Confronting [In]formality #1

Confronting [In]Formality

Contributions by David Juarez Marco Ferrario Rohan Varma Giorgio Talocci Berend Strijland Kria Djoyoadhiningrat Jaap Klaarenbeek Vera Kreuwels Laura Smits Diego Sepulveda Carmona

Experiences of working with urban informal development around the world

Daniel Radai - Todor Kesarovski - Yos Purwanto

Confronting [In]Formality Experiences of working with urban informal development around the world This publication is the summary of and reflection on ten presentations given during the Confronting [In]formality Symposium on the 11th December 2014 at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Delft Concept, Editors and Co-writers Daniel Radai - Todor Kesarovski - Yos Purwanto Contributors David Juarez Marco Ferrario Rohan Varma Giorgio Talocci Berend Strijland Kria Djoyoadhiningrat Jaap Klaarenbeek Vera Kreuwels Laura Smits Diego Sepulveda Carmona with Shipra Narang Suri, PhD, ISOCARP & World Urban Campaign Roberto Rocco, PhD, Delft University of Technology Final text editing Kate Unsworth Published by the Chair of Spatial Planning Department of Urbanism Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment Delft University of Technology ISBN/EAN: 978-94-6186-623-3 March 2016, Delft, the Netherlands Images and graphics are presented in this publication with the contributors’ permission and/or notification. Please contact the editors if ommissions have been made.

Terms of use: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License. It is attributed to Daniel Radai, Todor Kesarovski & Yos Purwanto, editors.

Contact radaid@gmail.com - tkesarovski@gmail.com - yospurwanto@gmail.com

We would like to express our gratitude to many who helped us along the way.

Roberto Rocco was a trustful advisor. He had pushed us for content quality along the preparations of the symposium where he also graciously moderated the discussions.

Without Vincent Nadin’s generosity the symposium would have never taken place and Linda van Keeken gave crucial support with many issues.

Thanks to Hans van Drongelen and his team from MoTiv for joining, inspiring and helping us along the way and hosting us for a perfectly informal post-event gathering.

Alexander Jachnow generously offered his time to come from IHS and provide reflection, while our friend Luis Montenegro took beautiful shots during the whole event.

And of course the highest appreciation goes for the speakers who voluntarily filled the symposium with their fascinating experiences and were willing to be of help during the assembly of this publication.

We were grateful to the 120+ audience and now also to you dear reader, for showing such interest in Confronting [In]formality.

https://confrontinginformality.wordpress.com/

behind the symposium daniel radai, todor kesarovski, yos purwanto & Belinda van zijl Organisers, 1st Confronting [In]formality Symposium Alumni, Department of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology

During our studies of urbanism, we developed an awareness of the remarkable complexity behind urban informality, which we saw as all non-professional involvement in the (re)use of spaces in the city.

This was an awareness tinged with concern for the uneven distribution of benefits around the world and our global future.

Yet for us, this became a motivation to work on new models to support the shaping and designing of cities.

Models based on studying and including urban informality, thereby giving an extended insight in to the workings and (social) failings of the city. To support this move towards social and environmental sustainability, we felt the urge to

discuss and share professional, practical and academic experiences with informality in widely varying geographical contexts. It was from this starting point that the symposium was born.

Delft, December 2014 - updated February 2016

abstract There is a growing attention for informal settlements and economies as global phenomena, witnessing the diversity in studies and projects on informality by architects and urbanists. There is a general belief that these informal structures possess an untapped potential to contribute to urban planning and design.

Nevertheless, there is little known on the professional use of the concept of informality. By definition, informality grows in those parts of the city which are neglected by (formal) practice. It begs the question if the spatial qualities and opportunities of informality should be reproduced, and if they can survive incorporation into a formal urban development framework.

The emergence of informal urban development and its complex

interaction with the formal counterpart inspires numerous design and planning professionals to experiment with innovative solutions and techniques in order to confront the shortcomings of (contemporary) urban planning and design. In turn, these experiments strengthen the interest by academics in the informal development of space.

This publication aims to honour the experience the speakers and guests shared. It summaries the practical knowledge of the presentations on working with spatial informality in cities and reflects on what they mean for further exploration.

A fascination with these efforts motivated the organisation of an international symposium, Confronting [In]Formality: experiences of working with urban informal development around the world that took place on 11th December 2014 at the Faculty of Architecture of the TU Delft.

The event gathered a versatile collection of problematics and practices from all around the globe.

For more information on the symposium and for the video registrations of the presentations see confrontinginformality. wordpress.com/category/2014/

The event on 11 December 2014 Š Confronting [In]formality Symposium & Luis Montenegro

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The Urgency of Confronting Informality roberto rocco, PhD Assistant Professor, Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy, Department of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology

One of the biggest challenges faced by humanity today is how to urbanise in a sustainable and fair way.

While news outlets and academics repeat endlessly that humanity is now officially “urban”, having crossed the threshold of 50% of humans living in cities, few people seem to remember that the other 50% still lives in rural areas, mostly in deprivation. 3,7 billion people are living in poor, mostly underserviced rural environments.

Not all of them yearn to go to the city. Many wish to preserve their traditional lifestyles, and rightly so, but many of them will take the road to the city with their families in search of prosperity and opportunity, just like the millions of people who did so in the last few decades. This immense human exodus, much accelerated after the Second World War, is not over yet.

Most of all, people are looking for the freedom and modern lifestyles that cities supposedly afford. Who wants to live in a dusty village when you can be anyone you want in the city? Traditional rural lifestyles are precious, but if you are a single mother, gay, “low cast”, if you belong to the “wrong” race or religion, or if you are simply forward

thinking, maybe a traditional rural lifestyle won’t agree with you.

rapid housing solutions, with greater or lesser success.

Of course, urban prosperity and freedom are elusive and the reality of the city is much grimmer. It may include violence, deprivation and serious environmental hazards.

Most of all, it means squalid living conditions for the millions of migrants who get to cities every year around the World. Many people migrating to cities will end up living in self-built settlements.

Let’s not forget that both Western and Eastern Europe largely solved their post-war housing crisis with such developments. But most people are quick to point out that modernist housing blocks are nowadays the backwater of most European and North American cities. So, slums don’t seem so bad after all.

Governments in the Global South are often unable or unwilling to provide decent housing to all these migrants. As a consequence, rural migrants roll up their sleeves and help themselves. Architects and urbanists in the industrialised world are fascinated by the inventiveness, the self-reliance, and the resilience of slum communities.

For one thing, slums all over the world seem to be much more successful in creating communities than the sterile and grey modernist blocks that have dotted the landscapes of countries in the Global North: Holland, the US, the UK, France, not to mention the former socialist countries and many countries in the Global South as well. All have experimented with modernist formulas for

However, the image of the hope and creativity of slums hides some deeper truths that must be confronted. Slums in the Global South lack basic services and sanitation, and housing units are squalid, not efficiently ventilated or heated and downright unsafe.

The lack of sanitation means that large swaths of humanity lack the most basic of all comforts: water and toilettes.

As someone once observed, having water running out of your kitchen tap is a luxury beyond imagination for a large chunk of humanity. Furthermore, slums are often targeted by criminal gangs.

The State is absent and the rule of law is only selectively applied, mostly to reduce slum dwellers to subjection. Citizens in slums are often in breach of the law, because

they are almost always living on illegally invaded or acquired land.

They are easy targets for greedy drug lords or corrupt politicians.

This is absolutely not sustainable.

TU Delft, as a leading technical university in one of the mostthoroughly planned countries in the world, has a duty to get involved in this debate. It must prepare its students to confront informality and to come up with sustainable, fair and innovative solutions that respect the livelihoods and hopes of slum dwellers.

While slums have many social and spatial features that architects and urbanists wish to emulate, there are real challenges ahead.

Discussing what is going on in practice is important for us to reflect on those challenges and finetune our attitudes and practices towards slums. We must strive to know more and to engage with actors on the ground. We must learn from local knowledge and we must bring the producers of new knowledge to the university.

The Confronting Informality Symposium has become an important part of the education and the creative and dynamic environment provided by the TU Delft.

Reference-initiatives at the TU Delft & Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy Delft Global Initiative, a platform for Science and Technology for Global Development at TU Delft www.delftglobal.tudelft.nl/ The 2014 Confronting Informality Symposium confrontinginformality. wordpress.com/category/2014/ The 2015 Planning & Post-Conflict Cities Symposium postconflictplanning.com/ The conference of Cities and Citizenship in Latin America The master courses on Globalization

Confronting inequality is one of the keys to confronting informal urban development around the world Š Roberto Rocco 4

Community building informal public spcace in Brussels Š Daniel Radai

foreword Shipra Narang Suri, PhD Vice-President, International Society of City and Regional Planners Co-chair, World Urban Campaign International Urban Consultant, India

Dealing with informality – informal settlements, informal economies, informal communities – is a challenge faced by urban and regional planners all over the world, particularly, but not exclusively, in countries of the developing South.

The need for planning to effectively address slums and informal settlements was clearly articulated in the Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, and has been reinforced in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which succeeded the MDGs in 2015.

international development, a time when the importance of addressing urbanisation and its challenges is being recognised, and also a phase when planning is making a comeback. It poses the right questions – is informality a disaster, or an opportunity; does it bring despair, or hope; is it even possible to have fully planned cities which also retain their uniqueness, encourage creativity and strengthen the complex web of relationships, which are a defining characteristic of urbanity?

The SDGs include a goal on cities and a target on planning. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted in March 2015, also mentions the role of planning in disaster risk reduction. The Habitat III conference coming up in October 2016, has included housing, basic services and planning as specific themes in its background papers.

