Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

2
The Prevalence of Slums
He let his mind drift as he stared at the city, half
slum, half paradise. How could a place be so ugly
and violent, yet beautiful at the same time?
Chris Abani1
The astonishing prevalence of slums is the chief theme of The Challenge
of Slums, a historic and somber report published in October 2003 by the
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). This
first truly global audit of urban poverty, which follows in the famous
footsteps of Friedrich Engels, Henry Mayhew, Charles Booth, and Jacob
Riis, culminates two centuries of the scientific reconnaisance of slum life
that began with James Whitelaw's 1805 S urvry of PovertY in Dublin. It is also
the long-awaited empirical counterpart to the World Bank's warnings in
the 1990s that urban poverty would become the "most significant, and
politically explosive, problem of the next century."2
The Challenge of Slums, a collaboration of more than one hundred
researchers, integrates three novel sources of analysis and data. First, it
is based on synoptic case-studies of poverty, slum conditions, and
housing policy in 34 metropolises from Abidjan to Sydney; this project
1 Chris Abani, Grace/and, New York 2004, p. 7.
2 Anqing Shi, "How Access to Urban Potable Water and Sewerage Connections
Affects Child Mortality," Finance, Development Research Group, working paper,
World Bank, January 2000, p. 14.
THE PREVALENCE OF SLUMS 21
was coordinated for UN-HABITAT by the Development Planning
Unit at University College London.3 Secondly, it utilizes a unique
comparative database for 237 cities worldwide created by the UN­
HABITAT Urban Indicators Programme for the 2001 Istanbul + 5
Urban Summit.4 And thirdly, it incorporates global household survey
data that breaks new ground by including China and the ex-Soviet bloc.
The UN authors acknowledge a particular debt to Branko Milanovic, the
World Bank economist who pioneered these surveys as a powerful
microscope for studying global inequality. (In one of his papers,
Milanovic explains: "For the first time in human history, researchers
have reasonably accurate data on the distribution of income or welfare
[expenditures or consumption] amongst more than 90 percent of the
world population."5) If the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change represent an unprecedented scientific consensus on the
dangers of global warming, then The Challenge of Slums sounds an equally
authoritative warning about the worldwide catastrophe of urban poverty.
Bu! _ \Vat _ }s _ _ a "lum"? The first published definition reportedly
occurs in the convict writer James Hardy Vaux's 1812 VocabulClfJI of the
Flash Language, where it is synonymous with "racket" or "criminal
trade."6 By the cholera years of the 1830s and 1840s, however, the poor
were living in slums rather than practicing them. Cardinal Wiseman, in
his writings on urban reform, is sometimes given credit for transforming
"slum" ("room in which low goings-on occurred") from street slang
into a term comfortably used by genteel writers? By mid-century slums
were identified in France, America, and India, and were generally recognized
as an international phenomenon. Connoisseurs and fldneurs
debated where human degradation was most awful: Whitechapel or
3 University College London Development Planning Unit and UN-HABITAT,
Understanding Slums: Case Studies for the Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, available
at www.ucl.ac.uk/dpu-projects/Global_Report. Most of these studies are summarized
in an appendix at the back of The Challenge of Slums. Missing, however, is the brilliant
survey of Khartoum by Galal Eldin Eltayeb, deleted, one supposes, because of his
characterization of the "Islamist, totalitarian regime."
4 See Challenge, p. 245.
5 Branko Milanovic, "True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First
Calculation Based On Household Survey Alone," working paper, World Bank, New
York 1999, n.p.
6 Prunty, Dublin Slums, p. 2.
7 J. A. Yelling, Slums and Slum Clearance in Victorian London, London 1986, p. 5.