“A billion people live in the shadow cities we call slums. Mayne’s trenchant social history traces how perception of them shifted. Victorians saw them as labyrinths or vortices—‘topsy-turvy’ realms of otherness. Today, they are more likely to be viewed as resilient hubs of innovation. Yet developers’ war on slums has seen no ceasefire. It’s hard to refute Mayne’s estimation: ‘We invent them to explain to ourselves the ugly traits, the logical incongruities, and the social inequalities of modern capitalist cities.’”

Nature

"Mayne's reach is impressively wide, ranging confidently over the policies an initiatives of not only the global south (As well as India, he cites evidence from Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Brazil) but the contemporary developed world too, where the clearance of areas condemned as obsolete or substandard has returned from time to time to disrupt and scarify the lives of the poor. . . . Inevitably Slums  is about failure. Mayne is candid about offering no solution to the problem he so comprehensively dissects. It is the dissection itself, laying bare the history of the slum label and exposing its malevolence, that he hopes will assist the world's policy makers to take a fresh look at the potential for environmentally sustainable informal housing areas, built as they have been, in the developing world at least, by the initiative and sheer hard graft of generations of the planet's poorest."

Times Literary Supplement

"Mayne reinforces his position as an academic expert on poverty. His impressive research and use of forceful language drives home his position to readers: the term 'slums' is a historically derived term of derision that is perpetuated by both popular misunderstandings ('slum tourism') and government-driven attempts to mitigate the negative consequences of slums ('slum wars'). The result is a continual misunderstanding of slums throughout the globe, characterized by inaccurate stereotypes, reinforced by existing prejudices against the poor and their locations, and perpetuated by futile government interventions doomed to failure. Mayne has done readers a great favor with his strong and direct approach. By demonstrating the historical development of the 'slum deceits,' the author demonstrates most clearly why determined efforts by governments have proven futile. He presents quite persuasively these failures from the past in order to enable present governments to be more successful in poverty alleviation, beginning with detaching 'slum' from its historically based misunderstandings. It can only be hoped that policy makers will read this book and gain a better understanding of their own flawed view of slums. . . . Highly recommended."

Choice

"Mayne argues that the term is so freighted with historical distortions that it should be retired. . . . Mayne’s argument is delivered with great heapings of detail, recitations of centuries of policy in Britain, Australia, India, and the United States, and data on the millions displaced in anti-slum campaigns."

Jake Blumgart | CityLab

"More than ever, we need broad syntheses that bridge the specialized literatures in which most of us spend our time. That is one reason why Mayne’s Slums. Another is that, by whatever name, slums have been a significant element in the modern urban experience, the object of much planning, policy, and writing. . . . It makes principled connections across time and space. Anyone interested in slums should check it out."

Richard Harris, McMaster University | Metropole

"A wise observer and historian of poverty in India and South Africa, Mayne unveils the hidden face of urban marginality. . . . Mayne tries to differentiate between the representation of slums inspired by the desire to improve them and a more complex reality where inhabitants show resilience and participate in economic life. Improving living conditions no longer means thinking about other people’s lives for them but with them. . . . Mayne’s book, in the line of David Harvey, Joseph Stieglitz, Mike Davis, and more generally, Henri Lefebvre, sheds light on the evolution of social inequalities in urban space."

American Journal of Sociology

"Mayne has mined historical archives, finding an overwhelming and recurring prevalence of a damning slum and inevitably anti-slum discourse, both steeped in ethnic and often more crudely racial prejudice. . . . The book is an important antidote to narratives that would have us believe in a progressive or linear evolution over time from crude to more-nuanced policies. Mayne leaves us hoping that an exposure of the continued meaning of the word 'slum' and its perversity may help steer change."

American Historical Review

“A tonic and rousing critique of the bad freight carried by the concept of ‘slum.’ Although an obvious offender in my own work, I’m entirely convinced by Mayne’s passionate polemic. No more ‘s’ word from me.”

Mike Davis, author of "Planet of Slums"

“That the purportedly poor and marginal insist upon a presence in cities even when faced with seemingly intolerable material conditions is a reality long subjected to dismissals of all kinds. Mayne lacerates these dismissals, this war on the poor, with sweeping historical critique, instead demonstrating how the logics and policies that keep the ‘poor’ unsettled, simultaneously pacified and volatile, constitute a deception, covering over the distorted productivity of inequality, spatial engineering, and the reliance upon those consigned to the margins to regenerate new forms of sociality in face of denigration.”

AbdouMaliq Simone, Goldsmiths, University of London

“Mayne is a leading authority on the history of ‘slums.’ In his new book he turns his attention to the repetitions and continuities in society’s attitudes and policies towards slums worldwide over the past 200 years, from nineteenth-century Britain to the twenty-first-century Global South. His challenging, forthright book exposes how our continued use of the word slum is misleading, deceitful and downright wrong. His book speaks to historians concerned with the relevance of the past, but more especially to planners and policymakers who have ignored or forgotten the past and papered over the real implications of current urban development policies.”

Richard Dennis, University College London