Bucktown in Cincinnati, Ohio, served as an almost quintessential ‘slum’ in the mid-nineteenth century, sharing numerous traits of impoverished and marginalized urban areas throughout the world over the past two centuries. Located in the lower part of Deer Creek Valley on the eastern outskirts of the city, Bucktown was an area where, according to prevailing miasmatic notions of contagion propagation, disease was naturally rampant, aggravated by the location there of agricultural processing. Bucktown drew in impoverished migrant workers – mainly Irish and African-American – and the common practice of inter-racial mixing and sexual relations scandalized moralizing white Cincinnatians, as did the prevalence of saloons and brothels. In his excellent essay on the Cincinnati case-study, one of 28 chapters in this valuable new volume on modern slums, Henry C. Binford demonstrates how the convergence of multiple factors in this particular location was enough for contemporaries to label it as a ‘slum’, while other impoverished areas escaped such a loaded characterization: ‘Moral, health, housing, racial, and geographic considerations combined to devalue the Deer Creek Valley more thoroughly than other neighbourhoods’ (p. 190). Crucially, in respect of wider societal perceptions of this area, and what it tells us of social relations in the wider urban centre, Bucktown was, Binford tells us, ‘vulnerable to vicious caricature’. For example, an 1860 newspaper report referred to Bucktown as ‘the Five Points of the Queen City’ (p. 191).

The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum is a considerable achievement in presenting 28 chapters by scholars from different disciplines (historians, archaeologists, geographers and anthropologists, as well as scholars in mobility and organization, international relations, land management, architecture and planning, development studies) and in maintaining an intellectual coherency throughout the volume. The geographical spread of the contributors’ expertise and case-studies is especially worthy of note: for sure, there are useful studies of Victorian London and antebellum and postbellum America, but among the most fascinating contributions are: Vivian Bickford-Smith’s analysis of slums and racial segregation in early to mid-twentieth-century South Africa (chapter 3); Kah Seng Loh’s discussion of the hazard of fire in Singapore ‘urban kampongs’ in the mid-twentieth century (chapter 22); Peter Kellett’s study of informal settlement and the accumulation of social capital in late twentieth-century Colombia (chapter 26); and Ivan Nevzgodin’s inquiry into slums in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia (chapter 19).

In the absence in this short review of a detailed and thorough synopsis and analysis of each chapter, it may be useful to identify some core themes that run throughout the book and which point both to universal trends and localized nuances. For instance, slums are, by their nature, marginalized places and are most often located on the peripheries of urban centres. In many cases, the poor have been relocated from ‘core’ areas (which have then been redeveloped in the interest of ‘urban renewal’) to the peripheries, cementing the framing of those latter areas as undesirable and morally noxious. Ella Howard argues (chapter 8) that such policies, also seen in cities such as New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, reflect the cities’ structural economic inequalities. The visibility of slums and slum inhabitants, especially when they existed in close proximity to wealthier (and more ‘respectable’) districts, has always exercised social reformers and urban planners, and this is evident, Kalpana Sharma argues (chapter 28), in the centrality to the stillborn Dharavi Redevelopment Project in early twentieth-first-century India of ridding Mumbai of the unsavoury sights of slums and urban poor settlements.

There has been an evolution of the terminology of slum studies and the classifications used within this field. In the Anglophone world, the eighteenth-century ‘rookery’ had evolved into the ‘slum’ by the mid-nineteenth century, perhaps cemented into public consciousness through the use of the term in the works of Charles Dickens. Robert Hone notes the nine-fold categorization of slums by the mid-twentieth-century writer Charles Abrams, based on the nature of tenure, while a recent typological study of slums in South Africa identified six different settlement types: ‘townships, housing-turned-slum, squatter camps, site and service settlements, transit camps, and hybrid multi-structured settlements’ (p. 290). Richard Dennis’ fascinating interrogation of Charles Booth’s famous surveys of late Victorian London utilizes the unpublished notebooks of Booth and his team, rather than the published works, to stress that the well-known poverty maps created therein were not exercises in clinical objectivity but, rather, grounded in the same subjective, moralistic judgments as his predecessors, with whom he is all too often contrasted (chapter 11).

Some minor quibbles may be identified. For example, for some of the non-historians who contribute to the volume, their engagement with the secondary literature on slum history is limited to the ‘classic’ texts such as those on Victorian England by H.J. Dyos (to whom this volume is dedicated, in tribute), Gareth Stedman Jones and Anthony S. Wohl. As such, five decades of subsequent scholarship is overlooked in these particular chapters. The nature of this volume means that, understandably, not every slum, city or country can be identified or discussed. Nonetheless, the present reviewer, notwithstanding admitted parochial biases, was surprised to see no mention of Ireland, in particular the slums of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dublin, long considered to be among the worst in Europe. A more significant absence is the lack of any mention of trade unions, industrial unrest and strikes. Men, women and children’s experiences of paid work and the organization of labour and social networks (vis-à-vis trade unionism) is fundamental to survival strategies in slum life. Furthermore, the social conditions of slums were commonly drawn upon by labour leaders in excoriating the specific conditions in which their members lived, as well as the wider economic structures of society.

Crucial to the understanding of slums is their spatial evolution and their extent within a particular urban context, as well as their proximity to better-off neighbourhoods. As such, the provision of maps is indispensable to aiding readers in their understanding. In this regard, this volume is lacking. For example, Henry C. Binford’s excellent chapter on the evolution of slum areas in mid-nineteenth-century Cincinnati contains two insufficient maps that do not identify many of the areas discussed in the chapter. It is to be appreciated that the co-ordination and management of 28 contributors and their disparate topics is a significant endeavour, and the potential co-ordination of maps by many of those 28 would greatly add to this workload (in terms of arranging high-quality scans, reproduction permissions and the financial cost of same). But it could also be suggested that this should have been built into the design of this volume, as the relative absence of maps is to the detriment of the work. These criticisms must not, though, take away from the value of this volume, which crystallizes much of what is already known about the evolution of modern slums, as well as offering fresh perspectives.