Read more
The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum explores the history of the modern slum, connecting nineteenth-century iterations through multiple pathways to its contemporary existence. With chapters by 28 scholars, this Handbook brings an array of important and original perspectives and methodologies to bear on slums, real and imagined, across the globe. Drawing upon anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology and urban planning, the Handbook delves into households and communities whose existence has been hidden by stereotypes.
List of contents
- CONTENTS
- Contributors
- Introduction: Slums and the Modern World
- Alan Mayne
- PART I. FUNDAMENTALS
- 1. "What's in a Name?"
- Alan Mayne
- 2. Women and Wages in Britain's "Classic" Slums
- Ellen Ross
- 3. The Intimate Relationship between Slums and Racial Segregation: a South African Case Study
- Vivian Bickford-Smith
- PART II. URBAN DISADVANTAGE IN THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD
- 4. Informality as Process and the Social Construction of Slums: Southeast Asian Cases
- Ross King
- 5. Slums: City Spaces of Governance and Global Disadvantage
- Winnie Mitullah
- 6. Slum Statistics in India
- Amitabh Kundu
- 7. Pride and Shame: the History of the Slums in Recife, Brazil
- Flávio de Souza
- 8. The Spatial Politics of US Homelessness: The Evolution of Boston's "Skid Row"
- Ella Howard
- 9. The Rise and Decline of the European Struggle against Social Exclusion
- Rob Atkinson
- PART III. PERSPECTIVES ACROSS TIME: FROM THE OUTSIDE
- 10. The Discovery of "Slums" in mid-Nineteenth Century Cincinnati, Ohio
- Henry C. Binford
- 11. Social Geographies of Poverty in Victorian and Edwardian London
- Richard Dennis
- 12. How Slumming makes the Slum
- Fabian Frenzel
- 13. Slums: Neglect, Clear, or Improve?
- Richard Harris
- 14. Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1853-70: A Reassessment
- Antoine Paccoud
- 15. Regulations of Slums and Slum Improvement in British Colonial History
- Robert Home
- 16. The Spillover Effects of Fire, Riot and Epidemics from Slums
- Alan Smart and Eliot Tretter
- 17. The Political Construction of Slums in India
- Nandini Gooptu
- 18. The Return of the Slums in Postwar America
- Alexander Von Hoffman
- 19. Slums and Communism: (Un-)Slumming the (Post) Soviet City
- Ivan Nevzgodin
- 20. NGO Representation of Informal Settlements: the case of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI)
- Marie Huchzermeyer
- PART IV. PERSPECTIVES ACROSS TIME: FROM THE INSIDE
- 21. Notting Dale: The Making and Breaking of a West London Slum, 1865-1946
- Jerry White
- 22. The Historic Fires of Singapore
- Kah Seng Loh
- 23. The Archaeology of Immigrant Lives and Livelihoods at New York City's Five Points
- Rebecca Yamin
- 24. Historical Archaeology and the Evolution of Twentieth-Century Slums in Detroit
- Krysta Ryzewski
- 25. Archaeologies of Disadvantage in the Modern City: Sydney and Melbourne Compared
- Tim Murray
- 26. Popular Housing Processes in Caribbean Colombia
- Peter Kellett
- 27. La Perla, Puerto Rico: Beyond Formal and Informal
- Florian Urban
- 28. Living at the Center, Pushed to the Edge
- Kalpana Sharma
About the author
Alan Mayne is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His previous books include Slums: The History of a Global Injustice, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (with Tim Murray), and The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914.
Summary
The modern slum is as prevalent as its stereotypes. Today, a slum is often understood to be a place of extreme poverty in the developing world-a place disordered, lacking the basic amenities of life, traumatized by violence, and perpetuated by dysfunctional families and disaffected extremists. Yet the word “slum” was not coined in the twenty-first century's developing world or its recent past. The word emerged in early nineteenth-century London, and its use expanded as modernization created what is now the developed world and its client territories.
The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum explores the history of the modern slum, connecting nineteenth-century iterations through multiple pathways to its contemporary existence. With chapters by more than twenty scholars, this Handbook brings an array of important and original perspectives and methodologies to bear on slums, real and imagined. Its analysis ranges across Europe, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa.
The Handbook probes the impact of gender and race on urban social disadvantage and traces the development of private and state-sponsored intervention-as well as tourist interest-in urban poverty. It suggests that characterizations of slumland disequilibrium, dysfunctionality, and unsustainability should be offset by evidence of make-do enterprise, strategic determination, resilience, homeliness, and neighborliness. Drawing upon anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology and urban planning, the Handbook delves into households and communities whose existence has been hidden by stereotypes.
Additional text
This compilation involves a comprehensive scholarly assessment of the contemporary so-called slum...This work will likely be of greatest interest to scholars and graduate students working in the fields of urban history, urban planning, urban anthropology, urban archaeology, urban sociology, and urban social geography, though it may also be of some interest to other non-scholarly readers with an interest in historical and contemporary urban life.
