Abstract
Over recent years, the political critique of the characterization of slums has progressively developed within hegemonic urban planning discourse. In planning history, however, the emergence of slums remains associated with the narrative and geographies of underdevelopment in the context of modernization theory. To deconstruct this narrative and thus contribute to the decolonization of planning discourse, this paper undertakes a historiographic analysis of English-language journal publications dealing with different forms of subaltern urbanism. I show how the concept of “slums” has progressively broadened in meaning to encompass an ever-larger array of derogatory concepts, and that the term “slum” is limited to certain geographical hotspots, thereby contributing to geopolitical biases and knowledge gaps. Through the content analysis of publications, I am able to outline a historical periodization of hegemonic planning themes and proposals addressing slums in diverse geographies, along with critical views on their underlying perspectives.
Keywords
Introduction
By default, the term “slum” today functions as a unifying concept encompassing various characterizations of areas displaying substandard environmental and spatial attributes. Soon after the term slum was defined in 1812, originally meaning simply a room or back room, different accounts of the unhealthy and even miserable housing conditions experienced in cities were reported in such foundational planning texts as Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1843) and Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (first published in English in 1887). 1 Since then and until recently, the term slum has been frequently used in historical narratives of urban planning to designate the antithesis of what is identified as modern urbanism. 2 In the wake of the Millennium Declaration of 2000, the status of the concept of slums was raised by the United Nations Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat) to a global phenomenon, something that was useful in developing indicators for the Millennium (and later Sustainable) Development Goals (MDGs and SDGs, respectively). The UN’s definition of slums as urban areas lacking legal and physical infrastructure compresses diverse classes of spatial problems across languages and geographies into a single concept. 3 This broad characterization allows international development institutions to create policy actions based on a global discourse of urbanization which, for example, asserts that about 30 percent of the urban population worldwide lives in slum areas. 4
Various strands of research in the field of urban studies are currently developing a social and epistemological critique of such universal conception of the term slum while also proposing alternative narratives of urbanization that link space to power and governance conflicts. UN-Habitat’s characterization of slums has been criticized for reproducing some traditionally negative biases, oversimplifying a heterogeneous phenomenon, setting unachievable policy goals, and legitimizing evictions in the context of slum clearance. 5 Through the practical denial of the intrinsic social dimensions of slums and the ad-hoc invention of their global history, UN-Habitat’s characterization naturalizes socially constructed problems and attributes social to spatial factors, two logical flaws that enable a subjective gaze on slums 6 – especially in architectural discourse. 7
Strikingly, these critiques all reject any naturalization of precarious urban areas and share the constructivist view that sees the enthroning of the concept “slum” as an ultimately political project to legitimize the stigmatization of urban areas regardless of their particular cultural contexts and dynamics. 8 Responding to this ontological principle, recently coined concepts attempt to situate existing imbalances of power into characterizations of urban space such as “gray spaces,” 9 “peripheral urbanization,” 10 or “subaltern urbanism.” 11 From these, the concept “subaltern urbanism” posits the most systematic understanding of stigmatized urban areas in postcolonial planning theory. Subaltern urbanism designates the places of subaltern subjects, that is, those without agency and whose actions have no institutional validation. 12 Subaltern spaces are thus not accidental formations but rather an outcome of hegemonic planning, understood as the set of institutions that—following a Gramscian perspective—extend the apparatus of the ruling power through its cultural program. 13 While hegemonic planning is generated and disseminated by civil society, it enables and legitimizes an implicit political formation that preserves the divisions between subaltern subjects, citizens, and the dominant class.
The ongoing development of a postcolonial urban planning theory is helping to reframe the historic narrative of stigmatized urban areas as one of subaltern urbanism: A number of recent contributions taking a critical theory perspective partially develop this new view on global histories of twentieth-century slums, 14 and on historical revisions of modernist architecture center-periphery narrative, 15 including its invention of self-help. 16 In addition, a number of situated analyses of urban areas such as Mumbai’s Dharavi, 17 Madrid’s barracas and chabolas, 18 Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, 19 or Buenos Aires’ villas miseria 20 have analyzed subaltern spaces beyond the historical archetype of the British industrial slum. Despite these new avenues of research, however, planning history at large remains attached to hegemonic planning narratives presented in monographs such as those of Hall, Mumford, or Benevolo, in which subaltern urbanism is basically ignored other than when referencing deprived areas in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the United States. 21 These historical works, which give primacy to technological, depoliticized narratives of planning, implicitly claim that slums illustrate the transformation of traditional into modern societies following modernization theory and Rostow’s categorization of economic growth. 22 Yet if we wish to advance the decolonization of hegemonic planning history, it is necessary to render visible such technological, depoliticized narrative on stigmatized urban areas. In this sense, the current article seeks to critically review the debates and interventions around stigmatized urban areas within hegemonic planning culture. By undertaking such analyses on mainstream planning and architectural journals, we aim to identify major case studies, projects, and themes of hegemonic planning to situate its latent ideology.
