Urban Involution (3)

3. the urbanization of poverty

by Mike Davis

The mountain of trash seemed to stretch very far, then gradually without perceptible demarcation or boundary it became something else. But what? A jumbled and pathless collection of structures. Cardboard cartons, plywood and rotting boards, the rusting and glassless shells of cars, had been thrown together to form habitation.

Michael Thelwell, The Harder They Come, 1980

The first published definition of ‘slum’ reportedly occurs in Vaux’s 1812 Vocabulary of the Flash Language, where it is synonymous with ‘racket’ or ‘criminal trade’. By the cholera years of the 1830s and 1840s, however, the poor were living in slums rather than practising them. A generation later, slums had been identified in America and India, and were generally recognized as an international phenomenon. The ‘classic slum’ was a notoriously parochial and picturesquely local place, but reformers generally agreed with Charles Booth that all slums were characterized by an amalgam of dilapidated housing, overcrowding, poverty and vice. (more…)

August 28, 2011 | Categories: Article, Publication | Leave a comment