Extreme Thinking About Slums and Slum Dwellers: A Critique

This article confronts two recent sets of thinking on slums and slum dwellers—the optimism that inadequate shelter can somehow be resolved in the near future and the opposing naysayer view warning of some kind of apocalypse. Neither line of thought is entirely wrong. Without the implementation of appropriate policies, the growth of festering slums continues to be an inevitable occurrence. The heart of this paper warns against over-generalization of the urban housing crisis: a phenomenon afflicting most journalists and increasingly academics too. To inject some objectivity into this pressing discussion, current lines of fashionable thinking about the proliferation of slums, access to land by the poor, infrastructure policies, social and residential segregation, privatization, property rights, and slumlords will be challenged and contested. The paper will also denounce the recent resuscitation of the word ‘slum’, a pejorative term with all of its negative connotations, for the people who live in low-income areas.