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analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action

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Slumming about
Aesthetics, art and politics

Gareth A. Jones

To cite this article: Gareth A. Jones (2011) Slumming about, City, 15:6, 696-708, DOI:
10.1080/13604813.2011.609017

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.609017

Published online: 12 Dec 2011.

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CITY, VOL. 15, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2011

Slumming about
Aesthetics, art and politics

Gareth A. Jones

Slums are categorised as having a deficit of infrastructure, income and adherence to norms
and a surfeit of dirt, disease, violence and other pathologies. Slums are spaces of stigma,
regardless of improvements to material or social conditions. This paper is concerned with
how stigmatic representations of slums might be tackled. The paper considers how urbanists
might understand the relationship between slums and aesthetics. Identifying different aes-
thetic registers, the paper argues that art projects can contest how aesthetics are constructed
and how stigma may be challenged.

Key words: aesthetics, art, representation, slum, stigma

S
lum is a dirty word. As a not too dili-
gent student of Geography and Econ-
omics at UCL in the early 1980s, I
recall Alan Gilbert teaching me that
much. I had ended up as his tutee and
took his courses in Development and the
Latin American City. I had actually come
across Alan, at a distance, a few years
earlier when he gave an evening lecture to
the Geographical Association at the Uni-
versity of Brighton. As an A-level student
in the throes of reading Andre Gunder
Frank, my academic hero at the time,
Alan illustrated a connection between
development, cities and poverty that I
wanted to explore further. I can remember
vividly one image from the lecture of chil-
dren playing on a small hand-turned
wooden Ferris wheel somewhere in India.
Although through my time at UCL my
interests were slanted toward the big struc-
tural issues first introduced by Frank, I
have since found the idea of how people
conduct daily life in small spaces more
intriguing. In particular, and the theme
that I want to take up in this paper, is
how we see these spaces of poverty and
the people whose lives are apparently
embedded within them, and in particular
how aesthetic sensibilities need to be chal-
lenged. It is about how and from where
we derive radical narratives of the urban
(Roy, 2011).
The majority of this paper will consider
how poverty, aesthetics and art work, an
endeavour that seeks to suggest that urba-
nists should take art more seriously in
addressing issues of poverty and exclusion.1
The paper is organised in three parts. In the
first, I trace my concerns with the ‘return
of the slum’ and consider what is at stake
if we cannot think more imaginatively
about the slum. In the second, I suggest
that we should revisit the idea of the slum
as the outcome of both material depri-
vation and aesthetic judgement. Here, I
ask what work art can do to contest pre-
vailing ideas of the slum, not least the

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/11/060696–13 # 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2011.609017

