in suspended animation; considered “illegal,” they lived in the hope that at some point they too would become “legal.” In the meantime, they had to live as best as they could, improve their temporary dwellings by infringing rules that did not permit improvement, negotiate the labyrinthine municipal bureaucracy for the simplest of permissions, such as repairing a part of an existing structure, and live in hope that someday the entire settlement would be redesigned and redeveloped, giving residents security of tenure. An important year in the “slum” history of Bombay was 1985 when the Supreme Court of India ruled on a case filed in 1981 by a journalist, after brutal demolitions of pavement slums were carried out by the city government at the height of the Bombay monsoon. People who had lived for decades in temporary shelters faced demolition squads who gave them little or no time to gather their meager belongings. They were left shelterless in the rain, their documents destroyed, their future uncertain. They were told that they would have to return to the places from which they had originally migrated to the city. The horror of those demolitions moved civic-​minded citizens, including Olga Tellis, a journalist, to appeal to the Supreme Court, arguing that these poor people were citizens of India and had the right to life as guaranteed to all citizens under the Indian constitution. The case dragged on for years but finally the 1985 judgment proved an important landmark. The Supreme Court confirmed that the basic right to life was linked to the right to a livelihood.10 Although the court qualified its ruling by stating that this did not give poor people the right to squat on land that was needed for a “public purpose,” it reiterated that it was incumbent on the state to give adequate notice before asking people to move and relocate. This judgment began the process of rethinking about the urban poor, at least in Mumbai. For one thing, the poorest of them, those who lived on pavements or along the railway tracks of Mumbai’s suburban railways, had never been counted. A non-​ governmental organization set out to do this.11 With this data, they were able to establish that the people living in such precariousness were employed, mostly in daily jobs or as domestics in the case of women; that they had lived in that area for at least two decades; and that they paid “taxes” indirectly to the municipality, or its employees, by paying for illegal water connections or by buying water, and by using pay toilets established by the municipality. In other words, they did not live off the state but actually paid for services

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    543 and also contributed to the local economy. This survey contributed to the policy that emerged ten years later that acknowledged that even pavement dwellers had the right to be resettled in the event of a demolition. This was a historic shift in acknowledging their rights as citizens. By the mid-​1980s, coinciding with the Supreme Court judgment, the state government had begun to accept the reality of slums. It is important to recognize, however, that this shift in the state’s attitude toward urban poor settlements was not born out of a sense of altruism or out of a recognition of their rights as citizens. Rather the compulsions were twofold: first, the reality that providing housing for so many people was beyond the capability of the state; and second, that land was not easily available to resettle people in such large numbers in what was already a densely packed city. Hence, the alternative to slum removal was first slum improvement (providing basic urban services like water, electricity, and drainage), and thereafter slum upgradation, which permitted slum residents to improve their own structures to the extent they could afford. This policy absolved the state of taking any responsibility beyond providing some basic services. What the state did not anticipate was that in the absence of a sound program to provide affordable housing for the poor, their only option was to move to settlements like Dharavi and others that dotted the city, or to create new settlements on vacant land. By the 1990s, the slum population of Bombay had grown to a point that it constituted almost half the population of this, the richest city in India. Yet slums occupied less than 15 percent of the land, with densities that were higher than possibly in any other city in the world. The mantra of “slum redevelopment” caught on in the 1990s as India’s economy moved out of the so-​called “socialist” era, which had begun post-​Independence under India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and that had placed restrictions on private business and ownership of land. The growth of the private sector in real estate inevitably meant that the land on which poor settlements were located came into the line of vision. One such tract of land was Dharavi, all 2.1 square kilometers of it.

From Periphery to the Center Dharavi, as it emerged and formed over the decades from the early 1930s to the 1970s, was once on the outer edges of the main city of Bombay, as it was known then. Both business and government were concentrated in the southern tip. Dharavi was poised at the northern edge, separated from the sprawling hinterland by the Mithi River that over time had become nothing more than a large sewer. The fishing village that gave the area its name had been pushed inland as the sea on its western edge was reclaimed to build a causeway linking the island city to the mainland. And toward its eastern edge, it touched the Central Railway line that ran the length of Bombay, ferrying several million suburban commuters as well as long-​distance travelers from other parts of India. Thus by accident, not design, Dharavi found itself virtually in the heart of the city, sandwiched

544   KALPANA SHARMA between the Western and Central railway lines, which increased the value of the land because of its easy accessibility. Dharavi’s location grew in importance also because in the mid-​1980s, the government decided to build another business district, apart from the existing one in south Mumbai, to its north. To do this, part of the mangroves on the Mithi River were reclaimed. The government argued that this was essential as there was no space for expansion in the older business precincts located in the southern part of the island city. Because of this, Bombay was losing its competitive advantage to other cities. This gradual process by which an area that was once on the outskirts came to be virtually in the center of Bombay was partly responsible for the events that unfolded in 1985 when the then–​prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, decided to grant Dharavi 390 million rupees (US $57 million) for its “redevelopment” as part of a larger packet of financial aid for Bombay. This gesture arose not necessarily out of an understanding of what Dharavi already contributed to the city’s political economy. More likely it was based on the calculation that Dharavi’s “redevelopment” would help once the new business district to the north, now called the Bandra Kurla Complex, was ready. This would raise land prices all around if the ultra-​modern business area, designed to attract international capital, did not have to contend with a dirty, disorganized settlement inhabited mostly by poor people to its south. Thus, the seed for Dharavi’s eventual gentrification was planted. It took almost twenty years before that seed germinated, by way of a proposal put forward by a private developer and architect, Mukesh Mehta, in 2004. Even before 2004, the idea of redeveloping slums in the city had already been put in place, first in 1991 and thereafter in 1995 when the state government, at that time comprising conservative right-​wing parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena, appointed a committee to propose a way to deal with slums. The report of this committee, headed by bureaucrat Dinesh Afzalpurkar, laid the ground for the policy that currently prevails, the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS). The 1991 slum redevelopment scheme had also tried to bring in private developers to play a role in rebuilding slums, but the SRS saw the opening of slum lands to builders in a way that had not happened earlier. The scheme was premised on a land sharing formula. Slum clusters could be redeveloped if 70 percent of the residents consented to a developer taking over the land, constructing seven-​story buildings to resettle the residents, and using the excess space to construct residential or commercial structures for sale. This way, the slum residents would get a free apartment, measuring 225 square feet and including a toilet, and the developer would be able to recover the costs through sale of the other buildings constructed on the same plot. The role of the state in this was merely to give the builder additional incentives, by increasing the floor space index (FSI) that determines how high you can build on a plot. On paper, the principle was fairly sound as long as land prices remained high. It had worked effectively in Thailand, for instance.12 So it should have worked in Mumbai. But it was not a success for several reasons. The idea was premised on the value of the land on which the slum was located. Only those slums that had public access, in that they

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    545 touched a main road, or were located in areas where land prices were high, attracted private developers. Many such developers offered the slum dwellers free houses in new buildings, gave them temporary accommodation until the land was cleared, and rehabilitated them. At the same time, they made substantial profits from the up-​market commercial and residential structures that were constructed on the rest of the land. Where the plan began to go wrong was when the smaller realtors found they were financially overstretched.13 They could not stick to schedules. Getting the consent of 70 percent of the residents of a particular slum was complicated, as the government had laid down that only those with proof that they had lived there before 1995 were eligible. This left out the renters, often a substantial number, as well as people who simply did not have adequate proof of residence. Thus, even the first step of getting consent stretched out over years. Second, finance became expensive, building schedules were never predictable, and in the end many developers simply abandoned projects and disappeared. In several instances, people were moved out into what are called “transit camps” only to find that what was supposed to be a temporary shelter became virtually the only shelter they had. And third, in 2008 land prices fell sharply in Mumbai, reflecting some of the turbulence in the global financial markets. As a result, the profit margins were not attractive enough for the bigger players to enter into the area of slum rehabilitation. Many who had earlier expressed interest gradually pulled out. Dharavi as it is today is a classic example of the patchy implementation of the SRS. Buildings that were constructed under this scheme cling to the main roads. But the inner part of the settlement remains virtually untouched, as builders were not confident they could sell property away from main roads or transport hubs. These parts remain chaotic and densely packed even though their residents have improved their individual structures and succeeded in getting some amenities such as piped water, electricity, and covered drains. Meanwhile in the rest of Mumbai, the SRS continues to be implemented somewhat erratically, with an occasional slum being redeveloped and replaced with poorly constructed, badly ventilated, seven-​story structures that sit awkwardly next to swanky high-​rise commercial towers. In Dharavi the SRS schemes have been halted. This is primarily because the residents of Dharavi were persuaded to accept that they would be better served if the entire locality was redeveloped as one unit instead of the piecemeal redevelopment as envisaged under the SRS.

The Dream Even before the 2004 proposal to redevelop Dharavi, the area had seen some improvement as a result of the PMGP in 1985. The municipality constructed two wide roads, improved the drainage, and built a handful of one-​plus-​three walk-​up buildings to resettle some of the residents. That is all the funds allocated could achieve.

546   KALPANA SHARMA The chief architect of the most recent dream of a redeveloped Dharavi was Mukesh Mehta, a property developer and a trained architect who had worked in the United States and had come back to India to explore business opportunities. It was a time when in Maharashtra, and more specifically Mumbai, many opportunities had opened up for private real estate developers under the government’s slum redevelopment scheme. With rising land prices, the lure of entering the arena of slum redevelopment and then reaping substantial profits from building on the excess land was tempting. Between 1998, when the SRS finally took off, until almost 2008 the property market in the city was buzzing with activity. Mehta’s singular contribution was his proposal to look at Dharavi as a whole rather than follow the existing pattern of developing piecemeal, as and when people living in different parts of the settlement came together to form a society and approach a developer to undertake redevelopment. Mehta’s approach would also have ensured that basic infrastructure needs would address the existing high density, which was higher than in any other part of Mumbai. In fact, with the proposed redevelopment, the density would have increased as more people would have come to live in the area in addition to the existing population. Clearly, infrastructure such as water supply, sewerage, and roads, grossly inadequate at present, would need to be substantially enhanced to deal with these higher densities. Mumbai in fact is already paying a heavy price because infrastructure has not been enhanced preceding redevelopment. Instead, improvements have been attempted patchily after redevelopment, a recipe for disaster. Nowhere is this more evident than in the old textile mill area. Mumbai/​Bombay, once called the Manchester of the East, had fifty-​four flourishing textile mills until the 1980s, most of them located in a central Mumbai district. The first textile mill was established as far back as 1854. The mills were built on properties taken on long lease from the government, which accommodated the factory, substantial open spaces, as well as one-​plus-​two walk-​up structures where the mill workers lived. Even outside the mill compounds, there were similar buildings available for a low rent for workers. Over time, this area had developed not just a working-​ class profile, but also spawned a rich cultural life drawn from the diversity of the people who came to work in these textile mills. In the 1980s, with the decline in the textile industry, the government allowed the owners of these mills to redevelop their lands by building new commercial and residential structures. The frenzy of building in this central district now stands as testimony to poor or nonexistent planning. No thought was given either to the needs of the thousands of workers who lived in the area or to the infrastructure that ought to have preceded the redevelopment. Today, this area is a commercial hub drawing in thousands of office employees during the day who work in high-​rise towers. The former mill workers continue to live here in their old crumbling structures. The roads are as narrow as they were before the new towers were constructed. The other infrastructure, for example drains and water supply, remain much the same. Worse still, the public transport hubs, such as the local train

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    547 stations that now handle many times more people during the day hours, have not been improved either. In 2017, at the height of the monsoon, twenty-​three people were trampled to death at one of these commuter rail stations because of the inadequacy of the walkways and over-​ bridges. Each monsoon brings with it the possibility of more such disasters. A heavy shower inevitably leads to roads being inundated with filthy water, although they adjoin some of the highest rental properties in the city. Yet all this wealth and political capital has not resulted in any pressure on the state to set right faulty and thoughtless planning. If this is the story of a working-​class area that has been gentrified, try and imagine what would happen to a settlement like Dharavi if the same approach were applied. So the merit of Mehta’s plan is that it acknowledged that infrastructure for the entire area of Dharavi had to be addressed alongside the redevelopment. However, what he missed out is the nature of this settlement, of the kind of people who inhabit it, of their personal histories and the history of the creation of Dharavi. By overlooking this, Mehta also overlooked a crucial detail: that you cannot work out a sustainable housing solution for this kind of place without engaging with the people who had created it. Mehta did engage, but after the fact. He had already drawn arbitrary boundaries, dividing Dharavi first into ten sectors, and thereafter into five. Why ten? Or for that matter five? What relation did this have with the existing boundaries between the different “nagars” and enclaves in Dharavi, many of which related to a particular kind of work or represented a specific history in the migration of people from other parts of India to Dharavi? The other basic mistake in Mehta’s plan was his belief that Dharavi could be converted into a “middle-​class suburb,” a term he used in some of his early presentations. Dharavi as it was then, and is now, is a working-​class settlement, where the majority of the people identify as Dalits. They came because the predominant occupation in the initial years was in the tanneries, a job that only the lower castes or non-​Hindus were prepared to do as it involved handling hides of dead animals. Even if they do aspire to rise above these caste markers, there is little possibility of the area being transformed into a middle-​class enclave without removing those who live there. In fact, a precondition for the redevelopment of Dharavi is that those living there have to be accommodated in the same area. Therefore, its character would not change even if spatially it seemed different. Mehta, on the other hand, projected a future Dharavi with a golf course, shopping malls, and high-​ end housing. In time, he realized that this would not happen. The upper classes would not want to live cheek by jowl with the poor if they could help it. Mehta was able to sell his idea to the state government because at that time, the central government was pushing the idea of converting Mumbai into a “world class” city, like Shanghai. In support of this aspiration, the central government allocated additional funds to the state government so that Mumbai’s infrastructure, such as roads and transport systems, could be enhanced. But a part of the plan was also to “clean up” the city of the unsavory sight of slums and urban poor settlements. These would sit ill with the projections of a Shanghai-​like Mumbai. So transforming a disorganized but thriving