In response, several case studies are offered, each of which is situated in a different context, and thus brings a unique combination of factors into the discussion.

Efforts to build inclusive cities can include a variety of initiatives, ranging from affordable housing to designing better public spaces, with elements of post-disaster reconstruction often thrown into the mix. Most importantly, these efforts must re-define the space for planning - as a political, rather than

This publication thus comes at a watershed moment in

simply technical, instrument - to support development, promote prosperity, and advance resilience.

Then again, what is the kind of planning that can achieve these goals? Clearly, it is time to reinvent planning, once again emphasising both process and product, plan and implementation, service delivery and management, and most importantly, a strong link with governance. We have to explore what kind of approaches and tools might work, and what kind of capacities may be needed. There is a need for a new vocabulary to be able to communicate planning´s original purpose – ensuring equitable access to scarce resources – to a new audience, in a dynamic context.

This is what the present volume attempts to achieve. Indeed, this is a timely publication, and a very useful one for those venturing into urbanism in our increasingly urban, chaotic and crisis-ridden world.

table of contentS giorgio talocci 25

CONTESTED SPACES, CRITICAL PRACTICE: RECALIBRATING URBAN DESIGN?

david juarez

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25

STRATEGIES FOR COLLECTIVE ARCHITECTURE

Kria Djoyoadhiningrat 45

Laura Smits EMERGENCY SHELTER PLANNING AS CATALYST FOR SELF-BUILD URBAN GROWTH

[IN]FORMALITY : WHO CARES?

33 29 Berend Strijland LEARNING FROM MAKOKO

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jaap klaarenbeek BRAZILIAN SIDEWALKS & CASA LEGAL

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Diego Sepulveda carmona REVISITING URBAN INFORMALITY

marco ferrario THE REAL AFFORDABLE HOUSING: AN EXPERIMENT TO CATALYSE INCREMENTAL HOUSING IN INDIA

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21 rohan varma THE OTHER HALF: TYPES & TYPOLOGIES OF MUMBAI’S SLUMS

41 vera kreuwels FROM DISASTER TO RECOVERY

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introduction reflection

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introduction Urban Informality

The theme of urban informality is a global phenomenon of growing importance. To a certain extent, every city around the globe comprises some degree of informality. This includes all developments that occur outside the scope of formal planning or administrative systems.

An increasing prevalence of informal development can be a sign that rational (formal) planning is lagging behind demand, being undermined by weak governance or even unable to cope with the contemporary reality. In many countries, mainly in the developing world, informal urbanism has even become the dominant force of urbanisation.

However, the binaries of ‘informal versus formal’ cannot be understood as absolutes. These terms are adopted in this document as working definitions of an urban reality that is much more complex and dynamic. By moving the definition from an applied label Paraisopolis in Sao Paulo © Roberto Rocco

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to a particular urban process, it allows a swifter inclusion of relevant cases and a re-evaluation of the stakeholders involved. To give a short indication, ‘urban informality’ can range from a shelter, selforganised by disaster victims, to unrecognised urban typologies.

Already several decades ago Christopher Alexander’s paper “A city is not a tree” (1966) noted the significance of human life over the application of rational planning within urban structures. He criticises the 1960s approach of designing artificial cities as a fully ‘planned society’, organised on the basis of conceptualising and dividing a complex entity into separate units.

On the contrary, in Alexander’s view the city is a system similar to a semi-lattice network, which works optimally when there are limitless links, most of which are unplanned, between all individual units.

However, as urbanists we work from a formal framework, raising the question: How do professionals deal with unplanned and even informal uses of space in practice?

Global Perspective

Speaking about urban informality, we see two sides of the same coin, both questioning the current model of building cities. Looking from a global perspective, an ever growing number of city inhabitants are thought to live in ‘slums’; 863 million people by the last estimate (UN-Habitat, 2007 & 2013).

This is one third of the world’s urban population and despite the countering efforts it is a growing number; thus, the urgency of dealing with the current situation is clear. The growth of slum inhabitants mainly highlights the incapacity of formal models to produce a sufficient amount of affordable and suitable housing, prompting the need to discuss different strategies in coming to terms with the existence of slums.

However, the contextual specifics cannot be ignored while speaking about ‘slums’ because of the vast differences between a São Paulo favela and mud houses in Nairobi, for example (Neuwirth, 2005). This

The formal and informal sprawl in Amman © Yos Purwanto

distinctiveness also demonstrates the limited precision of the word ‘slum’ and the necessity of further research in order to understand the phenomenon of urban informality.

Furthermore, as people without stable housing are difficult to track and register, for many places statistical information is missing and/or disputed. There is significant vagueness on the state of global housing and its specifics.

Academia, journalism and urban professionals have responded to this vagueness surrounding ‘urban informality’ with a wide range of notions and definitions, showcasing the overall confusion.

Note the complete difference

between the global scale pessimism of Davis (2007), indicating the presence of slums as one of global disaster, and the local scale diversity and optimism of Neuwirth (2005) and Saunders (2010) who portray slums as hopeful and/or essential elements of the city.

Post-Industrial Perspective

From the perspective of post-industrial cities, the professionalisation of urban planning defined a strong formal system aiming to ensure a coherent urban development and building process in the post-WWII era.

However, this practice was highly dependent on economic growth, subsequent major investments and

a high degree of security regarding financial revenues. The dynamics of the contemporary world have complicated the operation of this model. The fast, frequent and relatively unpredicted changes in the urban condition have led to a state of development where planning and reality seem to be poles apart (Urban Catalyst, 2013).

Within this context the traditional design approaches of the past do not seem to be adaptable and flexible enough to sustain urban growth and bridge the gap between large-scale, long-term strategies and local, urgent needs (Pfeifer, 2013). On the other hand, interim and often informal uses of urban

Unplanned public space use in Molenbeek, Brussels. Maximising the potentials © Daniel Radai

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space have demonstrated certain potential to drive development and enhance the quality of urban environments. The growing appreciation of these interventions and their positive impact on urban development seems to provoke a deeper consideration of the concepts of self-organisation and informality as a basis for alternative urban development approaches in post-industrial contexts (Urhahn Urban Design, 2010 & Urban Catalyst, 2013).

Confronting [In] Formality Symposium

The previous paragraphs outline some of the main justifications for the growing attention given to informal structures and economies as phenomena by architects and urbanists. These notions are also supported by the large diversity of studies and projects on informality developed in recent years. However, the challenge of working effectively and structurally with urban informality seems to be far from overcome (van Oostrum, 2013).

This leads to the formation of the general belief that working with informality possesses untapped

potential to contribute to planning and design practices. Nevertheless, the substantial lack of knowledge on the operation of the concept of informality limits the elaboration of coherent and structural planning approaches in practice.

In order to address this issue, the “Confronting [In]Formality Symposium” was organised on 11th December 2014 by urbanism graduate students of TU Delft. The event gathered urban professionals and academics with experience of working with informality in diverse geographic and socioeconomic contexts. Instead of delving into the conceptualisation of informality, the symposium focused on the operation of informality in order to confront the shortcomings of (contemporary) urban planning and design.

This publication aims to summarise, extract and frame the major notions generated at the event, responding to ‘urban informality’.

Although the location, assignment and overall context is completely different for each perspective, they all address a similar process from

Exploring the potential of abandoned space in a multicultural setting in Brussels © Daniel Radai

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a (relatively) similar position; that of the spatial professional. This allows insights in to the process of defining ‘urban informality’, and an evaluation of the usefulness of current theories and approaches.

The structure of this publication represents the logic behind the organisation of the symposium by paying attention to the individual presentations of all guest-speakers and panel discussion sessions.

Its content body consists of the individual stories from the key-note participants, documented in a relevant narrative and illustrative form. In addition to this, the publication concludes with a reflection, which compares all of the symposium’s cases and aims to outline at least modest assumptions with regards to main themes of interest i.e. dealing with urban informality in practice.

Essentially, the booklet’s closing part urges for the generation of practical propositions and further research directions on the basis of the shared set of knowledge, experiences and approaches that were presented at the symposium and, respectively, in this publication.

In Favour of Spontaneous Urban Growth. Temporary use of abandoned open space in Turin © Todor Kesarovski & Daniel Radai

References Alexander, C., 1966. A City is not a tree.

Design Magazine, London: Council of Industrial Design, Vol. 206.

Davis, M., 2007. Planet of slums.

London ; New York, Verso.

Hélie, M., 2009. Conceptualizing the Principles of Emergent Urbanism. International Journal of Architectural Research, Vol. 3 (2), pp. 75-91. Archinet-I-JAR. Neuwirth, R., 2005. Shadow cities : a billion squatters, a new urban world. New York: Routledge.

Pfeifer, L., 2013. The Planner’s Guide to Tactical Urbanism. Montreal: McGill School of Urban Planning.

Oswalt, P., Overmeyer, K. and Misselwitz, P., 2013. Urban Catalyst: The Power of Temporary Use. Berlin: DOM Publishers.

Saunders, D., 2010. Arrival city : how the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. New York: Pantheon Books.

Urhahn Urban Design, 2010. The Spontaneous City. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.

UN-HABITAT, 2007. State of the world’s cities 2006/2007. The Millennium Development Goals and Urban Sustainability: 30 Years of Shaping the Habitat Agenda. state of the world’s cities. Earthscan, UN-HABITAT. UN-HABITAT, 2013. State of the world’s cities 2012/2013. Prosperity of Cities. Routledge, UN-Habitat.