representations as a space of stigma. The
paper then outlines three registers of aes-
thetic sensibility, with illustrations of
each. My aim is not to reify or essentialise
what art can do—art can be as reactionary
as any social practice. I interpret aesthetics
as a practice that is not above the social and
political, and as represented in art can
provoke and offer a transgressive potential
that may open up some possibilities for the
‘return of the slum’ to be a more radical
venture.2
1. Worlding the slum
My starting point is a concern with the rep-
resentations of the ‘slum’ that have appeared
in the past decade or so through cinema, tele-
vision documentary and charity ‘telethons’,
magazine articles, exhibitions and design
studio, and popular books. As Gilbert
laments, the discursive and representational
positioning of the slum has become ‘a sign
of our times, . . . a victory for the banner
headline and for tabloid thinking’ (2007,
p. 710). The ‘return’ fulfils a number of
agendas, from critique of neoliberal develop-
ment to uplifting stories of hope, as well as
allowing celebrities, civil society organis-
ations and corporations to ‘position’ them-
selves against a shared moral register
(Gilbert, 2009; Jones, forthcoming). Relying
on, if not always seemingly aware of, the stig-
matic origins and pejorative connotations of
the term ‘slum’, there is a ready appeal to rep-
resent the slum as a dystopian space. Films
such as City of God and Ghosts of Cité
Soleil depict the slum as the space of gangs,
drugs and violence, The Constant Gardener
as the backdrop to a morality play involving
corporate greed and imperialist mindsets, a
space through which to critique ‘race’ and
othering in District 9 and a site of graft, socia-
bility and sentimental feel good in Slumdog
Millionaire (see Anjaria and Anjaria, 2010;
Melo, 2004; Peixoto, 2007). Through a host
of media, we are invited to be ‘slummers’,
an endeavour in which we are expected to
JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 697
be either shocked by the scenes of misery,
dirt and disease or to empathise with the
slum dwellers’ fate. As some suggest, the
packaging of poverty and the voyeurism of
suffering is a cynical manoeuvre, ‘poorism’
according to Roxana Popescu writing in
Newsweek (2007) or ‘poverty porn’ for
Alice Miles in The Times (2009).3
What is at stake is a geopolitics of represen-
tations; slums serve as spaces through which
the poor(er) are imagined, ‘governed’ or
abandoned (Bauman, 2004; Varley, forth-
coming).4 We can readily grasp the pervasive-
ness of such representations and their
material effects. The aesthetic of the city
negated by the slum forms a common
enough legitimation for eviction and is
inherent in a great many contemporary strat-
egies to re-imagine the city for global capital
(Ghertner, 2011; Kamete, 2007). The same
aesthetic frame also operates for those who
want to improve or upgrade the slum.
Rarely is upgrading a matter of installing
water or concrete walkways alone, there is
always an aesthetic dimension that an area
will ‘look’ better. However, as a resident of
a favela in Rio de Janeiro put it in our conver-
sation, even after having been upgraded ‘a
favela remains a favela’. In both reactionary
and apparently more progressive interven-
tions, therefore, the slum retains its stigmatic
representation as the space of dirt, disease,
toxicity and danger.
However, it is suggestive to go a step
further and consider that the ‘worlding’ of
the cities of the global South might become
coterminous with worlding the slum (see
Roy, 2011). As Mbembe and Nuttall point
out, expressing concern at the attention
afforded to the cartographies of poverty and
slums, the ‘ways of seeing and reading con-
temporary African cities are still dominated
by the metanarrative or urbanization, mod-
ernization, and crisis’ (2004, p. 353). They
call for greater imagination to writing and
attention to the ‘worldliness’ of the
‘African’ city rather than focus on the slum
and informal sectors as the ‘master trope’
(Mbembe and Nuttall, 2004, p. 353).
