The danger is that films like Slumdog Millionaire put India's slums into the public imagination without a more sophisticated awareness that many of India's most extreme slums are now being demolished, and the fate of millions hangs in the balance.
The ambition is to transform the slum into another district, integrated into the city, with proper transportation connections and services.
Still others were almost pessimistic, or at least satirical, such as Suraksha Bhatla and Sharan Sundar's Shanty-Scraper, which envisioned a slum as a vertical patchwork slum ascending into the sky.
Such secure tenure gives people an incentive to improve their dwellings and is thus the crucial first step to upgrading a slum into a suburb.Over the past six years, South Africa's government has been pursuing an active programme of housing improvement.
Plus, Oppermann explained, you get slum clearance into the bargain.
Also, governments need to urgently find solutions to integrate the actual slum dwellers into the formal city and solve the urban divide.
An unfortunately reality is that with the slum built into the mountainside, and with locals talking of "invisible borders" past and present between criminal gangs, it's impossible to have a clear picture of what goes on there.
In Sumawi in southern Iraq, we drove through the pitiful concrete slums into which the Marsh Arabs have been "relocated".
Certainly the director and his team, including cinematographer Frank Griebe, a Tykwer regular since his great Run, Lola, Run, do all they can to give you a memorable visual experience, especially in the disgusting evocation of Paris as the slum into which our anti-hero is born in 1738.
BRAC's Manoshi program has maintained an office in Kamrangir Char since March 2007, and divided the slum into seven segments.