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STRATEGIES FOR COLLECTIVE ARCHITECTURE David juarez is a restless inhabitant, architect and co-founder of Straddle3, a multidisciplinary team that work with open source environments. Next to their current projects including a private house self-built by its owner out of recycled materials, they are also working on free software tools for collaborative architecture and urban transformation

While discussing urban informality we cannot ignore the growing interest in minimalistic urbanism, a step-by-step approach to achieve urban transition. In order to involve this aspect of urban informality David Juarez, from Straddle3 (Barcelona) was invited to the ‘Confronting [In] Formality’ Symposium. David has worked on urban issues for the last 15 years, executing projects in Spain and South America. At the symposium on 11th December 2014 he presented a panorama

of projects by Straddle3 and their network of partners, mainly developed within the postindustrial context of Europe.

Intro

David Juarez introduces his view of urban informality as the subtle idea of using what you have on hand and what you can reach.

This practical view of urbanism is based on understanding the existing spatial structures of the city and recognising the untapped potentials. Many objects and

Designing the skatepark in Arbúcies with the skaters © Straddle3

forms in the spaces around us can be used for completely different functions than originally intended.

What is more, they can do this in a surprising and very successful way.

So it is crucial to learn to look at things in a different, extraordinary and ‘non-formal’ manner.

However, not only urbanists and architects can initiate urban interventions despite their ‘advantage’ of being educated in the field of spatial design. Today citizens increasingly intervene within the urban environment, taking charge of the spatial voids and emptiness which surround them. Although lacking professional knowledge many inhabitants work with a lot of passion and will to transform the urban environment due to their close connection with it.

This phenomenon raises essential questions such as ‘What happens when people modify their cities in a way they are not supposed to?’, ‘What happens when people act as creative inhabitants and do extraordinary things with urban spaces such as (abandoned) buildings, streets and squares?’ and ‘Who is able and who is supposed to produce the city?’.

The practice of Straddle3 is built around these questions.

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Collective reimagining of containers around Spain © Recetas Urbanas / Arquitecturas Colectivas

Collectivism

At the core of the practice of Straddle3 is intensive work with local citizens, people who are not professionals in the field of urban design and planning. In the words of David this technique possesses great potential to support urban development and generate knowledge regarding the transformation of urban space through people’s passion and will to intervene in the spatial

voids (i.e. the application of social capital). On the basis of this approach Straddle3 has developed a wide variety of urban projects which focus on diverse topics such as art, sports, technology, agriculture and many more.

BuilD with what you have All of the initiatives of the company are organised via an (informal)

network as the leading driver for the projects’ development. A huge part of this network is facilitated through Arquitecturas Colectivas.

The latter represent a wide network that consists of design professionals but also many ‘amateur’ enthusiasts.

Straddle3 is one of the promoters of Arquitecturas along with more than a hundred other collectives.

This ‘collective identity’ allows each of the participating smaller offices to implement much broader actions

The construction of the skatepark in Arbúcies by the skaters.© Straddle3

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in comparison to what they could achieve as an individual entity.

Essentially, the approach practiced

by Straddle3 originates from the local demands of the citizens and optimises the existing potential of urban structures.

The development of architectural projects such as bar la Fabrika and sk8+U, are characterised by small financial budgets and large involvement of non-professionals during the construction process.

In order to enhance the quality of the outcomes the company developed a card game about modular architecture as a tool to explore the possibilities for execution of autonomous projects with local communities.

As David states, this technique aims to act as an educational instrument that provides a common language between professionals and non-professionals in order to create spaces together. This tool explores the possibilities for execution of autonomous projects with local communities.

Similar to their architectural experiences Straddle3 has experimented with their alternative approach on a larger (urban) scale.

A group of teenagers asked David and his colleagues to support the creation of a skate park in a Catalonian village. In this project Straddle3 took the role of an active facilitator of the development

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since the local inhabitants already had a concrete idea of what their skate park could look like. The essential point was the professional support that the inhabitants received in terms of organisation to guide the execution of the initiative through the political and bureaucratic decision making process. In addition, Straddle3 secured the financing, the delivery of recyclable materials and professional guidance during the process of self-construction.

Nevertheless, according to David the leading notion during the project was the willingness of the local enthusiasts to realise their who can / is allowed to builD the city?

vision. This intervention was not included in the urban plan of the area. As a consequence, a new plan for the redevelopment of the area around the skate park, ten times bigger in size, was made.

Concluding Remarks

To conclude, all the projects discussed by David aim to support collective local movements.

These practices lead to the relevant question of who is able or supposed to actively (re) create the urban environment.

Without doubt, there is a tremendous amount of potential in cities which professionals do

not recognise formally. Thus, Straddle3’s alternative approaches to urbanism are valuable in the enhancement of cities, especially within post-industrial contexts.

Next to this, each project provides a great learning experience both for the professionals and the non-professionals who are part of the development process.

Since the fundament of Straddle3’s practice is the (informal) network, the way ahead lies in the expansion of their network by involving more participants in the process of spatial development. Therefore, their next project is to establish an interactive platform about practices in urban space focusing on legal issues, normative procedures and showcasing successful examples.

The idea behind this initiative is to empower citizens in the process of spatial transformation through the provision of useful information and links with supporting partners, and at the end of the day to make as many great ideas as possible a reality, regardless of whether they come from design professionals or citizens.

References www.straddle3.net/constructors Arquitecturas colectivas: arquitecturascolectivas.net

Skating intervention © Straddle3

Bar La Fábrica: the reclaiming of a silo into a bar as part of the rebuilding of a concrete works into a cultural centre © Straddle3

Wikitankers: urban forniture to recover public space by activating and equiping communities © Straddle3

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The Real Affordable Housing: An experiment to catalyse Incremental Housing in India Marco Ferrario, co-founder of mHS CITY LAB, favors minimalist, functional architecture to bring good design where it has never been and where it is needed the most: low-income settlements. In India, he is working with other professionals to promote a multidisciplinary approach in urbanism. Marco graduated from the Politecnico di Milano and worked as an architect in Italy, India, Singapore and USA. Since 2009 he works with mHS CITY LAB and as consultant for various organizations.

Up to today self-construction is still the method through which a substantial part of the built environment is produced. This is especially true for the urban regions in the Global South. Therefore, this theme is from significant while speaking about the future housing in the expanding metropolitan areas, mainly in developing countries. At the ‘Confronting [In] Formality’ Symposium this topic

has been addressed by Marco Ferrario. He is co-founder of mHS CITY LAB, who favours minimalist, functional architecture to bring good design where it has never been and where it is needed the most: low-income settlements.

In India, Marco works with other professionals to promote a multidisciplinary approach in urban planning and catalyse

Roof view on self-constructed neighbourhood in the Delhi region © mHS CITY LAB

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incremental housing. Therefore, Marco Ferrario and mHS CITY LAB have implemented an experiment of how to support this process of self-generating built environment. On ‘Confronting [In]Fromality’ Symposium he presented some major outcomes out of the experiment as well as draw further directions and suggestions of how the process of self-construction can be enhanced.

Different self-constructed typologies in the Delhi region © mHS CITY LAB

Intro

The issue of affordable housing in Indian and other growing cities around the globe is a crucial challenge to be confronted. An interesting perspective to be taken in consideration within this debate is to look at the role of self-built housing. Indeed, the number of selfconstructed structures in expanding metropolitan regions is enormous and they certainly have a critical

e

After

mHS City Lab

role in accommodating, as much as possible, the increasing low-income urban population. Based on this fact Marco Ferrario defines his key notion that self-constructed units as the ‘real affordable housing’.

However, there are certain threats present in inhabiting and building these kinds of structures.

Self-constructed housing consists of units that are built by people who are from the same community with very limited (if any) degree of formal technical knowledge. During the process the homeowner is closely involved in every aspect of building, extending or refurbishing his unit, either by undertaking the building work himself or contracting a mason under close supervision. Self-construction is not usually guided by current safe design or building norms and is influenced by word- of-mouth and informal knowledge of construction practices and technology.

The Experiment

Despite the problems regarding self-construction, the belief of Marco Ferrario is that this way of generating the built environment

mHS City Lab

is the answer to affordable housing provision for the increasing urban population. Therefore, instead of looking at other types of development models mHS CITY LAB focuses on supporting self-construction and finding possibilities to make better use of it. To achieve its aims, the team of mHS CITY LAB consists of half practitioners and half researchers. This is an important combination which allows them to fulfil the whole R&D cycle: from testing design hypotheses in the field through getting feedback to going back to the desk and continuing research in order to elaborate new design models.

The three major pillars on which the concept of mHS is developed are community, design and finance as well as the relationship between them with regards to informal construction. Another crucial element that frames their approach is that the collective looks at self-constructed housing not as a problem but as an essential opportunity to bridge the gap between housing demand and supply.

Before and after transformation © mHS CITY LAB 18

In order to explore the potential of self-build housing, mHS CITY LAB executed an explorative study aiming to quantify the risk of construction in low-income informal settlements. After investigating some units in Mangolpuri (New Delhi), where buildings are selfbuilt, the results were used as a template for the whole settlement to generate a hypothetical view of the impact of an earthquake in the settlement. The outcome confirmed the high vulnerability of the buildings - far below the minimum official normative standard for safety - and the need to intervene.

This presented a difficult challenge when thinking about existing structures because refitting them can be technically and financially unfeasible. However, there could have been a possibility to assist the new ones that are built in thousands every hour across Indian cities.