698 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 6
However, in a provocation of Mbembe and
Nuttall, Watts has questioned whether the
slum is not in fact ‘the defining feature of
contemporary African metropolises’ (2005,
p. 189). In taking a swipe at Mbembe and
Nuttall’s invocation of Simmel, he suggests
that it is not sufficient to concentrate on nar-
rative flourish in place of ‘thicker account’ if
we are to consider and do something about
how real, material, effects are created. Watts
argues that researchers need to specify the
“particular insight” that distinguishes con-
temporary urban life from understandings
derived from earlier writings on the city or
we risk perpetuating the situation of the Aje-
gunle slum in Lagos in which 2 million
people live ‘and absolutely nothing is
known about it’ (Watts, 2005, p. 189).5
As I have noted elsewhere, critical ethno-
graphy that is alert to the power geometries
of representation offers some opportunities
for ‘particular insight’ that challenge the dys-
topian master trope of the slum (Jones, forth-
coming). The research that underpinned the
treatment of the ‘slum’ while I was a
student drew from ethnographic and other
fine-grained accounts and related, if not
always explicitly, to a politics of represen-
tation.6 The term slum itself was rarely and
only deliberately used. Preference was often
afforded to critical use of vernacular
terms—basti, bidonville, gecekondu and as a
Latin Americanist the favela, barriada and
more generic colonia popular. Research
revealed these were not ‘spontaneous settle-
ments’ but the outcome of intense social
and political organisation (Gilbert, 1981;
Turner, 1967, 1968). Patronising and ethno-
centrically inspired conceptualisations such
as the idea that settlements were ‘cities of pea-
sants’ or ‘pueblos jovenes’ (young towns)
were undone by research showing these to
be spaces of social mobility (Mangin, 1967;
Portes, 1972). Important ethnographic
accounts took issue with the notion that
settlements were ‘marginal’ or represented a
process of marginality (Lloyd, 1980;
Perlman, 1976). Preference was given to see-
mingly, then, more neutral concepts such as
‘low-income settlements’ or in John
Turner’s phrase ‘progressive settlements’
(1967).7 To some extent, policymakers took
note.
While there have been some wonderful
ethnographic and other studies of ‘slums’
produced over the intervening period, much
less critical attention has been given to how
to represent the slum. Alongside the familiar
dystopias, the slum has returned as a space
with some awkward embedded character-
istics. In some accounts it is a hive of individ-
ual enterprise, in others a space of collective
organisation verging on the ‘intrinsic’, social-
ity inflected with ethnic or religious associ-
ation. The slum appears as a repository of
‘culture’, typically around music or
animism, and it is invested with qualities of
‘vibrancy’ or ‘inspiration’ (for critique, see
Jones, forthcoming; Varley, forthcoming).
The slum serves as a counterpoint to the
bland conformity of the non-slum city;
slum-life is not allowed to be boring and
mundane. It is exoticised anew and its image
commodified in the process, but its represen-
tation is decided by others. As such, we have
not gone much beyond a point made by
Simmel in his paper entitled ‘The Poor’
where he argued that being poor is akin to
being a ‘social anomaly’ whereby material
deprivation legitimates a lack of power over
one’s collective representation and identity
(1965 [1908]).
2. Representation and art’s work
Without ignoring the very real material con-
ditions present in ‘slums’ the task becomes
how we are to undertake a politics of rep-
resentation for the present times.8 My prop-
osition is to consider more closely how we
construct the slum according to a set of aes-
thetic registers and how we might mobilise
art as one means to encounter power relations
as to how the slum is represented, and ulti-
mately by whom.
This argument seeks to draw out how the
historiography of the slum is conjoined