Data and Methods
For the purpose of this paper, we surveyed English-language articles in planning and architecture journals that address stigmatized urban areas. Here the choice of language reflects, on one hand, the influence of English terms such as “slums,” “squatter settlements,” or “informal settlements” in international development policy; and on the other hand, the relevance of North Atlantic anglophone, architectural and planning discourses of the twentieth century in terms of the reach and acceptance of publications. The survey of journal papers took the form of a meta-analysis and thematic analysis. Both of these literature review tools have previously been used to analyze the emergence of favelas in social science, 23 to classify modes of informal urbanization, 24 as well as to characterize housing options for the poor. 25 The chosen data source was the Avery Index of Architectural Periodicals, a preeminent research database maintained by Columbia University with a list of subscribers encompassing more than two hundred scholarly institutions worldwide. The Index features article listings published worldwide on architecture and design, city planning, interior design, landscape architecture, and historic preservation. 26 For our analysis, we selected published articles in the Avery Index from the period 1921-2000 that feature one or more of a set of seventy terms associated with slums (as characterized by De Castro) in the title, summary, or abstract. 27 The publications analyzed were either academic or trade journals (gray literature was excluded). Physical records of papers were digitized for content analysis.
As a first step, a meta-analysis of the journals was undertaken to identify patterns in the use of concepts and case study locations associated with stigmatized urban areas. To this end, data were gathered from the papers’ titles, abstracts, sub-headings, and introductions; the resulting data set was divided into two equal time segments to investigate potential historical differences. In a second research step, the patterns uncovered by the meta-analysis enabled a thematic analysis of selected clusters of planning literature that situated main cases, debates, and interventions addressing subaltern urbanization in different time periods. Once these had been identified, a secondary search of relevant sources in the current literature was undertaken to increase the completeness of the exploratory survey and include key recent publications dealing with selected cases, policies, or debates. In total, the search gathered together 539 articles from the period 1921-2000, published in 109 different periodicals. From this initial sampling, non-English articles (n = 134) and exact duplicates of articles published in other journals (n = 20) were discarded. The remaining sample (n = 385) was digitally scanned and subject to detailed content analysis.
Designations of Stigmatized Space
The frequency of use of the different terms associated with “slums” in the analyzed articles is mapped in Figure 1, which shows the number of articles referencing these terms along with information about whether different terms were used in the same article. Approximately two thirds of the sampled articles (n = 248) used the term slum, half of which (n = 148) did not refer to any other equivalent concept. There are, however, striking contrasts between articles published before and after 1960.
Frequency of use of concepts associated with subaltern urbanization in the selected journal articles.
Figure 1 shows that up to 1960, only a handful of terms were used to designate stigmatized urban areas at building level. Among these, the most recurrent designation is that of “blighted” areas and districts (n = 16), a concept strongly associated with slums (n = 14). Terms such as “back-to-back dwellings,” “decayed structures,” “dilapidated housing,” “hovels,” “flop houses,” “rookeries,” “rooming houses,” “shacks,” “taudis,” and “tenements” were rarely used (n = 8, aggregated) in this period. In contrast, from 1961 onward, articles dealing with stigmatized urban areas used more than 40 different terms, including concepts such as “shanty-towns,” “informal areas,” “self-help housing,” “ghetto,” as well as non-English terms such as “favela,” “barrio,” or “gezekondu.” While in this latter period the concept of “urban blight” became progressively obsolete, “squatting” (used both for buildings and settlement areas) was found to be the most widely used designation (n = 158), even exceeding the use of “slums” (n = 139). Concepts also tended to be interchangeable: the majority of articles used more than one spatial designation to describe stigmatized urban areas at building, urban and territorial scales. This expanding conceptual family of terms employed in the second half of the twentieth century suggests a progressive loss in the core meaning of slum and squatting, which became commonplace terms for the designation of stigmatized urban areas.
