Introduction

Formal-informal, legal-illegal, planned-unplanned, organisedunorganised. The dichotomy in current planning practice is entrenched since the Dutch colonialization in Indonesia

Today, urban informality has started to gain attention from scholars in urban studies. The broad studies have mainly challenged the dichotomy of formal-informal, legal-illegal, or planned-unplanned within the current urban development.

Urban informal settlements have always been associated as an antithesis of the progressive cities. Generally, informality is any activity unauthorised by the current law or regulation (Jenkins, 2006). While, informal settlements is defined as the living activity outside the formal planning system (Leitner & Sheppard, 2018). It is characterised by the word ‘lack’, such as lack of basic service, tenure security, and control (Dovey & Raharjo, 2010). Thus, it is common to see that urban informal settlements are treated as a separate entity in the urban system.

The dichotomy between formal-informal, legal-illegal, and planned-unplanned creates a clear segregation to where development agenda and resource distribution are channelled. Informal settlements do not portray what the city needs to attract direct investment to achieve global city status (Jones, 2017). Their visibility is considered as the representation of government’s failure in developing the city, thus concealing them from public gaze is omnipresent (Dovey & King, 2011). Attempts to improve the quality of informal settlements vary from in-situ upgrading, formalisation, to eviction. However, it is common that the process is ill-planned leaving the affected communities to be worse-off (Achmadi et al., 2019). The eviction is common in city centre because the informal settlements are situated in investable land (Leitner & Sheppard (2018).

Urban informality should be seen as the integral part of urban production. It is not a sector but a process, is not passive but active as part of urban production (Roy, 2005). Informal settlements are form of selforganisation due to institutional incapacity in providing more affordable housing options (Roy, 2005; Jenkins, 2006). They are neither completely unplanned as they are the outcome of community’s strategic sensibility (Raharjo, 2019); nor entirely illegal because most of them exist in disputed land (Dovey & Raharjo, 2010); and nor totally informal as they are connected to city administration (Sullivan, 1986; Simone, 2014). Therefore, rather than segregate urban production into dichotomies, urban practitioner and policymaker should treat them as an integrated continuum.