Don’t Tear Slums Down; Help Them Unslum!

Slums: The History of a Global Injustice By Alan Mayne

London, England: Reaktion Books; 2017 Hardcover: 320 pp; $29.95 ISBN-10: 1780238096 ISBN-13: 978-1780238098

The British enclosure acts, which began in 1604, forced peasants off land that they and their families had lived on for generations. Many made their way to the burgeoning cities, trying to find a new way to live and make a living. The terrible housing available to them was a source of riches for landlords, who exploited their desperation, and horror for do-gooders, who observed the pitiful conditions that resulted. These areas came to be known as slums, areas unfit for human habitation. That they were inhabited by people who developed ways of living together was usually overlooked, drowned out by the intensity of raw sewage, noise, vermin, and violence. The slums, deemed unfit for people, were eventually torn down, one after the other, and the poor were forced to move.

TEAR IT DOWN!

Mayne has investigated the history of many slums around the world and documents that the appellation “slum” draws the reflex reaction: tear it down. Mayne documents that “tear it down” is socially acceptable worldwide, rarely involves investigation before or relocation after the demolition, and moves the poor while largely worsening their situation. In fact, he documents, the poor are the people most likely to invest in their own housing and therefore are the people who lose their capital when the demolitions occur.

Although the harms of slum clearance have been detailed by many, including myself,¹ large international policymaking bodies have been slow to move away from funding such programs. Mayne’s central point—one might say polemic—is that there is a “slum deceit,” which holds that slums are evil and should be demolished. This pernicious and tenacious mislabeling is at the base of these bad interventions.

SHOULD WE BAN THE WORD?

Mayne argues that we should stop using the word “slum” altogether. This is an interesting proposition, which bears further scrutiny, including whether slums are bad by definition. Are only slums cleared? And the really big question, in the context of uneven distribution of wealth, is how are the poor to be housed?

Slums in many parts of the world lack sanitation infrastructure, such as water, sewers, and indoor toilets. In the slums in developed countries, though sanitation may be present, the houses suffer from lack of maintenance, overcrowding, and pests. Slums everywhere are said to be “chaotic,” but often that is the result of outsiders’ estimation of scenes that differ from social life in more privileged parts of town. Deeper investigation has repeatedly demonstrated the underlying social order of these neighborhoods, especially those that have endured for generations. As everywhere, such social order is vulnerable to perturbations in the larger society, which, indeed, may lead to chaos. But, again, as elsewhere, with time the social order will reassert itself.

The growth of social order helps us to understand the natural history of slums, which is that they have the potential to evolve, through a process that Jane Jacobs called “unslumming,” which is characterized by people investing in their homes. It is important to note that Jacobs defined a slum as a place people want to leave, and many so-called “luxury” apartments are places people plan to leave; ergo, they are slums of the well-to-do. Those places also have the potential to “unslum,” should residents begin to think long-term about their habitation there.

While clearing slums is easily justified by policymakers, it is also possible to clear other property. In the United States, clearing property depends on “higher and better use,” which includes quite a range of structures. In New London, Connecticut, a woman’s perfectly fine house was taken by eminent domain for purposes of economic development.² Gentrification, which is a new mechanism of clearing neighborhoods, is not only pushing the poor out of their neighborhoods, but also displacing those people whose relative wealth is not enough to protect them from removal.

Mayne’s point, that slums have gotten a bad rap, is correct. What he does not say is that the finger-pointing at slums is part of a larger “blame-the-victim” strategy, which has served capitalism well over hundreds of years. Under the conditions of capitalism, especially in an era of unparalleled concentration of wealth, how are the poor to be housed? Mayne has no solution for this problem: he wants only to prove that the slum deceit is a dead end. This is an important warning for public health, as the horrors of the slums play to the concerns of public health, and many in our field could be drawn into the reflexive destruction because of concerns about sanitation and public safety.

Instead, we need to keep several principles in mind at all times. First, forced evictions are a violation of human rights. Second, forced evictions destroy the social, political, cultural, and economic capital of the residents and feed inequality. Third, concentration of wealth is the cause of slums, not poor people. Fourth, unslumming is fundamental to the natural history of stable human communities.

Given these provisos, I think that too tight a focus on slums obscures some of the nuance in understanding the social, economic, and cultural processes entangled in housing whole populations. It is easy to ban a word only to have the same issues turn up under a new name: deceits can be repackaged just as easily as old wine can be put in new bottles.

DON’T TEAR DOWN; BUILD UP!

Mayne’s book is a dense, demanding, albeit rewarding, read. Even if you do not read the book, do embrace the concept of slum deceit, the myth that slums must be demolished to help the poor. Taking Jacobs’s perspective—that slums are places people want to leave—urbanists have developed an important array of tools to support unslumming. French urbanist Michel Cantal-Dupart describes the setting down of roots as “appropriation,” and he places this process at the heart of great placemaking.³ American urbanists Catherine Brown and William Morrish have laid out a method for this process that they called “planning to stay.”⁴ These asset-based approaches help us begin with what is present in the place and use that as the foundation for improvements. This offers opportunity for synergy with the natural unslumming process, in which individuals and families invest in what they have, making it better over time. These synergies accelerate the pace of change. The investments can endure over long periods of time because they make sense to the people in the place and enhance what they already understood to be of value. These are viable pathways to management of slums that respect the inherent worth and dignity of every individual.