Slums and political agency

February 18th, 2005 | by aobaoill |

Alternet’s recent piece on slums and slum-dwellers is well worth reading. It is estimated that fully one quarter of the world population will shortly be living in slums. This piece touches on the various political questions that arise, such as issues of political agency. Discussing attempts to have the slum population themselves included in decisions around resettlement they note:

This means including them in the process – not, as has happened in the past, housing fishermen and vendors in high-rise new tenements where they can’t carry their equipment up the stairs. When you don’t ask squatters where and how they want to live, D’Cruz says, “you deliver and construct houses that aren’t good enough for the poor.” So it’s no wonder they often just sell the property that was given to them and move to another shanty town where they can determine their own lives again.

This reminded me strongly of the situation in Ireland where the Traveller population has often been excluded from decisions about resettling them. I think that matters are somewhat better now than it used to be, but it’s an issue that should be self-evident but which is bewildering to many people (including for instance Kevin Myers who has written repeatedly, in an unsympathetic manner, about the topic).
Another interesting point raised in the article is how the Left views the slum dwellers. This is linked of course to the issue of agency but can go beyond this, with some people seeing these people as the kernel of the future revolution. Somehow such interpretations seem, to my mind, to miss the point, but I may be misjudging the argument, which may be more sophisticated than I believe.

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