ABSTRACT
The growth of self-built squatter communities on the outskirts of Third World towns and cities must surely be one of the most striking and extraordinary social phenomena of the post-war world. Although a welter of statistical and descriptive studies have appeared in recent years, particularly on Latin American shanty-towns, systematic attempts to formulate a theory which would provide a general understanding of the phenomenon as a whole have been noticeably lacking. Only very recently have social scientists grasped the full complexity of the social processes involved, and this realization came about more by accident than by design. The tendency of disciplines to import their theoretical assumptions and substantive preoccupations into the field led in most cases to an eclecticism that only made the lack of a theory more embarrassing, as the comparability of discrete findings seemed increasingly questionable.
