The Slum Solution: No Lists and Back to Week 6

Upon reading the six slum articles assigned, I was overwhelmed by the impulse to classify and define. Every text is replete with statistics, numbers and charts. If this is not enough, it is even evident in the titles: “Six Misconceptions about Squatter Settlements” by Janice Perleman and “Seventeen Reasons Why the Squatter Problem Can’t Be Solved” by Angel and Benjamin. It seems the popular solutions are all in outlined format, such as the Habitat Agenda in the UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities Report. Even Davis’ chapter The Prevalence of Slums, the author spends most of the text simply defining what a slum is. From these articles, one gets the sense that it is difficult just defining what a slum is and setting up committees to address them. Davis recognizes that this is due in large part to the disconnect between the committees and the slum inhabitants, citing that the governments that are positioned in between do not always want to divulge the numbers on which the committees depend. Nevertheless, it seems that the overwhelming urge to classify is a typical top-down, western approach that may not be very effective, especially when you consider how the world’s population in slums is growing.

With this established method, I am not surprised that one article was entitled “Thirty Years of the Urban Agenda: What Has Been Achieved?” Maybe it is the method itself that needs to be challenged. In Angel and Benjamin’s reason number five the squatter problem cannot be solved, entitled “completeness,” I thought of a word from weeks past—emergence. The article states, “communities take shape over time,” a bottom-up quality essential to emergence. However, the top down nature of committees, conferences and resolutions is prone to articles entitled “Seventeen reasons why the squatter problem can’t be solved.” Instead, maybe if slums are not addressed as a “problem” to be classified, but instead a set of design parameters, less lists and less slums would exist.