What I will say, is that many slum inhabitants could be seen and see themselves as in transition. Transition from country to urban. From refugee to worker. From dispossessed to propertied. From slum dweller to somewhere else. This narrative is as old as capitalism. Peasants/agricultural workers are dispossessed and end up in city slums. In the West, horrors upon horrors followed, eventually manufacturing the industrial worker, but not before the near century of revolutions born in France in 1848 and dying in Spain in 1938. These insurrections were largely fought by transitional classes somewhat similar to those today, who in the process of being proletarianised lived in, “neither industrial nor village society but in the tense, almost electrifying force field of both.”

— Desert by Anonymous