Revisiting Stokes’ Theory of Slums: Towards Decolonised Housing Concepts from the Global South

Abstract

Recently, large-scale housing programmes have experienced a revival in many countries of the Global South. They are criticised for their top-down, standardised, and supply-driven nature, which hardly meets people’s demands. At the heart of the problem lies the concept of “material decency”—a normative and shelter-centric notion of housing, inspired by colonial planning and developmentalist thought. Many African housing programmes confuse “material decency” with the demand-driven, bottom-up concept, of adequate housing. Following this, the stigmatisation of autoconstructed neighbourhoods prevails and housing is primarily reduced to a question of material shelter. Adding to significant contributions about the need for southern perspectives on urban planning, this chapter offers an alternative entry point by revisiting Stokes’ A Theory of Slums published in 1962. Interestingly, Stokes’ theory did not deal with housing directly but focused on “slum” dwellers’ socioeconomic integration and structural factors of exclusion. I argue to re-interpret Stokes’ notion of barriers to social escalation as a structural discrimination of “slum” dwellers. Such stigmatisation may be read as a major reason behind the proliferation of so-called slums. Based on the author’s fieldwork in Morocco and additional literature, the aim is to deconstruct the role of “material decency” and to offer pathways towards decolonised housing concepts from the Global South. For this purpose, the chapter suggests five cornerstones of adequate housing, namely subjectivity, non-materiality, flexibility, contextuality, and choice.