SLUMS

A slum, as defined by the United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing and squalor and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from 47 percent to 37 percent in the developing world between 1990 and 2005.[1] However, due to rising population, and the rise especially in urban populations, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums[2] and the figure will likely grow to 2 billion by 2030.[3]

The term has traditionally referred to housing areas that were once relatively affluent but which deteriorated as the original dwellers moved on to newer and better parts of the city, but has come to include the vast informal settlements found in cities in the developing world.[4]    

The origin of the word slum is thought to be the Irish phrase ‘S lom é (pron. s’lum ae) meaning “it is a bleak or destitute place.”[10] An 1812 English dictionary defined slum to mean “a room”. By the 1920s it had become a common slang expression in England, meaning either various taverns and eating houses, “loose talk” or gypsy language, or a room with “low going-ons”. In Life in LondonPierce Egan used the word in the context of the “back slums” of Holy Lane or St Giles. A footnote defined slum to mean “low, unfrequent parts of the town”. Charles Dickensused the word slum in a similar way in 1840, writing “I mean to take a great, London, back-slum kind walk tonight”. Slum began to be used to describe bad housing soon after and was used as alternative expression for rookeries.[11] In 1850 Cardinal Wiseman described the area known as Devil’s Acrein Westminster, London as follows:

“Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and courts, and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms of huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach – dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten.”