Elements of an Economic Model for Slums in a Developing Economy

Abstract

To be concerned with a model for slum development seems to contradict the root hatred of civilized peoples for the The ideal city, we are told, is the slumless city. The slum is a cancer on the body social which should be removed as quickly as possible. This negative view, apart from the myths which it breeds, is legitimate but inadequate. The slum can play a dynamic role in the process of urban growth. It is this positive role which we are interested in examining from an economic perspective. The role of the slum in urban growth differs substantially between the developed and the developing economy. The slum in a New York or a Chicago typically is a blighted area. Its residential units may once have been adequate, even elegant, but because of changes in occupancy and physical deterioration they are now run down. The city's poor and rejects crowd into them, and the buildings become a slum. This process of blight may occur in the large urban area of a developing economy, but it is far less typical. The slums of Lima, Santiago, and Rio, for example, tend to form immediately as staging areas for the immigrant poor coming from rural and small urban areas in search of a better life. These are not, for the most part, dead end communities. Rather, they constitute an integral part of an urban community in the process of development. The families are typically young and numerous. They have the migrants' vigor and the initiative of the poor. They supply the city with its unskilled work force. They build their own homes and minimum infrastructure. They are at least dimly conscious of their political potential. The elements of the economic model proposed deal with this kind of slum-in-process. The questions are: (1) how to discover the economic role of the slum in urban process, and (2) how to integrate the slum more completely into this process.