548   KALPANA SHARMA settlement like Dharavi, located at a point in the city where it could not be avoided, was essential. For those wanting a “world class” city, Dharavi’s spatiality was an eyesore that needed to be removed or redeveloped. After a process of negotiations between Mehta and the state government, several important decisions were taken. Perhaps the most significant, in terms of Dharavi’s future and where it stands today, was to declare the entire area as a separate development zone. In other words, the laws that applied to the rest of the city or the state with regard to slum redevelopment as laid out in the SRS would not apply to Dharavi. Instead, a new Dharavi Redevelopment Authority (DRA) was established to manage its transformation, and Mehta was appointed an advisor. The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) has gone through several iterations between 2005, when it was launched with much fanfare, and 2018. It began with the idea of five sectors being sold to the highest bidder. International and Indian developers were given time to send in their bids for each sector. The preconditions were that each sector would require the existing “eligible” residents to be resettled in situ; the developer would also pay for the basic infrastructure on the plot, and the rest of the land could be developed with additional FSI. Given Dharavi’s location, it was assumed that international companies, as well as the larger local ones, would be interested. And the early response suggested that this was so. The problem, as always, lay in the details. The most important problem was that of eligibility. According to the existing laws in the state, slum dwellers who could prove that they had lived in the particular location before 1995 were eligible for a free house in the same location, or elsewhere if the land was required for a public purpose. In Dharavi, determining the exact number of people eligible for free housing was not an easy exercise. While those who “owned” structures, in that they had a “photo-​pass,” had little difficulty proving their eligibility, most had added another floor, sometimes two, to their original structure and rented out this space. What if the tenants also had proof that they had lived in that place before 1995? Would they be eligible? If not, where would they go? Would the government provide an alternative? Clearly, this issue was a political landmine with no easy resolution. The residents of Dharavi were able to bargain for a later “cut-​off ” date of 2000, and also for slightly bigger houses than those prescribed under the SRS (increased for Dharavi from 225 to 300 square feet). As a result, the problem of arriving at the number of households entitled to free housing became even more complex as more recent residents, those who had proof of residence before 2000, would also be eligible. One survey came up with the number of fifty-​six thousand households. This was disputed by many in Dharavi, including organizations that had worked in the settlement for decades. Gradually, the number has crept up to around eighty thousand households, although this too could change. Also the three hundred square feet promised to Dharavi residents remains disputed. Residents of Koliwada, for instance, have demanded five hundred square feet as the minimum as their homes are much larger. The question of the amount of space set aside for work-​related activities continues to remain in dispute. In the original plan, only 6

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    549 percent of the total area was reserved for this, a gross underestimation given that work of some kind is conducted throughout Dharavi, not just in structures recognized as workshops or small factories, but inside homes and in the spaces outside. How would a settlement that is home to such a variety of economic activity survive if people were pushed into high-​rise structures with little or no space for their work? These complications became evident even as the first bids came in 2007. If the developers could not establish how many free houses they had to build on a plot, how would they work out the economics of investing in the project? As it dawned on developers that the project was bound to be mired in controversy and local politics, and that it would eventually entail cost overruns with no guarantee of profits at the end, all of them pulled out and the project was essentially shelved by 2010. After the failure of the first round of bids, in 2013 the state government tried to keep the project alive by taking up the smallest of the five sectors and giving the task of its redevelopment to the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA). Five years later, there was little to no progress.14 So once again, the government set out to find investors. Seclink Tech, a company based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was the highest bidder but even this latest effort is mired in controversy, according to newspaper reports.15 Given the past history of trying to attract private capital to redevelop Dharavi, it is more than likely that once again this attempt will fail for the very reasons that the past ones did, namely that there is not enough profit to be made if the current residents of the settlement also have to be accommodated. Unfortunately, although residents of Dharavi have intervened at various points through their local organizations and have also sought the help of civil society organizations to present to the government alternatives to the DRP, they have not been heeded.

The Reality The profound impact of the failure of the DRP on the residents of Dharavi can perhaps best be summed up by the reaction of Vishnu Damle, an elected member of the municipal corporation who represents a part of Dharavi. He explained: “Government has opposed the people and not allowed them to construct a nice space. There are no markets in Dharavi or colleges or even footpaths. But now they are making a full plan for Dharavi, a big plan. But it would be nice if they just did small things to improve the conditions here,” adding that this “type of development would not make the kind of money that this big project will.”16 Although the project did find support among politicians in Dharavi, Damle’s reaction sums up what a lot of the ordinary residents felt. Where does all this leave Dharavi and its million inhabitants? Since 2007, when the DRP was set in place, the earlier redevelopment efforts through the SRS have been suspended. Only those projects that were already underway could be completed. As a result, several seven-​story structures built under the SRS now border the main roads in Dharavi. Yet once you leave the main roads and enter the inner areas, time appears to

550   KALPANA SHARMA have stood still. On a road that is euphemistically called Dharavi Main Road, a narrow stretch that is often in need of repair, the old mosque built in 1887 still stands surrounded by the same structures I took note of in 1999. Further down is the Ganesh temple, where the Adi Dravidas from the Tirunelvelli district in Tamil Nadu have worshiped since 1913. They have added to it by enclosing the area around it, putting a superstructure above the original small temple so that there is more space for the worshipers. But the area around the temple is virtually the same. And a stone’s throw away Abdul Aziz Khan, popularly known as Mamu, is still turning out baked goods in his wood-​fired ovens. He has handed over the reins to his son, Amir, and although the space the bakery occupies has shrunk, as has his business, he makes up the difference by renting out the other half of his bakery as a garment-​manufacturing workshop. The DRP has succeeded in freezing Dharavi in time. It has not allowed people who live in Dharavi to devise their own future because the state considers the land too valuable for poor people to live there. As a result, it is where it was. Some paths have been paved, some drains have been covered, people have improved their own dwellings, some of the more cohesive communities have taken up the job of keeping their areas clean, and water is now available directly in most dwellings, although only for a few hours a day. If the plan to redevelop Dharavi had been centered on the needs of the enterprising and self-​motivated residents of this settlement, it is possible that they would have evolved designs and systems that would have worked for them. Indeed in 1985, when the first efforts at redevelopment came into place under the PMGP, suggestions had come forward for how Dharavi could be reorganized so that people could continue to live there and yet have open spaces, better basic facilities, and the freedom to build their own structures within certain defined parameters. This would have permitted residents to build as and when they had the funds. If they needed space to conduct work-​related activities, for example, they would under the proposed arrangement have gone ahead and designed their new structures accordingly, much as they have already been doing informally for years notwithstanding the extreme space constraints. The potters, for instance, work and live in the same space, and have left a common area for the community-​owned kilns that all of them use. This is the best use of available space that suits everyone’s needs. If people are given the autonomy to design their spaces, then they can remain together and even if they have to shift, they can work out solutions. Instead of allowing private developers to make the maximum profit from the land, the state could have invested in infrastructure. Then Dharavi would have remained the home of its original inhabitants.

Conclusions The failed DRP effort holds out several important lessons that have a bearing on how to deal with the settlements of the urban poor.

Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge    551 The first, and most important, is that people are more important than the value of the real estate on which they live. When the latter becomes the primary motivation for redevelopment, you get the mess that is the DRP. The concern of the state, and its private partners, is to derive the maximum profit from the value of the real estate. The people who live and work in places such as Dharavi, and who have given the land its value by literally creating it with their own bare hands, basically want security of tenure, decent housing, and services such as water, sanitation, and electricity, and to be allowed to continue to work and prosper. Second, urban settlements like Dharavi have existed, and indeed done well for themselves, for decades without much help from the state. The residents deserve urban services as much as people living elsewhere in the city, and it is incumbent on the state to find ways to deliver these services. If the concept of slum removal has been discarded, so should the concept of removing the poor from areas where the price of land has escalated. Mumbai as a city is becoming unsustainable, but this is not because it has too many poor people. It is so because the state has chosen to ignore the contribution of the urban poor to the economy and culture of the city and to acknowledge their rights as equal citizens. Until that attitude changes, there is no lasting solution for urban poverty and slums. Unrealistic dreams like the DRP leave everyone poorer, not only the residents of Dharavi but all the inhabitants of the city of Mumbai.17

Notes 1. Population estimates for Dharavi are not accurate because of the nature of the settlement with a large floating population, many of whom live in rented properties or sleep where they work. In 1985, when a census of sorts was conducted, it was estimated that the population was 350,000. Given natural growth and in-​migration, it would be safe to put the estimated population at one million. 2. In the Gazetteer of Bombay City and Island (Bombay, 1909), vol. 1, Dharavi is included in the list of “six great Koliwadas of Bombay—​Mazagaon, Varli, Parel, Sion, Dharavi and Bombay.” 3. See Kalpana Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from India’s Largest Slum (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000); Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 4. Weinstein, Durable Slum, 37. 5. Dalit means “oppressed” and is now a term used for people who belong to the lower castes in the Hindu caste hierarchy, including people formerly termed as untouchable. 6. Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi, 54–​56. 7. For more on Dharavi’s Koliwada, see Local Governance in Dharavi-​Koliwada, https://​urbz. net/​artic​les/​local-​gov​erna​nce-​dhar​avi-​koliw​ada. 8. Sharma, Rediscovering Dharavi, 157. 9. When Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister, he came to Bombay for the 100th anniversary celebrations of the Congress Party. At that time, he announced a special grant for Bombay of Rs 100 crores, of which Rs 39 crores was allocated to Dharavi. 10. See https://​india​nkan​oon.org/​doc/​709​776/​.

552   KALPANA SHARMA 11. The Society for Promotion of Urban Resource Centres (SPARC) conducted its own census of pavement dwellers and people living along railways tracks. The full report can be found at http://​www.spa​rcin​dia.org/​pdf/​artic​les/​invis​rev.pdf. 12. See Francesco Montresor, Preconditions of Land Sharing and Development of the Principle, http://​www.hdm.lth.se/​filead​min/​hdm/​Educat​ion/​Underg​rad/​ABAN​06_​2​013/​Mont​reso​ r_​Fr​ance​sco.pdf. 13. For a critique of the SRS, see Gurbir Singh and P. K. Das, “Building Castles in Air: Housing Scheme for Bombay’s Slum-​Dwellers,” Economic and Political Weekly (October 7, 1995): 2447–​2481, http://​www.niv​arah​akk.com/​publi​cati​ons/​build​ing%20cast​les%20in%20 the%20air.pdf. 14. See Sweety Adimulam, “Dharavi’s Sector-​5 Redevelopment Project Work: MHADA in Limbo: To Continue or Stall?” Free Press Journal, October 22, 2018, https://​www.freep​ress​ jour​nal.in/​mum​bai/​dhara​vis-​sec​tor-​5-​redeve​lopm​ent-​proj​ect-​work-​mhada-​in-​limbo-​ to-​conti​nue-​or-​stall/​1380​348. 15. See Kailash Babar, “Government Delaying Award of Dharavi Redevelopment Project, Alleges Bidder,” Economic Times, March 28, 2019, https://​econom​icti​mes.ind​iati​mes.com/​ news/​polit​ics-​and-​nat​ion/​gov​ernm​ent-​delay​ing-​award-​of-​dhar​avi-​redeve​lopm​ent-​proj​ ect-​alle​ges-​bid​der/​arti​cles​how/​68607​126.cms. 16. Weinstein, Durable Slum, 130. 17. This essay was written in 2018. Since then, the plan to redevelop Dharavi has once again been revived. After another round of bidding, on November 29, 2022, the Adani Group was selected. The problems outlined in this essay, however, still have to be addressed. See https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/mumbai/adani-group-wins-dharaviredevelopment-project-with-5069-crore-bid/article66199979.ece

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number 21 de Abril settlement (Recife, Brazil), 138 Abrams, Charles, 19–​20, 22–​23, 26–​27, 28, 289–​90 Accra (Ghana), 99, 376 Addams district (Chicago), 29 Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), 98 Aden (Yemen), 288 Afghanistan, 99 African Americans in Boston, 149–​50, 153–​54, 338–​39 in Chicago, 336, 337–​38, 341, 346 in Cincinnati, 186, 189–​90, 191, 192, 193, 195–​ 96, 298–​99 in Detroit, 336, 337, 342, 474–​75, 481 gangs and, 342 homelessness among, 149–​50, 153–​54 in Los Angeles, 336 migration to cities during twentieth century among, 332, 334, 335, 336, 481 Myrdal on, 93 in New York City, 336, 337–​38, 339, 341, 446, 451–​52 segregation and discrimination against, 301–​2, 303, 305, 336–​38, 343–​45 African Association of Planning Schools (AAPS), 393 African National Congress, 65–​66 Afzalpurkar, Dinesh, 544 Agar Town (London), 202–​3 Agenda 21, 96 alcoholism South Boston homeless population and, 149–​50, 151, 155

in Victorian and Edwardian London, 42, 45, 46–​47, 216, 412–​13 Aldrete-​Hass, Jose, 94 Allahabad (India), 288 Almrita Patel case (India), 322 Alson, Philip, 48 Amaraji (Brazil), 139 Anbinder, Tyler, 446 Ancoats district (Manchester), 28, 29–​30 Anderson, John, 472 Annan, Kofi, 3–​4 “Annawadi settlement” (research site for Katherine Boo in Mumbai), 38, 40–​41, 48 Anshe Chesed synagogue (New York City), 449 archaeological evidence assumptions and stereotypes regarding slums reassessed through, 487, 488, 489, 490f, 492, 494–​97 Detroit sites and, 471–​72, 476, 478–​81, 480f digital humanities research and, 488–​89 Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City project and, 489–​90, 491, 493 historical methodology and, 487–​ 88, 492–​93 Melbourne sites and, 9, 486, 487–​89, 490, 492–​93, 494–​96 New York City sites and, 446–​48, 449–​51, 450f, 453–​56, 455f, 457f Sydney sites and, 489–​91, 492–​94, 495–​96 Argentina, 90, 126–​27, 503 Arora, Sandeep, 98 Arputham, Jokin, 374–​75, 377, 385, 394 Arraes, Miguel, 138–​39

