A barefoot childhood: so what? Imagining slums and reading neighbourhoods

This study analyzes slum journalism in the British provincial press and reveals that it continued to be a major theme until well into the twentieth century. Instead of the rather moralizing reporting of the earlier nineteenth century, this journalism used the device of civic shame to pressurize local government into taking action on slums as a matter of public health. It examines the discourses that resulted from civic shame in two newspapers—the Manchester Guardian and the Birmingham Daily Gazette—and challenges the idea that interest in reporting local political matters decreased during this period. Civic shame is shown to work in two ways—offering detailed vignettes of aspects of slum life based on personal observation and showing (some) slum-dwellers as worthy of better living conditions, and blaming the local authority directly for failing to address the problem. In this way, later slum writing sought to appeal directly to the reader not just to impart facts but to stimulate empathy and to develop a desire for action. Such in-depth studies of a particular social issue sought to address the local authorities directly, to apportion blame and to use slum writing as a tool for social action.

Section: Journalism and The Slummentioning

confidence: 91%

Section: Journalism and The Slummentioning

confidence: 98%

Naming and Blaming: Civic Shame and Slum Journalism in Late Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Manchester and Birmingham

O’Reilly

2022

“…16 It was with the movement of "slum stereotypes" from the West to the newly independent post-colonial nations that the term was incorporated into their developmental programmes, [while they] forged partnerships with international aid agencies and explained their social policies and modernization strategies in international networks and forums, "slum" became a familiar and credible term throughout the world in non-English speaking as well as English speaking nations. 17 In a historical account of informal housing in Mumbai, Anjaria argues that the use of the word slum only appeared in the late-nineteenth century and that earlier a more diverse lexicon was used to refer to poor people's housing. 18 Referring to vernacular practices, Bhan stresses that in local languages, the terms used to denote to poor people's housing were much more encompassing.…”

Section: Slums As the Icons Of Urban Poverty: From "Bad Densities" To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Abandon the Slum? Toward an Alternative Recognition of Urban Informal Dwelling

Banerjee

2022

The focus on urban poverty in the Global South has centered on slum-centric discussions of urban marginality to explain the supposed crisis of Third World cities. Evidently, ideological and material eradication of slums is symptomatic of the erasure of urban poverty and is regarded as a developmental panacea to address all urban problems. Notwithstanding the political significance of this term to understand and respond to subaltern urbanism, the Eurocentric gaze of urban scholars and practitioners in using slum, as an analytical and developmental category, has impeded the recognition of varied forms of dwelling practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with footpath-dwelling communities in Mumbai, I argue that to understand the diversity of dwelling in the city, attention needs to be extended to what could be called non-slums, spaces that embody a set of practices and negotiations that are spatially distinct from those characterizing places officially labeled as slums and expand beyond density politics. Unlike residents of so-called slums, these groups are often dispersed and numerically weak. It is this spatial organization (or the lack of it) that shapes their everyday politics in making their place within the city. The exposed nature of their habitation makes their everyday living transient and sets forth a form of spatiality that is distinct from dense neighborhoods labeled slums. While slums are being peripheralized through various policy and state interventions, these groups continue to hold on to the urban core and in doing so produce new spatializations of poverty and varied subaltern subjectivities of dispossession and belonging.

“…Thus, Mayne walks the reader through a series of stories involving so-called slums that continue to reiterate concerns over stigmatization, sensationalism, and top-down approaches to policy. 21 But perhaps slum is most stigmatizing in what it does than in what it means: in the very sweeping gesture implied by its utterance. 22 In its incapacity to describe the spaces at stake, slum erases them; it implies a lack of curiosity to understand their complexity or the interests and tensions at play; and it performs a refusal to engage consistently with what they are and how they are experienced by those who live in them.…”

Section: An Initial Surprise: On Slum In the English And Spanish Lang...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Slums, Villas Miseria, and Barriadas: Why Terms Matter

Massidda

2022

Building upon previous debates surrounding the English-language term slum, this article argues that slum stigmatizes the spaces and subjects that it refers to not only because it evokes nineteenth-century imaginaries of pauperism and crime but also for the sweeping gesture that it implies; for its refusal to observe in depth the experience of those who inhabit the spaces at stake and the interests associated. Intended as a universal term, “slum” can refer to such disparate urban typologies as inner-city high-rise tenements, low-rise overcrowded housing, and peripheral shantytowns, which empties it of specific meaning and converts it into an abstract container on to which external agendas are projected. To further demonstrate this point, the article reads slum alongside the seemingly analogous yet more specific Argentine and Peruvian terms villas miseria, barriadas and pueblos jóvenes, fields of dispute whose meanings have been contested by different actors, including residents, from the outset.