2024年度入試【英文】
Alan Mayne’s book, Slums: The History of a Global Injustice, retraces the history ofwhat are commonly called “shantytowns” in an attempt to better understand the reasonsfor the failure of successive policies carried out throughout the world from the 19thcentury until today. While shantytowns represented the darker side of industrial cities in
the 19th century, since that time, the world’s cities, centers for business and finance,
have not avoided the emergence of poor communities, nurturing social inequalities.
According to a recent United Nations’ report, as of the year 2000, more than 200
million people have been able to escape from slum conditions; however, it is estimatedthat over 900 million will be residing in “slums” worldwide by 2020.
The term “slum,” used to name workers’ districts located in East London in the 19th
century as well as today in Dharavi, situated in the center of Mumbai, does not reflect
the differences nor the inherent complexity and diversity of the favelas in Brazil,
the barrios in Latin America, and the bidonvilles in France. By studying the term“slum,” its circulation from one continent to another, and from one culture to another,
Mayne, a specialist in social history, analyzes the emergence and evolution of thisconcept as well as antipoverty and urban renewal programs. Originating from Cockney,a working-class slang indigenous to London’s worker districts, slum has a negative
connotation that suggests a world of poverty, entailing violence and epidemics, which isa real affliction for the city. It contributes greatly to nurturing an imaginary state wherefear and “the attraction of repulsion” are paradoxically mixed, according to Charles
Dickens’s words. By the end of the 19th century, philanthropic reformers “confirmedthat slums were a real and a terrible presence in urban society” (p. 76) and committed
themselves to teaching their inhabitants principles they believed were necessary toimprove their daily lives. At the same time, the particularity of slums stirred thecuriosity of tourists who came to visit them in London and New York and later on thoseestablished in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Such visits reinforced an attachment to acomfortable lifestyle and contributed to accentuating social differences. Far fromdescribing the objective reality of extreme poverty housing, the author argues that theword “slum” is used by politicians, developers, or journalists to justify their destruction,
to promote urban renewal programs, and to move inhabitants to modern housing.
Major events, such as the Olympic Games or the official visit of a dignitary, become anideal pretext for masking, or even eradicating, the subworlds that would be a reminderof the undeniable failure of politicians. This is a real war against the slums based onprinciples such as “unfit neighborhoods,” or “unfit for human habitation.” Describingneighborhoods where the inhabitants have neither money nor opportunity is part of aconceptual construction. This is a real obstacle in considering the issue of low-income
settlements properly and in finding alternative solutions to those usually imposed bypoliticians. The author states: “Slum is fundamentally a deceitful construct” (p. 8).

2024年度入試

Indeed, an analysis of the word shows that it confines slums to a simple abstraction,
while ignoring their diversity, as well as their physical and social complexity. It locks
their inhabitants into a fate of social failure and keeps them out of the economic life of
the city and that of the region. Social marginalization reinforces religious and ethnic
difference and makes slum dwellers the emblematic figures of the Other, often inducing
contemptuous, coercive, or paternalistic actions. The term “slum” circulated as of theend of the 19th century in the colonies of the British Empire, particularly in India, where
it referred to the living conditions of overpopulated cities, with some colonialconnotation. When independence was obtained, the term regained its original meaning
with postcolonial programs that spread throughout the world at that time.
A wise observer and historian of poverty in India and South Africa, Mayne unveils thehidden face of urban marginality: the experience to benefit from the site and the spirit ofinitiative to promote business, often through the creation of microenterprises supported
by microcredit. The author recalls one of the most striking initiatives: in 1983,
Muhammad Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Twenty years later, 6.5
million people have had access to loans and have consequently taken part in local
economic life. The United Nations’ guidelines, defined in the Millennium Development
Goals entitled “Cities without Slums,” recognize the resilience of people where state
governance has failed.
Mayne pursues the reflections he began with Tim Murray in their book, The Archeologyof Urban Landscapes: Explorations in Slumland (Cambridge University Press, 2001).
In his opinion, “slums are constructions of imagination” (Alan Mayne, The Imagined
Slum: Newspaper Representation in Three Cities, 1870–1914 [Leicester University
Press, 1993, p. 1]), more related to scholars, economists, or politicians who maintaindistant or even erroneous stereotypes of reality. The author also seeks to question
stereotypes, associated with the term “slum,” that appeared with the first eradication
policies carried out in Birmingham as early as 1875 and that are still being promulgatedtoday with Dharavi’s renovation in Mumbai, India.
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 andparticipate 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.
Text Source:Billier, Dominique. 2019. Review of Slums: The History of a Global Injustice. by AlanMayne. American Journal of Sociology 124(6): 1856-1858.