Before implementing actual interventions, a priority was to understand where the failures arise from a systematic point of view. In this kind of settlements, the poor construction quality originates from the process behind the production of the building.

There is an absolute absence of professional architectural and engineering involvement. This highlights the socio-economic component of the system failure, wherein there is a lack of interest by architects to work for clients i.e. dwellers, who cannot pay a sufficient amount of money for a rethinking the technical language of communication used by professionals is required project. On the other hand, the local inhabitants do not understand the value that educated professionals deliver because this type of service is totally unfamiliar within these communities. Therefore, it can be stated that the construction quality of the self-built houses tend to be poor not only to save money but also due to lack of technical knowledge. According to Marco Ferrario there is room to improve and deal with the latter issue.

Based on this assumption, mHS CITY LAB has developed an approach

Proposed mobile application to share new building technologies for the slum context © mHS CITY LAB

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which can deliver technical expertise bundled with financial support. The idea is that inhabitants, who want to construct a house, are provided with a monetary loan and technical assistance. Utilising this model, mHS CITY LAB implemented a step-by-step process that involved approximately 120 families.

The three main steps in the process were to: (1) raise awareness within local communities regarding self-construction; (2) design with homeowners and clients and (3) assist the actual construction.

As a result of this experiment 20 units have been constructed using the technical advice.

In Marco’s words this design experiment turned out to be a very successful one. By the end of the project the local inhabitants and masons were coming by themselves to take advantage of the provided technical support.

Concluding Remarks

Learning from this experience Marco argues that there are solutions possible to bridge the gap between informal construction and technical formally-acquired knowledge. Indeed, bringing

The three steps in the pilot for mHS CITY LAB’s building program to renovate self-constructed houses © mHS CITY LAB

architects where they have never been and are needed the most is a critical ambition for mHS CITY LAB. The first priority for achieving this is to progress with the R&D work where the link between research, model development and practical interventions can be elaborated.

Another priority is to organise regular training sessions for masons including illustrative instruction manuals which can provide further technical information for the locals. Furthermore, rethinking the technical language of communication used by professionals is also required. Translation of formal and technical expressions is necessary if one would like to pass on construction knowledge in an understandable way to local homeowners and masons.

Apart from this a further ambition of mHS CITY LAB is to extend its reach to people who would like to be assisted in the process of self-constructing housing.

Training sessions and experimental interventions with 300 participants are useful but the numbers of people who are self-building housing in India are millions. In

order to catalyse this process mHS CITY LAB relies on technology.

The collective are working on the development of a mobile application which can provide assistance on house building on the basis of limited input data such as location of the construction area and desirable features i.e. building informal selfbuilt housing will be present regardless of the position of architects and developers about it

This tremendous pressure on cities makes it almost inevitable that informal self-built housing will be present regardless of the position that architects and developers take on it. What is more, it seems to be the only affordable housing for low-income urban inhabitants. Thus, Marco Ferrario and mHS CITY LAB pursue a vision where this way of generating the built environment can achieve better results through professional assistance.

References mHS CITY LAB: www.microhomesolutions.org www.facebook.com/MicroHomeSolutions

footprint, number of floors etc. The idea is that through the application local homeowners and constructors can receive an indication of how much the construction will cost and how much material they need, for example. These kind of estimations are very well-appreciated by citizens who do not possess any knowledge in construction.

All of these tools to support self-construction are critical for a country such as India due to the ongoing process of urbanisation.

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THE OTHER HALF: TYPES & TYPOLOGIES OF MUMBAI’S SLUMS Rohan Varma graduated with distinction from TU Delft in 2013 with a Masters in Architecture. His thesis project Integrating Informality under the tutelage of Prof. Dick van Gameren was nominated for the Dutch Archiprix Award. Since graduating he has worked at Mecanoo Architecten and now resides in Mumbai where he has started his own firm Studio Varma, while simultaneously writing articles on affordable housing and informality in the developing world.

Spaces in Mumbai contain both India’s financial capital and a majority slum population. These two worlds coexist, collide and are interdependent in the case of urban (re)development, with unfavourable consequences for the weaker side. Increased densification and destruction of social and economic networks in the name of slum rehabilitation shows the current lack of understanding of slums by policy makers.

Based on his personal experience, Rohan Varma shared his perspectives regarding this theme at the ‘Confronting [In]Formality’ Symposium on 11th December 2014. As an urban researcher he brought the notion that although each slum is unique, a mapping

of spatial conditions can reveal insight in to the urban needs of humans, and the diversity of typologies meeting them.

Intro

Mumbai is a city of extreme contrast; it is a city of about 22 million of which 12 million actually live in informal settlements, yet is also the financial capital of India.

It is also a city of extreme density; it accommodates more people than all of the Netherlands. As a result, you end up with landscapes which are completely contradictory You can judge a city by how its poor live - Kamu Iyer

The diversity of informal buildings typologies © Rohan Varma

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and schizophrenic. You have the rich and the poor, the formal and the informal colliding and occupying the same space. If we look at Mumbai’s development over the last 400 years it can be seen that informal settlements only become an issue from the 1950s onwards with the real surge in informal settlements since 1990, after India opened up her economy to the world.

Understanding what the different attitudes have been over the past 60 years, and comparing them with what happened in the rest of the world is a fine starting point. According to Rohan, the governments of developing nations are generally in a state of denial and demolition, or at best build

Slums and skyscrapers in Mumbai Š Jonathan Hubbard via Flickr

social housing at the border of cities. In Mumbai this approach resulted in the slum clearance act of 1965 and slightly later in the slum improvement act of 1971.

Interestingly enough, over the last 15 years some very innovative models have come up in, amongst others, Latin America. However, in India, or at least in Mumbai, the redevelopment of slums is still a dominant approach. Housing is built by the private sector in order to transform Mumbai into a ‘world class city’, although nobody really knows what this is. This approach hinders some essential issues concerning socio-spatial justice.

During the process the government is merely a non-paying facilitator, inviting the private developers. Any slum that comes under this scheme is first eradicated completely, demolishing all living patterns and communities, and in its place come new tenements which occupy only 1/3 of the site. The remaining 2/3 is given to private developers to make profits that turn out to be enormous most of the time. Looking at density, slums accommodate 60% of the entire population of Mumbai whereas they occupy only 9% of the land.

So what this redevelopment model suggests is that we should squeeze these people into just 3% of the

land, and keep the remaining 6% of the land for high end real estate.

Typologies

Something seems to be wrong in dealing with slums in India and thus, Rohan suggests that a better way of understanding their importance, structure and function is absolutely necessary.

In the current practice, it is not only a question of adding extreme density on sites that are already very dense, but also about not realising that the slum inhabitants require much more than a place of shelter. They require schools, open spaces, hospitals and this is something the dominant scheme

22 22

does not provide. Most of all, it is important to understand that 65% of the entire workforce in Mumbai is employed in the informal sector.

So destroying informal settlements i.e. slums also harms the economy, amongst many other urban aspects.

This leads to the essential question of trying to understand what kind of (informal) typologies exist.

Following this idea Rohan investigated multiple slums in Mumbai and elsewhere and identified several typologies which we do not recognize or talk about enough. UN-Habitat and the statistics office of India have different definitions, and of course there are similar characteristics, but also many differences, for example in types of construction and standard of living. Often, slums can be found that are entirely constructed out of bamboo and plastic sheets or cases where people have managed to put together different materials to make houses.

and planners. Furthermore, if you look at densities, those in Rio never come close to those natives in Mumbai, so while it is interesting to look at models from e.g. South America, it is not a clear case of simply transferring them to Mumbai and expecting them to work. Even if you just look at Mumbai, there are several types of slums that exist: peripheral slums are extremely different from city centre slums which are extremely different from urban villages. All of them completely differ based on origin, location, size, but also the level of accessibility in regards to the rest of the city and the level of amenities.

There is a lot of information that does exist on the theme, be it in written form as a part of books or articles. The particular interest of Rohan is in mapping the spatial dimension of slums.

Going down to the detail of a house and trying to understand Industries in Backbay slum © Rohan Varma

The first major parameter of comparison is the different standards of living and cost of construction. Another important parameter is function and program. There are slums which are entirely residential in nature but also slums which are a complete mix of housing, commercial spaces and industries such as Dharavi (Mumbai).

So while it may seem that all around the globe regardless of whether it’s Mumbai, Caracas or Rio, many cities seem to be sharing and facing the same problems, the reality is that informal urbanisation manifests itself differently in diverse contexts.

For example, informal settlements in Buenos Aires are quite different than the ones in Mumbai due to the fact that in Buenos Aires most of the slums are located on the outskirts of the city, while in Mumbai they are elsewhere. This requires and triggers a different response from architects 23

the built form of different slums, and the level of amenities and densities. Some of his inspiration comes from books like ‘How the other half lives’, written more than a century ago. This consisted of photographing the slums of New York, and in a way it managed to affect housing policy at that time.

As a case study of his approach to analysis Rohan uses the Backbay slum in Mumbai. In his words, the first thing he did was to map the area paying attention also to the surroundings of the slum area including land-use, accessibility, infrastructure and public amenities.

An intriguing finding was that the slum also has internal spatial differences. On the outskirts the houses generally accommodate commercial functions such as shops, whereas when going towards the core of the settlement, in the case of Backbay, the houses are poorer in construction with

streets more dimly lit. Looking from the perspective of typology, four variations of buildings were identified, based on the different combination of functions.

