Should we be concerned about slums in cities?

The answer depends on what we mean to protect: the people living in slums, or the structures themselves. If we care about people, we should feel no alarm at those who choose to enter a slum. We should instead worry about those who cannot leave one. If we care about the structures, we have reason to value them rather than condemn them.

India’s five megacities, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, and Bangalore, house an estimated [X]% of their combined population in slums. Slums are not an exception in these cities. They are the norm, woven through the urban fabric as tightly as any other thread.

Slums function as a solution, not a problem. Like mushrooms after rain, they emerge in response to underlying conditions, and clearing them away in haste helps nobody. It only damages the networks and livelihoods that residents have built around them.

Five conditions create slums together: poverty, migration, informal labour markets, expensive housing, and weak property rights. The rural poor migrate to cities in search of better opportunity, and cheap, informal housing gives them their first foothold there. That foothold lets them service the city through low-wage informal work, work that itself cannot pay for decent housing, and residents build dense, informal structures on land parcels where property rights sit fuzzy or poorly enforced.

City governments, to be clear, provide slums with almost no services. Slum communities build their own instead, through neighbours, small entrepreneurs, or extra-legal arrangements, and slum dwellers end up paying more than better-housed residents for water, electricity, waste removal, and basic legal protection. Conditions inside a slum can still be abhorrent. Residents stretch themselves to the absolute limit of what a human being can bear, just to survive there.

The real question, then, is why residents who move into a slum cannot move out of one. In cities where household incomes rise slowly, sometimes across several generations, that stagnation traps people in place. In the harshest cities, local goons and mafias capture entire slum territories, overcharge residents for basic services, and exploit the vulnerability that comes with living an informal, illegal existence. Slum dwellers get locked in.

Successful cities show the opposite pattern. Slums appear, and then transform. A city that grows faster and opens its markets to poor slum dwellers on the same terms it offers everyone else sees more residents exit slums, and it can turn the slums that remain into dense but livable neighbourhoods.

Uprooting these informal arrangements, then, means uprooting a product of real human ingenuity, built by people with an admirable instinct for survival, the same people who keep a city’s engines running. Doing so in haste is not just poor judgement. It is a moral failure.