In which a Guardian writer bemoans the lack of slums...

Or so it seems:

In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to assert “we are here” and “this is also our city”. Or, as the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it, “Estamos presentes”: we are present, we are not asking for money, we are just letting you know that this is also our city.

It is in cities to a large extent where the powerless have left their imprint – cultural, economic, social: mostly in their own neighbourhoods, but eventually these can spread to a vaster urban zone as “ethnic” food, music, therapies and more.

All of this cannot happen in a business park, regardless of its density – they are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. Nor can this happen in the world’s increasingly militarised plantations and mines. It is only in cities where that possibility of gaining complexity in one’s powerlessness can happen – because nothing can fully control such a diversity of people and engagements.

OK, our writer - one Saskia Sassen - doesn't actually use the word 'slum' here because that would load a whole lot of negatives onto her narrative. This narrative is filled with the popular "everything is being bought up by huge corporations" line - as if the buildings in London, New York and Berlin were all owned by collectives, co-ops and interesting old couples who've lived there since the place was built. There's also a slightly worrying 'and lots of the money is Chinese' as if this is necessarily a problem (a decade or so ago the bad foreigners with funny names were Japanese).

Now the point about slums is that they allow people to do those capitalist things away form the gaze of the authorities occupying expensive real estate in the city proper. And our writer is perhaps right to be concerned about the squeezing out of these places:

"Arrival cities are known around the world by many names," Saunders writes: "slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighbourhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing two million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world."

But Sassen is also wrong because the arrival of those grand developers, the imposition of those gigantic regeneration schemes, and the suborning of public space to private use doesn't stop those migrants coming. They still fill up the cracks, occupy what space can be found that's too marginal, contested or contaminated to attract those rich foreigners with funny names and their millions. And Sassen seems overly bothered by the location of public buildings filled with regulators and controllers - as if these people are either the friend of the slum-dweller or their places of work truly public spaces.

In The Arrival City, Doug Saunders talks about Istanbul - not the old city of tourists and old architecture but the far suburbia where the rural migrants settled illegally and built the fastest growing, most dynamic communities of Turkey. And this is the pattern in all our cities - the success of those at the margin makes the success of the city, a success achieved in the teeth of government opposition, eviction, regulation and distrust.

But they stay in the city. I remember selling a magnificent hand-stitched quilt to a middle-aged Jewish lady in Mill Hill. She and her husband were rich, living in a multi-million pound house in a desirable North London suburb. Asking the woman why she wanted the quilt she told me that she 'wanted an heirloom, our families came here with nothing and we want our families to have something'. Those families didn't come to Mill Hill, they came to London's East End and lived in a couple of cramped rooms from where they made their way in the world.

We look at slums and see squalor, dirt and disorganisation. The leaders of these places speak of poverty, exclusion and prejudice. But those new arrivals aren't staying in those slums - the best summation of what drives them is this quotation from Marco Rubio, one of the men seeking the Republican nomination in next year's US Presidential election:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

This isn't a defence of slums, just an observation that, for many of those who live in urban poverty, their life is better than the one they left behind. And they also know their children's lives will be better too. I guess only a conservative would really understand this though.

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Perhaps we should stop trying to create communities - mixed or otherwise.

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I live in a mixed community. Socially, in terms of income and, to a degree, ethnically. But the real magic about the place is that it wasn't 'created', there wasn't a great masterplan that would mean Cullingworth had a variety of housing - flats, terraces, semi-detached and detached, old and new, large and small. Nor was there a grand plan to make sure that the village had about 20% of its stock available for social rent. Yet somehow we've managed to have that mixed community that makes Cullingworth such a fine place.

So it does rather concern me that the solution to some communities - whether Belgravia or Easterhouse - not being 'mixed' is to chain up the wrecking ball and knock stuff down. It's as if we're channelling some petulant child troubled by the failed sandcastle - kicking out at our failures. So, as Peter Matthew's describes:

An area of predominantly social housing is demolished, replaced with a mixed-tenure community, with a net reduction in the numbers of social housing units and an increase in rents. These developments intend to, and do, push the poor and marginalised out of our cities.

We have done this time and time again. Even Cullingworth wasn't immune to slum clearance - back in the 1960s the then Bingley Urban District Council bought up the back-to-backs in the village (paying an average of £43 pounds - no I haven't missed off any noughts - for each house) and flattened them. For a few residents there were new council houses in the village but for most the new Woodhouse Estate at Keighley beckoned.

