Rhetoric of the 'slum’

Despite Gilbert's recent identification of the 'return of the slum’ as a dangerous trend (2007), scholars such as Rao (2006) assure us that there is a broader theoretical interest in applying the term 'slum’ in a normative sense, as it offers a new analytic framework for understanding the global cities of the South. Using the recent politics of large-scale slum evictions in Indian cities, this paper explores this tension, asking if a theoretical return to slums can help generate new narratives of poverty, serving as an important site in which historiographies of neoliberalisation in the global South can be unfolded and addressed. It underscores the need for a new direction in collecting ethnographies of the urban poor in India as they negotiate the current political and policy drive for creating 'slum-free’ cities, conscious that the resulting spatial articulation could possibly reveal how formal and informal geographies connect with each other in increasingly multiple and complex ways. As this paper argues, what is needed in the context of contemporary urban change involving harsh and often violent slum eradication strategies is perhaps not 'slum as theory’ but a sincere engagement with in-depth, empirical case studies that clarify much of the uncertainty surrounding the spatialisation of urban poverty.