A billion people live in the shadow cities we call slums. Alan Mayne’s trenchant social history traces how perception of them shifted. Victorians saw them as labyrinths or vortices – “topsy-turvy” realms of otherness. Today, they are more likely to be viewed as resilient hubs of innovation. Yet developers’ war on slums has seen no ceasefire. It’s hard to refute Mayne’s estimation: “We invent them to explain to ourselves the ugly traits, the logical incongruities and the social inequalities of modern capitalist cities.”
Nature
A wise observer and historian of poverty in India and South Africa, Mayne unveils the hidden face of urban marginality . . . Mayne tries to differentiate between the representation of slums inspired by the desire to improve them and a more complex reality where inhabitants show resilience and participate in economic life. Improving living conditions no longer means thinking about other people’s lives for them but with them . . . Mayne’s book, in the line of David Harvey, Joseph Stieglitz, Mike Davis, and more generally,Henri Lefebvre, sheds light on the evolution of social inequalities in urban space.
American Journal of Sociology
Mayne has mined historical archives, finding an overwhelming and recurring prevalence of a damning slum and inevitably anti-slum discourse, both steeped in ethnic and often more crudely racial prejudice . . . the book is an important antidote to narratives that would have us believe in a progressive or linear evolution over time from crude to more-nuanced policies. Mayne leaves us hoping that an exposure of the continued meaning of the word “slum” and its perversity may help steer change.
The American Historical Review
‘A tonic and rousing critique of the bad freight carried by the concept of “slum”. Although an obvious offender in my own work, I’m entirely convinced by Mayne’s passionate polemic. No more “s” word from me.'
Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
‘Mayne lacerates . . . [the] war on the poor, with sweeping historical critique, instead demonstrating how the logics and policies that keep the “poor” unsettled, simultaneously pacified and volatile, constitute a deception, covering over the distorted productivity of inequality, spatial engineering, and the reliance upon those consigned to the margins to regenerate new forms of sociality in face of denigration.’
Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths, University of London
‘Alan Mayne is a leading authority on the history of “slums”. In his new book he turns his attention to the repetitions and continuities in society’s attitudes and policies towards “slums” worldwide over the past 200 years, from 19th-century Britain to 21st-century Global South. His challenging, forthright book exposes how our continued use of the word “slum” is misleading, deceitful and downright wrong.’
Professor Richard Dennis, University College London