"slums": Creole technologies diffusing through space and time

"The modern materials from which many slums are built is sometimes 
inscribed in their very names. The early temporary slums of North Africa 
were known as bidonvilles, for the buildings were made from opened-up 
and flattened-out oil drums (‘bidons'). The term is now generic in 
French. The Arabic term for bidonville in Morocco is mudun safi, ‘metal 
towns'. The Durban slum dwellings are called imijondolos in Zulu, 
possibly derived from the use of wood from crates that had carried John 
Deer tractors in through the port in the 1970s.[48]

One material stands out in the development of the poor world, rural and 
urban, and that is ‘corrugated iron', ‘galvanised iron' used for making 
‘tin roofs'. In the nineteenth century, it spread around the world to 
areas of British army operation as transportable housing. It also became 
a key material for building roofs and walls of white settler communities 
in Australia, New Zealand, and the Americas, where it is now of interest 
as a vernacular architecture. It was hugely important in the twentieth 
century as a truly global technology. Its cheapness, lightness, ease of 
use, and long life, made it an ubiquitous material in the poor world in 
a way it never had been in the rich world...."

cont'd....
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/03/creole-technolo.html