page_title: Slum
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Slum / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Jacob Riis, "Lodgers in a Crowded Bayard Street Tenement--'Five Cents a Spot'"
context_page_description: A slum is usually a highly populated urban residential area consisting mostly of closely packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or incomplete infrastructure, inhabited primarily by impoverished persons. Although slums, especially in America, are usually located in urban areas, in other countries they can be located in suburban areas where housing quality is low and living conditions are poor. While slums differ in size and other characteristics, most lack reliable sanitation services, supply of clean water, reliable electricity, law enforcement, and other basic services. Slum residences vary from shanty houses to professionally built dwellings which, because of poor-quality construction and/or lack of basic maintenance, have deteriorated.
  Due to increasing urbanization of the general populace, slums became common in the 18th to late 20th centuries in the United States and Europe. Slums are still predominantly found in urban regions of developing countries, but are also still found in developed economies.
  According to UN-Habitat, around 33% of the urban population in the developing world in 2012, or about 863 million people, lived in slums.
context_section_description: Before the 19th century, rich and poor people lived in the same districts, with the wealthy living on the high streets, and the poor in the service streets behind them. But in the 19th century, wealthy and upper middle class people began to move out of the central part of rapidly growing cities, leaving poorer residents behind. 
  Slums were common in the United States and Europe before the early 20th century. London's East End is generally considered the locale where the term originated in the 19th century, where massive and rapid urbanization of the dockside and industrial areas led to intensive overcrowding in a warren of post-medieval streetscape. The suffering of the poor was described in popular fiction by moralist authors such as Charles Dickens – most famously Oliver Twist (1837-9) and echoed the Christian Socialist values of the time, which soon found legal expression in the Public Health Act of 1848. As the slum clearance movement gathered pace, deprived areas such as Old Nichol were fictionalised to raise awareness in the middle classes in the form of moralist novels such as A Child of the Jago (1896) resulting in slum clearance and reconstruction programmes such as the Boundary Estate (1893-1900) and the creation of charitable trusts such as the Peabody Trust founded in 1862  and Joseph Rowntree Foundation (1904) which still operate to provide decent housing today.
  Slums are often associated with Victorian Britain, particularly in industrial English towns, lowland Scottish towns and Dublin City in Ireland.  Engels described these British neighborhoods as "cattle-sheds for human beings". These were generally still inhabited until the 1940s, when the British government started slum clearance and built new council houses. There are still examples left of slum housing in the UK, but many have been removed by government initiative, redesigned and replaced with better public housing.
  In Europe, slums were common. By the 1920s it had become a common slang expression in England, meaning either various taverns and eating houses, "loose talk" or gypsy language, or a room with "low going-ons". In Life in London Pierce Egan used the word in the context of the "back slums" of Holy Lane or St Giles. A footnote defined slum to mean "low, unfrequent parts of the town". Charles Dickens used the word slum in a similar way in 1840, writing "I mean to take a great, London, back-slum kind walk tonight". Slum began to be used to describe bad housing soon after and was used as alternative expression for rookeries. In 1850 the Catholic Cardinal Wiseman described the area known as Devil's Acre in Westminster, London as follows:
  Close under the Abbey of Westminster there lie concealed labyrinths of lanes and potty and alleys and slums, nests of ignorance, vice, depravity, and crime, as well as of squalor, wretchedness, and disease; whose atmosphere is typhus, whose ventilation is cholera; in which swarms of huge and almost countless population, nominally at least, Catholic; haunts of filth, which no sewage committee can reach – dark corners, which no lighting board can brighten.
  This passage was widely quoted in the national press, leading to the popularization of the word slum to describe bad housing.
  In France as in most industrialised European capitals, slums were widespread in Paris and other urban areas in the 19th century, many of which continued through first half of the 20th century. The first cholera epidemic of 1832 triggered a political debate, and Louis René Villermé study of various arrondissements of Paris demonstrated the differences and connection between slums, poverty and poor health. Melun Law first passed in 1849 and revised in 1851, followed by establishment of Paris Commission on Unhealthful Dwellings in 1852 began the social process of identifying the worst housing inside slums, but did not remove or replace slums. After World War II, French people started mass migration from rural to urban areas of France. This demographic and economic trend rapidly raised rents of existing housing as well as expanded slums. Fren
caption: Inside of a slum house, from Jacob Riis photo collection of New York City (ca 1890).
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