Concluding Remarks

By exploring the spatial and typological dimension of slums, a globally useful insight concerning the operation of informal settlements can be created. It is critical to generate information about these specifics because there seems to be a lack of understanding by officials. When mass housing in the city is organised they do not seem to incorporate all the different elements that actually define the informal settlements. What is more, these kind of spatial studies might support cross-national comparison of slums within different contexts.

Mapping of slums is also important because then the outcomes can be presented and showed to the general public as well as to the government in order to raise awareness and improve housing policies - in India but also all around the world. Therefore, a concluding notion of Rohan was that, in aiming to get a better overview of different (informal) typologies, researchers who work on this topic should be open to collaboration in order to generate common and comparable knowledge.

Building typologies in Backbay Slum, Mumbai © Rohan Varma Spatial uses of a small scale Industrial unit © Rohan Varma

References McKinsey & Company, Inc., 2003. VISION MUMBAI. Transforming Mumbai into a world-class city. A summary of recommendations. [pdf } Bombay First. See: www.visionmumbai.org/ Riis, J. A., 1890. How the other half lives: studies among the tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

See: www.bartleby.com/208/ Rudofsky, B., 1964. Architecture without architects, a short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture. New York: Doubleday.

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Contested spaces, critical practice: recalibrating Urban Design?

Giorgio Talocci is a Teaching Fellow in the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD), at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), London. Giorgio and the MSc BUDD team and students have been working along with urban poor communities, grassroots organisations, networks of professionals and academics. How to move towards a collective and shared production of space and knowledge in today’s city? And what does this mean in term of a possible recalibration of the design discipline?

Informality is a key part of a settlement in Manila (Philippines) - an area that experiences flooding every year - but also in a former barracks in Rome which is now squat-occupied. The context and history of these spaces and the related actors are complex and completely different. In response, Giorgio Talocci argues for a restrained role of the architect and planner; for a patient approach, which builds and shares an understanding of the complexities (and conflicts) of circumstances.

In his lecture he talks about The Bartlett Development Planning Unit’s global teaching experience with confronting informality.

and a huge informal settlement.

Some people in the image are doing a survey to define which people can stay and which houses need to be demolished because of a rehabilitation project, affecting those units lying too close to the railway track. The land around the railway costs less than in Is a contested space necessarily an informal one?

To start Giorgio looks at a railway settlement in Phnom Penh (Cambodia): a disused railway track

the rest of Phnom Penh, so it is logical that the lower strata of the population find it easier to settle there. The rehabilitation project is a much contested one: one of the promoters of this project is the Asian Development Bank, in theory a development bank.

Nevertheless, they are evicting

A railway settlement in Phnom Penh in 2013 © Giorgio Talocci

The Borei Keila district in Phnom Penh in 2013 © Giorgio Talocci

Intro

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people without providing sufficient solutions for their relocation.

These are places where many interests converge and sometimes clash. Different actors try to exercise their power there and try to have dominance over space.

We can define these as contested spaces (Boano & Talocci, 2014). Is a contested space necessarily an informal one? Probably yes, but these characteristics can be found all over cities. Probably when the TU Delft campus was built it was a contested space. Nevertheless, in the informal world we can find extra features belonging to a kind of survival strategy (Fabricius, 2008).

People living in an informal context could not find a different solution for settling in the city. So it is a way of evading or manipulating

The ‘Libis’ community in Manilla © Giorgio Talocci

The ‘Del Rosario’ community in Manilla © Giorgio Talocci, Community Architects Network Regional Meeting 2013

power: urban informality is bound to cover a range of situations where the building stock, occupations and aesthetics violate the normative and regulatory frame.

This begs the question: how can we understand who is producing space here? As Giorgio reflects, we need to investigate further in order to understand what kind of actors are ruling the space.

Who is deciding how the space transforms and who is resisting the pressure for development?

And what kind of nuances can we identify between apparently homogeneous sets of actors?

People Driven City-wide Upgrading Plan, Metro-Manila

The settlement of the Del Rosario community in Manila is a place which experiences flooding once a year. As the water rises to window height, this situation requires a yearly reconstruction of the dwellings. To deal with this the community decided to come up with a strategy for upgrading. Although their condition is one of poverty and environmental risk, they are not under direct threat of eviction.

The Community Architects Network invited the DPU to their Regional Meeting in Manila, Philippines, to participate in the process of upgrading in order to avoid the eviction of the community in the future and reduce the

People Driven City-Wide Upgrading Plan by communities in Metro-Manilla © Giorgio Talocci, Community Architects Network Regional Meeting 2013

environmental threat. This effort led to a presentation of the projects run by the community leaders themselves in front of the local and national authorities.

This action favoured a process of empowerment of the urban poor, putting at the centre of the process those subjects directly concerned with the status of the settlement.

The Squatting Occupation of Porto Fluviale, Rome

A former army barracks in Rome which is now occupied by squatters is the second case discussed. The building is occupied illegally by migrants and Romans who are in a situation of ‘housing emergency’.

These are people who could not afford a place to rent. The barracks’ “Designing Investigative Strategies in Contested Spaces” at UCL © Giorgio Talocci

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courtyard is usually closed, but the community leadership wanted to convert the yard into a public square. The intention was to open it only under certain conditions though, as they wanted neither a place only for passing by nor a conventional square with associated commercial activities.

Rather, they aimed for a space where the ‘use value’ could finally overcome the ‘exchange value’.

While the overarching goal was to devise a strategy to open up the space, the main challenge was to start understanding the community and its daily life. This meant trying to get in contact with as many people as possible instead of hearing only the voice of the leadership. For instance, the use of space during different hours of the day was mapped, while other students focused on collecting stories of the inhabitants, and there was also a moment where a group of students participated in an assembly (an exceptional thing as these are usually not public).

The entire community took part in the presentation of the resulting proposals. About a hundred families sat down and discussed it with the group of students. Some proposals then had an actual impact on the building and its community. One proposal was to repaint the façade in order to show off the richness of the community and, in so doing, symbolically open up the space.

Afterwards, a squatter came in to contact with a painter famous for working with abandoned city buildings, who repainted the whole façade partially inspired by this idea that had been developed by the students along with the community.

Concluding Remarks

Looking at these examples Giorgio concludes that it is necessary to rethink the role of the architect. Not a professional that comes up with projects, but one who is listening, 27

who facilitates and tries to envision what kind of transformation the community itself might want.

To do so, the teaching approach followed by the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development (BUDD) at the DPU engages with critical and transformative spatial practices. This means working with communities on the production of urban visions and imaginations, going towards a shared production of space and knowledge.

In the case of the squatters in Rome this approach involved listening to the whole group alongside the leaders, to make all the voices heard.

It was, and always is, important to understand all the nuances, to find out what people want from the to envision what kind of transformation the community itself might want space and what they aspire to for the future. Also, as in the Philippines case, many informal communities live a bare life, excluded from any political role in the city. In the moment that they are empowered to present and discuss their own projects with the authorities they become political subjects.

The MSc BUDD wishes to offer a renewed perspective on design, suggesting a reorientation between politics and aesthetics that would not simply reorder power relations but create new political subjects too. Obviously, the act of doing (of designing, of building) is important in every kind of situation when a transformation is on-going.

However, at the beginning, students and professionals need to learn to refrain from taking direct physical action on an environment, because we must understand properly a situation

before intervening. Design then becomes an act of research aimed at producing knowledge about a context. Facing informality, design has to decipher the socio-spatial context. This means surveying the human, economic and social capital (potentialities) that is present in a given context, as well as the power relations in place: design needs to make such knowledge conveyable toward other people, producing counter-narratives that contest the mainstream ones.

References Roy, A. 2003 Urban informality. Towards an epistemology of Planning. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 71 No. 2, Spring 2005 Fabricius, D. 2008 Resisting Representation.

The Informal Geographies of Rio de Janiero. Harvard Design Magazine, number 28, spring/summer 2008 Boano, C., & Talocci, G. (2014) The (in)operative power: architecture and the reclaim of social relevance. Studio Magazine, 6, 108–115, http:// www.rrcstudio.com/studiomagazine_issues Boano, C., & Talocci, G. (2014) Fences and Profanations: Questioning the Sacredness of Urban Design. Journal of Urban Design, 19(5), 700–721.

Boano, C., & Talocci, G. (2014) The politics of play in urban design: Agamben’s profanation as a recalibrating approach to urban design research. Bitacora Urbano Territorial, 24(1).

Talocci, G. (2012) Occupying and the New Monuments. In C. Boano, W. Hunter, & G. Talocci (Eds.), Rome Occupation City - DPU summerLab 2012 series (pp. 4–9).

DPU. See: www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/ http://www.communityarchitectsnetwork.info/

Results of “Designing Investigative Strategies in Contested Spaces” © DPU -UCL

Design proposals and realised design in Porto Fluviale, Rome. Taken at the DPU Summerlab “Rome Occupation City” in 2012 © Giorgio Talocci, DPU

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learning from Makoko berend strijland is an architect who works with NLÉ, an architecture, design and urbanism practice focused on developing cities.

Since joining in 2011 he has been involved in several of NLÉ’s projects, including the acclaimed Makoko Floating School in Lagos, Nigeria.

A global informality perspective cannot be complete without an introduction to African informal settlements. It is even better if it can be combined with different challenging perspectives such as climate change and rapid urban growth.

Consequently, Berend Strijland was invited to the “Confronting [In]Formality” Symposium.

He represented NLÉ, an Amsterdam and Lagos based architecture office heavily concerned with

development projects in Africa.

They have multiple running assignments in Nigeria and their Lagos influence is already vital.

