Slumming about: aesthetics, art and politics

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 aesthetic registers, the paper argues that art projects can contest how aesthetics are constructed and how stigma may be challenged.