556   Index Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR), 374–​76, 377–​82, 383, 387, 388t Asian Financial Crisis (1997-​98), 75 Association for Clothing Children, 47–​48 Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (New York City), 188 Association of Boston Urban Priests, 151 Atlanta (Georgia), 305, 347 Attlee, Clement, 231–​32 Aungier, Gerard, 539 Australia. See Melbourne (Australia); Sydney (Australia) Aves, Ernest, 215 Avondale Park (London), 418 Baan Man Kong program (Bangkok), 79, 86 Bachelard, Gaston, 8 Bahia state (Brazil), 126 Baldwin, James, 339 Bales, Kevin, 206 balki (slums in Russia’s oil-​producing towns), 365–​66 Baltimore (Maryland), 340–​41, 342, 344–​45, 430–​31, 466–​67 Bandemer’s Hotel (Detroit), 469–​70, 471–​72 Bandra Kurla Complex (Mumbai), 544 Banerjee-​Guha, Swapna, 319–​20 Bangalore (India), 21, 319 Bangkok (Thailand). See also specific neighborhoods Asian Financial Crisis (1997-​98) and, 75 fires during 1960s in, 431 khlong (canal) network in, 74 khlong settlements in, 79–​80 luxury housing and corporate offices in, 73, 75, 76–​78 migration from Burma and Cambodia to, 74, 76 relocation of the port during 1930s and 1940s in, 74 rural migration to, 74, 75–​76, 79 shophouse rows in, 74–​77 slum clearance in, 75–​76, 79 violence in slums of, 31 Bangladesh factory fire (2012), 296 Bangor Street area (London). See also Notting Dale district (London)

alcoholism in, 412–​13 begging in and near, 413–​14 common lodging houses and furnished rooms for rent in, 407–​9, 414, 418, 420 construction of houses (1854-​65) in, 405–​7 domestic violence in, 412–​13, 422 employment patterns among residents in, 409–​11, 410t First World War and, 420 Improved Tenements Association Ltd and, 421 laundries in, 410–​11, 410t population figures and overcrowding (1881-​ 1901) in, 405, 406t, 418 poverty among the residents of, 411–​12, 422 prostitution in, 408, 416–​18 Rag Fair in, 421 renaming as Becher Street (1935) and, 422 rental incomes at, 409 sanitation at, 407 Sims’s identification of slum in, 403, 417–​ 18, 423 slum clearance in, 419, 422, 423 as “suburban slum,” 216 theft in, 414–​15 as “West-​End Avernus,” 403, 404–​5, 415, 416, 418, 419–​20, 423 Workman’s Institute in, 417–​18 Barnes, Harry, 21–​22 barriadas (slums in Peru), 247 Barth, Fredrik, 457–​58 Bashkirs, 361 Bayly, Mary, 404–​5 Beames, Thomas, 200–​1, 202 Becher Street and Becher Place (London), 422 Begbie, Harold, 419–​20 Begum, Halima, 92, 100 “Behind the Shade” (Morrison), 45 Belvedere (California), 336 Bengal, 282–​83 Bengoechea, Josefina, 529 Bennane, Bridget, 471–​72 Bennett, E. H., 475 Bennett, Henry Curtis, 415 Berghman, Jos, 166–​67 Bermondsey (London), 46–​47, 202–​3, 209–​10 Berwick Street (London), 202

Index   557 Beth Hamridash synagogue (New York City), 448, 452–​53 Bethnal Green (London), 21, 29, 42, 209–​10, 404 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 544 Bharucha, Ruzbeh, 27 Big Dig Archaeology Education Centre (Australia), 494 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 386 Birmingham (Great Britain), 43–​44, 47–​48, 93, 252, 258 Black Bottom neighborhood (Detroit), 474–​ 75, 481 Blackburn (Great Britain), 45–​46 Black Lives Matter, 3–​4 Blackmar, Elizabeth, 188–​89 Bleak House (Dickens), 204 Bloch, Ernst, 85 Blodgett, C. W., 473 “The Bloom” (Bangkok), 76–​77 Blossom Street Municipal Building (Boston), 148 B’nai Jeshurun synagogue (New York City), 449 Boer Republic of the Transvaal, 54, 59 Bolivia, 377–​82, 380t Bolnick, Joel as Cape Town staff member for Slum Dwellers International, 377 on data gathering, 385 on Informal Settlement Network, 383–​84 on Slum Dwellers International’s different international partners, 384–​85 on Slum Dwellers International’s digital communication, 392–​93 on Slum Dwellers International’s logo, 391–​92 on Slum Dwellers’ International’s organizational structure, 376, 385–​86, 387, 390 on Slum Dwellers International’s work on slum upgrading, 382–​83 Bolshevik Party (Russia), 356. See also Communist Party (Soviet Union) Bolsonaro, Jair, 131 Bombay (India). See also Mumbai (India) Bombay Improvement Trust and, 255, 288, 302–​3

bubonic plague outbreaks in, 288, 302–​3 cotton mills in, 282–​83 population growth during colonial rule in, 302–​3, 314–​15 racial segregation during British colonial era in, 297 riot (1898) in, 302–​3 slum clearance in, 288 slums during British colonial era in, 281, 282–​83, 284, 287, 288, 314–​15 Boo, Katherine, 38, 40 Booth, Charles Bangor Street area and, 417–​19 East End research of, 206–​7, 208–​9, 210f, 211, 219 maps and typology of Victorian London poverty developed by, 200–​1, 202–​3, 206–​14, 207t, 209f, 210f, 212t, 217–​19, 230, 420–​21 School Board Visitors reports utilized by, 203, 206, 207–​8 slum clearance and, 218 Toynbee Hall and, 231–​32 West End research of, 208–​10, 211–​16, 212t, 219, 414–​15 Borrow, George, 404–​5 Boston (Massachusetts). See also specific neighborhoods and streets African Americans in, 149–​50, 153–​ 54, 338–​39 Boston Redevelopment Authority and, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153–​54 building rehalitiation projects in, 346 Bureau for Homeless Men in, 148 fire (1872) in, 298, 430–​31 gentrification in, 157–​58 Great Depression in, 148, 153 homeless population and lodging houses in, 146–​57 slum clearance in, 3, 149, 250–​51, 344–​45 urban renewal programs in, 148–​52 Boston Industrial Home, 149–​50, 151 Boswell, Phoebe, 412–​13 The Bottoms district (Cincinnati), 184, 186f, 187, 188 Bourdieu, Pierre, 504–​5 Bourillon, Florence, 266–​67, 271

558   Index Boyer, M. Christine, 298–​99 Bracero program, 335 Brasilia Teimosa, 133 Brazil. See also favelas; specific cities authoritarian regime (1964-​85) in, 129–​30, 141, 233–​34 Canudos War (1885-​97) in, 126, 140 Conferences of the Cities in, 137–​38 constitutional monarchy era in, 127–​28 Foundation of Popular Housing (FCP) in, 129 Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) in, 131 housing policies in, 129–​32, 133, 139–​41 invasões (households occupying land) in, 132–​33, 134–​36 Land Law (1850) in, 128 Ministry of Cities in, 131 My House My Life Program (MCMV) in, 131 National Council of Cities in, 137 National Housing Bank (BNH) in, 129, 130, 131 National Housing Council in, 131 National Housing Plan (PlanHab) in, 131 neoliberal economic policies after 1985 in, 130, 131, 136–​37 Participatory Budget (PB) program in, 136–​37 population growth in, 127 Portuguese colonial era in, 127–​28 Programa de Habitação Popular (Popular Housing Program) in, 133 Regularization Plan of the Special Zones of Social Interest (PREZEIS) in, 134, 137, 140–​41 republic established (1889) in, 128 Retirement and Pension Institutes (IAPs) in, 129 rural-​to-​urban migration in, 129–​30 Sistema Financeiro da Habitação (Housing Finance System) in, 133 slavery in the history of, 140 slum clearance in, 128–​30, 138–​39 Slum Dwellers International in, 377–​82 social housing in, 130–​31, 137 Social Housing Program in, 131

Special Zones of Interest (ZEIS) in, 133–​34, 137, 141 World Cup (2014) hosted by, 139 Bremner, Robert H., 7–​8 Briggs neighborhood (Detroit), 335 Brinkley, David, 334 Bristol (Great Britain), 21, 30 British colonialism in Cape and Natal colonies and, 54–​63, 287, 290 fire risks to cities under, 299 in Hong Kong and, 281, 299–​300, 431, 432 in India and, 59, 281–​84, 287–​88, 297, 302–​3, 314–​18, 326 kacha buildings (made from natural local materials) and, 282, 285 pakka buildings (made from modern materials) and, 282, 285 public health responses to epidemic disease threat under, 302–​3 racialization of poverty under, 55–​59, 60, 61–​62, 63 racial segregation under, 58–​59, 60–​63, 83–​ 84, 297, 302–​3, 305 sanitation and public health practices under, 314–​15 in Singapore, 83–​84, 281, 283, 285, 302, 432, 435–​36 slums as concept used by administrators under, 23–​24, 54–​55 British Dutch East India Company, 59 Brooklyn district (New York City), 337–​38, 341, 342, 347 Brown, Edwin, 147 Brown, Patrick, 414 Brown-​Luthango, Mercy, 89, 97, 100 Brownsville district (New York City), 337–​38, 341, 342 bubonic plague in Bombay, 288, 302–​3 Hong Kong outbreak (1894) of, 284–​ 85, 302–​3 in seventeenth-​century London, 298 in South Africa during nineteenth century, 61–​62 in Sydney (Australia), 486–​87 Buchanan v. Warley, 337

Index   559 Bucktown district (Cincinnati), 190, 191, 195–​96 Buenos Aires (Argentina), 490 Bukit Ho Swee settlement (Singapore) absence of formal law in, 434 Bukit Ho Swee Fire National Relief Fund and, 439 fire (1961) in, 300, 430, 432, 436, 438–​41 former Chinese cemetery under, 434 gangs in, 434 housing construction after fire (1961-​2) in, 439–​41 slum clearance plans for, 436 Bureau of Labor investigation of slum conditions (United States, 1894), 466 Burkina Faso, 380t, 382 Burnell, Thomas, 408–​9 Burnham, Daniel H., 475 Burrows, Edwin, 451 Cabeça de Porco (Rio de Janeiro), 126 Calcutta (India) “arrival cities” surrounding, 247 Calcutta Improvement Trust and, 288–​89 cholera outbreaks in, 249–​50 Municipal Act of 1899 in, 289 population growth during colonial rule in, 302–​3, 314–​15 racial segregation during British colonial era in, 59, 297 Richards’s “slum map” (1912) of, 23–​24 rural migration to, 284 slum clearance in, 289, 319 slums during British colonial era in, 281, 283, 284–​85, 287, 289, 314–​15 slum upgrading in, 253, 258 Calle Tiburcio Reyes (La Perla, Puerto Rico), 525f, 528f, 531f Camaragibe (Brazil), 139 Campbell Bunk neighborhood (London), 31, 404, 423 Campbell Road (London), 45 Canada, 247, 249–​50, 255, 256–​57 Canudos War (Brazil, 1885-​97), 126, 140 Cape Colony (South Africa), 54, 58–​59. See also Cape Town (South Africa)

Cape Flats (Cape Town, South Africa), 63–​64, 65–​66 Cape Town (South Africa) African migration from rural areas during nineteenth century to, 59–​60 Asian population in, 55, 57–​58, 60 bubonic plague outbreak during late nineteenth century in, 61–​62 Cape Colony era of British rule in, 54–​60, 61–​62 European immigration in nineteenth century to, 54, 58, 59–​60 housing conditions during nineteenth century in, 54–​55, 57 Native Location Commission in, 60 newspaper coverage of slums during nineteenth century in, 54–​58 racialization of poverty in, 55–​59, 60, 61–​62 racial segregation in, 58–​59, 60–​62, 65–​ 66, 290 slum clearance in, 53–​54, 63–​64, 65–​66, 290 “slum tourism” in, 24–​25 slum upgrading programs in, 97 smallpox outbreaks during nineteenth century in, 54–​55, 57–​58 Caranguejo Tabaires community (Recife, Brazil), 139 Cardiff (Great Britain), 31 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, 130–​31 Carnegie Commission, 63 Carpina (Brazil), 139 Carsten, Janet, 507 Cass Corridor (Detroit), 335 Casselden Place (Melbourne, Australia), 486, 489, 494–​95 Castaño, Manuela, 502 Castells, Manuel, 305, 431, 441 Catholic Church, 133–​34, 374, 417–​18 Catholic Worker movement, 154 Cato Manor (Durban), 64–​65 Cawnpore (India), 288 Chadwick, Edwin, 188, 300–​1 Chadwick Street (London), 212t, 215 Chao Phraya River (Thailand), 79–​81, 80f, 84 Chapman, Brian, 272 Charles Street (London), 211–​15, 212t, 219 Charlotte (North Carolina), 340–​41

