Urban Slums and the Experience of Social Suffering (Case Study: Nayssar in Sanandaj)

The main goal of this article is to explicate the experience of social suffering in urban slums through a dialectic structure of social, historical, and spatial aspects of the construct of people living in urban slums. The study of slums requires a theoretical framework which emphasizes on the social aspects of life in such spaces. A slum is a highly populated urban residential area consisting mostly of closely packed, decrepit housing units in a situation of deteriorated or incomplete infrastructure, inhabited primarily by impoverished people. This research studies a slum called Naysar near Sanandaj city. Through critical ethnography, and by relying on concepts of “Social Suffering” and “The Space of Representation”, we study the lived experience of suffering of inhabitants. The findings show that there is a great degree of “Feeling Distaste for the Neighborhood”, “Distrust”, “Abandonment” and “Inability to Change the Situation” among inhabitants. These all are terms related to social suffering. Some other terms related with the hierarchy of domination are “Property Acquisition”, “The Functions of Urban Organization” and “the Disability of Inhabitants”. Finally, according to critical urban theory, “The Right to City” is the main concept which clarifies the situation of subaltern excluded people in slums. In slums like Naysar, a social movement is needed to resist the power of capital and interventions of state organizations in order to re-appropriate the urban spaces to subalterns.