Slum

A slum is generally understood to be a neglected, wretched, densely populated neighborhood or area. In this sense, slums are zones within inner cities and the shanty-town city fringes where the poor congregate. Today the term is usually associated with the Third World, but from the middle of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century it was widely applied to [Page 729]American cities. Slums therefore feature as a significant subtheme in United States urban history. They are used to highlight the early social costs of industrialization and urbanization during the “take-off” phase of a developing society, and they are juxtaposed with the longer term ameliorating effects of modernization, integration, and increasing affluence in American society.

These understandings of slums are problematic. First, urban inequality in America cannot be delimited in time by a “slumland” model which supposedly ceased to apply after the middle of the 20th century. Ongoing social disadvantage is manifestly still a feature of American cities today. Second, the complicated and evolving social geography of sprawling urban regions contradicts slum stereotypes that attempt to contain poverty within set zones of urban “blight.” Third, the social problems that are evident in disadvantaged areas cannot be explained by the supposedly shared deviant character traits of those who live within them. This viewpoint has a long history. The pioneering investigative journalist Jacob Riis, in his influential books How the Other Half Lives (1890) and The Battle With the Slum (1902), characterized social life in America as a winner-take-all race to get ahead, and he argued that slums comprised those who had fallen behind. A quarter of a century later, urban sociologists in Chicago systematized Riis's argument by proposing that the business centers of all modern cities were encircled by a slumland deterioration zone with crime, poverty, and degradation, as noted by Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and Roderick D. McKenzie in The City. Other sociologists in the middle of the 20th century gave this deviant way of life an evocative name: the culture of poverty. These characterizations of slum culture not only homogenize social life into a universal stereotype of deviant “slumminded” behavior; in doing so they also preclude recognition of nonpathological energy and strategy among the inhabitants of the supposed slums.

The inadequacies inherent in conventional characterizations of slums necessitate that understanding of the term be radically reformulated. The word slum was coined and has been so heavily used in order to condemn, to marginalize, to ridicule, and to rebuke, that these purposes are irreversibly embedded in the word's essence. They cannot be stripped away in order to use the word as a neutral term with which to describe the actual social geography of urban disadvantage. There are plainly deep and enduring inequalities of access in American cities, as reflected in the conditions of life in poor urban neighborhoods both in the past and in the present day. However, these neighborhoods are not slums, and they have never been characterized as such by their inhabitants. Slums are the imaginary overlays that have been laid upon such places by others.

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