Among some high-end projects, over the last 3 years they have been working on the ‘Makoko Floating School’, a mobile floating prototype addressing social and adapting an object to its context

Testing the prototype of the foundation for the floating school © NLÉ

physical needs in the age of rapid urbanisation and climate change.

Berend is an alumnus of the Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture and co-author of the floating school and NLÉ’s entry to the ‘Uneven Growth’ exhibition commissioned by MOMA, profiling the floating settlements and urbanisation possibilities in Lagos.

The ‘Confronting [In]formality’ Symposium was particularly honoured by Berend’s presence since the widely acclaimed Makoko Floating School project had not been discussed in front of a larger audience at the TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment before.

He presented the approach of the house and how large scale problems such as sea level rise and lack of social infrastructure can be tackled through local resources such as a floating school using, for instance, replaceable recycled oil barrels as a building foundation.

The following paragraphs sum up his major storyline and thoughts.

Context

The problem statement of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition ’Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities’ claims that by 2030 8 billion people will 29

Possible extension of the floating school design into a new urban typology © NLÉ

inhabit the planet, 2/3 of these will live in cities and most of them in poverty. In the Global South growth rates are already staggering and the urbanisation level in Africa is a hot topic among practice and academia.

Rapid urban growth compounded by climate change effects in delta areas creates an increased challenge for both present and future formal, but especially informal settlements.

The most populous and 2nd fastest growing African city, Lagos, gains 800,000 new inhabitants every year, on top of its already substantial 16-million population.

An average ‘Lagosian’ spends 4 hours in traffic daily. Basically, roads are expanded into community places and markets. Nigeria is currently the biggest economy in Africa – the land value in Lagos is about the same as in Amsterdam.

Developments target the highend population and only cover 30% of the newcomers. As a result, housing and living costs are highly unaffordable for the majority of the population and informal settlements are popping up in various places including on water.

Rapid urban growth spiced with climate change Such an example is the Makoko Floating Village in the heart of Lagos surrounded by the most expensive lands. There are about 100,000 people living there who are mostly involved with floating wood to the nearby timber industries as well as being a fishing and boat building community. The area is about 45 hectares, mostly community

owned surface built on water.

Small canals act like streets and the whole system shapes a grid, even though it has never been planned.

The buildings are appropriately determined by the sun and wind, and they mostly consist solely of a ground floor built on stilts. Boats act as taxis, shops and floating retail units that often form a market together. During their research, NLÉ realised that social infrastructure was significantly missing; for example, only one school operated for 100,000 residents.

The Floating School

This is what NLÉ calls maximum urbanisation with minimal means.

A settlement of 100,000 residents is built where only water is available.

The office is not trying to give an answer to poverty but rather

Walls and basic structure of the floating school © NLÉ 30

provide amenities that can serve the population regardless. The school project arose from a local demand, originally conceived as an extension of the aforementioned facility. The project was self-initiated to begin with but eventually gained funding from the United Nations, which became a trigger for plenty of further partners.

Flexibility also holds the potential for upscaling The final concept was created through a series of model-based consultations. The main driving force was combining global and local technology to tackle sea level-rise. Since Nigeria is heavily based on its petrol industry, recycled oil barrels were chosen to float the building. As a floating object, stability was crucial and the triangle shape provided the structure with a sufficiently low centre of gravity. Pre-folded elements eased the construction.

The platform is made of 16 equal elements, each floating on 16 barrels. Eight workers finished the ‘building’ in just over two months.

The building has a flexible and standardised structure. Therefore, it can be easily reproduced. Such flexibility also means that the structure holds the potential for further up-scaling, despite the building already being the highest in Makoko. Even though it currently has a clear purpose, the structure can also accommodate functions such as dwelling, place of worship etc. The school is self-sustaining (using solar energy, rain water collection), which was a must in an energy and clean water scarce area. Since the first day the floating school also acts as a community

centre for retail boats or cultural activities. The building showed that by adapting an object to its context it can truly contribute to the living quality even in the toughest socio-economic conditions.

Concluding Remarks

Flexibility is possibly one of the keys for the future urban environment. There are smart solutions popping up in different contexts, the question is whether they will provide us with reproducible, perhaps globally interchangeable opportunities.

NLÉ hope is that, if we have to conquer water, similar objects can contribute to create a socially and environmentally sustainable framework. What is more, building on water could be an exemplary model for African coastal cities.

As Berend concludes, quoting the Boston Globe on floating cities: “It may sound like science fiction, but in fact it is already happening in Lagos...”.

The Makoko Floating School is an operating and successful prototype that showcases how, if a project fully responds to a clear problem and context and it is developed with the local community, it can indeed be a valuable answer to existing challenges. The main question is whether ‘we can accurately recognise the key opportunities and threats of our communities and cities on both a smaller and larger scale’. Furthermore, even if we do so, ‘do we discuss enough and share engineering and planning solutions in order to be able to place appropriate and longserving sustainable solutions?’

We certainly need to continue sharing these kind of experiences and discuss the actual outcomes.

Sketch of Makoko as a new way of urbanisation for coastal cities in Africa. Part of MOMA’s ‘Uneven Growth’ exhibition © NLÉ 31

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informality who cares? kria Djoyoadhiningrat is an architect and co-founder of Casa Legal, a multi-disciplinary support strategy to develop informal settlements. He is also Conservator ‘inclusive cities’ at the Cartesius Museum in Utrecht. He believes the best experts in the design process are most of the time the inhabitants and the users. How to harness their power? How indeed!

Urban informality is a global phenomenon but diverse contexts require the adoption of different approaches. This is clearly realised by professionals who have confronted and worked with informality in very contradicting settings. Indeed, Kria Djoyoadhiningrat is an architect who has practiced his professional capabilities in various locations around the globe. He is co-founder of Casa Legal, a multi-disciplinary support strategy to develop informal settlements and also

Conservator of ‘inclusive cities’ at the Cartesius Museum in Utrecht.

Kria believes that the best experts in the design process are most of the time the inhabitants and the users.

At the ‘Confronting [In]Formality’ Symposium he reflected on his own practical experience and how his ideas about informality gradually evolved. Furthermore, he discussed from a wider perspective why and for whom informality is actually important. The following lines express the main notions posited

by Kria during his talk on the event.

Getting Familiar with Informality

Kria’s first experience with informality was in his youth. A very basic example of informality for him was at home. Growing up in Indonesia his mother did not have the habit of using cooking recipes. She just followed her feeling and this is how Kria’s mother gradually built up her skills to cook traditional dishes. At the larger scale of the urban environment his first experience with informality was in the Dutch neighbourhood

Experiences with building in Senegal © Kria Djoyoadhiningrat

check out my wall!

the plot is slightly different…

CONSTRUCTION – Thiès (SN) – putting the buildings in place with Zal & Jules 33

CONSTRUCTION – Thiès (SN) – skill assessment

Why invest in a broken down environment? © Kria Djoyoadhiningrat

why run out of the site when they spotted a police car. This situation invest? brought concerning notions into

where he grew up. While a child, at a construction company. During his parents and other adults unified his work there Kria became familiar to create a more child-friendly and with the negative aspects of cosy playground near his house.

The municipality appreciated the is somebody successful result and recognised welcome to ESSENCE Are you welcome intervene if you don’t follow their efforts. At a – later stage in life if the Kria delved into studying issues of (s)he does informality at the TU Delft where not follow a he graduated as an architect, but predetermined struggled with the exclusively recipe? architectural graduation track.

Inspired to learn more about the global context he initially started informality while witnessing how his professional career in Curaçao the construction workers would

his personal concept of informality.

Confronting Informality

recipe?

Just before his presentation

Kria was working on a project in Senegal. This is a situation with limited economic pressure within a highly informal working setting.

The governmental structure is constrained and constructors lack expensive equipment. From the very first moment that he started

sorry, we got stuck in traffic on site

CONSTRUCTION – Thiès (SN) – steady water supply?

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his work in Senegal, Kria confronted informality in almost all aspects of his work. Once he arrived on the construction site he realised that the plot was very different from what he had been prepared for from the official drawings.

Apart from this, fundamental issues such as communication with the construction workers was challenging due to the absence of a common speaking language.

Within such a context many aspects of construction seem to be different from the formal process. A significant difference is that on the site there is no use of official qualifications and / or diplomas. So the selection process for employment of construction workers usually happens on the plot through a direct test of demonstrating what constructors are capable of; for example, by building a wall. In addition, during the construction the planned (formal) process is frequently confronted by various unexpected failures which, consequently, influence the formal schedule.

For instance, postponing of the water supply delivery can result in the building team digging a twelve metre deep well for water.

These kind of situations suggest that flexibility of the construction schedule is vital within such a context. Furthermore, due to the specific socio-economic conditions in Senegal, the construction process, as known in industrialised countries, seems to be quite different as well. On the site where Kria worked, the formation of a human chain was the most effective way to move building blocks to the upper floors of the construction. A human substitute for the use of mechanical cranes.

At the end of the day, despite these multiple confrontations to the ‘formal’ building process, the actual construction progressed and was accomplished in fine order.

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As well as sufficient knowledge in construction, Kria indicated that in order to work successfully in a certain context it is necessary to build up a good understanding regarding the socio-cultural norms of behaviour. They might be significantly different from the familiar ones. For example he mentioned that in general, informal settings have a strong impact on the way people demonstrate their status in society. Kria found that, unlike in the Netherlands, local residents Making your own recipe as you go along allows for many different qualities to be included in Senegal seem to be more connected to their own belongings, meaning that development work had to allow space for people to carry their possessions with them. In this way, confronting informality goes beyond the direct professional connection with the work into an understanding of the societal context.

