The 21st and 21st centuries saw an unprecedented increase in urban population. Poverty and inequality in urban areas have followed the same curve, and the most visible effect is slums, which are precarious facilities where people are still growing. The plastic arts, architecture and literature have been seized, and here we are trying to determine what meaning should be given to artistic and architectural productions around, in and from slums, in an analysis characterised by the idea of a political and economic distribution of representations. The first part defines the slums and gives its main characteristics for an aesthetic investigation rooted in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ ‘DIY’ concept, which finds in modest ways of making complex poets. The analysis of artistic productions around slums is based on two main ideas: slums as utopia, as part of an overall criticism of capitalism; and the slums as a moralising surplus of a world dyed by neoliberal rhetoric. These two antithetics approaches are roughly organised into two historical periods, the first, critical, from 1950 to 1980, the second, more ambivalent, from the 1980s to the present day. Memory is affected by the problem of speaking ownership and the instrumentalisation of representations: the majority of the productions referred to are made by people outside the slums, who plush ideas on places, people and lifestyles. What legitimacy should these productions be given, how can the conditions for the visibility of artistic and architectural speeches from slums be organised?