How to Use shantytown in a Sentence

shantytown

noun
  • In the 2- or 3-foot gap between the metal and the wall sat a long makeshift shantytown with a web of tarps, chairs and cardboard.
    Heather Knight, SFChronicle.com, 6 June 2020
  • The film takes place in a shantytown constructed on a garbage dump on the outskirts of Tokyo.
    Ben Sachs, Chicago Reader, 2 Feb. 2018
  • The town of Bria tails off into a refugee camp that is a seething shantytown of one-room structures spread over the hills.
    Roger Cohen Mauricio Lima, New York Times, 24 Dec. 2022
  • With the shantytown long gone, the homeless piled onto the streets of a Skid Row that was forcibly contained to 50 square blocks.
    Tori Richards, Washington Examiner, 22 Apr. 2021
  • To the south, cardboard shantytowns slump miserably in the dust.
    Julia Scheeres, WIRED, 23 Aug. 2001
  • Most had to walk hours more, through torrential downpours, to reach the refugee shantytown.
    Hannah Beech, New York Times, 2 Sep. 2017
  • Their shantytown, hidden from view by walls and closed to most visitors, is the envy of Skid Row.
    Scott Harrison, latimes.com, 21 Feb. 2018
  • Shoot-outs in favelas, or shantytowns, have killed dozens of people.
    The Economist, 5 Oct. 2017
  • Residents of Complexo de Alemão, a shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, have no such cause for cheer.
    The Economist, 26 Oct. 2017
  • Killings in Rocinha, once the showcase shantytown in Brazil’s showcase city, had quadrupled in less than a year.
    Washington Post, 5 Jan. 2018
  • At the hotel gate, a man from the shantytown across the street was sharpening knives for the hotel’s kitchen, a weekly assignment that earned him $3.
    Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Discover Magazine, 12 Aug. 2010
  • The shantytown’s concentric bands of humanity can be read in the same way scientists like Hessl read the rings of a pine tree.
    Russ Juskalian, Discover Magazine, 28 May 2015
  • For someone used to only a muddy shantytown, this can be life changing,’’ Muir says.
    National Geographic, 4 Nov. 2016
  • People crowded into slums, shantytowns and favelas from where they were hard put to reach jobs.
    The Economist, 5 Apr. 2018
  • The rich traverse the skies in private jets, while the poor struggle in favelas, the shantytowns that have come to symbolize the city’s impoverished.
    Jiayang Fan, The New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2017
  • Days later, Malawians living among South Africans in a shantytown in the coastal city of Durban were attacked and displaced.
    Washington Post, 11 Sep. 2019
  • A few miles north, in a shantytown in the foothills, two young men described another option: buying a kidney.
    Gerry Shih, Anchorage Daily News, 6 Jan. 2023
  • One of the largest shantytowns once occupied the concrete channel in the Tijuana River, but the police burned it down.
    Benjamin Preston, Fortune, 24 July 2017
  • Perhaps the shantytown’s most memorable structure was the Hunger Wall, which served as a backdrop for the encampment’s city hall.
    Brandon Tensley, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Aug. 2020
  • The hurricane had destroyed their homes, located in the sprawling shantytown in Marsh Harbour known as the Mudd.
    New York Times, 9 Sep. 2019
  • Skid Row, located in downtown Los Angeles, was born in 1910 when the city built a shantytown to house migrants.
    Tori Richards, Washington Examiner, 22 Apr. 2021
  • Lesser known is a shantytown in a corner of Gangnam district, whose makeshift homes were destroyed by a fire on Friday.
    Min Joo Kim, Washington Post, 20 Jan. 2023
  • In time the area also gave rise to an illicit shantytown replete with bars, brothels and trafficked young girls.
    Kevin Monahan, NBC news, 26 Sep. 2022
  • Many of these immigrants, known as Mizrahi Jews, were sent to shantytown transit camps and largely sidelined.
    Aron Heller, Jewish Journal, 5 July 2017
  • But as the Kurdish refugee from Iran quickly realized, dreams and despair were intertwined in the shantytown known as the Jungle.
    Thomas Floyd, Washington Post, 29 Mar. 2023
  • In Cape Town’s sprawling shantytowns, where about 15% of the city’s residents live, lining up for water is nothing new.
    Gabriele Steinhauser, WSJ, 3 Mar. 2018
  • Memon said her husband is a truck driver and the family lives in an urban shantytown.
    Pamela Constable, Washington Post, 21 Jan. 2018
  • At its high point, 350 people lived in tents sprawling under the overpass, creating a shameful shantytown in the middle of one of the world’s richest cities.
    San Francisco Chronicle, 25 June 2018
  • Joy Okumu, 48, sells tomatoes in the sprawling Nairobi shantytown of Kibera to feed her five children.
    Anchorage Daily News, 2 Apr. 2020
  • An 8-year-old girl who was killed by a stray bullet in a Rio de Janeiro shantytown was buried on Sunday amid allegations that she was hit by police fire.
    Washington Post, 23 Sep. 2019

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shantytown.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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