with ideas about aesthetics. Both Marx and
Engels, for example, wrote passionately but
disparagingly about slums, seeing them as
spaces of filth, immorality and inhuman
existence (Engels, 1973 [1845]). Marx’s aes-
thetic sensibility and his epistemic position
on working-class life under industrial capital-
ism led him to argue that artistic talent was
concentrated in certain individuals; for the
‘broad masses’ there was ‘craft’ and toil but
not art (Rader, 1967, pp. 241, 243). Marx’s
sociological imagination was constrained by
a particular aesthetic register, but as
Bauman (2004) notes, capitalism has sub-
sequently destabilised this meaning of art
and aesthetics. According to Bauman, an aes-
thetic ideal has lost its universal claim and the
objet d’art has been replaced by an aesthetic
found in the ordinary of daily life (2004,
pp. 119– 120). Bauman seems pessimistic
that this turn to the ordinary in art might
have transformative potential. Rather, he
seems to suggest that the demise of the
work of art has not undone the propensity
that to be defined as ugly still brings the pro-
spect of being condemned to the rubbish tip.
I would claim this is too static and
restricted a view of how ‘art works’. The
‘ordinary’ might operate within the socially
constructed aesthetic notions of ‘taste’ and
value, but its replacement of the objet d’art
has resulted from a redefinition of represen-
tation. Moreover, the engagement of aes-
thetics with the public sphere is clearly an
ongoing endeavour. As Tom Scanlan shows
in his fascinating historiography of garbage,
the objects, peoples and ideas considered
residual, rubbish, trash and waste and those
considered valued and ordered have altered
over time (2005). Nowhere is this clearer
than in art. Led by Marcel Duchamp,
the works of Robert Rauschenberg,
Jasper Johns, Richard Hamilton and James
Rosenquist (re)use materials to create new
forms and subjects. Their works are ‘valued’,
financially and aesthetically. Working
through this recalibration of aesthetics, or
more mundanely how art affects change and
makes certain ideas uncomfortable, is what
JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 699
produces debates. Consider, for example, how
treatments of poverty in Slumdog Millionaire
are deemed gratuitous, voyeuristic encounters
with the ‘other’, or depthless romanticisations
or, strangest of all, simply inaccurate. The chal-
lenge to codes of beauty and ugliness highlights
what some consider to be, or should be, ‘real’
(Anjaria and Anjaria, 2010).
Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that
we should imagine slums through aesthetics
as found in a ‘guidebook’ to art. Nor am I
suggesting that we should see the slum ‘as
art’ or a particular form of art. To draw an
analogy with an art genre, notwithstanding
the nomenclature as ‘self-help’ slums are not
thrown-together ‘ready-mades’. What I am
drawn to, however, is the ways slums, and
their increasingly popular representations,
seen from the perspective of art and aesthetics
do possess some opportunities for challen-
ging our sociological imagination, and offer
perhaps a little chance for action. I am
drawn to the potential for ‘radical art’ or
the ability of certain aesthetic forms to instil
what Marcuse calls a ‘consciousness of
crisis’ (2003). This potential employs a differ-
ent register of aesthetics, each more challen-
ging than the next.
Register 1: aesthetics and the slum, not slum
aesthetics
The first register relies on an aesthetic of visu-
alisation that in turn can rely on an enigmatic
quality. We can relate this register directly to
the slum. It is constantly invoked when
people say how they were surprised by how
neat some slum residents can be despite
what is implied as the dirt all around. The
archetype observation is the wonderment at
how schoolchildren always seem to have
pressed clothing and white socks. It is
repeated in the notions of ‘shack chic’ and
‘favela chic’ that are being spread around
the world in a variety of forms from coffee
table books, photo exhibitions, and the
image of eponymous bars and clubs; a rep-
resentation of the slum as ‘smart’. Although
700 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 6
these representations are usually identified
with the observer, it is important to appreci-
ate how residents and slums may act to con-
struct these representations.
Consider, for example, a scene from Nima
in Accra (Figure 1). Nima is a complicated
settlement, an important hub for trade in the
city, a dense concentration of microenter-
prises that, such as the batik workshops
(which leave some streets dyed purple), give
it a national and even international reputation
for enterprise. However, Nima is also a stig-
matised space in Accra, an area occasionally
referred to by the colonially charged term
‘zongo’, associated with sharp practices,
crime and dirt. Nima is a long-standing recep-
tion area for migrants, mostly from the north
but also from outside Ghana, composing a
complex ethnic map and a majority adherence
to Islam. Yet, houses throughout Nima are
usually well cared for and often brightly
painted, regardless of their physical integrity.
Rather incongruously at first sight, a great
Figure 1 ‘American beauty’ in an Accra ‘slum’
many houses and shops are painted in the US
Stars and Stripes. Speaking with the owner of
a barber shop in the area known as ‘Little
Lagos’ it was explained that the hut was
painted this way to make it stand out,
obvious enough from a commercial view-
point, but also to give the street a sense of its
location. Although the Stars and Stripes are
the most common palette, the visual aesthetic
serves to break Nima down into zones, rein-
forcing the designations of areas such as
Alaska, Chicago and Dallas. Variations in
the styles, the additions of cartoon characters
or other symbols to buildings serve to dis-
tinguish one area from another, just enough
to map the alleys, complementing all the
other signals that aid navigation. These
moves do not undo the stigma of Nima but
they challenge it, they claw back a little of
the chance to exert collective representation
and identity.
A similar idea of aesthetic is presented by
Cato Manor in Durban. When I visited, the

