Main themes
Sustainable Cities
Slum Upgrading
Land
Housing
Evaluation

Title
Understanding the History of Slums

Focus
The presentation looks at the main

Issues which the lecture addresses
Slums are the physical manifestation of urban problems related to poverty and/or inequality. Yet, little effort has been placed on linking the historical sequence of urban planning programs and design practices that emerged in the 19th Century and have since evolved in methods and practices to address the challenges of informality. This lack of emphasis in historical precedents – in their success and failures – weakens our ability to understand the meaning of informal urbanization within urban history.

Short analysis of the above issues
Architectural design is increasingly paying attention to slums; though it is unclear how spatial disciplines can go beyond the physical provision of housing, infrastructure or services. Despite the number of renowned and impressive interventions recently built at informal settlements throughout the world, slums today represent an epistemological gap for spatial disciplines because it is still hard to assess the role of design in solving social problems tied to poverty and inequality. One way to understand this relationship is to looking at the ways physical and social problems at slums have been understood.

Propositions for addressing the issue
The presentation portrays a historical sequence of five urban planning and design paradigms that have historically responded to the evolving nature of slums. During the presentation I will use particular cases to analyze the evolution and types of these paradigms as a response to urban problems throughout the 20th century.

The first is the paradigm of the “poor laws” and “poor housing” responding to the rural homeless in industrializing nations in the 19th century; the second is the paradigm of slum clearance programs at the beginning of the 20th century; the third is the paradigm of urban redevelopment as a response to the problem of blight between 1930s and 1960s; the fourth, now on international development, is the paradigm of self and mutual help housing from the 1960s and 1980s; and the last one is the paradigm of urban and integral upgrading from 1980s on. All these periods are closely tied to the disciplinary development of urban planning and architecture, and overall show how slums have been an underlying problem to modernization that continues and transforms throughout the last century.

Additional Reading Materials
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (2004)
Gilbert, Alan (2007) The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?
Roy, Ananya (2005) Urban Informality: Toward and Epistemology of Planning
Pieterse, Edgar (2010) Filling the Void – Towards and Agenda for Action on African Urbanization