Informal Horizons By Johan Mottelson, Anton Ryslinge, Anna Wahlén, and Margarida Waco

Exhibition at the Royal Danish Academy Library

INFORMAL HORIZONS

Informal Horizons is a dissemination project on land rights and urban development in East Africa. The project included an exhibition and a book partially based on the practicebased work focusing on land titling in Maputo described in the previous section. Lack of formal land rights constitutes a major issue within urban development in East Africa, as it can lead to insecure tenure, forced evictions, as well as exclusion from public services, compromising sustainable development for millions of urban dwellers across the region. The project addressed these complex issues and highlighted a number of efforts to formalize land ownership through innovative solutions. The project was exhibited at the Royal Danish Academy Library and at Institute for (X) in Aarhus. The project was developed in collaboration with Anton Ryslinge, Margarida de Waco, and Anna Wahlén of Architects without Borders - Denmark.

The dissemination project is titled Informal Horizons as the immediate future of East African cities is likely informal in terms of the primary type of urban development accommodating the majority of the urban population growth. Furthermore, many major cities in East Africa are characterized by vast peripheral informal settlements extending towards the horizon. The title of the publication and exhibition thus both refers to the physical structure of cities in the region and the likelihood of limited state regulation of future urban development. The project focused on current efforts to counter issues related to informal land ownership in East Africa, along with research on the underlying structures conditioning the informal urban growth. This included projects by the NGO, Architects without Borders - Denmark, addressing issues with land rights in Uganda and Mozambique. Informal Horizons sought to highlight a major issue in relation to the ongoing extensive urbanization processes in East Africa as well as showcase current attempts at transforming informal settlements into sustainable neighborhoods. The exhibition featured a condensed adaptation of the publication along with films and physical models. The material was displayed on an exhibition framework built of recycled plastic, referring to the plastic waste experiments in Maputo previously described in this chapter. The configuration of the exhibition framework emulated the spatial structures of informal settlements, thus providing visitors the experience of walking through the narrow alleys emblematic of such urban environments.

Informal Horizons publication (2019)

Exhibition opening at the Royal Danish Academy Library (2019), photo by Jóannes B. Lamhauge

Exhibition at the the Royal Danish Academy Library →