A London slang room that named global urban poverty
Slum likely began as East End slang for a room, then back slum by about 1845 for poor alleys. Now it marks dense, fragile urban housing tied to poverty—a label potent enough to weaken residents' claim on land before redevelopment arrives.
A slum is a crowded district of poorly built homes, usually lived in by poor people and served by broken or missing infrastructure. Dwellings range from improvised shanties to once-solid buildings that decayed through shoddy construction or neglect, and most lack dependable sanitation, clean water, electricity or policing. The United Nations defines them as informal settlements missing at least one of a handful of basics such as improved water, improved sanitation or enough living space. They also appear in low-quality suburbs, not just city centres, and Orangi in Karachi is described as the largest.
Many languages have their own words: favela, gecekondu, bidonville, basti, barrio and dozens more, each with a distinct shade of meaning. Before the 1800s rich and poor tended to share neighbourhoods, the wealthy on the main streets and the poor in the service lanes behind, but as cities boomed the affluent moved outward and left poorer residents concentrated in the core.
London's East End, where dockside and industrial growth packed people into a maze of old streets, is usually named as the word's birthplace. Charles Dickens dramatised such misery in Oliver Twist of 1837–1839, and reforming zeal fed into the Public Health Act of 1848. A widely reprinted description of the alleys hidden beside Westminster Abbey, breeding typhus and cholera, did much to make slum the standard term for bad housing. Friedrich Engels called Victorian working-class districts cattle-sheds for human beings, and Britain began clearing them and building council homes in the 1940s.
Causes include fast migration from countryside to city, economic slumps, joblessness, informal work, forced segregation, poor planning, disasters and conflict. Responses have ranged from demolition and relocation to upgrading, citywide infrastructure and public housing, with mixed results. The word itself carries weight: calling an area a slum can serve to delegitimise how residents use land that others hope to redevelop.
Source: Slum
