shantytown means an area containing a collection of shacks, shanties or makeshift dwellings. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 88 out of 100.
Why “shantytown” is a great word
SHANTYTOWN — [Noun] An area, typically on a city's periphery, consisting of a collection of crudely built shacks or makeshift dwellings. From shanty (meaning a small, crudely built shack) + town; first attested in American English in 1836. Unlike "favela" (which names the specific, hillside settlements of Brazil) or "slum" (which broadly describes any squalid urban district), a shantytown is defined by the material fact of its provisional architecture. It is a settlement of corrugated tin and tarpaulin, of plywood walls bowed by the wind, and of footworn paths tracing a precarious geometry between lean-tos—an architecture of grim ingenuity, built on borrowed ground.
Etymology
From shanty + town.
noun
- An area containing a collection of shacks, shanties or makeshift dwellings.“The forest gave way to shantytowns that stitched themselves into waves of blue-tented internally displaced camps and then stone dwellings hundreds of years old.”