Subaltern Geographies
Of the 385 articles sampled, a large proportion analyzed a case of subaltern urbanization in a specific country (n = 343) and city (n = 242). Two maps were created to identify the distribution of these case studies in different locations (see Figure 2). The maps show that a handful of countries and cities cluster the debates around stigmatized urban areas. At country level, more than two thirds of all articles presented case studies from just five countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and Turkey. At city level, one third of all articles indexed dealt with case studies in one of the following seven cities: New York, London, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Delhi, and Rio de Janeiro. The articles were mostly clustered around one or two cities in each country, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the United States, and India.
Geographical focus of articles addressing subaltern urbanism at country and city levels.
The geographical focus of the articles shifted drastically between the two selected time periods: In the period 1921-1960, articles discussed slums almost exclusively as a U.S. (n = 68) and British (n = 39) phenomenon, with the exceptions of Canada, France, and Germany (each with n = 1). At city level, the most salient case studies observed in this period considered New York (n = 21) and London (n = 9), followed by Philadelphia (n = 5), Liverpool (n = 4), and Leeds (n = 4). Surprisingly, the search found almost no references to slums in the overseas territories of colonial countries apart from single instances in South Africa, Singapore, and Puerto Rico (each n = 1). In the period 1961-2000, a clear change of geographical focus can be seen following the mid-twentieth century, in particular the proliferation of articles devoted to case studies in the Global South. While the United States (n = 44) and the United Kingdom (n = 28) remained important foci of research, many new country and city case studies began to appear in the articles, most notably India (n = 33), Brazil, Turkey, and Hong Kong (each n = 10). However, the wider geographic scope of academic attention to stigmatized urban areas from the 1960s on does not encompass Central Asia, China, and Africa. In the case of the latter, only South Africa (n = 7) and Zambia (n = 6) were named in a significant number of publications.
The analysis reveals an epistemological bias in the geographical distribution of case studies. On one hand, articles in the period 1921-1960 barely mention the occurrence of stigmatized areas in colonized territories. On the other hand, the geographical distribution of articles addressing slums in the period 1961-2000 does not follow the geographical prevalence of actual slums according to UN data. 28 While the UN recognized that the United Kingdom and the United States both had a negligible number of slum dwellers in the latter part of the twentieth century, the survey ranks these countries fifth and second, respectively, in terms of number of articles. At the same time, countries such as China and regions such as Central Africa with large numbers of slums dwellers are generally ignored in the indexed articles (n = 3). While it can be assumed that the location of the Avery Database favors case studies in Anglophone countries, the clear disparity between the geographical areas where slums are prevalent and those areas subject to case studies reveals a clear epistemological bias in hegemonic architectural and planning discourse.
The Historical Discourse on Slums in the Global North
The survey revealed three main sets of policies responding to slums that became dominant at various times in the Global North (outlined in Table 1). These are ideas and projects of Sanitary Reform in the 1920s and 1930s; the conception and implementation of Urban Renewal policies and projects in the United States and the United Kingdom (including some criticism and alternatives) from the 1930s to the 1960s; and since the 1970s, discussions on the problem of squatting, both at building and settlement levels, especially in the United States.
Predominant Subaltern Urbanism Themes of Case Studies in the Global North.
Source: Own elaboration.