area was being fought over by warlords for
control of land access and taxi routes, prompt-
ing the intervention of police who surrounded
the area with Casspirs. The area was being
closely associated with crime and informality,
and residents of the adjacent former white-
only suburbs had highlighted inappropriate
urban practices of wood fires and animal
slaughter to local newspapers. Between the
trees of Cato Manor was a mixture of ronda-
vels (roundhouses) constructed of mud and
planks with some block buildings usually
lacking cement. Despite their illegal presence
and the argument of residents of the neigh-
bouring suburbs that the houses had ‘sprung
up’ as if unnoticed, the buildings were brightly
painted. Some of the more peripheral houses,
moreover, seen from a distance seemed to
have graffiti on them that on closer inspection
was revealed to be the word ‘Toyota’. It tran-
spired that every few weeks wooden packing
cases from the Toyota car company were
dumped in Cato for the inhabitants to use
building their shacks. Walking through Cato
Manor and especially standing back from the
main road looking up at the hillside presented
a confusing vista, a mixed media of mud and
tin rondavels painted in yellows and reds
and shacks emblazoned with Toyota signage
and ‘this way up’ markings.
Seen from certain disciplinary perspectives
or with other motives in mind, the actions of
residents in Nima and Cato Manor might be
classified as resilience or ‘making do’.
However, there is clearly an aesthetic at
work. Importantly, while the actions challenge
the representations of the slum they do not
undo the stigma attached to the specific
space or the slum in general. As Alfred Gell
puts it in his book Art and Agency, a reliance
on visual aesthetics imposes a limitation on
how we think about art forms. Art, he
argues, needs to be understood for its vital
role in human relations, a role performed
through the visuality of the object but also
through a process that requires us to think or
act differently (Gell, 1998). In short, Gell
regarded aesthetics as related to an ‘effect’,
the relation of the art object to its meanings
JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 701
and in this more anthropological sense, to
the potential for agency—in thought and
action—that relates to cultural context.
Although writing about ‘art’ as a piece,
Gell’s observation can apply here. The Stars
and Stripes and the Cato vista force us to
think of the slum a little differently but only
as exceptions that prove the rule.
Register 2: aesthetics and transgression
For those who have never visited Nima, Cato
Manor or similar spaces, their idea of the
slum may be unmoved by local peoples’
efforts. Yet, as Rosalyn Deutsche (1996)
traces, the idea of art can be more deliberately
transgressive and ‘political’. While art has
been implicated in a great many more reac-
tionary processes—political nonetheless—
from gentrification and the privatisation of
space, numerous artists and their works
have attempted to highlight exclusions—she
refers to Krzysztof Wodiczko specifically.
Although art in public is likely to be per-
mitted according to the criteria of whosoever
determines the idea of ‘taste’, activist art enli-
vens debate about the dynamics and qualities
of difference and shift the terms by which
‘public art’ is understood and how we envi-
sage the public itself. This is clearly the case
with guerrilla art, pop-ups, graffiti and
murals. The relationship of art to space is
important to this process.
I have looked at a number of activist art
projects in cities of the global South, includ-
ing in slums. However, to illustrate the aes-
thetic register in operation here, the site that
I have in mind is a previously vacant piece
of land in Bermondsey, South London.
Sitting on this triangular plot at the end of
an otherwise anonymous residential street is
a T-34 tank (Figure 2). The tank has occupied
the site for the past 15 years. So the story
goes, the land was intended for redevelop-
ment by its owner, property developer
Russell Gray, but was refused permission
by Southwark Council. The decision
prompted Mr Gray to apply for the
702 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 6
Figure 2 A ‘tank’
placement of a ‘tank’ on the site. The plan-
ning officer, assuming the word ‘tank’
referred to a septic tank, allowed the appli-
cation. Mr Gray promptly installed the T-34
and, it is claimed, pointed its gun ominously
in the direction of Southwark town hall
(Evening Standard, 11 April 2008).
However, it is what happened next that is
more interesting.
The tank has become a canvas for artists. In
2002, Aleksandra Mir painted the tank pink.
A possible inspiration is the T-34’s original
role in the Prague Spring of 1968 when
another tank parked by the Soviets on the
city’s central square as a symbol of its
power was painted pink by protestors. Mir’s
‘Summer Art’ as it became known reclaimed
that moment. A still on Mir’s website
shows the Pink Tank occupied by friends
who helped with the painting including a
small child dressed as Superman on top
pointing to the sky (see http://www.alek
sandramir.info/projects/pinktank/pinktank.
html). Perhaps reinforcing the political sym-
bolism, Gray has named the tank Stompie
after Stompie Muketsi Sepei, the young man
killed by Winnie Mandela’s Soweto Football
Club, and as a counterpoint to Southwark’s
renaming an adjacent road Mandela Way.
Other artists have taken over the site. The
tank and the back wall to the plot have
become popular with taggers and graffiti
with one image briefly attributed to the artist
Banksy. With each visit the site changes and
what was a dispute about property rights has
had the paradoxical effect. Although South-
wark attempted to impose an ‘order to
remove’, nothing appears to have happened:
the plot has become a public space especially
for children (willing to negotiate the obsolete
 JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 703

