Slums: the history of a global injustice

Slums: The History of a Global Injustice by Alan Mayne, who teaches urban history and public policy in Australia and the United Kingdom, is a sweeping survey of middle-class and elite perceptions of ‘slums’, and the often-destructive policies and plans that these perceptions have engendered. The book’s most direct forebear is Mike Davis’s popular Planet of Slums. It also adds to the sociological literature on how the designations of ‘informal’ or ‘slum’ are often a matter of perception and prejudice, and to the work of urban historians on the transnational transfer of planning ideas. The book is a work of both history and advocacy. Mayne argues that prejudicial attitudes towards urban poverty worldwide over the last century and a half have been rooted in conceptions of ‘slums’ originating in nineteenth-century England, and that these attitudes are embodied in, and perpetuated by, the word ‘slum’ itself. Early chapters take the reader through the origins of the word in the urban slang of Victorian England, and the word’s export to the United States, Canada, and Australia. Mayne explores the fascination and repulsion slum stereotypes engendered among the middle classes, and the misguided slum clearance and ‘urban renewal’ schemes imposed on the urban poor by planners and policymakers in these countries up until the 1970s. The scene then shifts to Britain’s colonies, where British colonial officers and local elites replicated prejudices from England. Following independence, these prejudices remained, reinforced by American development consultants. While the use of the term ‘slum’ eventually fell out of favour in the ‘developed’ world, the United Nations and other international development organizations revived it in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. According to Mayne, this usage also revived prejudicial slum stereotypes, and spread them worldwide. Mayne’s main argument, that the word ‘slum’ should be dropped from our collective vocabulary because of its ‘deceitful’ connotations and ignominious past, has its merits, but is sometimes overstated. He imputes great power to the word ‘slum’, at times appearing to blame the word itself for all class snobbery, ethnic prejudice, land grabs, and planning failures. Mayne even consigns Jane Jacobs, who argued against the demolition of poor urban neighbourhoods, to the wrong side of history for having used the word (128). His fixation on the word itself is such that he approves of terms like ‘informal settlements’, ‘shanty towns’, and ‘squatter communities’ as useful alternatives to ‘slums’ (12–13), without considering how they too might be problematic. Mayne insists that the original associations of the word ‘slum’ in wealthier countries have carried over largely intact to its contemporary usage in poorer countries in the twenty-first century. He notes the diverse ways in which the word ‘slum’ is used today – by the United Nations, Asian and African governments, Marxist and subaltern studies scholars, and even grassroots organizations like Shack/ Slum