I make this observation to provide a context for the assertion that knocking stuff down and starting again probably isn't the right solution - however despairing we may be at the prospects for residents of Holme Wood or Bracken Bank (these great peripheral estates has such appealing names). Nor are we served by the common assertion that somehow the depressing dreich of the council estate is responsible for the failings of that estate's residents.

Indeed, just as health inequality is caused by the mobility of the healthy and wealthy, places of multiple deprivation come about because they are the only places where the poor and ill can afford to live. And we know that, at the first opportunity, those poor and ill folk will up sticks and head for a nicer place - indeed the most ambitious will leave before they cease being poor and ill in the expectation that another place, however tough, will provide the opportunity for escape.

This is why people from the other side of the earth will crowd into unsanitary, damp and dangerous accommodation in Bethnal Green - the prospects are better than in Sylhet or Timisoara. And why young people from Barnsley and Huyton head to London, prepared to pay through the nose for a shoe box and have a job. The problem is that, once these places start to work, the authorities decide they must act - and acting means enforcement, slum clearance, regeneration.

Nor - however cute the argument might be - is there a case for turning the approach upside down and:

...demolish large areas of high-value owner-occupied housing and replace it with high density, socially-rented housing...

This suffers from the same problem as slum clearance except instead of kicking at our failed sandcastle we run over and trample on some other kid's spectacular sand version of Versaille. Such demolition utterly fails because - like slum clearance - it doesn't really face up to the problem but rather neatly sidelines that problem. We get action for the sake of action, a sort of Gentilean approach to regeneration rather than asking why it is that we residualise social housing and marginalise the residents of social housing. Or for that matter why it costs £650,000 to buy a 3-bed terrace in Hackney.

The truth - or at least the beginning of truth - is to remember where I started: mixed communities should be places of the willing rather than creations of the planner. Indeed, more often than not, our planning disrupts that process of community building. Indeed, as Jane Jacobs remarked about that godfather of the planned community, Ebenezer Howard:

As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

Every day I see examples of planners disrupting people's innovation because it fails to fit their rules - from little examples like not allowing people to keep goats in Detroit or getting a couple to demolish their rather beautiful woodland home, to the grand plans that make land too dear and too precious for the growth of wonderful communities.

So to return to Cullingworth. There's an application from Barratt Homes to build 233 houses on the edge of the village. It's a brownfield site, it's not in the green belt and Cullingworth's a nice place to live. The development will happen - all we really want as a village is for the developer to build us a new village hall. We'll cope with a classic estate development because the remaining 1200 homes are so diverse and we're watching to see what happens to other sites in the village - some homes for rent maybe, a few more apartments and some smaller houses for younger couples.

But in other places - already cursed by planners - we'll see 'urban extensions' into the green belt that consist of vast swathes of suburban sameness, the very opposite of the mixed community we want to create. And this, like so much else about Britain's housing (from poor space standards to the price of housing land) can be laid firmly at the door of our planning system. Even the much maligned housebuilding companies exist in their current form because of the manner in which land markets are skewed by the, often bizarre, decisions of planners.

In the end regeneration isn't about knocking stuff down. Cullingworth wasn't created by demolition and rebuild (the land the back-to-backs occupied prior to their demolition remains largely - the existing and ageing village hall aside - open land) but rather by the interaction of its residents, by the fact that there's a chance for most of staying here and by the initiative of businesses and individuals. Perhaps - and there are many places like Cullingworth - we should restart our search for community by looking at these villages and learning about how they stay mixed.

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Life in Brazil's slums...

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...isn't quite what our mental image would suggest:

Beatriz Soares, 21, a resident of Complexo da Maré, falls into this middle class status, despite the fact that water, sewerage, electricity and gas are not regulated in her home. “I’ve never missed anything here at home,” says Soares, a student of Journalism. Her parents run a bakery in the slum and have a monthly income in excess of R$2,000. This income allowed Soares to study in private schools, today making progress in English and Theatre studies.

Soares demonstrates an increased consumption among families of the slums: she has health insurance, her own car, computer and cell phone. Furthermore, her spending on clothing is constant. “I love buying clothes from stores in the mall,” says Soares. She is not alone in her lifestyle. Instituto Data Favela found that most households in the slums have refrigerators (99 %), washing machines (69 %) or microwaves (55%), with many also owning a plasma, LED or LCD TV (46 %), or freezer (38%).

The central point here, the thing that makes Complexo da Maré a 'slum', is that word 'regulation'. People have sanitation, running water, electricity and gas but it is not as regulated or controlled as is the case with those parts of Sao Paulo that aren't 'slums'.

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