perimeter wire fence) and a visitor attraction.
The spirit of the law may have been broken,
but people like the tank, and although a
maximum Floor Area Ratio condominium
might offer greater financial return, the
‘value’ of the site exceeds political will to regu-
late the ‘installation’ or compulsory powers to
purchase.9
The Bermondsey ‘tank’ demonstrates the
plasticity of representations and how shifts
in aesthetic register affect value, including in
material ways. In this instance, an object
intended as a political statement became a
piece of art and as art continued the work
of transgression. The meaning of the site
was extended beyond the private realm of
the owner and its use was no longer overseen
by the council but was appropriated by a
range of users. Although by no means ‘beau-
tiful’ by conventional aesthetic code, much
less ‘in keeping’ with the surrounding land-
scape (that was partially the point), its aes-
thetic work was in transforming the
perception of the space, its users and purpose.
(Ranciere, 2009b). Political art operates at
the borders of these two concepts. This is
all very abstract. However, in essence it
means that art becomes a part of a contest
for political subjectivity, about how the
daily life of some is valued or dismissed by
others and how that power can be challenged.
What does this mean for the so-called
slum? Can art both highlight the difficulty
of the poor to determine their forms of self-
representation and identities, and can it
project to us what these different represen-
tations might be like? The experience of
Project Morrinho might provide one clue.
Morrinho is a quasi-‘installation’ that was
not originally conceived as an art object but
as a social exercise when it was created in
the favela Pereira da Silva in Rio de Janeiro
in 1998 (Figure 3). Being based in and of a
favela, Morrinho challenges the idea of what
this space means. It does this through a
careful transgression, taking the visualisations
commonly associated with the ‘favela’ and
working these into a statement of aesthetics.