560   Index Chatham Square (New York City), 459 Chatham Street (New York City), 446, 451 Cheesman, Rose, 416–​17 Chelobityevo (Soviet Union), 367 Chennai (India), 319. See also Madras (India) Chesterton, Ada Elizabeth, 22, 28, 30 Cheysson, Emile, 304 Chicago (Illinois) African Americans in, 336, 337–​38, 341, 346 Chicago school of sociology and, 6 fire (1871) in, 298, 430–​31 gangs in, 342 homeless population in, 157 landlords and building inspectors in, 343 Puerto Ricans in, 337 slum clearance in, 250–​51, 344–​45 slumming in, 232 Southern Whites migration during early twentieth century to, 335 twentieth-​century fires in slum neighborhoods of, 341 vermin as problem in slum neighborhoods in, 342 A Child of the Jago (Morrison), 205 China, 40, 255–​56, 258–​59, 306–​7. See also Hong Kong Choay, Francoise, 270–​7 1 cholera in Cincinnati, 187, 188, 192, 193–​94 immune populations and, 300 in India, 249–​50, 315 mapping of risks associated with, 301 sanitation and, 188 tenement housing and, 193–​94 in Victorian London, 228, 230, 301 Chrysler Freeway (Detroit), 474 Church Lane (London), 202 Cincinnati (Ohio). See also specific neighborhoods and streets African Americans in, 186, 189–​90, 191, 192, 193, 195–​96, 298–​99 Board of Health in, 193–​94 cholera outbreaks during nineteenth century in, 187, 188, 192, 193–​94 Civil War and, 192–​93 establishment (1780s) of, 183, 184 flooding in, 184–​85, 188

maps of, 185f, 186f Miami and Erie Canal and, 185, 186f, 190–​92 nineteenth-​century migration to and population growth in, 183, 186–​87 Ohio River and, 183, 184–​85 Radical Republicans in, 192, 193, 194 sanitation in, 191–​92, 193 Second Great Awakening and, 187 slaughterhouses in, 190, 191, 192 Southern Whites migration during early twentieth century to, 335 tenement housing in, 193–​95 Cincinnati Colonization Society, 190 Cincinnati Relief Union (CRU), 188, 192–​ 93, 196 Cities Alliance, 374, 376–​77, 382–​83, 385 Citizens’ Association (New York City), 193 City Beautiful movement, 465–​66, 475 City Improvement Trust (Glasgow, Scotland), 288 City of God (film), 235 Clark, Kenneth, 338 Clarksdale (Mississippi), 339 Classification of Households (Booth), 207t Classification of Streets (Booth), 207t Cleveland (Ohio), 249–​50, 336 Clibbens, Patrick, 317–​18 Clynes, J. R., 421 Coalition Against the Pine Street Inn Moving Into the South End, 152 Cobbett, Billy, 376–​77 Cobden Arms (London), 412 Cold War, 289, 346–​47 Coleman, Elizabeth, 411–​12 Collier, David, 248 Colombia. See Santa Marta (Colombia) colonialism. See British colonialism Commonwealth Block (Melbourne), 486, 487, 488, 490, 494. See also Little Lon site (Melbourne) Communist Party (Soviet Union), 355–​56. See also Bolshevik Party (Russia) Community Action Program, 346–​47 Compton (California), 338 Comunidade da Linha (Recife), 139 Comunidade Pocotó (Boa Viagem, Brazil), 139 Conboy, Daniel, 412

Index   561 Congress Party (India), 40–​41, 318 Considerant, Victor, 301 The Constant Gardener (film), 235 Copeland, Paul, 171 Coqueiral (special zone in Recife), 134, 136 Corbridge, Stuart, 323 CORDAID, 385–​86 Corktown (Detroit) archaeological evidence from, 476, 478–​ 81, 480f “ell-​cottages” in, 477–​78 foreign-​born population in, 477 Foy family in, 478–​79 Michigan Central Railroad Station built in, 469, 475–​76, 477f, 478, 479, 480f Roosevelt Park established in, 469, 476, 477f, 478, 480f slum clearance in, 469, 476, 477f, 481 Corporación de Renovación Urbana y Vivienda (CRUV, Puerto Rico), 529 corralones (slums in Peru), 247 cortiços (slums in Brazil), 126, 128–​29, 140 Covent Garden (London), 208 covid-​19 pandemic, 40, 131, 139, 157–​58, 373 Crabtree, Pam, 450–​51, 455 Crane, Jacob, 434–​35 Crawford, Arthur, 287 Crescent Street (London), 405, 407, 408–​9, 412–​13, 416, 420–​21, 422 Crook, Penny, 489, 490–​92, 495–​96 Crouch End (London), 205, 216–​17 Cry the Beloved Country (Paton), 64–​65 Cultural Revolution, 306–​7 Cumberland and Gloucester Streets (Sydney), 489–​90, 491, 492–​93, 494, 495–​96 Curley, James, 148 Cushon, Roy, 153 Cuthbert, Alexander, 89–​90 Dalits, 245, 382, 539, 547 Dallamore, William, 411–​12 Dallas (Texas), 342 Daly, Mary, 171 Damle, Vishnu, 549 Darnton, Robert, 8–​10 Das, Veena, 324 Davin, Anna, 44–​45, 46, 47

Davis, Mike, 92, 238, 259 Dawes Hotel shelter (Boston), 148, 149–​50 Day, Dorothy, 154 D’Cruz, Celine, 376 Dead Rabbits (New York City gang), 445 Deer Creek Valley district (Cincinnati), 184–​ 87, 186f, 188, 189–​92, 193 Deleuze, Gilles, 73, 81, 85 Delhi (India). See New Delhi (India) Delors, Jacques, 164 Denmark, 171–​72 Dennis, C. J., 495 Dennis, Norman, 21 Deshpande, Satish, 320–​21 Detroit (Michigan) African Americans in, 336, 337, 342, 474–​75, 481 archaeological evidence from, 471–​72, 476, 478–​81, 480f automobile industry in, 465 building rehalitiation projects in, 346 City Beautiful movement in, 465–​66, 475 City Plan and Improvement Commission in, 475, 479–​80 Detroit Dry Dock Engine works in, 471, 472 Detroit Paper Stock Company in, 471 fires in slum neighborhoods of, 341 foreign-​born population in, 472–​75, 477 home ownership rates in, 477–​78 maps of, 468f, 477f population growth during early twentieth century in, 465, 472–​73, 481 Riis’s visits (1901-​4) to, 473 sanitation in, 467 slum clearance in, 469, 474–​75, 476, 477f, 481 slumming in, 470, 473–​74 Southern Whites migration during early twentieth century to, 335 vermin as problem in slum neighborhoods in, 342 developing world. See Global South Devil’s Acre (London), 202–​3, 215 Devlin, Ryan, 173–​74 Devonshire Place (London), 212t, 214–​15, 217–​18, 219 Devonshire Street (London), 211–​14, 212t

562   Index Dewar, Margaret, 246 Dhaka (Bangladesh), 100 Dharavi district (Mumbai) Bandra Kurla Complex and, 544 Dalit population in, 539, 547 Dharavi Main Road, 549–​50 Dharavi Redevelopment Authority (DRA) and, 548 Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP) and, 538, 548–​51 fishing village origins of, 538, 539–​ 40, 543–​44 gentrification in, 544 legality questions regarding slum residents in, 541–​42 Mehta’s role in redevelopment plan for, 313–​14, 546, 547–​48 nagars (enclaves) in, 540, 547 population size of, 538 Prime Minister’s Grant Project redevelopment funding (1985) for, 541, 544, 545, 550 railroads in, 543–​44 sanitation and, 545–​46 slum redevelopment proposal for, 538, 543–​45 Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) and, 545, 548, 549–​50 tanneries in, 540, 547 Dickens, Charles on Five Points district of New York City, 445, 458 magazines published by, 204, 215, 404–​5 novels of, 204 on slums and “the attraction of repulsion,” 4, 7, 25 slums compared to labyrinths by, 281 Dieckhoff, Martina, 168 Disraeli, Benjamin, 55 District Six (Cape Town, South Africa), 53–​54, 61–​62, 63–​66, 290 Dohany, William, 478 Doornfontein district (Johannesburg), 62 Dorset Street (London), 404 Dovey, Kim, 6 Dowling, Robert, 232 drunkenness. See alcoholism

Duckworth, George H., 21–​22, 211, 216 Dufresne, Bethe, 24–​25 Dukakis, Michael, 154 Durban (South Africa) African migration from rural areas during nineteenth century to, 59–​60 bubonic plague outbreak (1903) in, 61–​62 European immigration during nineteenth century to, 59–​60 Natal Beer Act of 1908 and, 62–​63 racial segregation in, 59, 61–​63, 65–​66 slum clearance in, 65–​66 Dyos, H. J. (Jim) on “accidental” suburban slums near London, 403–​4 on challenges of understanding life in Victorian London slums, 8 on interplay between suburbs and slums, 282 on legitimate versus mischievous uses of the word “slum,” 6, 7–​8 on London’s slum clearance efforts during nineteenth century, 7 on slums and labor costs in Victorian London, 2 East End (London). See also specific neighborhoods Booth’s analysis of slums and poverty in, 206–​7, 208–​9, 210f, 211, 219 religious mission halls and settlement houses in, 231–​32 slumming and slum tourism in, 24–​25, 224, 228–​29 slums during Victorian and Edwardian eras in, 202, 205, 206–​7, 403 East Harlem (New York City), 333–​34, 338 East London (South Africa), 59 Edinburgh (Great Britain), 253, 256, 288 Egan, Pierce, 23 Eggleston, Benjamin, 191–​92, 193 Ehrenburg, Il’ia G., 357 Ellens, Samantha, 478 Ellmoos, Laila, 491 Elsayed, Hanan, 96 Eltz Residences (Bangkok), 76–​77 eminent domain, 188–​89, 526

Index   563 Engels, Friedrich, 93, 181, 235–​36, 269–​70, 272–​73, 356 England. See Great Britain Englander, David, 2–​3, 206, 208, 214 epidemics. See also specific diseases bacterial transmission discovered as cause of, 303 elite residential districts threatened by, 296–​98, 300 mapping of risks associated with, 301 miasma theory and, 300–​1, 303 overcrowding as factor in, 342 quarantine and surveillance responses to, 302 racial segregation and, 301–​3 sanitation and, 300–​1, 302, 303 slum clearance debated as response to, 303 urban populations’ development of immunity to, 300 vaccination and, 300 zoning and building code responses to risk of, 296–​97, 298, 300, 303, 307 European Commission (EC), 163–​64, 167. See also European Union (EU) European revolts of 1848, 297–​98, 303–​4, 307 European Union (EU). See also European Commission (EC) austerity policies after 2007 in, 162, 169–​70, 171, 172–​73, 174–​75 citizenship rights in, 164, 166–​67, 170 Europe 2020 Strategy and, 169, 170–​7 1 European Social Fund and, 169 “flexicurity” approach to labor markets and, 171–​73, 174–​75 France and, 164 Lisbon Strategy and, 168, 170–​7 1 Maasstricht Treaty (1992) and, 164 National Action Plans on Social Inclusion and, 168 National Reports on Strategies for Social Protection and Social Inclusion and, 168–​69 neoliberalism and, 162, 170–​72, 173 Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in, 168 Single European Market in, 164

social exclusion and, 162, 164, 165–​70, 171, 173, 174–​75 Social Investment Strategy in, 172–​ 73, 174–​75 Exploring the Archaeology of the Modern City project (EAMC), 489–​90, 491, 493 Ezeh, Alex, 89 Fagan Commission, 65–​66 Fair Housing Act (United States, 1968), 337, 346–​47 favelas community and optimism in, 29 drug violence in, 31 etymology of, 126 favela tourism and, 24–​25, 224–​25, 233–​35, 236–​37 in Recife, 127, 132–​33 Regularization Plan of the Special Zones of Social Interest (PREZEIS) and, 134, 137, 140–​41 in Rio de Janeiro, 25, 29, 31, 127 slum clearance and, 128–​30, 138–​39 stereotypes regarding, 25 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 334, 337 Federation of the Urban and Rural Poor (FEDUP), 378t, 383–​84 Fenian movement, 453 Fernández, Mercedes, 522–​23 Field Lane (London), 204 Fieuw, Walter, 383–​84 FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), 139 Filtzer, Donald, 362 Finn, Daniel, 150 Finn, Mary, 411–​12 Finsbury district (London), 42, 202–​3, 208–​10 fires in Boston (1872), 298, 430–​31 in Chicago (1871), 298, 430–​31 elite residential districts threatened by, 296–​98 fire department and water supply upgrades following, 298 Great Fire of London (1666) and, 298, 430–​31

564   Index fires (cont.) Grenfell Tower fire (London, 2017) and, 296, 307–​8 in Hong Kong, 289, 299–​300, 431 in Singapore, 300, 430, 437–​41 in Toronto (1849), 298 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (New York City, 1911) and, 296, 430–​31 zoning and building code responses to risk of, 296–​97, 298–​99, 300, 307 First Five-​Year Plan (Soviet Union, 1928-​32), 358–​59, 362 First World War, 286, 305, 334, 420 Fisherton Street Estate (London), 214–​15 Fisk, G. H. B., 57–​58 Five Points District (New York City) African Americans in, 446, 451–​52 archaeological evidence from, 446–​48, 449–​51, 450f, 453–​56, 455f, 457f Dickens on, 445, 458 electoral participation among residents of, 446 eminent domain debates regarding, 189 gangs in, 445 garment industry and, 448, 451–​58, 452t, 455f Goldberg family in, 449–​51, 455, 459 Irish immigrant population in, 445–​46, 447–​48, 451–​52, 453, 454, 458 Italian immigrant population in, 451–​52, 454 Jewish immigrant population in, 446, 447–​59 Polish immigrant population in, 454 racialization of populations at, 458–​59 synagogues in, 448, 449, 451, 452–​53 Flint (Michigan), 247 Flower and Dean Street neighborhood (London), 45 Flynn, Nick, 155–​56 Flynn, Raymond, 156 Fokdal, Josefine, 376 Ford, Henry, 465 Ford, James, 252 Ford Foundation, 257, 386 Fort Greene housing project (New York City), 345

Fort Point housing shelter (Boston), 155 Foster, George, 446, 448–​49, 455–​56, 459 Foucault, Michel, 38, 281–​82 Fox, Sean, 100–​1 Foy family (early twentieth-​century Detroit), 478–​79 France, 164–​65, 166, 167, 301 Frankenhoff, Charles, 247 Freedom Park (Cape Town, South Africa), 97 French, Matthew, 99 French Revolution, 304, 307 Freyre, Gilberto, 140 Fulham district (London), 216–​18 Fuller, Bernard, 60–​61 Furber, Charles, 413–​14 Gaffikin, Frank, 173 Gaillard, Jeanne, 269–​70 Gallie, Duncan, 168 Gandhi, Indira, 317–​18, 541 Gandhi, Mahatma, 313 Gandhi, Rajiv, 544 Gandhi, Sanjay, 318 gangs, 337, 342, 434, 445 Gangs of New York (film), 445 Gans, Herbert, 3, 30, 149 García family (Santa Marta, Colombia), 506–​7, 508–​9, 510 Gaskell, S. Martin, 285 Gautier, Théophile, 304 Geddes, Patrick, 276, 284–​85, 288, 316–​17 gender analysis of slum life London in Victorian and Edwardian eras and, 39–​47 revisionist history regarding nineteenth-​ century urban capitalism and, 6–​7 sexual violence and, 38–​39 water access and, 39 women’s development of networks and community in slums and, 37–​38 world poverty and, 38–​39 gentrification in Boston, 157–​58 Haussmann and, 270, 304 in Moscow, 368 slumming and, 232, 234

