When a person from a remote village moves to the city and finds themselves living in a slum, they have not become poor and marginalised. They were already poor, and have moved closer to the centre and taken a slot in a giant possibility machine.
The odds of a drastically better life may not be great (how can we improve those odds?), and it may not look like much, but the move to the slum was an enormous step of self-un-marginalisation – of empowerment – for them and their families.
But we don’t like the look of the slums: we’d rather most of them stayed home and the city stayed tidy.
Out of site, out of mind.