Slumming it - rethinking prejudices

How would you feel if someone called your home a shack or said the area you lived in was a slum?

I know I would personally be offended.

A person’s home is sacred. A personal place where he or she can go to find solitude. Yet, every time you refer to a place as a slum, you are contributing to a huge problem that faces more than a billion people worldwide on a daily basis.

According to the World Bank, by 2015 2.8 billion people will be getting by with less than $2 per day.

It is estimated that one billion people live in “slums” world-wide, and by 2030, the figure is projected to rise to two billion.

The fact that those living in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day, without access to education, clean water, electricity and other basic needs — while we in America and many other nations have so much — is utterly sickening.
The term “slum” originated as a shortened version of the term “back slum,” meaning a back room or “back alley”. It comes from an Irish phrase meaning an “exposed vulnerable place.” This is exactly what a slum is; a place where people excluded from society are sent. They are extremely vulnerable, and they live their lives in constant fear that tomorrow might never come.  

A UN Expert Group said, a slum is a place with “inadequate access to safe water, inadequate access to sanitation and other infrastructure, poor structural quality of housing, overcrowding, and insecure residential status.” But regardless of what the official definition of a place might be, it is still someone’s home.
The term “slum” really strikes me as an offensive term by which people of wealth attempt to demonstrate their power to name and look down upon people who have less than them. No one has the right to invade people’s homes and deem them as “slums” because they feel they do not meet a certain standard of living. This process of elite groups naming poor spaces has occurred all over the globe, especially in many African countries.

The World Bank and UN-HABITAT have designed a “Cities Without Slums” initiative. It sounds too good to be true, and that’s because it is.
You can’t just get rid of slums. They are a manifestation of many other societal problems like extreme poverty, inequality, corruption and lack of access to basic needs. Instead of constructing real ways to get rid of slums, these organizations simply take people out of their homes without providing them the aid that they so desperately need.

Slums will not go away if we merely say there will be no more slums. Rather the communities must adopt economic, social and political empowerment programs that assist the poor who live in these areas instead of merely judging them for their poverty.
Instead of passing judgement upon people and calling the neighborhoods in which they live slums, we should think about their daily struggle to fulfill the most basic of needs and reach out to help.


E-mail: tmkennel@indiana.edu