Unslumming

Definition

Unslumming is Jane Jacobs's name for the self-regeneration that slums demonstrably perform when their populations stay: "The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast — and in the meantime dream of getting out. This is the link that has to be broken if any other efforts at overcoming slums or slum life are to be of the least avail" (Jacobs 1961, pp. 271–272). "Unslumming hinges, paradoxically, on the retention of a very considerable part of a slum population within a slum" (p. 272). Its signs are a population drop "accompanied neither by an increase in dwelling vacancies nor by a decrease in dwelling densities" — the uncrowding of people who gained income and stayed (pp. 279–280) — followed by "self-diversification within the population itself" (p. 282). The process is anti-paternalist at its root: "The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so. To overcome slums, we must regard slum dwellers as people capable of understanding and acting upon their own self-interests" (p. 271). Against both the pessimists ("there is something inferior about the current crops of slum dwellers") and the optimists ("nothing wrong with slums that could not be fixed by housing… and enough social workers"), Jacobs holds that unslumming is the work of the metropolitan economy itself: "Cities grow the middle class. But to keep it as it grows… means considering the city's people valuable and worth retaining, right where they are, before they become middle class" (p. 282).

The concept's dark corollary is that unslumming slums are the most vulnerable places in the city: they are blacklisted by lenders, lack credit, are "ripe for redevelopment," and — most damning — display, "inevitably, features of layout, use, ground coverage, mixture and activities that are diametrically opposed to the ideals of Radiant Garden City. Otherwise it would never have been able to unslumm" (pp. 273, 287). Boston's West End, "a stable, low-rent area" by Gans's account, was destroyed precisely because it was unslumming (p. 272).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author: staying-put as the slum's regenerative force (1961).
• Herbert Gans (not yet paged — see log) — the sociologist whose West End study supplies the "stable, low-rent area" portrait Jacobs builds on (p. 272).
• Saul Alinsky (not yet paged — see log) — the Back-of-the-Yards organizer whose Council broke the district's credit blacklist and anchored its unslumming (pp. 297–300).

Related Concepts

• cataclysmic-money — the finance machinery that starves unslumming: credit blacklisting as "accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies" (p. 301).
• aged-buildings — the physical precondition: unslumming needs cheap space to improve and "old buildings 'filter up'" (p. 193).
• gentrification — the contested descendant: Jacobs describes winners crowding out diversity, but insists the self-diversified former slum population is "the indispensable foundation" of a healthy district (p. 283).
• mixed-primary-uses — the foundation: "The foundation for unslumming is a slum lively enough to be able to enjoy city public life and sidewalk safety" (p. 279).
• housing — the institutional target: public housing as "planned slums" whose "time… is an eternal disrupter instead of a builder" (p. 277).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the concept's chapter (Ch. 15, pp. 270–290): the key link (pp. 271–272); the Gans West End portrait (p. 272); preslum formation through dullness (pp. 273–275); the Salisbury planned-slum portrait (pp. 276–277); uncrowding as the first symptom (pp. 279–280); the Greenwich Village and North End census evidence (p. 280); "Cities grow the middle class" (p. 282); discrimination's concurrent overcoming (pp. 283–284); the cobbler's shoes parable (p. 286); the vulnerability of unslumming slums to clearance (pp. 287–288); the Garden City's static-society origins of the blindness (pp. 289–290).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Jacobs ingest; awaits the post-Jacobs slum literature (Gans's Urban Villagers, the displacement studies) and the Global South slum-upgrading critiques.

Open Questions

• Is unslumming distinct from gentrification, or is it the same process with the incumbent population retained? Jacobs's test — the drop in population "accompanied neither by an increase in dwelling vacancies nor by a decrease in dwelling densities" (p. 279) — offers a falsifiable criterion the gentrification literature rarely states. Can it be operationalized?
• "If people are going to stay by choice when they have choice, they must have become attached before that time. Later is too late" (p. 279). What creates attachment early — and does the wiki's social-capital register (Røe's micro-places) supply the mechanism Jacobs left informal?
• Jacobs writes that Negro slums can unslum only as residential discrimination is concurrently broken down outside them (pp. 283–285). Does the subsequent history (arrested unslumming, concentrated disadvantage) vindicate or refute the concurrency thesis?