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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

Cover -- Slums: The History of a Global Injustice -- Imprint Page -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. 'Slum' and 'Slumming' -- 2. The Attraction of Repulsion -- 3. The War on Slums -- 4. Orientalizing the Slum -- 5. New Slums in a Postcolonial World -- 6. Little Palaces -- 7. Building Communities? -- 8. Shadow Cities -- Conclusion -- References -- Select Bibliography -- Acknowledgements -- Index

More than half of the world now lives in urban areas, but a billion of these people reside in neighbourhoods characterized by entrenched disadvantage. These neighbourhoods, known as 'slums', are often seen as a debilitating and even subversive presence within society. In reality, however, it is often the host societies and public policies that are at fault. In this comprehensive global history, Alan Mayne explores the evolution and meaning of the word 'slum', from its origins in London early in the nineteenth century to its use to describe favela communities in the lead up to the Rio de Janeiro Olympic games in 2016. The word 'slum' has been extensively used for two hundred years to condemn and disperse poor communities. Mounting a case for the word's elimination from the language of progressive urban social reform, Slums is a must-read book for all those interested in social history and the importance of these vibrant and vital neighbourhoods.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ambivalent relationship that San Francisco and Darwin developed with Asia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand they presented themselves as gateways that facilitated trade with Asia. On the other hand they acted as sentinels that protected Europeans from Asian immigration. This quirky behaviour is encapsulated in the quarantine regulations that were applied in both ports to Asian commodities and people. The two case studies suggest a broader paradox in the history of port cities. Their prosperity and vitality rested upon the free flow of goods and people, but those flows generated enormous frictions.

Starting with Englander's denial (Urban History, 21, 2 (1994)), that 'slums are … real only in words, … rather than being rooted in the material conditions of everyday life', the article draws a distinction between historical analyses of slums, which entail an examination of words, signs and symbols, and analyses of inner-city neighbourhoods which have been overshadowed by slumland representations. It is claimed that this latter task entails a nuanced materialist historicism, attuned to the surviving material and oral culture of actual neighbourhoods, in place of Englander's faith in an older style of historical materialism.

Let me take you on a Cook's tour of urban historic preservation outcomes in the United States. The undertaking is doubly complicated. First, I am an outsider from Australia, a nation that is known more for its sheep farms than for its cities—or, indeed, for a significant national history or a non- Aboriginal cultural heritage that is worth preserving. Second, the dislocation between subject matter and observer is further compounded because I am writing from the ancient Italian city of Parma. Here, in contrast both to the United States and Australia, a multiplicity of structures and artifacts dating back to Etruscan times makes manifest the depth and richness of the surrounding historical texture.

Robert Darnton writes that one can read cities as one does texts. Few historians would disagree. After all, the doyen of British urban history, H.J. Dyos, had been 'reading' streetscapes since the 1950s. Moreover, his peers had long felt comfortable with the idea that cities were templates which could in a sense be read in order to extract the historical developments that were 'reflected' in them. A younger generation of urban historians had been enthralled by the release in 1973 of the remarkable two-volumeThe Victorian City, and by the unfolding patterns through which its contributors sought to read the nineteenth-century cityscape. But now, well into the second decade afterThe Victorian City'sfirst publication, it is timely to ask how have historians sought to read? My conclusion is unflattering. It seems to me that historians are awkwardly equipped to interpret the urban past because of their primitive approach to texting the past. Some of the most successful readings of the urban past have drawn less from history than from archaeology, architecture, geography, literary criticism, and cultural anthropology. Such analysis is more directly geared to address the essence of the text: its immediacy to a particular audience. The texts which historians think of familiarly as their own are in fact anchored in the local horizons of people other than ourselves. Their context is not our own. Moreover, their quality is profoundly dynamic. They were tools by which people addressed and sustained common-sense meanings and rhythms amidst the indeterminacies of daily living in ever-changing urban settings.