TITLE:
“Slumification” of Consolidated Informal Settlements: A Largely Unseen Challenge
AUTHORS:
Awais Azhar, Holly Buttrey, Peter M. Ward
KEYWORDS:
Informal Housing, Slum Terminology, Latin American Cities, Public Policy and Housing Rehab, Neighborhood Densification
JOURNAL NAME:
Current Urban Studies,
Vol.9 No.3,
July
16,
2021
ABSTRACT: Today most scholars, policy makers, and low-income
“slum” residents themselves eschew the term slum and some argue that it is high
time to retire the term altogether. We agree, and yet recent research of
consolidated informal settlements in Latin America and the United States
suggests that the conventional wisdom of successful self-building trajectories is
sometimes severely constrained, or stymied altogether. In this paper we analyze
why some types of housing may enter a downward decline of deterioration, into
what might constitute the erstwhile term of a slum, after having successfully
consolidated over 20 or more years. This paper draws upon a nine-country study
through the Latin American Housing Network or LAHN (https://www.lahn.utexas.org/) of low-income housing in Latin America with comparisons to Texas, USA. Examples
from the former comprise of different types of consolidated settlements that are
located in the “innerburbs” or “first suburbs” today, and where some authors
argue there is a need for new policy imperatives of housing and community rehab
to overcome deterioration and dilapidation. Despite the apparent success of
self-building consolidation since the 1960s
and 1970s, we are now beginning to observe evidence of heavy distress to
the physical fabric of dwellings and communities, a process that may be
considered de facto “slumification”. This process is triggered through
structural changes under neoliberalism and the “poverty of resources,”
heterogeneity of land access, physical constraints and deterioration, the lack
of legal titles and title clouding, densification and stress on the built
environment, environmental hazards, and natural and man-made disasters.
However, in part, slumification occurs due to the failure of policies to
respond to deteriorated housing conditions after years of intensive use. Unless
policies addressing the triggers of slumification are addressed, we argue that
today’s consolidated informal settlements may very well become the slums of the
future.