Index   565 slum upgrading efforts leading to, 96–​97, 102–​3, 254 in South Africa, 53 George Street (London), 211–​14, 212t Germany, 165 Ghana, 39, 378t Gibbs, Henry, 64–​65 G.I. Bill (Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, 1944), 334 Giddy, Julia, 90 gig economy, 38 Gilbert, Alan, 4–​5, 23–​24, 28 Gill, Kaveri, 40 Gilyarovsky, Vladimir A., 354 Gissing, George, 204–​5, 215–​17 Glasgow (Great Britain), 281, 288, 305 Global Campaign for Secure Tenure, 376–​77 Global Financial Crisis (2007-​9), 162, 169, 171, 172 Global Platform for the Right to the City, 375 Global South economic inequality in, 4 informal economies in, 27–​28, 40 lack of affordable low-​income housing in, 92, 96 lack of services in, 40–​41, 48, 101 limited state power in, 255–​56 municipal governance in, 90, 100–​2 neoliberalism and, 3–​4, 40, 91 slumming and, 225, 234–35, 238 slums and, 3–​4, 40, 90, 92, 95–​96 zoning laws in cities of, 296–​97 Goh Keng Swee, 436 Goldberg family (New York City, 1840s), 449–​51, 455, 459 Golden, Daniel, 155 Gómez, Jorge, 531 González, José Luis, 529–​30 Goodwill Industries, 150 Gordimer, Nadine, 66 Grande Croisée (Paris), 268 Grantham, Alexander, 306 Gratiot Avenue (Detroit), 473 Gray, George W., 473 Great Britain. See also British colonialism Artisans’ Dwelling Act (1882) in, 286 Cross Act (1875) in, 214–​15, 255, 286

Department of Work and Pensions in, 48 Housing Act of 1930 in, 63–​64 Housing and Town Planning Act (1919) in, 305 Housing of the Working Classes Act (1890) in, 214–​15, 258 Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act (1851) in, 285–​86 Local Government Act of 1848 and, 285 Nuisances Removal Act (1855) in, 285–​86 Poor Law system in, 44–​45, 47–​48 public education in, 40 Public Health Act (1848) in, 252–​53, 283–​84, 285 Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Act (1915) in, 305 Sanitary Act (1866) in, 252–​53 Social Inclusion Unit in, 253 Torrens Act (1868) in, 255, 286 Towns Improvement Clauses Act (1847) in, 285 voting rights in, 248 Great Depression, 63, 148, 153, 247, 251, 334, 340–​41, 518 Great Fire of London (1666), 298, 430–​31 Greece, 165, 172–​73 Grenfell Tower fire (London, 2017), 296, 307–​8 Grey, George, 59 Griggs, Heather, 453–​54 Grinstein, Hyman, 448, 449, 457–​59 Griscom, John, 188 Grogan, John, 414 Grogan, Sabina, 408, 409, 414, 419 Guangzhou (China), 99–​100 Guattari, Félix, 73, 81, 85 Guayaquil (Colombia), 126–​27, 503–​4 Guaypao (Puerto Rico), 521–​23, 528, 532–​33 Guest, Edgar A., 465–​66 Gulag prison system (Soviet Union), 358–​59, 368 Gupta, Raj Bahadur, 316 Habitat International Coalition (HIC), 94–​95, 96, 374–​75, 384–​85 Hager, Brian, 172 Hailey, Lord, 290 Hajjan, Jeanette, 152

566   Index Hamble, Nancy, 414 Hampstead Heath (London), 47–​48 Hankins, George, 408–​9 Harare (Zimbabwe), 99 Harlem district (New York City), 333–​34, 338, 339, 340 Harrington, Michael, 346–​47 Harriss, John, 323 Harvey, David, 25–​26, 91, 276, 304 Hastings Street (Detroit), 474–​75 Haussmann, Georges-​Eugene Engels on, 269–​70 gentrification and, 270, 304 “Haussmannization” and, 235–​36, 266–​67, 270, 271–​72, 276–​77, 304 land expropriation powers of, 268–​69 Napoleon III and, 266, 268–​69, 276 “nomads” of Paris and, 272–​73 parks and public buildings in Paris established by, 268 property owners’ confrontations with, 273–​76 sanitation in Paris and, 266, 268, 270–​7 1 slum clearances in Paris and, 251, 267, 269–​ 72, 275–​77 street design and layout in Paris and, 266, 268, 274, 286, 304 Head Start program, 346–​47 Heap, Chad, 232 Heidegger, Martin, 504 Helm, D. J., 473 Henry Dickens Court (London), 422 Hermann, Christoph, 170–​7 1 Herrle, Peter, 376 Heywood, Philip, 92 Highland Park Plant (Detroit), 465 Hill, Isabella, 416–​17 Historic Conservation and Interpretation, Inc., 446, 447f HIV/​AIDS, 38–​39, 109–​10 Hobbs, Charlotte, 414–​15 Hobbs, Edward, 412 Hobsbawm, Eric, 297–​98, 303 Hoffman Boardinghouse (Detroit), 479–​80, 480f Hofmeyr, J. H., 58 Holborn district (London), 202, 219

Hollingshead, John, 202–​3, 215–​16 Holloway district (London), 45, 405 Holmes, H. W., 409 homelessness alcoholism and, 149–​50, 151, 153–​54, 155, 157 almshouses and, 147 in Boston, 146–​57 Great Depression and, 148, 153 mentally ill population and, 153–​54, 156 press exposés regarding, 147, 155 Reagan and, 155 urban renewal programs and, 146–​47, 149 women experiencing, 152–​54, 156, 157–​58 work requirements for welfare services and, 147 Homestead (Pennsylvania), 247–​48 Hong Kong bubonic plague outbreak (1894) in, 284–​ 85, 302–​3 China’s return to control (1997) of, 289 Communist Party takeover of China (1949) and, 306 Disturbances (1967) in, 306–​7 fire (1949) in, 299–​300 fire (1953) in, 289, 299–​300, 431 population growth during twentieth century in, 299 racial segregation during colonial era in, 303 refugees from Communist takeover of China in, 289 Resettlement Estates in, 306 riot (1952) in, 306 sanitation in, 303 slum clearance in, 255–​56, 289 squatter population during 1950s in, 306 Squatter Resettlement Programme in, 299–​300, 306 Ten Year Housing Scheme (1970s) in, 306–​7 Hoogendoorn, Gijsbert, 90 Household Words magazine, 204, 215, 404–​5 House of All Nations living quarters (London), 467 Housing Act of 1949 (United States), 148, 344–​45 Housing Act of 1954 (United States), 346 Housing of the Working Classes Act (Great Britain, 1885), 24

Index   567 How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 7–​8, 24, 146, 333, 473 Huchzermeyer, Marie, 28 Hugh-​Jones, Stephen, 507 Hull House (Chicago), 24 Hyde Park Barracks (Sydney), 489–​90 Hyderabad (India), 288, 319 Hyndman, Henry, 200–​1 Idawati, Dyah Erti, 83 Igarassú (Brazil), 139 India British colonial rule in, 59, 281–​84, 287–​88, 297, 302–​3, 314–​18, 326 bubonic plague outbreaks in, 315 bypass urbanism in, 320–​21 censuses in, 112–​14, 119, 123 cholera outbreaks in, 249–​50, 315 cities as drivers of economic growth in, 319–​21 civic nationalism during colonial period in, 316 data gathering on slums in, 110, 112–​14, 119–​23 democratic electoral politics in, 110 Diwali festivals in, 316–​17 electoral participation of urban poor in, 323–​25 Emergency period (1970s) and class conflict in, 317–​18, 321–​22 Great Britain’s Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1885 as a model for, 24 infant mortality rate in, 40–​41 legal cases about squatter settlements in, 322–​23 Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation (MHUPA) in, 112–​13, 114–​15, 116t, 118, 120–​21, 123 overall size of slum population in, 123 Prime Minister’s Grant Project (PMGP) in, 541, 545, 550 Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), 374–​75, 378t Pronab Sen Committee in, 114 rebellion (1857) in, 59, 314–​15 Residents Welfare Associations (RWA) in, 321–​22

sanitation in, 119–​20, 120t, 121, 121t, 122t, 314–​15 scheduled caste and scheduled tribe populations in, 115, 119–​20, 122t slum clearance in, 27, 110–​11, 250–​51, 258–​59, 288–​89, 316, 317–​20, 322, 323, 541, 542 slum upgrading programs in, 98, 110–​11, 120, 253, 258, 318–​19, 541, 543 slum vulnerability indices in, 114–​17, 116t Supreme Court in, 322, 542 tenability of slum residency in, 111, 112, 117–​21, 120t, 121t Indian Grey Street Complex (Durban, South Africa), 65–​66 indignados movement (Spain), 174 Indiranagar slum (Mumbai), 27 Indonesia Dutch colonial era in, 81–​82, 249–​50, 252, 253, 258 factories in, 40 Independence War (1945-​49) in, 81–​82 kampung (improvised urban settlements) in, 81–​83, 86, 97–​98 luxury housing and corporate offices in, 82–​83, 251 Muslim-​majority population in, 83 rural-​to-​urban migration in, 81–​82 slum clearance in, 82 slum upgrading in, 97–​98, 249–​50, 252, 253, 256–​57, 258 Industrial Revolution, 89, 93, 306–​7 Infanzón, Amador, 523–​24 Ingold, Tim, 504–​5 International Federation of the Homeless Poor, 389. See also Slum Dwellers International (SDI) International Monetary Fund (IMF), 91 International Sanitary Conference (1851), 302 Internet and Communications Technologies (ICTs), 235 Intramuros (Philippines), 46–​47 Iofan, Boris M., 364–​65 Irkutsk (Russia), 366 Italy, 165 Jacobs, Jane, 66, 236, 338 Jacobs, Sarah, 454

568   Index Jacob’s Island (London), 202, 204 Jagmohan, 318 Jakarta (Indonesia), 26, 82, 253, 256–​57, 388t, 431 Jamaica Plain district (Boston), 150, 152 Japanese Village carnival (Detroit, 1886), 470 Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), 320, 324–​25 Jenkins, Elizabeth, 341 Jennings, Hilda, 30 Jephson, Arthur William, 30 Jessop, Bob, 173 Jewish immigrants in New York City American patriotism and assimilation to democracy among, 457–​58 gangs among, 342 garment industry and, 447–​48, 451–​58, 452t, 455f kosher dietary observance among, 449–​51, 453–​54, 455 racialization of, 459 synagogues and, 448, 449, 451, 452–​53 Johannesburg (South Africa) Asian population in, 62 British colonial rule in, 62 bubonic plague outbreak (1904) in, 62 gold mines in, 59–​60 racial segregation in, 61, 62, 64 shantytowns surrounding, 64 slum clearance in, 53–​54, 64, 65–​66 slum tourism in, 24–​25, 231 John Milner Associates, Inc., 447 Johnson, Lyndon, 248, 346–​47 Jones, Gareth Stedman, 200 Jones, Paul, 97–​98 Jones, Siân, 459 Jones v. Mayer, 337 Kala Killa district (Mumbai), 539 Kaliasin kampung (Surabaya, Indonesia), 82–​83, 84, 86 Kalil, Alice, 152 Kali Surabaya river (Indonesia), 83 Kalyanwadi district (Mumbai), 540 Kamenka River slums (Soviet Union), 364–​65 Kampala (Uganda), 99 Kampong Bugis (Singapore), 437–​38

Kampong Koo Chye fire (Singapore, 1958), 437, 438 Kampong Tiong Bahru (Singapore), 433, 438, 439 Kampung Baru (Kuala Lampur), 83–​84 Kampung Bratang (Surabaya, Indonesia), 83 Kampung Kebraon (Surabaya, Indonesia), 83 Kanpur (India), 316 Kantor, Harvey, 3 Karachi (Pakistan), 288 Karskens, Grace, 494 Kazan (Russia), 367 Keating, Peter J., 7–​8 Kenley Street (London), 406t, 419–​20, 422 Kennedy, John F., 346–​47 Kenney, Charles, 146 Kensal New Town (London), 209–​10, 410–​11 Kensington district (London). See also Bangor Street area (London); Notting Dale district (London) begging in, 413–​14 Borough Council in, 296 Grenfell Tower fire (2017) in, 296, 307–​8 Kensington Vestry, 417–​19, 422 laundries in, 410–​11 lodging houses in, 419–​20 rents during Victorian Era in, 407 South Kensington and, 307–​8 Victorian and Edwardian era slums in, 202–​3, 403, 404–​5, 417–​18 Kenya slum alleviation programs in, 96–​98 Slum Dwellers International in, 382, 383–​86 Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP), 96–​97 Kerner Commission, 248, 249 Khan, Abdul Aziz, 549–​50 Khlong Bang Bua settlement (Bangkok), 79–​81 Khlong Toei slums (Bangkok), 74, 75–​79, 78f Khrushchev, Nikita S., 363–​64, 367 Kibera (Kenya) girls as victims of sexual violence in, 38–​39 informal economic sector in, 27 Kenyan government’s eviction of residents from, 290 Kenya Slum Upgrading Programme (KENSUP) and, 96–​97

Index   569 rural migration to, 290 size of overall population in, 290 urban politics and, 4–​5 volunteer tourism in, 234 Kidambi, Prashant, 315 kijiji (slums in Kenya), 90 Kimberley (South Africa), 59–​61 King, Henry Seymour, 419 King, Julia, 412 King, Robin, 92 King, Ross, 6 King’s Cross (London), 202–​3, 217–​18 Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), 247 Klein, Maury, 3 Know Your City Campaign (KYC), 385, 392–​ 93, 394 Koens, Ko, 226–​27 Kohr, Leopold, 529–​30 Koliwada district (Mumbai), 539–​40, 548–​49 Kolkata (India). See Calcutta (India) Kotkin, Stephen, 360–​61 Koven, Seth, 200, 225–​27, 232 Kowloon area (Hong Kong), 289, 299–​300 Kramer, David, 66 Krestovsky, Vsevolod V., 354 Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), 83–​84, 86 Kulaks (“rich” peasants in Russia), 358–​59 Kumbharwada district (Mumbai), 539 Kundu, Amitabh, 115, 118, 123 Kurz, Otto R., 478 Kyrgyz, 361 Lagos (Nigeria), 288 Lambert, Brooke, 230–​31 Langa (South Africa), 63 Langford Road (London), 216–​17 La Perla (Puerto Rico) churches in, 527–​28 consolidation and gentrification period (1980-​present) in, 529–​32 drug arrests (2011) in, 531–​32 Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit (1934) to, 524–​25 foundation and growth period (1900-​40) in, 519–​24 land transfers to residents (1980-​2010) in, 530

