Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
—Lawrence Walsh, Chinatown
He was at once a fence for stolen articles and a spy for the police. He worked a thriving trade both ways, because the district on which he bordered was the Maze, a tangle of muddy, winding alleys and sordid dens, frequented by the bolder thieves in the kingdom.
Welcome to the Narrows. No-one's coming to save you.
—Joker, The Joker Blogs
Martha: You've brought me to the slums?
Doctor: Much more interesting! It's all cocktails and glitter up there; this is the real city.
Doctor: Much more interesting! It's all cocktails and glitter up there; this is the real city.
Cpn. Ben Sisko: They made some ugly mistakes, but they also paved the way for a lot of the things we take now for granted.
Dr. Julian Bashir: I assume this is one of those mistakes.
Sisko: A bad one. By the early twenty twenties there was a place like this in every major city in the United States.
Bashir: Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?
Sisko: No. People with criminal records weren't allowed in the Sanctuary Districts.
Bashir: Then what did they do to deserve this?
Sisko: Nothing. They're just people without jobs or places to live.
Bashir: So they get put in here?
Sisko: Welcome to the twenty first century, Doctor.
Dr. Julian Bashir: I assume this is one of those mistakes.
Sisko: A bad one. By the early twenty twenties there was a place like this in every major city in the United States.
Bashir: Why are these people in here? Are they criminals?
Sisko: No. People with criminal records weren't allowed in the Sanctuary Districts.
Bashir: Then what did they do to deserve this?
Sisko: Nothing. They're just people without jobs or places to live.
Bashir: So they get put in here?
Sisko: Welcome to the twenty first century, Doctor.
—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Past Tense Pt. 1"
There's nothing to be on Cluny Square. It's fallen off the world. And they can't find their way back on their own. You're not supposed to say that in America, are you? The land of can-do, the American dream of grab all you can and fuck the other guy. But it's true. Cluny Square is rotting. If and when utilities workers enter these apartments to service power and water, they have to wear anti-bacterial suits. But the people who live here don't get them. Cluny Square is poison. The police enter in groups of no less than twenty, cabs won't enter at all, the address on a job application is death…
—Spider Jerusalem, Transmetropolitan
No one lives in the slums because they want to. It's like this train. It can't run anywhere except where its rails take it.
—Cloud Strife, Final Fantasy VII
The post-war fascination with technocracy and the sudden availability of lots of modernist architects who had fled the Nazis meant that everybody wanted to do big urban renewal projects with grand designs and visions. Hence the rise of brutalism... The standard example is Pruitt-Igoe
, a shoddily constructed block of housing that quickly degenerated into a crime-ridden nightmare and was demolished less than twenty years after its construction. The two extremes of this form a clear snapshot of this sort of modernism. On the one hand, Pruitt-Igoe was an unmitigated disaster of a construction. On the other, it was built by respected architects and was an acclaimed piece of architecture. The contrast led to the ironically derogatory phrase 'award-winning design' to refer to something beloved by architectural critics and thus, by implication, almost certainly a piece of crap in practice.
, a shoddily constructed block of housing that quickly degenerated into a crime-ridden nightmare and was demolished less than twenty years after its construction. The two extremes of this form a clear snapshot of this sort of modernism. On the one hand, Pruitt-Igoe was an unmitigated disaster of a construction. On the other, it was built by respected architects and was an acclaimed piece of architecture. The contrast led to the ironically derogatory phrase 'award-winning design' to refer to something beloved by architectural critics and thus, by implication, almost certainly a piece of crap in practice.The Tower of David wasn't destined to stay empty indefinitely. In 2007, the skyscraper was invaded by droves of squatters...Since most of the 45-story unfinished building didn't yet have the amenities you expect from a home — like, say, electricity or windows — residents took to MacGyvering basic utilities. You know your city has hit the skids when you're this excited to finally install your own toilet. Instead of being home to fancy executives and shitheel bankers, now over 3,000 people live in what is essentially a real-life version of the slum tower blocks from Dredd.
In my dreams, I can still see the paths I used to tread: roofing precariously stretched across neglected yards and gardens; rickety walkways connecting the upper stories of rotting buildings; cellars accessible only through neglected tunnels. Only the inhabitants who were intimately familiar with the dangers within - from collapsing doors and floors to insidious deadfalls - entered with impunity. Deep within those mazes, criminals planned robberies, fencers stored their goods, fugitives cowered and the destitute scrounged. This was the heyday of the "rookery," the robber's nest: the infamous Thieves' Citadel.
—Vampire: The Masquerade - Clanbook: Nosferatu (Revised)
This is a bad neighborhood, really. Even in the worst neighborhoods I've lived in, the cops never shot people and just... left the bodies. That's a sign of falling real estate prices right there.
This is worse than my old neighborhood, too. This is more like Harry's neighborhood. Harry's neighborhood was this bad - especially at night. They would climb the walls there. Yeah, his dad fired a shotgun at the ceiling, and he only scared some of them off...
—Gordon Freeman again, Freeman's Mind 2
There are parts of town the tourist board don't mention. Parts of town where the police travel in threes if they travel at all. In my line of work you get to visit them more than is healthy. Healthy is never.
— The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Neil Gaiman
The east bank filled with homes, shops and society. And so, the taverns and brothels moved to the west bank, where foreigners, sellswords and pirates erected their own shadow city of fornication, drunkenness and murder. In time, the west bank became such a cesspit of crime and depravity that the Volantenes had no choice but to send their slave soldiers across the Rhoyne to restore order and some semblance of decency. Like all such missions, they succeeded, they left... then they failed.
—Lord Varys, History and Lore of Westeros: Volantis
Where the Universität is the pride of the Neuestadt, the Shantytown is its shame. A collection of shabby houses, filthy streets, and profane odours, the Shantytown is the haven of thief and murderer, men and women of low morals (if they had them, they’d own property), and the diseased and malformed. Most decent Nulners avoid this part of town, seeing the people there as nothing more than rabble. And though it was the Shantytowners who came to the city’s defence when the Skaven boiled up from beneath the city, Nulners have a short memory when it suits them.
—Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Paths of the Damned — Forges of Nuln
Every city has at least one area where all the rules have broken down, where humanity comes and goes, and civilisation is a sometime thing. Blaiston Street is the kind of area where no-one has ever paid any rent, where even the little comforts of life go only to the strongest, and plague rats go around in pairs because they're frightened. It's mob rule, on the few occasions when the brutal inhabitants can get their act together long enough to form a mob. They live in the dark because they like it that way. Because that way they can't see how far they've fallen.
The empty integuments of grand buildings began to fill. Rural poor from Grain Spiral and the Mendican Foothills began to creep into the deserted borough. The word spread that this was a ghost sector, beyond Parliament's ken, where taxes and law were as rare as sewage systems. Rough frameworks of stolen wood filled the empty floors. In the outlines of stillborn streets, shacks of concrete and corrugated iron blistered overnight. Inhabitation spread like mould. There were no gaslamps to take the edge off the night, no doctors, no jobs, yet within ten years the area was dense with ersatz housing. It had acquired a name, Splatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky.
They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.