Most articles from the 1920s and 1930s describe the need for cities to implement Sanitary Reform measures. These encompass Robert Moses’ praise of the works of Baron Haussmann in Paris, 41 yet most articles refer to practical interventions like slum clearance schemes 42 and Model Housing schemes developed with new construction standards for the working classes, either as philanthropic or for-profit ventures. 43
From the mid-1930s to the 1960s, the articles focus on the inception and development of national housing programs in the United States and the United Kingdom, in which slum clearance programs, urban development, and subsidized housing construction were progressively coupled. This took place in two phases: first, through the creation of national housing programs before the Second World War, and second, through the expansion of such programs in the post-war period. In the British case, the Housing Acts of 1935 and 1936 fostered national urban redevelopment and housing programs, 44 including projects such as Maxwell Fry’s Kensal House estate. 45 Also in the 1930s, various financial and planning institutions set up in the United States aimed at encouraging the construction of new infrastructure and the development of housing programs as part of the New Deal; these included the Public Works Administration (PWA) in 1933, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934, as well as the first U.S. Housing Act and the U.S. Housing Authority (USHA) in 1937. One prominent and highly active participant in professional discussions around the national upscaling of housing provision was Catherine Bauer, the primary author of the Housing Act and director of research at the newly formed USHA. Bauer, together with architects such as Walter Gropius and Raymond Unwin, as well as the writer Lewis Mumford, had indeed introduced advanced architectural ideas to planning policies in 1934, through their participation in Carol Aronovici’s exhibition “America Can’t Have Housing” at the Museum of Modern Art of New York, which proposed the creation of a national housing institution following the principles of sanitary reform and modern urbanism. 46 A similar effort in Britain can be seen in the early schemes to replace slums with modern housing estates designed by Sir Patrick Abercrombie (1935), who later went on to create the Greater London Plan of 1944. 47
After the end of World War II, a large number of case studies detailed in the articles refer to the United Kingdom’s 1947 Town Planning Act and the United States’ 1949 Housing Act, both of which expanded existing national housing provisions, linking these to different forms of subsidized housing and urban development (called “urban renewal” in the United States and “urban redevelopment” in the United Kingdom). Articles from this period deal with the implementation of urban renewal programs in various cities such as St. Louis’s prize-winning Pruitt-Igoe housing development 48 (which later came to symbolize the failures of the International Style), 49 Sheffield’s renowned Park Hill project, 50 or Chicago’s urban renewal program, which was the subject of an opinion piece by Nathaniel Owings, a co-founder of the architectural practice SOM. 51
In the United States, the survey shows no record that further urban renewal programs were attempted after 1965 when the USHA was transformed into the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). A number of articles in the following years described initiatives such as the Model Cities Program, 52 or discussed the work of community architects in New York’s Harlem. 53 The surveyed articles do not contain any criticism of the practices of racial and socio-economic segregation that were fostered by urban renewal programs, even though the creation of the HUD and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was in part inspired by the aims of the Civil Rights Movement as a response against institutionalized racial injustice. Even further, criticism of urban renewal designs or implemented projects in the surveyed articles is almost absent. In fact, the only criticism appeared in a number of short, visual pieces that considered slums as old cottages or traditional building typologies that were transformed into asphalted estates. 54 The two pieces in the survey that most clearly raised questions of social equity are a comprehensive assessment of the U.S. urban renewal program written by Catherine Bauer and an empirical analysis of the lack of affordable new housing units in connection with the relocation of residents following a slum clearance in New York. 55 However, more recent research into the history of urban renewal programs raises fresh criticism, such as in the investigation of the arbitrary criteria used by New York developers to claim that pre-existing renewal areas are forms of “blight.” 56
A minority of the articles from the 1930s to the 1960s offered alternative approaches to slum clearance and urban renewal, aiming to minimize relocation and avoid tabula rasa developments. These approaches include the interior renovation of tenement buildings, 57 wet core “instant rehabilitations” of tenement blocks, 58 and new programs of urban rehabilitation somewhat similar to contemporary slum upgrading, such as one in Philadelphia. 59 In addition, two recurrent conceptual themes appeared across this initial period. The first was the description of the legal planning process required to implement slum clearance and eviction/relocation programs that reduced potential conflicts between tenants, landowners, and housing managers. 60 The second theme was the search for correct, operational characterizations of blight areas 61 and slums. 62
In addition to the formation of inner-city slums, the only other new housing phenomenon recognized from the 1970s onward and judged problematic was that of squatted housing. As a counter-cultural act of law-breaking, squatting cannot be considered part of the same subaltern urban phenomenon that gave rise to slums. Yet it is relevant to our purpose since the concept of squatting describes a stigmatized urban phenomenon semantically linked to those articles describing squatter settlements in geographies beyond the North Atlantic. Surveyed articles described the political and economic grounds that citizens had to either squat dilapidated buildings 63 or create squatter settlements such as Christiania 64 and Slab City, 65 which are depicted as vibrant social and physical environments. Recent research since 2000 additionally recognizes the existence of unincorporated low-cost settlements labeled colonias at the U.S.-Mexico border 66 as well as hidden illegal immigration and marginalized communities in suburban areas of the United States. 67
The Historical Discourse on Squatter Settlements in the Global South
The survey identified four interests in the Global South that progressively developed from the 1960s onward (see Table 2). First, in the early 1960s, there arose a strong interest in the characterization of subaltern urban types in “Third World” countries and former colonies; then, in the 1970s, the concepts of enablement, self-help, and slum upgrading were institutionalized in international development programs and interventions; specific land sharing and redistribution programs appeared in the 1980s; and since the 1990s, a number of new planning debates have taken place. It is noticeable that there is a lack of references to subaltern urbanism cases in Global South geographies up until the 1960s, apart from fleeting references to South Africa, 68 and to the non-self-governing territories of Singapore 69 and Puerto Rico. 70
Predominant Subaltern Urbanism Themes of Case Studies in the Global South.
