Chapter 3 traces how key representations of the slum are transformed from everyday neighborhood talk into an organizing lens for remaking the city. Drawing on fieldwork among activists in resident welfare associations (RWAs), it shows how RWAs position slums on the “outside” symbolically and materially in everyday conversations and how these lay depictions of slum unbelonging circulate and gain sensory self-evidence in popular and state visions of the city. The chapter demonstrates that “nuisance”—an inherently aesthetic category used to identify sensory revulsion—has become the key principle according to which discourses of the slum are organized in everyday speech and translated from the neighborhood into official policy. By examining how nuisance talk—everyday depictions of slums as dirty and uncivil—circulates between RWAs, the media, and the government, the chapter elucidates how aesthetic codes for determining what is considered pleasant and abhorrent in public life are put in place.