Lewis’s depiction (1965) of, 516, 526–​27 modernization and proposed clearance (1940-​80) of, 524–​29 photos of, 517f, 520f, 521f, 523f, 525f, 527f, 528f, 531f prostitution in, 524 ranchón buildings in, 519–​21, 522f, 522–​23, 524, 528f, 528 slaughterhouse in, 517, 518, 519, 523, 528 “slum” image of, 516–​18 tourism and, 533 upgrading of buildings over time in, 519 US developmental program funding in, 517 La Puntilla (Puerto Rico), 526 Lawndale district (Chicago), 337–​38, 342 Lee Ah Gar, 433–​34, 439 Lee Kwan Yew, 439–​40 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 94–​95 Lemuel Shattuck Hospital (Boston), 155 Lenin, Vladimir I., 356–​57 Leningrad (Soviet Union), 356 Lewis, Heylan, 90, 94 Lewis, Oscar, 37, 516, 526–​27 Ley, Astrid, 376 Liberia, 380t, 382 Licking River Valley (Kentucky), 184 Lilyvale site (Sydney), 489–​90, 491 Lima (Peru), 6 Lindner, Rolf, 230 Linnott, John, 453 Lisson Grove (London), 209–​10 Little Clarendon Street (London), 208, 212t Littlejohn, Henry, 253 Little Lon site (Melbourne) archeology and material analysis of life (1850-​1950) in, 9, 486, 487–​89, 492–​93, 494–​96 Casselden Place and, 486, 489, 494–​95 contemporary business located at, 495 slum clearance at, 486 Liverpool (Great Britain), 21–​22, 28–​29, 43–​44, 93, 288 Living Museums (Sydney), 490, 494 Lloyd, John, 418–​19 Lock Bridge (London), 209–​10 Logue, Edward J., 150

570   Index London Archaeological Archive and Resource Centre (LAARC), 492 London City Mission, 417–​18 London County Council (LCC) Bangor Street area and, 418–​19, 421–​22 Boundary Street Estate developed by, 286–​87 slum clearance and, 214–​15, 218, 219 London during Victorian and Edwardian Era. See also specific neighborhoods and streets alcoholism in, 42, 45, 46–​47, 216, 412–​13 Booth’s maps and typology of poverty and slums in, 200–​1, 202–​3, 206–​14, 207t, 209f, 210f, 212t, 217–​19, 230, 420–​21 charities in, 47–​48, 231, 238 childcare and housework in, 46 cholera outbreaks in, 228, 230, 301 endogamy and social networks in, 42 family history as means of studying, 404 fiction about slums in, 204–​6, 215–​17 gendered analysis of slum life in, 39–​47 “hidden matriarchy” in, 43, 45 immigrant communities in, 202–​3, 216–​17 male breadwinner model and, 45–​46 Metropolitan Board of Works in, 214–​15, 286, 418 Metropolitan Commission of Sewers in, 252–​53 Metropolitan Water Act (1871) and, 252–​53 mutual aid networks in, 44–​45 oral history as means of studying, 404 prostitution in, 208, 216 railway and road construction in, 201, 214–​15, 219, 283–​84 Removal Act (1855) and, 252–​53 sex and, 46–​47 slum clearance and, 7, 41–​42, 201, 214–​16, 218, 219, 250–​51, 258 slumming in, 24–​25, 224, 225–​26, 227–​32 vermin and filth in, 42 violence in, 45, 46 London Lock Hospital, 416–​17 Long Island Hospital (Boston), 155, 157 Los Angeles (California) African Americans in, 336 homeless population in, 157 Mexican Americans in, 335, 336, 337, 338–​39 Zoot Suit Riots (1943) in, 337

Lovejoy, Luther E., 466–​67, 468–​69 Lower East Side district (New York City), 333, 458, 459 Lower Sukhumvit district (Bangkok), 75, 76 Loyer, François, 266–​67 Lucknow (India), 288 Lugard, Lord, 290 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 131 Luzhkov, Yuri M., 367 Maastricht Treaty (Treaty on European Union, 1992), 164 Macclesfield (Great Britain), 45–​46 MacLehose, Murray, 306–​7 Madison, Charles A., 7–​8 Madras (India), 59, 297. See also Chennai (India) Mae Nak Phra Khanong, 78–​79 Magalhães, Agamenon, 129 Magnitogorsk (Soviet Union), 360–​62 Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA), 549 Maharashtra state (India), 541, 546 Mahila Milan, 253–​54, 374–​75, 378t Malawi, 378t, 383–​84 Malaysia, 83–​84 Manchester (Great Britain) Engels on working class in, 93, 181 Industrial Revolution and, 93 Irish population in, 245 pawnshops in, 43–​44 people’s pride in their homes in, 28 sanitation in, 252–​53 Mangin, William, 94 Mangueira (Brazil), 133 Mangue Seco Beach (Brazil), 139 Manila (The Philippines), 431–​32 Mann, Michael, 86 Mannik and Smith Group, 471 Manning Place (London), 211–​14, 212t Marqués, René, 529–​30 Marris, Peter, 21 Marshall, T. H., 166 Martin, Anna, 46–​47 Martin, Richard, 21–​22, 25 Marvel, Lucilla and Tom, 516, 529–​30 Marx, Karl, 356, 504

Index   571 Marylebone Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, 214–​15 Marylebone Council, 219 Massachusetts Avenue (Boston), 157–​58 Mathema, Ashna, 21–​22, 25 Matunga Labour Camp (Mumbai), 539 Mayhew, Henry, 6, 7–​8, 229–​30 Mayne, Alan, 228, 432, 486–​87, 489, 494 McAlpin, Kailey, 479 McMorris, Mary Ann, 413–​14 Mead, George, 411–​12 Mearns, Andrew, 24, 64, 200–​1, 230–​31 Megion (Russia), 365 Mehta, Mukesh, 313–​14, 325–​26, 544, 546, 547–​48 Melbourne (Australia). See also specific locations archaeological research regarding slum sites in, 9, 486, 487–​89, 490, 492–​93, 494–​96 British settlement established (1835) in, 487 Chinatown in, 228–​29 contemporary sales of Victorian Era housing in, 30 slumming in, 494 Melun Law (France, 1850), 301 Merrifield, Andy, 270 Mexican Americans Bracero program and, 335 deportations of, 335, 337 in Los Angeles, 335, 336, 337, 338–​39 migration to cities during twentieth century of, 332, 334, 335 segregation and discrimination against, 336, 337 Miami (Florida), 337, 346 Miami and Erie Canal, 185, 186f, 190–​92, 193 miasma theory, 188, 191, 300–​1, 303 Michigan Central Railroad Station (Detroit), 469, 475–​76, 477f, 478, 479, 480f Middleman, Judah, 452–​53 Middle Sukhumvit (Bangkok), 75 Millar, Katharine, 390–​91 Mill Creek Valley (Ohio), 184–​85 Millennium Development Goals (MDG, United Nations), 1, 5, 91–​92, 96, 111, 114, 120

Milne, Claudia, 450–​51, 455 Mingione, Enzo, 174 Miranda slum (Puerto Rico), 520, 524 Miró building (La Perla, Puerto Rico), 522–​23, 527f, 528 Misereor, 386 Mitchell, James, 412 Mithi River, 539, 540, 543–​44 Mitlin, Diana, 383–​84, 386 mocambos (Brazilian squatter settlements), 126–​27, 129, 132, 140 Model Cities program, 346–​47 Modi, Narendra, 313–​14 Modisane, Bloke, 66 Molokoane, Rose, 377, 384–​85, 387–​89, 391–​92 Moloney, John, 494 Monkkonen, Paavo, 96, 100 Monroe (Louisiana), 339 Morris, Constantine, 407 Morrison, Arthur, 45, 203, 205 Morrison, Nicola, 99 Morro da Favela (Bahia, Brazil), 126 Morros de Casa Amarela (Recife, Brazil), 133 Moscow (Russia), 356, 367–​68 Moser, Caroline, 503–​4 Moses, Robert, 236 Muchadenyika, Davison, 99 Mumbai (India). See also Bombay (India); Dharavi district (Mumbai) “Annawadi settlement” described by Katherine Boo in, 38, 40–​41, 48 commuter rail station deaths (2017) in, 547 Dalit population in, 245, 539, 547 electoral participation of urban poor in, 323 Global Financial Crisis and land price declines (2008) in, 545 Maharashtra state government and, 541, 543, 544 monsoons in, 547 nongovernmental organizations advocating for slum residents in, 374–​75 old textile area in, 546–​47 overall size of slum population in, 95–​96 private sector’s role in slum rehabilitation in, 99–​100 refugees from India partition in, 540–​41

572   Index Mumbai (India) (cont.) slum clearance in, 250–​51, 258–​59, 319, 323, 541, 542 Slumdog Millionaire (film) and, 235 Slum Rehabilitation Scheme (SRS) and, 544–​46, 548, 549–​50 slum residents in, 540–​41 slum upgrading in, 541, 543 Murray, Tim, 9, 491, 495–​96 Museum of Victoria (Melbourne), 490, 494 Mustardinha (Brazil), 133 Myers, Mendel, 454 Myrdal, Gunnar, 93 Nairobi (Kenya), 4–​5, 24–​25, 96, 235. See also Kibera (Kenya) Nakhalovka settlement (Novosibirsk, Russia), 364–​65 nakhalovki (squatter settlements in Russia), 357–​58 Namibia, 378t, 382, 388t Napoleon I (emperor of France), 268 Napoleon III (emperor of France), 266, 268–​69, 272–​73, 276 Nassar, Dina, 96 Natal Colony (South Africa), 54, 59–​60, 61–​62, 287 National Party (NP, South Africa), 53–​54, 65–​66 National Slum Dwellers Federation (NSDF), 21, 374–​75, 378t, 383–​84, 389 Native Americans, 149–​50, 184, 335 Native Reserve Location Act of 1902 (Cape Colony), 61–​62 Ndabeni (South Africa), 61–​62 Near West Side (Chicago), 29, 333 Nefteiugansk (oil slum in Russia), 365–​66 neoliberalism Brazil and, 130, 131, 136–​37 European Union and, 162, 170–​72, 173 free markets and, 91, 162, 170 Global South slums and, 3–​4, 40, 91 private property emphasis in, 91, 94–​95, 102 slum upgrading programs and, 97–​99, 101–​2, 103 state withdrawal from public sector and, 38, 47–​48, 91, 162, 170, 256

trickle down economics and, 171 wealth concentration and, 40 The Netherlands, 54, 81–​82, 171–​72, 249, 252, 253, 258 The Nether World (Gissing), 205, 216–​17 Neuwirth, Robert, 24, 517–​18 Newark (New Jersey), 336 New Deal, 148, 524–​25 New Delhi (India) legal cases about squatter settlements in, 322–​23 slum clearance in, 27, 258–​59, 318, 319 New Economic Policy (NEP, Soviet Union), 356–​58 New Guinea, 249 Newman, Peter, 98 New Orleans (Louisiana), 183, 193–​94, 342 New Peter Street (Chadwick Street, London), 215 New York City. See also specific neighborhoods and streets African Americans in, 336, 337–​38, 339, 341, 446, 451–​52 Charity Organization Society and work requirements for welfare in, 147 cholera outbreaks during nineteenth century in, 193 Draft Riots (1863), 193 gangs in, 342, 445 grassroots resistance to urban development programs in, 236 homeless population in, 153, 154, 157 Metropolitan Board of Health in, 193 public housing projects in, 345 Puerto Rican population in, 333, 335, 337, 338 slumming in, 232 tenement housing in, 194 zoning laws introduced (1916) in, 296–​97 Ngangelizwe township (South Africa), 38–​39 Nigeria, 376, 378t, 382, 383–​85 Nightingale Street Buildings (London), 212t, 214–​15, 217–​18 Nixon, Richard, 364, 366–​67 Nolan, Brian, 167–​68 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) bases for legitimacy at, 387–​89

Index   573 democratic standards for representation and, 386–​89 digital communication by, 390–​91 housing programs and, 100 images of suffering utilized for fundraising by, 391 “right to the city” approaches and, 375 volunteer tourism and, 234, 238 North, Ellen, 415–​16 North Marylebone district (London), 211–​15, 212t, 219 Notting Dale district (London). See also Bangor Street area (London) alcoholism in, 412 begging in, 413–​14 furnished houses in, 408 informal economy in, 41 laundries in, 410–​11 Notting Dale Special Area (NDSA) and, 406t, 418, 419–​20, 421–​22 pigs in, 404–​5 police in, 415–​16 “The Potteries” in, 202–​3, 404–​5, 417–​18 prostitution in, 416–​17 renaming of streets (1921-​35) in, 422 as source of domestic laborers for Notting Hill District and, 404–​5 Novak, William, 189 Novosibirsk (Russia), 357–​58, 363, 364–​65, 366–​67 Oakland (California), 340 Octavia Hill, 214–​15, 286 O’Day, Rosemary, 206, 208, 214 Ohio River, 183, 184–​85, 190–​91 Old Nichol Street (London), 404 Old San Juan (Puerto Rico), 516, 518, 531–​33 Olinda (Brazil), 139 Oliver Twist (Dickens), 204 Olley, Maria, 412–​13 Operation Bootstrap (Puerto Rico), 335, 525 Operation Wetback (United States), 335, 337 Oram, Nigel, 245–​46, 249 Orange Free State, 54 Orange Street (New York City), 446, 447–​48, 451–​58, 452t, 459 Orcus Street (London), 212t, 214–​15, 217–​18