Source: Own elaboration.
The main conceptual debate of the 1960s and 1970s was on how best to characterize the typical subaltern urbanism of developing countries. Here diverse concepts were studied ranging from the campamentos in Chile, 80 to the barrios in Venezuela 81 to squatter settlements 82 in India, to name just three. More broadly, a comprehensive characterization of housing problems in the Global South, as well as of the urbanization programs launched by international development agencies in this early period, is laid out in the monograph Man’s Struggle for Shelter in an Urbanizing World by Charles Abrams. 83 Squatting is not necessarily portrayed negatively in the surveyed articles, but rather as a form of self-help housing. This idea is rooted in the many publications authored by John Turner, 84 William Mangin, 85 and Peter Ward. 86 Turner’s advocates imagined that the role of public institutions in developing nations was to help dwellers construct their own housing by providing support in land distribution and basic infrastructure. In contrast, his critics attacked the supposed social repercussions of the underlying laissez-faire attitude implied in self-help. 87 The Habitat I conference held in Vancouver in 1976 (which led to the creation of UN-Habitat) delved into the two aforementioned conceptual debates and—even though this was not an actual planning or architectural event—became the subject of special monographs published in the journals Ekistics, 88 Architectural Design, 89 and Architectural Record. 90
The survey shows that the practical responses to squatter settlements from the 1970s onward were rooted in the concepts of self-help and community building. These were operationalized via three types of solutions: Sites-and-Services schemes for new urbanizing areas, and slum upgrading programs as well as land sharing programs for consolidated informal settlements. Site-and-Services schemes were an international development tool initiated by the World Bank to provide basic infrastructure and legal and financial support to realize some form of self- or mutual-help housing in new urban areas. In addition to some references showcasing the local implementation of such programs, 91 the monograph Urbanization Primer 92 (commissioned by the World Bank to the Joint Center for Housing Studies) showed how to evaluate, design, and implement projects in different locations, and represented the engineering, technocratic nature of the original program. To evaluate the success of Sites-and-Services schemes, several studies have been published in recent years. 93
Slum upgrading programs—which also focused on infrastructure upgrading and land titling but in consolidated informal areas—appeared in the survey from the end of the 1970s and increasingly toward the end of the century. Although such solutions were usually conceived at the scale of municipal institutions, they were often developed together with support from international development banks. Examples range from the Kampung Improvement Program in Indonesia 94 to the later Favela-Bairro program in Rio de Janeiro. 95 Among the various instruments of slum upgrading, land titling appeared as a specific topic of some articles from the 1980s onward. 96
Land sharing and redistribution was a third type of response to squatter settlements described in the articles that implied the demolition of at least part of settlements, which was then redistributed to neighboring settlement areas. This approach appeared sporadically in the survey in the 1980s, detailing only a few cases such as Bangkok. 97 In addition, the survey spotlighted two debates at the end of the twentieth century that problematized the role of hegemonic planning in squatter settlements. The first dealt with the epistemological challenge faced by urban planning as a discipline in addressing informality 98 ; the second focused on the problems around the perception and representation of slums, 99 a criticism that evolved as a reaction to the aestheticization of poverty implicit in architectural practices of the Global North in their treatment of slums. 100
From Slums to Subaltern Urbanism
Our historiographic analysis identified a clear distinction between the normative policy orientations of hegemonic urban discourse in the Global North (i.e., urban renewal) and those in the Global South (i.e., self-help), implying a fundamental divergence between advanced and peripheral geographies. Furthermore, our survey identifies a clear geographical shift in the focus of hegemonic urban discourse on stigmatized urban areas. Institutionally, this shift coincided with the simultaneous crisis of urban renewal and the growth of international development aid for self-help programs in the mid-twentieth century, paralleled by the progressive rise in planning-specific journals with a rather more scientific orientation than their architectural counterparts.