Register 3: aesthetics or can the subaltern

play?

Nima, Cato Manor and the Bermondsey tank

do aesthetic work. They operate according to
what Ranciere (2009a) has called the ‘politics
of the sensible’, which he defines as the ten-
sions over the designation of the qualitative
boundaries between what is regarded as
beauty and ugly, permanent and imperma-
nent, socially appropriated and discarded.
To follow Ranciere, and with Simmel’s
observation on ‘The Poor’ in mind, the
relationship between art and politics he
argues ‘is a relationship between two commu-
nities of sense’ (2009b, p. 32). More precisely,
this relationship is about the reconciliation of
what he calls the aesthetics of politics,
meaning the ‘distribution of objects and sub-
jects, places and identities, spaces and times,
visibilities and meanings’, and the politics of
aesthetics or the ‘regime of identification’,
that is about visibility and intelligibility Figure 3 Morrinho in situ
704 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 6
Unlike the Durban or the Accra shacks, the
result is not to make poverty less ugly, an
enigma amidst the dirt, which relies on an
aesthetics of poverty. Rather, the outcome is
a political set of statements, the making of
the favela as an intelligible space and challen-
ging the representations of social relations.
One can arrive at Morrinho via a number
of different routes. All involve walking
uphill, initially on asphalt roads and even-
tually on packed earth alleyways as one
enters the favela and, in recent years, follow
the signs to the newest version of the installa-
tion.10 Entering Morrinho banks of stabilised
earth rise up covered in brightly coloured
bricks broken down and arranged to
resemble favela houses. Appropriately, Mor-
rinho was originally built with materials dis-
carded on the tip, but as the space was
extended the locals accused the participants
of stealing bricks and sand from housing pro-
jects. Now, the materials are brought in for
the purpose. At a number of levels then, Mor-
rinho mimics the city’s favela, consolidating
physically as de facto occupancy rights are
granted. Some of the slopes moreover are
signposted as Providencia or Fogueteiro,
actual favela. The Morrinho version includes
shops, hospitals, bars and police stations.
Amidst the ‘buildings’ are modified Lego#
figures (bonecos), some as generic favelados,
others as police, including the special forces
Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais or
BOPE that used to regularly raid Pereira
when it was more prominently controlled
by a commando faction.11 The headquarters
of BOPE is prominent, along with helicop-
ters and armed personnel carriers, but the
site also has easily recognisable bocas, the
drug sales points controlled by commandos,
bonecos with guns attached and small piles
of drug wraps.
Morrinho operates as a tableau vivant. The
pieces are moved around giving the scene a
quasi-animated feel. The young people who
built the site, and keep building it on a
more or less daily basis in a constant
process of maintenance and modification,
follow the fights between drug dealers and
police, to the more mundane improvements
to houses. There are squabbles between ‘per-
formers’ as a boss is found to be corrupt or a
rival trafficker or politician extends his terri-
torial control. Characters fall in and out of
love, there are domestic disputes, suicides,
pieces identified as untrustworthy, girls as
sluts, there are baile funk DJs and aspiring
‘honest’ workers wanting better cars and
holidays, and gold-chained drug bosses with
swimming pools.12 Some of the performances
at Morrinho are carefully controlled; they
operate within norms established between
the group or with the community. Others
are versions of rumour, news, telenovela
and film. Morrinho—which includes no
maquette of Rio that is not favela (all of Rio
is favela in Morrinho, with the exception of
the Christ the Redeemer drape above the
site)—draws upon information, gossip and
image that extends beyond Rio. Morrinho
works as a ‘replica of daily life’ but also a
parody of the favela.
Morrinho seems to perform according to
the politics of representation applied to the
favela, it is organised and understood accord-
ing to established orders and meanings. It
conforms to how a favela should look and
mimics a social and cultural life that replicates
supposed favela identities. However, Mor-
rinho is, in my view, more disruptive. It
works as a politics of aesthetics, it challenges
the visibility and intelligibility of what the
organisers and ‘visitors’ think of as a favela.
Morrinho operates at the point of tension
between what is play and performance,
what is real (or realist) and fantasy, and ulti-
mately what is favela (Pereira) and what we
think favela is (Morrinho). Some of these
relations verge on pastiche, notably the use
of Morrinho as a stage for a Fernanda
Abreu music video, but similarly in the
DVDs and YouTube clips of ‘TV Mor-
rinho’.13 As Angelini observes, what is hap-
pening here is more than Morrinho intruded
upon by a ‘cast of NGO personnel, film-
makers, artists, curators, social workers, psy-
chologists, tourists, and anthropologists’
looking over children’s play (2008). That