After gaining valuable experience about confronting informality in Africa, Kria got a chance to revisit the initial ideas and ambitions of his graduation project that did not work out. He decided to bring his confrontation with informality to the next level and teamed up with fellow symposium speaker Jaap Klaarenbeek to establish the design collective Studio Rosa.

Together they work on developing tools and knowledge for people living in informal circumstances to access the legal, financial, physical and social resources of society.

In this form Kria has continued his exploration of informal settings all over the globe. One of the contexts that Studio Rosa focused

on for a long period of time is Brazil. There they identified that local people fight on an everyday basis for their right to take care of themselves by adapting and forming their surroundings.

Physical acts are mostly undertaken through informal means but nevertheless the formal structures take them in to consideration. This brought Kria to the conclusion that the recognition of bottomup interventions by the formal authorities in countries such as the Netherlands is actually not as well developed in comparison to some other parts of the world.

Concluding Remarks

Based on his gained experience and personal beliefs Kria argues that the major issues regarding informal interventions can be expressed by the initially used metaphor about cooking. In other words, is somebody welcome to intervene if (s)he does not follow a predetermined recipe? Making your own recipe as you go along allows for many different qualities to be included; qualities that tend to be neglected by predetermined plans.

This leads us to even more insightful questions such as what are the consequences and the full potential if one does not follow the recipe. By posing this notion Kria emphasises that is essential to think about what kind of benefits can be brought by formal recognition of informal development(s).

However, this recognition should consider not only approaches that were established in the past but also (re)evaluate the constantly changing potential benefits for interventions and respond in respect to the context.

A human answer to a lack of machinery in Senegal: going up fast with no crane Š Kria Djoyoadhiningrat

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brazilian sidewalks & casa legal jaap klAarenbeek is urban designer, architect, cofounder of Studio ROSA and director of Posad-Rosa Estratégias Espaciais.

Since 2008 he has carried out various projects in Brazil in the formal and informal city. He believes that good spatial strategies render the formal/ informal dichotomy irrelevant.

Often one major shortcoming of global design is the lack of integration with the local context.

As an example of an alternative, Studio ROSA’s ‘Estadio do Povo’ demonstrates a combination of societal sports heritage with environmental demands and lifts these two factors to the urban and global level. Such a construction leaves the possibility of various informal functions within a formalised structure, confronting real estate informalities.

To start with the question of what informality is, Jaap argues that good solutions render the formal/informal dichotomy irrelevant. He stresses that the concept of formality and informality are too often falsely presented as a dichotomy, which makes devising solutions in practice much more difficult.

The streets of São Bernardo © Jaap Klarenbeek

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Sidewalks of São Bernardo, Brazil

The first part of Jaap’s story is about a formal climate, in which the informal processes of the city are encountered. The municipality of São Bernardo (São Paulo conurbation) asked them to improve the poor quality of the sidewalks. The formal sidewalk design model used in all of Brazil contains a wide 1,2m “Faixa livre” (the strip on which you walk) and next to that a service strip and an entrance strip. However, reality contains narrow sidewalks, different kinds of pavement and formal and informal elements which block the use of them. The formal regulations omit the situation in 80% of the city.

Posad-Rosa analysed and developed from the actual sidewalk use a typology defined by the formal properties and the (informal) use of

adjacent space. The typologies act as a tool, they allow the municipality a choice of what kind of sidewalks they want. From there it becomes clear what actions should be prioritized, and which stakeholders should be addressed (because stakeholders define the different typologies). This is important because in the Brazilian system, the property is legally a public good but the maintenance should be done by private parties, the owners of plots adjacent to the sidewalks.

They found out that the diversity of sidewalk use provides direction for different ways of design. They believe that accessible streets require accessible rules. Before the project there was an expansive book of street regulations, which nobody was actually aware of. Therefore, they developed visual guidelines (rather than written ones) to

accessible streets require accessible rules improve accessibility for responsible stakeholders. These were tested with different local social groups.

Currently their main effort is to develop a digital tool, working on different devices. It is aimed both at the public sector (overseer), but also at the people who actually use the streets. It contains the guidelines, but also enables people all over the city to share how they made their sidewalks.

Casa Legal Concept, Paraisópolis, São Paulo

Impressions of side-walk development in São Bernardo © Jaap Klarenbeek

Jaap’s graduation research looked at the meaning of informality in different fields: economy, sociology and spatial practice. It was found that these topics all have very different definitions: ‘If you overlap all these definitions of formality, and look at it spatially (by projecting them on the city) you get a heat map of formality. Some places have a high intensity of different kinds of informality. These places are often the places we call slums.’

Getting back to the present, one of the most recent ventures of Jaap

and Kria is ‘Casa Legal’ meaning ‘Legal House´, confronting the illegal status of many slums. It is a project started when Gilson Rodrigues (a Paraisópolis inhabitant) spoke of the problems of the illegal status of his house. Although he has lived in his house for 28 years, it is still unclear if he will be living there tomorrow. Losing your home is still an every-day risk in Paraisópolis, adding to the other problems of illegal housing: no postal address so no access to insurance or a bank account, amongst others.

Strangely enough, many people in São Paulo have the right to own their plot, since by Brazilian law, individuals living longer than five years on a plot can claim the right of ownership. However, for legalisation of the plot, the house has to have a certain formal status, which slum dwellings do not. So an investigation is compulsory, requiring a bank loan and account, which is not accessible without a formal house. This vicious circle means that legalisations hardly occur. Furthermore, the original land owners of the favela often engage the inhabitants in legal trials to reclaim land. So we are talking about an incompatibility of the perspectives of different

Interests and stakeholders in the Casa Legal concept © Studio Rosa

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stakeholders, leading to one big standstill. To get a solution to this problem we want to start thinking about commonalities and shared interests. Because both owner and inhabitant want a solution: one with certainty and cost-efficiency.

So they started with meetings, both with Gilson and other members of the neighbourhood – from the slums and social housing projects -, with developers, banks and of course owners. At the end of the day, due to the commonalities, the problems affected everybody in some way. Studio ROSA was busy for four to five years in the area and involved the Caixa Federal (Federal Bank) which finances all of São Paulo’s social housing projects.

Today, they continue to develop a business plan together which includes physical, financial and social aspects. The plan transforms a plot step-by-step. A success on the plot scale holds promise for a change on the urban scale.

Nevertheless, Jaap and Kria found that the workings of Casa Legal were theoretical and complex.

The organisation of the last World

Illustrating the conflict in favelas © Studio Rosa

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Cup in Brazil provoked a lot of dissatisfaction, so they used that as inspiration to apply Casa Legal.

Studio ROSA found it a paradox that a football loving country should protest against the organisation of the world football cup. So for Gilson and his neighbourhood they designed “Estadio do Povo” (Stadium for the poor). start thinking from commonalities and shared interests The stadium is really for the people, and they want to create a World Cup experience as it should have been.

In Gilson’s favela, as in many other ones, there is this open space with sunlight and open views, which is called the football field. Through the “Estadio do Povo” project, the edges around the field will be developed, giving more space for schools, clinics and living, overall enhancing the life quality of the inhabitants.

In this way, the Casa Legal concept shall be tested by hosting a special tournament in a temporary

structure just before the next big event, Rio 2016. An inspiring project to create an environment where (international) passion for football and neighbourhood quality of life go hand in hand, while it provides local communities with a possibility to preserve their homes.

Concluding Remarks

Studio ROSA’s ”Estadio de Povo” concept clearly demonstrates that there are great possibilities for working within highly disadvantaged informal settings.

While the challenges are complex - from the everyday life drawbacks to the unregulated property ownership - with a smart set of tools and by establishing people’s needs as a key aspect, new development directions can be achieved.

While the stadium-city will not be trialled for some time, it is a captivating example of combining a particular sport as a local heritage, housing, recreation and community into a complex solution for modern day Brazilian favelas. Can contextually similar environments around the world be approached with a similar mind-set?

Designing ‘Estadio de Povo’ © Studio Rosa

Design workshop for ‘Estadio de Povo’ © Studio Rosa

Drawings of the inspiration for ‘Estadio de Povo’ and possible realisation © Studio Rosa

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from disaster to recovery vera kreuwels is an urban planner working as a technical advisor in humanitarian responses. In (post-)disaster and (post-)conflict settings she works with community-based local solutions that offer safe, adequate and durable shelter within an integrated settlement approach. Vera has experience in urban and rural reconstruction projects in Haiti, Pakistan, Philippines, Central African Republic, Gaza, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

There are some places in the world at particular times when the expertise of planning professionals and architects is utilized in an extraordinary manner and possesses exceptional value. The context of (post-) disaster and (post–)conflict environments requires specific attention while working towards recovery. Aiming to address this spectrum of planning interventions Vera Kreuwels was invited to the ‘Confronting [In] Formality’ Symposium. She shared her experience as a technical advisor working on humanitarian responses. Vera, educated as an

urban planner, seeks to assist affected communities with community based local solutions that offer safe, adequate and durable shelter within an integrated settlement approach. During her presentation she outlined the main notions and lessons which had been acquired in several emergency and long-term urban and rural reconstruction projects in Haiti, Pakistan, Philippines, Central African Republic, Gaza, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Vera began the talk with the important clarification that emergency shelter is principally a

The devastation of Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban (Philippines) 2013 © REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco

Typhoon Haiyan, Tacloban, Philippines 41

Photo: REUTERS/Romeo Ranoco, November 2013

three phase process, with constantly evolving needs and possibilities within an ever increasing complex situation of stakeholders. However, solutions, related to demands and possibilities, are always highly context driven, from (e.g.) providing house rental vouchers in Turkey, to assisting the design of moveable shelter in the Philippines, to community planning in Pakistan.

