Locations/building in the slum district

[haakon1]

Poorer neighborhoods will have flophouses and communal apartments, abandoned buildings, once-fine structures now run down and turned to new uses. Tiny little chapels instead of fine churches. Soup kitchens. Whorehouses and gambling dens. Something that was once a park and is now controlled by gangs or something else dangerous.

Frequently poor neighborhoods are in industrialized zones, so you might have butchers and slaughterhouses, leatherworkers and tanners, dyers, laundries and other industries that produce noxious fumes and noise that would not be tolerated in better neighborhoods.

Old warehouses (maybe used by smugglers, or just abandoned or used for lesser value merchandise). No sewers, no running water - so wells where the women gather to fetch water, chat and bathe, children playing untended in the streets because both parents labor, or because they are orphaned. Many beggars, homeless, crippled and otherwise "outcast" peopole.

If your society has an outcaste group, then even if they are not poor, they may be forced to live in such a neighborhood, so there would be small clusters of these folk struggling to improve their living standard. They might have enclaves of middle-class shops and craftsmen among the worse streets.

Well done!

The only things I would add are:
- small shops that sell mostly (or perhaps exclusively) cheap beer to go (bodegas in NYC, cuca shops in Africa)
- storefront fences of cheap goods (like 1970s NYC dealers in "used" hubcaps)
- rubbish heaps, and perhaps abandoned "fill" (broken stones and dirt from rebuilding other sites)
- small, heavily fortified militia offices, perhaps offices providing relief food to the starving, perhaps recruiting offices for the military or other high risk jobs
- small homes made of discarded junk like old sails or pieces of rotted out barrels in a medieval setting, most a motley collection of junk, but some brightly painted junk (think Latin American slums and South African townships)

 

[Zenodotus of Ephesus]

People burn things when they need heat, sometimes things they shouldn't be burning. Sometimes when they are trying to get heat, other things just catch on fire. Shells of burnt out buildings are not uncommon in abandoned neighborhoods. Alleyway bonfires and smaller "urban campsites" are also not infrequent.