Our characterization of predominant themes in case studies of subaltern urbanism of the Global North and South sheds some light on the specific dynamics of hegemonic planning discourse. In the context of the Global North, the literature survey shows how the hegemonic planning history of slums is in close alignment with the narrative of modernization theory embedded in the histories of urban planning by, for instance, Hall 101 and Mumford. 102 Policies addressing slums and blighted areas followed the technological paradigms of sanitary reform and urban renewal; and, the evaluation of urban renewal projects was mainly conducted on the basis of technological and formal building innovations. The large majority of surveyed articles describing projects were not evaluative but rather eulogistic in tone and—with some exceptions 103 —they did internalize the social problems of racism and segregation that underlie the disappearance of urban renewal schemes. In the context of the Global South, this analysis represents a first historical account of hegemonic planning history with a focus on stigmatized urban areas, which hitherto has received little attention. While the extensive post–World War II discussions of “Third World slums” in the United States and the United Kingdom could initially be viewed positively, under a postcolonial perspective these are better interpreted—following Spivak’s critique of “area studies” 104 —as a cultural extension of hegemonic power aimed at internalizing subaltern subjects. The dominance of the positive view of informal settlements found in the survey, in this context, underlines a narrative that sees squatter settlements in the Global South as a natural, inevitable phenomenon. Historically, the analysis shows that the recognition of urbanization problems in “Third World” countries began in the 1960s as former colonies became independent, at a time when the Bretton Woods and other international development institutions started to implement their urban agendas. From the 1960s onward, self-help housing was employed as the main planning instrument for proposals that (in the surveyed literature) were often supported by agencies of the UN and the World Bank. As squatter settlements progressively became consolidated urban areas, the principle of self-help sone of slum upgrading, with case studies concentrated in rapidly growing cities such as Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai.
By analyzing planning policies associated with subaltern urbanism in this way, it is possible to weave together a coherent history of hegemonic planning that encompasses institutions, projects, and strategies addressing stigmatized urban areas. Our findings show that governmental legislative measures such as Housing Acts were key in defining major planning and architectural strategies. International development agencies such as the World Bank and the UN were also important in explaining the logic of interventions in squatter settlements. Furthermore, academic institutions such as the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies (today the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies), or the AA Department for Tropical Studies (today the Development Planning Unit at UCL, London) acted as intellectual seedbeds for some of the surveyed publications, authors, and intellectual debates from the 1970s on. However, it is remarkable that no urban renewal project in the survey could be connected to any of CIAM’s renowned members, despite the explicit recognition in the Athens Charter (CIAM IV) of the problems of and potentials solutions for slums, as well as the theoretical backing of CIAM for urban renewal projects under the functionalist principles of city planning. 105 Equally, the analyzed sources did not include any thematic references to CIAM IX in Aix-en-Provence (1953), which presented urban renewal schemes in French colonies and protectorates. It should be said that some of CIAM’s senior members did, however, become involved in projects aimed at improving squatter settlements through their work in international development agencies. 106
An additional insight generated by our analysis is the discovery of relevant case studies, authors, and themes that have been overlooked in planning culture dealing with subaltern urbanism. First, the case studies brought together in the survey help build a concrete, historical implementation of planning policies, thereby helping to counteract the potential “mystification” of policy innovations. This is certainly the case as regards slum upgrading, which today is most closely linked to Rio de Janeiro’s Favela-Bairro program of the 1990s, 107 still when it dates back to the Indonesian Kampung Improvement Program of the 1970s, 108 the U.S. urban rehabilitation programs of the 1950s, 109 and even programs to improve Calcutta’s bustees in the nineteenth century. 110 Second, the survey highlights those intellectuals and practitioners whose contribution to debates and policies on subaltern urbanism should be further acknowledged and studied. Of these we can name, in particular, Charles Abrams, Michael Cohen, and Maxwell Fry, and especially overlooked women planners such as Catherine Bauer, Carol Aronovici, Yasmeen Lari, or Somsook Boonyabancha. And third, the analysis uncovered debates that suggest interesting alternatives to hegemonic planning practices and ideas. This is true of papers that describe the limitations faced by formal planning when attempting to address informality, 111 the aestheticization of poverty in design initiatives, 112 the social conflicts implicit in slum clearance procedures, 113 as well as rehabilitation policies for building interiors as an alternative to tabula rasa urban renewal. 114
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jordanna Lacoste, Fatema Al-Zeera, Eder García, Elena Vanz and Di May Yu for their help in gathering sources in this paper. I am also grateful to Adriana Massida for her valuable critique of the content of the paper, and to Clara Irazabal and Rosa Cervera for their overall support.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.