Informality through Sustainability

Urban Informality Now

Antonino Di Raimo, Steffen Lehmann, Alessandro Melis, Antonino Di Raimo, Steffen Lehmann, Alessandro Melis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000335750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Informality through Sustainability explores the phenomenon of informality within urban settlements and aims to unravel the subtle links between informal settlements and sustainability.

Penetrating its global profile and considering urban informality through an understanding of local implications, the authors collectively reveal specific correlations between sites and their local inhabitants. The book opposes simplistic calls to legalise informal settlements or to view them as 'problems' to be solved. It comes at a time when common notions of 'informality' are being increasingly challenged.

In 25 chapters, the book presents contributions from well-known scholars and practitioners whose theoretical or practical work addresses informality and sustainability at various levels, from city planning and urban design to public space and architectural education. Whilst previous studies on informal settlements have mainly focused on cases in developing countries, approaching the topic through social, cultural and material dimensions, the book explores the concept across a range of contexts, including former Communist countries and those in the so-called Global North. Contributions also explore understandings of informality at various scalar levels – region, precinct, neighbourhood and individual building. Thus, this work helps reposition informality as a relational concept at various scales of urbanisation.

This book will be of great benefit to planners, architects, researchers and policymakers interested in the interplay between informality and sustainability.

Part I
What does informality have to say to architecture?

Decolonising the enquiry and the enquirer

Antonino Di Raimo

The informal city, like informal architecture, as well as being a topic that has been well-investigated and debated, is above all an increasingly emerging reality implied by the development of the contemporary city. Taking a closer view, informality not only concerns the urban realm, but rather, we would like to argue, it also matters to architecture.

As has been already introduced in this book, one of the main aims of the first part is to disclose and emphasise how informality can imply architectural discourse. Perhaps at the architectural level, as has been said before, we should use the plural version of the word, namely referring to the informalities which we can observe, rather than informality as a unique and coherent phenomenon. Therefore, in this introduction to the first part of the book, I would like to argue for the need to consider informality in its multiscalar sense, implying different manifestations from the point of view of architecture, and not just from the points of view attached to such disciplines as urban studies or planning, as has traditionally happened. Although these have provided valuable research on the topic, the privileged level of observation rarely intercepts the architectural realm, while informality naturally also acts at the architectural level despite the potential difficulties in fully addressing this.

Within an empirical observation it is very common to choose a point of view which can rely on the account of emergent qualities rather than on singularities. Hence, I would like to argue that the phenomenon of informality is perhaps a significant and missing link between the problems presented by the growth of contemporary cities as complex places embodying social transactions and contracts, and architecture design, which still holds to the scale of the individual or groups of individuals. The architectural dimension of informality, I would like to claim, should be regarded as an imperative dimension to be observed and investigated, rather than being – sic et simpliciter – subsumed by the urban and planning dimensions. Informality starts with an architectural action that doesn’t derive from any acknowledgment of the urban and the planning. Perhaps informality could specify the urban articulations of a city or even implement planning expectations, but it could also contradict them. I would like also to argue that informality represents what we need to look at from an architectural point of view, just as our concerns with sustainability and ecology are authentic actions aimed at embracing our planet’s priorities within the discipline, rather than being merely marketing labels that may be useful at this stage, while being scrapped as soon as other priorities arise. Roy says that, “In many parts of the world, the site of new informality is the rural/urban interface. Indeed, it can be argued that metropolitan expansion is being driven by informal urbanization” (Roy, 2005). Yet, informality, according to this emblematic sentence, might have the status of an interface, namely, “the place at which independent and often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other” (Interface, n.d.). Roy, as has been highlighted, moved the label of informality to an epistemological level, aiming at extending the word as a tool for knowledge. I would like to assume and to extend this definition by claiming that informality, through being an interface between the rural and the urban as Roy significantly pointed out, can also be regarded as an interface between many other dichotomies such as the urban and the architectural, the legal and the illegal, the peripheral and the central, the individual and society, and so on. Informality as an interface, which in our view is a phenomenon fully belonging to what we call the built environment, should be primarily regarded as a physical, tangible, material interface with a proper morphology that is anything but unformal. As architects, we are interested in the way that informality as a material interface can work in architectural terms. Like a strange corollary of the city as a theoretical notion, informality takes its physical reality in the form of turbulent borders combining different areas of our contemporary cities. It emerges as an anarchic appropriation of the city’s interstitial spaces. We might recognise informality even in those areas in which, depending on different socioeconomic factors, a proto-urbanisation is occurring. Informality has taken hold according to different modalities up to the point that it can even be acknowledged as a palpably emerging different genre of landscape.

In our experience, informality is already part of our everyday life. It occurs when we enter a city, going across the areas which mark its borders. Whether we are arriving in the city by train or exploring its immediate suburbs, the feeling of informality is palpable. In some cases, informality as a physical phenomenon has ceased to be hidden and has turned out to be a quality to be exhibited. Paradoxically, travel agencies offer tours in the favelas of Rio De Janeiro in Brazil or in the slums of Klong Toei in Bangkok.