Orgad, Shani, 391–​92 Orlando (South Africa), 63 Orleans Landing (Detroit), 471–​73 Orser, Charles, 458 Ortiz family, 505 Ottakring quarter (Vienna), 304–​5 Over-​the-​Rhine district (Cincinnati), 186–​87 Oxfam, 390–​91, 392 Ozarow, Daniel, 503 Paccoud, Antoine, 304 Paddy’s Market (Sydney), 489–​90, 491 Painter, Joe, 504 Pakistan, 388t, 540–​41 Pakuwon Group, 82–​83 Pamoja Trust, 92–​93, 378t, 384–​85 Pantanal favela (Recife, Brazil), 138 Paradise Square (New York City), 445–​46 Paradise Valley neighborhood (Detroit), 481 Paris (France) cholera outbreaks (1848-​49) in, 301 income inequality in, 267 medieval core of, 268, 271, 276 “nomads” of, 272–​73 Paris Commune government (1871) in, 269–​70, 304 parks and public buildings in, 268 peripheral suburbs incorporated (1860) into, 268 revolts (1789-​1871) in, 303–​4 rural migration to the city and region of, 271, 272 sanitation in, 266, 268, 270–​7 1 slum clearance in, 251, 267, 269–​72, 275–​77 street design and layout in, 266, 268, 274, 286, 304 Parnell, Susan, 53, 62 Patel, Sheela, 377 Paton, Alan, 64–​65 Paugam, Serge, 165–​67 Peabody Trust, 215 Pearl Street (New York City), 446, 447–​49, 450f, 451 Peattie, Lisa, 94, 249 People +​Place database, 491, 493 People’s Action Party (PAP, Singapore), 431, 436, 437–​38, 440

574   Index People’s Dialogue on Land and Shelter, 375 Pepper, Simon, 6 Perlman, Janice, 25, 29, 31 Pernambuco state (Brazil), 129, 132, 133, 138–​39 Perry, David, 173 Peru, 94, 126–​27, 247, 388t Pete’s Place (Detroit), 469–​70 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 334, 336, 347, 466–​67 The Philippines, 377–​82, 380t, 388t, 392–​93 Phra Khanong market (Bangkok), 76–​79 Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 86 Pillai, S. Devadas, 20 Pina neighborhood (Recife), 138–​39 Pine Street Inn (Boston), 151–​52, 155, 157–​58 Pitampura-​Manchanda case (India), 322 Place de la Nation (Paris), 268 Place de l’Etoile (Paris), 268 Planet of Slums (Davis), 2, 92, 238, 366, 517–​18 Plug Uglies (New York City gang), 445 Poor Law system (Great Britain), 44–​45, 47–​48 “Porkopolis” (Cincinnati), 190 Port Elizabeth (South Africa), 58–​62, 64–​65 Porter, Stephen, 298 Portobello Road market (London), 412 Portugal, 165, 172–​73 Potomac Quarter (Detroit) archaeological evidence from, 471–​72 boarding houses in, 467, 469–​70, 471–​72 Japanese Village carnival (1886) in, 470 maps of, 468f, 477f prostitution in, 469–​7 1 sanitation in, 471–​72 slumming in, 470 as “vice quarter,” 467, 469–​72 The Potteries (London), 202–​3, 404–​5, 417–​18 Preston (Great Britain), 45–​46 Progressive Era urban reforms, 196, 333, 341, 342 Prospect Town settlement (Johannesburg, South Africa), 64 Puerta de Tierra district (Puerto Rico), 520, 521f, 522f, 523–​24 Puerto Rican Architects’ Association, 529 Puerto Ricans in mainland United States gangs and, 337, 342 music and, 340

New York City and, 333, 335, 337, 338 Operation Bootstrap and, 335 segregation and discrimination against, 336, 337 twentieth-​century migration to cities and, 332, 334, 335 Puerto Rico. See also specific towns Department of Housing in, 529 Housing Association (PRHA) in, 525 Junta de Planificación in, 525 land ownership and rental laws in, 520 New Deal and, 524–​25 population size of, 516 Reconstruction Administration in, 525 Resettlement Administration in, 525 slum clearance in, 525–​26 Spanish colonial period in, 519 US annexation (1898) of, 516 Purcell, Mark, 94–​95 Pye Street (London), 202, 215 Quartier de l’Europe (Paris), 275 Queenstown (Singapore), 435 Quinter family and (Santa Marta, Colombia), 506, 507–​8, 510 Radical Republicans (US political faction of nineteenth century), 192, 193, 194 Rangoon (Burma), 288 Rapoport, Amos, 28, 29, 30 Ratcliffe Highway (London), 202 Rattanakosin district (Bangkok), 74 Reagan, Ronald, 155, 173 Recife (Brazil) favelas in, 127, 132–​33 flooding (1975) in, 132 invasões (households occupying land) in, 132–​33, 134–​36 mocambos (squatter settlements) in, 132 Participatory Budget (PB) program in, 137 population density in, 132 slum clearance in, 129, 138–​39 slum upgrading programs in, 133 Special Zones of Interest (ZEIS) in, 133–​34, 136, 137, 140–​41 Workers Party in, 137 World Cup (2014) hosted in, 139

Index   575 Reckner, Paul, 456–​57 Reeder, David, 2, 282, 403–​4 Ren, Xuefei, 99–​100 Rhodes, Cecil, 56, 58 Riccardi, Pamela, 490 Richards, Edwin (E.P.), 23–​24, 281, 284–​85, 289 Richmond (California), 334 Riera, José D. expropriation and redevelopment of the estate of, 530, 532 land owned in La Perla by, 519–​20, 521–​24 properties rented by, 520–​21 refusal to sell land for slum clearance purposes by, 526 “right to the city” philosophy, 94–​95, 103, 375 Riis, Jacob, 6, 7–​8, 24, 146, 150, 333, 473 Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) City of God (film) and, 235 drug violence in, 31 Earth Summit (1992) in, 233–​34 electoral politics in, 99–​100 favelas in, 25, 29, 31, 127 favela tourism in, 24–​25, 224–​25, 233–​35, 237 research tourism in, 234 Riomar shopping center (Recife, Brazil), 139 riots barricades as response to, 304 in Bombay (1898), 302–​3 elite residential districts threatened by, 296–​98, 303 European revolts of 1848 and, 297–​98, 303–​4, 307 in Hong Kong (1952), 306 Hong Kong “Disturbances” (1960s) and, 306–​7 housing reforms as a response to, 304 in Paris (1789-​1871), 303–​4 racial segregation as response to, 305 in US cities (1967), 248, 249 US race riots (1917-​19) and, 305 in Vienna (1848 and 1911), 304–​5 zoning responses to risk of, 296–​97, 307 Rive, Richard, 66 Roberts, Robert, 44 Robinson, Joan, 40 “The Rocks” (Sydney), 486–​87, 489–​90, 493–​94

Rogosin, Lionel, 66 Rojas, Eduardo, 98 Romero-​Barceló, Carlos, 529 Romeyn, Esther, 25–​26 Room, Graham, 166 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 524–​25 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 524–​25 Roosevelt Park (Detroit), 469, 476, 477f, 478, 480f Rosen, Christine Meisner, 298 Rosie’s Place (Boston), 153–​54, 156, 157–​58 Ross, Ellen, 6–​7, 226–​27, 229, 232 Rotherhithe (London), 204, 209–​10 Rouse, James, 346 Rousseff, Dilma, 131 Roxbury district (Boston), 150, 152 Roy, Ananya, 383 Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1884-​85), 24, 41–​42, 417–​18 Rue de Rivoli (Paris), 268 Rusha, Alfred, 408–​9 Russia. See also Soviet Union civil war (1917-​22) in, 356, 357 Decree on the Nationalization of Land (1917) in, 356 privatization of housing during 1990s in, 366 slum clearance in, 367–​68 slums in, 354, 366–​67 urbanization during twentieth century in, 354–​55 Safa, Helen, 516, 527 Saffron Hill (London), 202–​4 Sainath, P., 319 Saint-​Simon, Henri de, 274 Saint-​Victor neighborhood (Paris), 271 Salford (Great Britain), 43–​44 Salisbury, Harrison, 345 Salvation Army, 148, 150, 201, 231 samostroy (unauthorized housing construction in Russia), 354, 365 Sampson, Anthony, 66 Sandbrook, Richard, 93 Sandhurst, Second Baron of, 24 San Francisco (California), 228–​29, 232, 298–​99, 466–​67, 486–​87

576   Index San Juan (Puerto Rico), 250–​51, 516, 520–​21, 523, 524–​26. See also specific neighborhoods Santa Marta (Colombia) educational achievement in, 509–​10, 511 García family and, 506–​7, 508–​9, 510 informal settlements and gradual improvements in housing in, 502–​3, 505–​8, 511 kinship clustering in, 507 Quinter family and, 506, 507–​8, 510 Torres family in, 510–​11 washing machines in, 509 Santa Marta favela (Rio de Janeiro), 234–​35 São Paulo (Brazil), 127, 134 Satterthwaite, David, 386 Sauer Report, 65–​66 Saunders, Doug, 247, 259 Save the Children, 390–​91, 392 Sayansk (Russia), 366 Scollay Square (Boston), 147, 148–​49, 156–​57 Scorsese, Martin, 445 Scott, John, 361 Seabrook, Jeremy, 27, 30 Seclink Tech, 549 The Second Day (Ehrenburg), 357 Second Great Awakening, 187 Second World War, 64, 334, 340–​41, 362–​63, 422 Seeley, John, 338–​39 Senegal, 380t, 382 Sengupta, Urmi, 98–​99 Shaftesbury Act (Great Britain, 1851), 285–​86 Shapiro, Ann-​Louise, 271–​72 Sharay Zedek synagogue (New York City), 52, 448, 449 Sharpeville massacre (South Africa, 1960), 64–​65 Shattuck, Lemuel, 188 Shaw, George Bernard, 63 Shawmut Avenue (Boston), 150 Shearith Israel synagogue (New York City), 449 Sheffield (Great Britain), 93 Shek Kip Mei fire (Hong Kong, 1953), 289, 299–​300, 431 Shelley v. Kraemer, 337

Shepstone, Theophilus, 59 Shiv Sena Party, 544 Shoreditch district (London), 30, 202–​3, 211, 407–​8 Siberia (Russia), 357–​59, 362–​63, 364–​66 Sierra Leone, 380t, 382 Si Kah Teng fire (Singapore), 433 Silas, Johan, 82 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 19–​20 Simpson, H. E. (216), 216 Simpson, W. J., 61, 284–​85 Simpson, W. J. R., 434 Sims, George R., 203, 403, 404–​5, 417–​18, 419–​20, 423 Singapore. See also specific neighborhoods Attap Dwellings Committee and, 435 British colonial rule in, 83–​84, 281, 283, 285, 302, 432, 435–​36 Chinese majority population of, 431, 432 “emergency flats” during postwar period in, 436, 437–​38, 439, 440 fires as chronic threat during postwar period in, 437–​38 gangs in, 434 Home Ownership Scheme in, 440 Housing and Development Board (HDB) in, 430, 432, 436–​41 immigration laws in, 432 independence (1963) of, 440 Master Plan for housing in, 435–​36, 438 postwar population growth in, 432 shophouses in, 285, 433, 434 Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) in, 288, 435–​38, 439 slum clearance in, 255–​56, 435–​36, 440 squatter population during postwar period in, 433–​35, 441 surveillance response to public health threats during colonial era in, 302–​3 Singapore River, 86, 437 Singh, Manmohan, 319–​20 Sirdar Road (London), 411–​12, 417, 419–​21, 422 Skoll Foundation, 386 Slaughterhouse neighborhood (Bangkok), 31 Slayton, William, 250 Slopers Island (London), 212t, 216–​17

Index   577 slum clearance in Brazil, 128–​30, 138–​39 Cross Act (Great Britain, 1875) and, 255 flood-​prone areas and, 254 grassroots resistance to, 5, 139, 236, 258, 346 “Haussmann Method” and, 235–​36 Housing Act of 1949 and, 148, 344–​45 in India, 27, 110–​11, 250–​51, 258–​59, 288–​89, 316, 317–​20, 322, 323, 541, 542 negative outcomes for individuals displaced by, 248–​49, 344–​45 property values impacted by, 250–​51 rehousing of residents affected by, 250–​51 in South Africa, 53–​54, 63–​64, 65–​66 urban renewal programs in United States and, 146, 149, 250, 255 Slumdog Millionaire (film), 235, 291 Slum Dwellers International (SDI) Asian Coalition for Housing Rights and, 376, 377–​82 bases for legitimacy for, 389, 393–​94 Cities Alliance and, 374, 376–​77, 382–​83, 385 data mapping initiatives supported by, 385 democratic election of local leaders in, 377 digital communication by, 391–​93, 394 donor funding for, 373, 377, 386, 390–​91 facilitation of relocation of informal settlements by, 376 founding (1996) of, 375 governance problems and restructuring (2019) at, 373 housing rights and, 95 Informal Settlement Network and, 378t, 383–​85 Know Your Cities Campaign and, 385, 392–​ 93, 394 leadership and affiliate structure at, 377, 378t logo of, 391–​92 organizational structure of, 385–​86 rebranding (2016) at, 390 rights advocacy approach of, 92–​93, 98–​99, 256, 291 rights-​based court action not favored at, 384–​85 savings collectives organized by, 375–​76, 382, 386–​87, 393–​94 slum upgrading and, 253–​54, 382–​83

UN-​Habitat and, 374, 383 Urban Poor Fund International and, 378t, 383 slumming charity organizations’ roles in, 229, 238 definitions of, 226 developmental tourism and, 224–​25, 234 exposés of homelessness and, 147, 155 favela tourism and, 24–​25, 224–​25, 233–​ 35, 236–​37 gentrification and, 232, 234 health conditions as an emphasis in, 227–​28 leisured slumming and, 226, 229–​30, 231, 233–​34, 238 in modern Global South as a whole, 225, 234–​35, 238 moral assessments of slum residents and, 227–​28 nineteenth-​century reform movements and, 24, 26–​27 in nineteenth-​century South Africa, 56–​57 origins of the term, 24 Othering and, 228–​29, 237–​38, 239 post-​Apartheid “township tourism” in South Africa and, 224–​25, 233, 237 poverty tourism and, 224–​25 research tourism and, 234 settlement houses and religious mission halls with roles in, 24, 231 sex and, 232 “slum cool” and, 232, 236, 238–​39 Slumdog Millionaire (film) and, 235 slum tourism and, 24–​25, 224–​25 in Victorian London, 24–​25, 224, 225–​ 26, 227–​32 volunteer tourism and, 234 voyeurism and, 24–​26, 229 women’s participation in, 229, 232 slums aesthetic judgments and, 85 crime and, 109–​10, 246, 283, 342, 466–​67, 488, 494 debates regarding use of term, 19–​21, 27, 74 definitions of, 1, 19–​20, 21–​22, 90, 111–​12, 114, 245–​47, 281, 290–​91, 313 “freedom to build” approach to, 94 Global South and, 3–​4, 40, 90, 92, 95–​96 informal code enforcement in, 249