would hardly be unique for Rio’s much tra-
versed favela. Rather Morrinho is a ‘space as
an interface of knowledges’, the question is
who gets to construct those knowledges. As
Gell might have it, Morrinho appropriates
the semiotics of poverty but it also draws
value from those signs through social
relations (1998).
Morrinho has shifted from a project
through ‘performances’ to become a set of
exhibitions, ‘mini Morrinho’ that have
toured the world through the Venice Bien-
nale, the World Urban Forum in Barcelona,
museums in Paris and Oslo, and an installa-
tion on the South Bank Centre in London
in 2010 (Figure 4). And here I think the
South Bank installation is instructive.
Unlike most exhibitions, the Morrinho
installation was not ‘imported’ but con-
structed in situ. Over a number of days, the
Figure 4 Morrinho displaced, London South Bank
JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 705
installation took shape with the assistance of
young people from Stockwell and Brixton,
as well as a small team from Pereira. Still
recognisably a favela—and in case anybody
was in any doubt a large sign declared
Project Morrinho: South Bank Centre
Favela—this version had some interesting
adaptations. A tower had written on it SW9,
Brixton’s postcode, and another had the
name Chris Barrett painted in marker pen
on the side. Some of the brick houses
acquired mini tags. Most prominent of all
near the top of the site was located Brixton
Prison. Morrinho not only brought a favela
to the South Bank but it also brought
Brixton and Stockwell there too.14 Morrinho
on the South Bank suggests that there are
possibilities for the social difference to be
exposed and closed between sites of differ-
ence—revealingly, blogs and comments
706 CITY VOL. 15, NO. 6
about the installation on websites for the
London Evening Standard and The Guar-
dian, many by Brazilians in the UK,
claimed embarrassment and outrage that a
favela should be constructed on the South
Bank.
3. Conclusion
It is vital that we recognise the slum.
However, it is also vital to realise how we
recognise the slum (pace Roy, 2011; Varley,
forthcoming). Indeed, the thread of this
paper is to suggest that how we recognise
the slum, according to what set of represen-
tations, and drawing in turn on which set of
aesthetic registers, is as important as raising
the slum’s profile in urban studies and
policy forums. Defining the slum according
to a narrow range of technical parameters—
mostly ‘deficits’ of property rights, sani-
tation, health, income, or an over-abundance
of density, violence or problematising its
implicit qualities such as ‘race’ and ethnicity,
can be useful. However, these conversations
preserve the idea of the slum as the antithesis
of modernity and its inhabitants as ‘social
anomalies’, and disturbingly there is little evi-
dence that so-called practical interventions
do much to change this latter condition.
Pace Mbembe and Nuttall, there is a need
for imaginative texts that offers new vocabul-
aries, insights from different and more acute
angles, and new voices that can challenge dys-
topian and counter-modern narratives and
offer positive mundane accounts of city-
ness. I have argued that ‘political art’ that
challenges the aesthetics that underpin
views of the slum can be part of this progress-
ive project. This is not a positivistic endea-
vour. There is no template to what makes
one form of art induce critical thinking in
particular ways, much less whether there
will be material outcomes as a result. Mor-
rinho on the South Bank is not without its
problems but it should not be conflated
with the ‘chic’ of photographers, filmmakers
and academics producing ‘neat’ images of
favela. ‘Worlding the slum’ needs to be
about finding aesthetic registers that can go
beyond surprise, fascination and inspiration
of discarded materials put to new uses, of
bright colours and sounds, and tackle the
layers of stigma that attach themselves to
the slum. It is about changing the focal
point and critiquing the power of the
viewer/author to define the aesthetic, and
what messages are read into and from par-
ticular aesthetic codes and practices.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Alan, Pushpa and an
anonymous referee for comments on an
earlier draft, and to Alessandro Angelini
and Damian Platt for assistance in Rio and
discussions since. Feedback from students
on my class Cities, Culture and Politics
(now Urban Ethnography) at LSE have also
been invaluable. All errors are mine.
Notes
1 This forms part of a set of papers looking at the slum
in novels and art.
2 As an objection to Kant’s notion of aesthetics as
above practical interest, and aware of the struggles
over technology, art and power, Benjamin famously
observed that Fascism relied on bringing aesthetics
in to politics, whereas it was the task of communism
to politicise art.
3 See also Eric Weiner, ‘Slum Visits: Tourism or
Voyeurism’, New York Times, 9 March 2008, p. 1;
John Lancaster, ‘Next Stop, Squalor’, Smithsonian
Magazine, 1 March 2007, p. 96; Robin Moroney,
‘“Poorism” Comes to Mumbai’, The Wall Street
Journal, 15 March 2007; Amelia Gentleman, ‘Slum
Tours: A Day Trip too Far’, The Guardian, 7 May
2006; and Sally Kohn, ‘Poorism? What is Inequality
Coming To?’, The Huffington Post, 11 March 2008.
4 In his much read account of West Africa, with ample
descriptions of slums, pending disease pandemics
and the threat of juju warrior gangs, Robert Kaplan
questions whether ‘the West’ should give up on the
region (as if its presence was innocent) and suggests
a politics of disengagement (2000).
 JONES: SLUMMING ABOUT 707

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Gareth Jones is a Reader in Urban Geogra-
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Environment at the London School of
Economics and Political Science. Email:
g.a.jones@lse.ac.uk