The Dictionary of Human Geography

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means of paying off a debt or a loan in

their own countries, especially in India,

Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. When these

are included, the International Labour

Organization estimates that the minimum

total of people enduring some form of forced

servitude is 12.3 million, while Bales (2004,

p. 8) puts the figure at 27 million: both esti-

mates are more than the total number caught

up in the horrors of the Black Atlantic

(Epstein, 2006). dcl

Suggested reading

Bales (2004); Drescher and Engerman (1998).

slum An area of substandard housing and

inadequate provision of public utilities (espe-

cially water and sanitation), inhabited by

poor people in high densities, who develop a

distinctive culture as a means of both survival

and self-respect. The term originated in

Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth

century. Labourers living in the countryside

endured wretched conditions too, but the

overcrowding of tenements in the central dis-

tricts of industrial cities – the shock cities of

the age – and of capital cities such as London

was symptomatic of the slum. Life in these

communitiesbecame a central object of social

commentary and investigation, in studies such

as Engels’Condition of the English working class

(1844) and novels such as Dickens’Hard times

(1854). Areas of poor housing for poor people

had existed in many other periods and places

too, from imperial Rome to Georgian Bath,

but it was the connection forged between the

built environment and the ‘moral environ-

ment’ – by the close of the century, fears over

public order and public health were increas-

ingly compounded bybiopoliticaltheses of

‘urban degeneration’ (cf. Luckin, 2006) – that

was diagnostic of the politics of the slum on

both sides of the Atlantic. The connection was

both constructed and contested (Ward, 1976),

so that slums were not only the product of

intersections between housing and (often cas-

ual)labour marketsbut also of a particular

imaginative geography (Stedman Jones,

1991 [1974]; Mayne, 1993). Their modern

analysis has relied on recovering built forms

andmaterial cultures, and analysing con-

temporary photographs and memoirs (Rose,

1997a; Mayne and Murray, 2001; cf. Roberts,

1990). Slums became targets forstateinter-

vention, including social regulation andurban

renewalin the nineteenth century – one of

the objectives of the Haussmannization of

Paris – and ‘slum clearance’ schemes in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Wohl,

1977; Yelling, 1986, 2000).

The political salience of the term has been

revived by critics such as Davis (2006), who

points to the contemporary transposition of

slums from the globalnorthto the global

south. Colonial cities were often bipolar,

with acordon sanitairebetween the European

districts (the ‘white city’) and the poor, over-

crowded ‘native city’, but the slum is primarily

a product of class zonation rather than

the racial discriminations associated with the

ghetto. Class distinctions loom large in the

rapidly growing cities of the South, and it is

estimated that one-third of the global urban

population now lives in slums, the vast majority

of them in the South (Davis, 2006, p. 23). If the

overcrowding, poverty, human degradation

and exploitation are familiar from older

descriptions – ‘There is nothing in the cata-

logue of Victorian misery that doesn’t exist

somewhere in a Third World City today’

(Davis, 2006, p. 186) – the immensity of scale

is radically new. And unlike the nineteenth-

century slums of the North, most of these new

slums are on the edges of cities (not at the core)

and their production is wired to transnational

(not national) circuits of capital and to the

political–economic projects ofneo-liberalism.

Finally, if slums have always been sites for the

warehousing of what Marx called a ‘surplus

army’ of labour, the new slums confront real

armies who foresee urban warfare swirling

around our ‘planet of slums’ (Davis, 2006,

pp. 202–6). Although this dystopian vision is

rhetorically powerful, however, it offers a

remarkably undifferentiated view of a far more

complex urban geography and it overlooks the

crucial contribution of progressive urban

social movements(Angotti, 2006). Indeed,

Roy’s (2003) incisive exposure of the politics

ofpovertyin Calcutta is explicitly staged as ‘a

satire on the very trope of the dying city’ and,

like Simone’s (2004) brilliant study of four

African cities, is a critique of the urban fantasies

(and fears) ofabjectionand failure projected

on to cities of the global South by planners and

theorists alike, and contained within the very

concept of a ‘slum’. (See alsosquatting.) dg

Suggested reading

Davis (2006); Philpott (1991 [1978]); Ward

(1976).

social area analysis Atheoryand related

technique for characterizing urban residential

neighbourhoods, linking changes in urban

social structure to economic development

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SLUM