578   Index slums (cont.) infrastructure provision and, 101, 111 lack of services in, 89, 90–​91, 101, 109–​10, 115, 181, 182, 244, 290–​91 medical and disease analogies used to describe, 22, 150 modern urbanization and, 2, 4, 181 municipal governance and, 90–​91, 100–​2, 247, 254–​55 origins of the term, 23, 181, 195–​96 overcrowding and, 90, 109–​10, 111, 182, 244, 281, 283, 290–​91, 313, 332–​33, 341, 342, 343, 466–​67 poverty and, 91–​92, 127, 244, 281, 283, 290–​91, 343, 488, 489 “right to the city” philosophy and, 94–​95, 103 rural-​to-​urban migration and, 247 sanitation and, 90, 92, 93, 111, 182, 245, 313, 314–​15, 332–​33, 340–​41, 343, 466–​67 size of world population living in, 90, 92 social exclusion and, 95–​96, 115, 244, 290–​91 tenability of residence and, 111, 112, 117–​21, 120t, 121t, 244, 246, 289–​91 water access and, 90, 92, 101, 111, 244–​45, 284–​85 The Slums of Saint Petersburg (Krestovsky), 354 slum tourism. See under slumming slum upgrading citizen input and, 253–​54, 256–​57 community cohesion issues and, 97–​98 elite stakeholder interests and, 99, 102 federal funding for, 250 gentrification as a consequence of, 96–​97, 102–​3, 254 government leadership and, 99 home ownership emphasis in, 91, 98–​99, 101, 102 in India, 98, 110–​11, 120, 253, 258, 318–​19, 541, 543 informal economy as obstacle to, 97 land use controls and, 252 neoliberalism and, 97–​99, 101–​2, 103 property value motivations for, 249–​50 public health motivations for, 249–​50, 253 sanitation and, 245–​46, 252–​54 social service provision and, 255

tenability and, 253 smallpox, 54–​55, 57–​58, 300 Smart Cities Mission (India), 320 Smit, Suzanne, 89–​90 Smuts, Jan, 65–​66 Snow, John, 301 Social League Against the Mocambo, 129 Solomon, Saul, 55–​56, 59 Somdet Toh, 78–​79 Somers Town (London), 208, 212t, 217–​19 Sophiatown district (Johannesburg), 53–​54, 62–​63, 65–​66 South Africa. See also Cape Colony; Natal Colony apartheid policies and racial segregation in, 53–​54, 58, 62–​63, 64–​66, 233, 237, 290 establishment (1910) of Union of South Africa in, 54, 58 flu epidemic of 1918 and, 63 gentrification in, 53 Great Depression in, 63 Group Areas Act (1950) in, 65–​66 Mineral Revolution in, 54, 58, 59–​60 Natives (Urban Areas) Act of 1923 and, 62–​63 nongovernmental organizations advocating for land and shelter rights in, 375 Population Registration Act, 53–​54 post-​Apartheid “township tourism” in, 224–​25, 233, 237 racialization of poverty in, 63, 65–​66 re-​blocking requirements in, 383 rural-​urban migration in, 64 Second World War and, 64 shantytowns in, 64–​65 Slum Act (1934) in, 63–​64 slum clearance in, 53–​54, 63–​64, 65–​66 Slum Dwellers International in, 383–​84 smallpox in, 54–​55, 57–​58 Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme in, 383 South Boston district (Boston), 150 South Bronx district (New York City), 37, 347 South End district (Boston) alcoholism in, 149–​50, 151, 155 gentrification in, 157–​58

Index   579 homeless population and lodging houses in, 147–​48, 149–​52, 153, 154, 155, 156–​57 immigrant populations in, 338–​39 urban renewal programs in, 149, 154 Southmead district (Bristol), 21 South Side district (Chicago), 338, 340, 347. See also specific neighborhoods Southwark district (London), 208–​10 Soviet Union. See also Russia agricultural collectivization in, 358, 359–​60 communal flats in, 356 communist theory regarding slums in, 355–​56 forced labor in, 358–​59 Gulag prison system in, 358–​59, 368 internal migration restrictions in, 359–​60 military and heavy industrial production in, 360, 364 New Economic Policy (NEP) in, 356–​58 Russian civil war (1917-​22) and, 356, 357 Second World War and, 362–​63 “shadow cities” in, 359 slum clearance in, 357 slums in, 354–​55, 356, 358, 359, 360, 361–​62, 364–​66 standardization of municipal housing during 1950s in, 363–​64 “The Thaw” (1953-​64) in, 363–​64 urbanization in, 354–​55, 359–​60, 364, 368 Vedomstvos (Central Government departments) in, 364 Soweto (South-​West Townships, South Africa), 62, 65–​66, 233 Spain, 172–​73, 174 Spiller, Else, 229, 231 Srivastava, Sanjay, 320–​21 Stack, Carol B., 37–​38, 44–​45 St Agnes Soup Kitchen (London), 411–​12 Stalin, Joseph V., 355, 357, 359, 368 Stallybrass, Peter, 25 St Ann’s Court (London), 215–​16 St Ann’s Lane (London), 205 Starbuck, Calvin, 188, 193, 194 Statistical Society of London, 200, 202 St Clement’s Road (London), 209–​10, 405, 406t, 415–​16, 422 Stead, W. T., 211–​14, 215, 219

Steinbrink, Malte, 226–​27 St. Francis House (Boston), 157 St Giles district (London), 23, 202–​3, 405 St James district (London), 301 St Katherine’s Road (London), 406t, 412, 415–​18 St. Louis (Missouri), 181–​82, 183, 185, 336, 340–​41 St Marylebone Borough Council, 214–​15 St Marylebone Housing Association, 215 The Stories of the Slums (Gilyarovsky), 354 Suartika, Gusti, 89–​90 Suffolk Place (London), 211–​14, 212t Sukhumvit 71 (Soi 71, Bangkok), 76–​81, 78f, 85, 86 Sullivan, Paul, 151 Sunderland (Great Britain), 21 Surabaya (Indonesia), 82–​83, 84, 86, 251, 256–​57 Surgut (Russia), 365–​66 Susilawati, Connie, 92 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), 89, 91, 92, 96, 111, 123, 291 Suttles, Gerald, 29 Swanson, Maynard, 61 Sweden, 171–​72, 386 Sybil (Disraeli), 55 Sydney (Australia). See also specific sites archaeological research regarding slum sites in, 489–​91, 492–​94, 495–​96 British settlement established (1788) in, 487 bubonic plague outbreak (1900) in, 486–​87 comparisons between archaeological evidence in London to archaeological evidence from, 492 Tales of Mean Streets (Morrison), 205 Tan Tiam Ho, 441 Tanzania, 39, 378t Tartars, 361 Tatarstan (Russia), 367 Taylor, Henry, 298–​99 Tay Yan Woon, 433 Tazreen Fashion factory fire (Bangladesh, 2012), 296 Teferi, Zafu, 98 Te Lintelo, Dolf, 89

580   Index Tellis, Olga, 322, 542 Temer, Michel, 131 Tewksbury almshouse (Massachusetts), 147 Thailand, 77–​78, 81 Thane, Pat, 48 Thatcher, Margaret, 173 Themba, Can, 66 Thernstrom, Stephan, 3 Third World. See Global South Thompson, E. P., 7–​8 Tiernan, Kip, 153–​55, 156 Tin Can Alley (Detroit) African Americans in, 473–​74 Chrysler Freeway built over, 474 foreign-​born populations in, 473–​74 maps of, 468f physical layout of, 468 slum clearance in, 469, 474–​75, 481 slumming in, 473–​74 Union Trust Company’s ownership of properties in, 473–​74 Tomsk (Russia), 366 Topalov, Christian, 206–​7, 218 Toronto (Canada), 247, 249–​50, 255, 298, 302–​3 Torres, Alfonso, 510–​11 Torres, Gloria, 510–​11 Townsend, Peter, 156 Toynbee Hall (London), 24, 231–​32 Treaty on European Union (Maastricht Treaty, 1992), 164 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (New York City, 1911), 296, 430–​31 Triomf (South Africa), 53–​54 Tristan, Flora, 304 Truman, Harry S., 334 Tsheglovsk (Soviet Union), 360 tuberculosis, 151, 300–​2, 342, 434 Tunjungan Plaza (Surabaya, Indonesia), 82–​ 83, 84, 86 Turner, John F. C., 6, 94, 101–​2, 236, 247–​48, 257, 374, 527, 530 Twilight in South Africa (Gibbs), 64–​65 typhoid, 300–​2 typhus, 55, 227–​28 Uganda, 378t, 382–​83, 385 The Unclassed (Gissing), 205, 215–​16

United Cities and Local Government (UCLG), 383, 385 United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and, 48 Conference on Environment and Development and, 96 Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) of, 95 Human Settlements Programme (UN-​Habitat) and, 95, 96–​98, 103, 111, 374, 376–​77, 382, 383, 385 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and, 1, 5, 91–​92, 96, 111, 114, 120 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and, 89, 91, 92, 96, 111, 123, 291 United Party (South Africa), 65–​66 Urai (Soviet Union), 366 UrbaMonde, 374 urban renewal in Boston, 148–​52 grassroots resistance to, 251 homelessness and, 146–​47, 149 New Deal programs and, 148 postwar urban planning in United States and, 6, 146, 148, 250 slum clearance and, 146, 149, 250, 255 The Urban Workshop I at 50 Lonsdale Street (Melbourne), 494 Valens, Richie, 340 Valmiki Basti (Delhi), 313 Valmikis, 539 Van Apeldoorna, Bastiaan, 172 Van Berkel, Rik, 172–​73 Van Der Aa, Paul, 172–​73 Vázquez, Federico, 522–​23 Vellinga, Marcel, 503, 508, 511 Vernacular Architecture Forum, 6 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 65–​66 Vidigal favela (Rio de Janeiro), 234–​35 Vienna (Austria), 304–​5 Vila Oliveira favela (Recife, Brazil), 138–​39 villas miseria (Argentina), 90 Vossen, Franz, 272 Vrededorp district (Johannesburg), 62

Index   581 Waiswa, Jeremy, 99 Walham Green (London), 212t, 216 Wall, Diana, 453–​54 Wallace, Mike, 451 Walsh, Martin, 157 Walsh, Thomas, 415–​16 Walton, Michael, 324 Wandsworth Bridge Road (London), 209–​10, 216–​17 Wardle, John, 494 War on Poverty policies, 346–​47 Warren & Wetmore, 475 Warwick House (Boston), 153 Washington (District of Columbia), 336 Waterside district (Cape Town), 57 Wayfarers’ Lodge (Boston), 147–​48 Way Street School (Boston), 148 Webb, Beatrix and Simon, 231–​32 Webb, Carolyn, 495 Weber, Matthew D., 246 Webster, David, 452–​53 Weld, William, 156 Wells, Thomas, 407–​8 West End district (Boston), 3, 148–​49, 156, 338–​39 West End district (London), 208–​10, 211–​16, 212t, 219 See also specific neighborhoods Westmacott, Charles, 23 Westminster district (London) Booth’s assessment of slums during Victorian and Edwardian Era in, 202–​3, 205, 209–​10, 212t, 215, 216, 217–​18 moral assessments of slums in, 227–​28 social surveys during Victorian Era in, 202 West Side district (Chicago), 29, 333, 337–​39, 347 Whelan, Christopher, 167–​68 White, Allon, 25 White, Jerry, 3, 29, 30–​31, 45 White, Kevin, 151, 152 Whitechapel district (London), 45, 209–​10, 211, 231, 405 Whitten, Robert, 305 Whyte, William, 94 Wicht, J.A.H., 54–​55 Wiessenger, George W., 478 Wietschorke, Jens, 228–​29 Willeck, Hannelore, 472

Williams Street (London), 211–​14 William Street (London), 405, 406t, 408–​9, 411–​12, 413–​14, 416–​17, 422 Willmott, Peter, 29, 42 Willow Run (Michigan), 334 Willrich, Michael, 300 Wilsham Street (London), 421, 422 Wilson, Brad and Jarrod, 495 Wilson, James, 254 Wise, Sarah, 200 Wiseman, Nicholas, 202–​3, 227–​28 Wohl, Anthony, 200, 403–​4 Wolfe, Tom, 37 Wolff, Michael, 6 Wonokromo community (Surabaya, Indonesia), 83, 84 Wood, Elizabeth, 245–​46 Woodbury, Clarence, 333 Woodlawn district (Chicago), 339–​40 Workers in the Dawn (Gissing), 204–​5 Workers Party (PT, Brazil), 136–​37 World Bank community-​driven improvement standards and, 253–​54 failure of slum upgrading programs of, 97, 102–​3 housing programs supported by, 91, 133 neoliberalism and, 91, 101–​2, 136–​37, 256 slum clearance programs and, 236, 255–​56 slum stereotypes influencing policymaking at, 23–​24 slum upgrading programs and, 250, 541 Xhosa population (South Africa), 59 Yamin, Rebecca, 9, 29 Yamuna Pushta settlement (New Delhi), 27, 319 Yelling, Jim, 200, 218 Yeo, Eileen, 7–​8 YouMe Agency, 391–​92 Young, James, 414–​15 Young, Michael, 29, 42 Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), 380t, 382 Zhou Lian Che, 439 Zimbabwe, 376, 378t, 382 Zoot Suit Riots (Los Angeles, 1943), 337