So why is it still so difficult for informality to be fully acknowledged as a part of architectural discourse?

From an urban point of view, informality is grounded in a solid research tradition dating back to the seventies. Over the following decades, scholars, researchers and stakeholders, each from different backgrounds, developed an extensive range of studies, resulting in a broader understanding of the phenomenon aimed initially at decreasing the dichotomy between the formal and the informal, and the stigma applied to informal settlers.

Informality now embodies inclusive meanings, allowing us not only to overcome prejudices surrounding informal settlements and their inhabitants, but also showing that there is a wide range of social and economic conditions that do not always fall into the simple category of poverty. Yet, informality is a very nuanced phenomenon, and even if it has often been associated with categories such as marginality, informal settlements can display creative meanings, though this may seem contradictory, and a richness of distinct values. The pioneering work developed by Janice Perlman since the seventies has shown the importance of the demystification of categories often associated with informal settlements, like marginality, poverty and segregation (Perlman, 2002). An extensive overview that summarises this long path for the recognition of informality as a complex phenomenon not falling within a dualistic vision, along with several other contributions, can be found in UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda (Alfaro d’Alençon et al., 2018).

From these highly relevant studies it is worth noting that the physical and morphological aspects implied by informal settlements, especially at the level of architectural scale, remain fields that are relatively unexplored, or at least they have only been explored sporadically and never systematically. This is a sign of the stigma and prejudice attached to informality, which prevents it from being part of the architecture agenda. Significant exceptions exist in some architecture practices, while others belong in the didactic and research activities developed in architecture studios at the university level, which take the informal as a possible field for the application of architectural ideas; the more analytical of these, focusing on the study of urban morphology, are the most common. Yet, in an era of the proliferation and pervasiveness of architectural images, even a certain figurativeness which might be considered an implicit feature of informality through its recurring motifs reaches the architect’s imagination, such as the reproduction of small derelict housing units and their ‘in progress’ appearance. To a certain extent informality seems to influence architecture, at least in some proposals which emphasise features like self-sufficiency, flexibility, open-ended process and sustainability, though perhaps this needs to be firmly be established by targeted research.

Even if the architect’s imagination and the presumption of aestheticisation implicit in their work is inevitable, romanticising informality and not distinguishing between basic conditions related to poverty and inequality, including a lack of sanitised water and toilets, and the informalities which act as a set of practices at the socioeconomic and urban levels carried out beyond any legal framework, may further imply a fundamental disengagement between architecture and urban speculations, and their capability to address real problems.

Monika Grubbauer argues about the importance of what she calls the “modes of (dis)engagement between urban theory and professional practices” (including architecture) within the context of post colonialism urbanism. A paradoxically interdisciplinary debate which relies on an “eclectic mix of statements”, and often the “dominance of the global architect” – a figure who works as a vehicle for polarising the debate and creating “architecture as urban theory’s ‘other’ ”, reinforcing the reciprocal “epistemological difference” between architects and social scientists instead of opening up a space for a mutual exchange of ideas and knowledge (Grubbauer, 2019). Despite the production of knowledge produced by architects who have been involved with informality, “exhibitions are often not shown and publications are not available in the cities of the Global South which serve as sites of these projects” (Grubbauer, 2019). In the meantime, she points out that “Leading Western architects and designers active in cities of the Global South, for instance, are frequently criticised for their actions by urban scholars. At the same time, ongoing changes in the intellectual foundations of the field of architecture and urban design have not received much recognition in urban scholarship” (Grubbauer, 2019).

Other authors have made significant comments on the involvement of global architects such as Rem Koolhaas with the Global South’s megacities, as in Lagos, “where he turned the dysfunctionality of the African city into a sort of virtue in so far as it can be understood theoretically to incubate the future. In an attempt to overturn the prevalent apocalyptic view of a doomed urbanisation strategy, Koolhaas sees a continued functionality in the slumscape of Lagos and other megacities of the South, making a case to revise our existing theories, tracing instead a new kind of urbanism in this anomaly” (Arabindoo, 2011). And, as Gandy critically points out, “Koolhaas urges us not to ‘anguish over its shortcomings’ but instead to celebrate the ‘continued, exuberant existence of Lagos and other cities like it’, and the ‘ingenious, alternative systems’ which they generate” (Gandy, 2005). There is, of course, a significant disengagement between actors who are dealing with informality on different levels, and from different disciplines and social backgrounds.

In an alternative and tangible way, many architects, among them Teddy Cruz, stand out for their capability to assume that informality is a complex physical and social field in which architecture is not a tool aimed at producing disengagement, nor at simply formalising the informal. Cruz’s work for instance contemplates architecture as a set of disciplinary tools capable of extrapolating informality’s socio-physical properties, along with the conflicts th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: What does informality have to say to architecture?: Decolonising the enquiry and the enquirer
• Part II: Informality as a mode of sustainability
• Part III: Informal behaviour as a form of community resilience
• Index