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In 1925, aged 20, the Hungarian poet Attila József was expelled from the University of Szeged for a radical poem published in a periodical He left Hungary for Vienna, where he squatted in a slum with tens of thousands of other people, many of them refugees from eastern Europe He sold newspapers outside restaurants and cleaned university buildings As he did for much of his life, he lived in housing he had no formal right to, and earned a living without a wage, unrecognised by the state He existed, to use a modern phrase, in the informal economy After four months in ‘that frightful slum’, József had a rare stroke of luck He was invited by the Hatvany family to live at their mansion Even for those without benefactors with mansions to share, over the next few decades more and more Viennese residents became, as it were, legitimate (give or take a Nazi invasion) Land rights were formalised, social housing was built and slums diminished, as they did across Western and Northern Europe   It seems unlikely that the informal settlements of the global south will dwindle as did their forebears in Europe, at least in the near future In fact, slums are getting bigger According to the UN’s 2003 report ‘The Challenge of Slums’, in 2001 around 924 million people, or thirty two per cent of the world’s total urban population, lived in slums In the first thirty years of this millennium that number is likely to double The term slum is usually defined by standard of living rather than rights to land, although it is often used interchangeably with informal or extra-legal settlement In developing countries, the majority of people living in slums are also employed in the informal economy   Contemporary slums are in many ways similar in the conditions they provide for their residents to those of Vienna in the 1920s or Manchester in the 1850s Most lack basic amenities, are cramped, crowded and susceptible to the rapid spread both of diseases and flames But whereas Victorian slums were largely a product of the industrial revolution, in the