Happily, the debate about slums is no longer dominated by the project of replacing or eradicating them.
One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient.
He views the four hour walking tours, aside from being a way to make money, as an opportunity to dispel negative preconceptions about the slums.
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For Silvinha, creativity and ambition within the favela are ways of combating the negative preconceptions people have about the slums as well as overcoming difficult conditions.
The most influential work about the new slums, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto's The Mystery of Capital, published in 2000, takes the ownership side of the debate, underscoring the limits of security of tenure.
Their community awareness camps educate families in rural villages and city slums about the dangers of sex trafficking, and a daily patrol at crossing points along the India-Nepal border successfully rescues an average of four Nepali girls a day.
Development bankers like to talk about a project in the slums of Orangi in Pakistan's capital, Karachi.
But an un-Riis-like consensus has formed about how best to address the new slums' problems.
Rather than prattle on about the coming apocalypse, they could work to replace treeless, dense slums with shaded low-lying clean houses that are easier to heat or cool.
Governments have rarely dared try to evict the occupants of the slums because they are condemned for destroying the homes of the poor, though about 70, 000 relatively new dwellings have been bulldozed in the past month.
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