Slum
A slum, as defined by the United Nations agency UN-HABITAT, is a run-down area of a city characterized by substandard housing, squalor, and lacking in tenure security. According to the United Nations, the percentage of urban dwellers living in slums decreased from a massive 47 percent to 37 percent in the developing world between 1990 and 2005. However, due to rising population, and the rise especially in urban populations, the number of slum dwellers is rising. One billion people worldwide live in slums and the figure is projected to grow to 2 billion by 2030.
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Famous quotes containing the word slum:
“What is a slum?... it is something that mostly exists in the imaginations of middle-class do-gooders and bureaucrats: people who do not have to live in them in the first place and do not have to live in what they put up afterwards once they have pulled them all down. One person’s slum is another person’s community.”
—May Hobbs (b. 1938)
“... several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity ...”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)
“The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound to be dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.”
—Albion Fellows Bacon (1865–1933)