The modern slum is as prevalent as its stereotypes. Today, a slum is often understood to be a place of extreme poverty in the developing world-a place disordered, lacking the basic amenities of life, traumatized by violence, and perpetuated by dysfunctional families and disaffected extremists. Yet the word "slum" was not coined in the twenty-first century's developing world or its recent past. The word emerged in early nineteenth-century London, and its use expanded as modernization created what is now the developed world and its client territories. The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum explores the history of the modern slum, connecting nineteenth-century iterations through multiple pathways to its contemporary existence. With chapters by more than twenty scholars, this Handbook brings an array of important and original perspectives and methodologies to bear on slums, real and imagined. Its analysis ranges across Europe, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Handbook probes the impact of gender and race on urban social disadvantage and traces the development of private and state-sponsored intervention-as well as tourist interest-in urban poverty. It suggests that characterizations of slumland disequilibrium, dysfunctionality, and unsustainability should be offset by evidence of make-do enterprise, strategic determination, resilience, homeliness, and neighborliness. Drawing upon anthropology, archaeology, architecture, geography, history, politics, sociology and urban planning, the Handbook delves into households and communities whose existence has been hidden by stereotypes.

About the Author
Alan Mayne is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His previous books include Slums: The History of a Global Injustice, The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (with Tim Murray), and The Imagined Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870-1914.


Book Information
ISBN 9780190879457
Author Alan Mayne
Format Hardback
Page Count 600
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 176mm * 253mm * 45mm