Vera stated that understanding these specifics is key while working as a humanitarian professional, who advocates the position of the most vulnerable and facilitates the recovery process after a disaster.

Intro

In recent decades an increasing number of cities all over the world are hit by natural and man-made disasters. Many of these situations result in a humanitarian crisis. One of the most urgent needs that has to be met in such a context is the one for dignified shelter and settlement: a place you can work and live in. Thus, it also represents the most relevant and primary objective for architecture and urban planning professionals to support.

The immediate need for shelter is fairly easy to recognise after a disaster. However, the physical construction of homes is part of a long recovery process in which the stakeholders’ demands

Shelter priorities The needs for emergency shelter and settlement develope over time © Corsellis and Vitale: Transitional Settlements Displaced Populations

inevitably change. Also, people affected by disaster are often already in problematic situations.

As an urban planner Vera often recognises the urban poor within the destroyed areas as her clients. sheltering is a process, not a product!

After a disaster, the clients who are in need of shelter, often the urban poor, usually do not pay for the project nor develop the recovery policy themselves. The government and often an outside donor are responsible for securing the financial and structural resources for reconstruction. Furthermore, the government is often impaired in its capacity by the disaster. Therefore, the post-disaster recovery process is a fairly hard task to organise since it should coordinate between the many stakeholders, their ideas and the urgent needs of the numerous affected people.

conceptualises this situation into and threats within the situation. the shelter and settlement-cycle, Three options are most commonly Settlements priorities which is split into three different undertaken: (a) camps for internally phases: from supporting emergency displaced people / refugees, needs through transitional solutions (b) evacuation centres and (c) to permanent reconstruction.

In safe, this dignified host families communities.

Basic human need for andoradequate shelter case planning professionals have Any emergency support is a Source: Corsellis and Vitale, Transitional Settlements Displaced Populations; the task to facilitate the process, balance between international 2005 assisting the affected population to standards and guidelines, and get on to the path of self-recovery. local possibilities and culture.

Phase I: Supporting Emergency Needs

There is not a single universal good solution. Decisions are very context sensitive and should be based on the urgent needs of the people, the potential possibilities

Effective support can be provided only after a comprehensive contextual assessment of the urgent needs of the community, what the city can offer to the population in crisis and what is structurally not there.

The transitional shelter built after typhoon Sendong hit Cagayan d’Oro (Philippines) which can be moved and upgraded © Charisse Mae Borja, CRS Transitional shelter is ‘an incremental process which supports the shelter of families affected by conflicts and disasters, as they seek to maintain alternative options for their recovery.’

(SHELTER CENTRE (2012) Transitional shelter guidelines, Geneva)

Formal Framework and Local Reality

The situation after a natural disaster changes constantly in terms of needs and conditions. Put shortly, people need to be provided simply with a roof above their heads before they are supported with a house (Corsellis & Vitale, 2005). Theory

Typhoon Washi transitional shelter design: re-locatable, flexibility, upgradeable 42

Moveable transitional shelter post-typhoon Sendong – Cagayan d’Oro, Philippines (photo: Charisse Mae Borja, CRS)

There is no perfect solution, it really depends on the context. However, in any case, internationally set humanitarian standards (Greaney, Pfiffner & Wilson, 2011) have to be followed.

Therefore, emergency shelter solutions can be quite diverse: •

In Samar, Philippines: emergency shelters were self-constructed by the affected people after being provided with plastic sheeting and nails and by using wood salvaged from the ruins.

•

In Duhok, Iraq: refugees settled in unfinished buildings. However, due to the upcoming winter, organisations distributed tents so people could protect themselves from the cold.

•

In Turkey: renting space for refugees was supported through subsidies, as Turkey had sufficient housing stock.

•

In Jordan: a classic solution, a refugee camp.

Phase II: Providing Transitional Solutions

There are also three main scenarios: There are also three main scenarios: (a) return to place of origin, (b) integrate at the location of displacement and (c) relocate to a third location or country. It is still a part of the recovery process which is highly context dependent, where many different influences and specific needs make the task at hand extra complex (Corsellis, 2012). To illustrate this complexity Vera presented some examples from her experience at the symposium: •

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In the Philippines: the government imposed a limit of two years on the use of an piece of land for transitional shelters. In response, the local community was assisted

to build moveable shelters, based on the local principle of social support (“bayanihan”).

•

In Pakistan: to prevent possible (inter) tribal disputes, a process of community planning was facilitated, where all the stakeholders could come together and discuss a conflict-free solution beforehand. By facilitating rather than directing, professionals contributed to a smooth reconstruction.

•

In Tacloban, Philippines: the proposed relocation site for the affected households, mostly informal settlers, was 16 km north of the city. Most of the affected households were unmapped and their livelihoods took place in the city. Community planning was undertaken as a first kind of formalisation in order to secure the population a degree of protection inside the city.

Phase III: Permanent Reconstruction

The third phase deals with the expansion of a transitional shelter solution into a permanent house and home. At the ‘Confronting [In] Formality’ symposium this stage of the post-disaster recovery process was covered by another guest-speaker, Laura Smits.

Concluding Remarks

To sum up, the key notion of Vera’s talk was that sheltering is a process, not a product. The affected community should be the driver of the process in order to be set on the path to self-recovery. Internationally agreed standards can help to guide the process, but the design should be user-oriented to accommodate local needs and possibilities. This requires professionals to act mainly as process facilitators, and not so much as designers. In practice, this

can mean facilitating mapping or community planning in order to secure disaster struck communities’ access to improved housing, land and property rights. In addition, humanitarian professionals, such as architects and urbanists, are in a key position to advocate for the interest of the most vulnerable population.

They can pursue this goal directly during meetings with powerful stakeholders, and indirectly through community planning and mapping efforts. The affected people often cannot step up to the government with their opinions and demands; therefore, they need the support of planning professionals. for displaced people lacking access to the decision making processes, mapping and community planning can be a game changer

References Corsellis, T. and Vitale, A., 2005. Transitional Settlement Displaced Population. [pdf ] Oxfam GB and University of Camebridge. See : www.ifrc.org Corsellis, T. ed., 2012. Transitional shelter guidelines. [pdf ] Shelter Center. See: www.iom.int Greaney, P., Pfiffner, S. and Wilson, D. eds., 2011.

The Sphere Project. Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Humanitarian Response. [pdf ] The Sphere Project. See: www.ifrc.org

The shelter and settlement cycle: from emergency help to transitional solutions to permanent reconstruction Š Vera Kreuwels The facilitation of a community planning process about a new settlement in Sindh (Pakistan) allows conflict mitigation and creates solutions with social sustainability Š Adeel Javaid, CRS Pakistan

Facilitating settlement planning, social sustainability, conflict mitigation

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Sindh, Pakistan, 2014 (photo: Adeel Javaid, CRS Pakistan)

emergency shelter planning as catalyst for selfbuild urban growth laura smits continued on the theme of post-disaster recovery with her experience as a shelter consultant gathered during her work in Haiti. Laura has worked for several organisations (UN Habitat, Cordaid) in several projects within the context of post-earthquake Haiti.

Her work ranged from participatory urban design and documenting informal urbanisation processes in Port au Prince, to working with local government on spatial planning and housing policies, to projects about activating public space.

Laura focused her talk on the case of Canaan, a self-constructed suburb of 80,000-150,000 inhabitants north of Port au Prince. The district emerged partly as a consequence of formal post-disaster relief efforts by the international community in Haiti. Canaan is not the first example of its kind, often, disasters and the associated displacement catalyse new informal settlement. Most of all, the case of Canaan underlines three main points: (1) it questions how post-disaster reconstruction efforts should be managed so that they fit the local context (2) it urges us to understand the drivers of urbanisation and (3) it advocates for a shift towards thinking about post-disaster housing systems rather than (fixed) designs.

Intro

In 2010 due to a heavy earthquake in Haiti 200,000 people were killed and approximately 85,000 buildings were destroyed. The response to a disaster can have an enormous impact, if only because of the amount of money flowing into a country in the post-disaster period.

After the Haiti earthquake, the international community pledged $3 billion, and although only $1 billion was actually received, that represented 17% of the country’s GDP of that year. Everybody realised the enormous impact these funds would have in the context of Haiti; it might be a positive impact, for example if it could strengthen urban management structures. However, it might also have a negative impact,

The Canaan area before January 2010 (left) and in August 2014 (right) Š Google Earth

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by steering urban development into areas where it is undesirable, or by adversely impacting (for example through rent price inflation) the housing market Prior to the earthquake, literally no one lived in the area of Canaan but this changed dramatically in the following years. It is important to note that, except for an IDP camp, until 2014 the whole development of Canaan did not see a penny from international agencies or the Haitian government. What is more, the process in the area had received lots of criticism from formal authorities.

An NGO employee commented: “Canaan is a slum in the making; a violent slum developing around the road that leads to a tourist

The 2010 Haiti earthquake © Christian Als

area, it is not going to work”. A Haitian urban planner added: “When I see Canaan, I see the exact replica of Cite Soleil – a politics of neglect, a large growing cancer.”

1.

The actions of the international community and the Haitian government directly contributed to the emergence of Canaan

Nevertheless, the local people have managed without any support. Until today 80 schools and numerous churches, markets and other urban amenities have been constructed in Canaan. Even technical concerns about the quality of the housing and access to services do not justify the formal negativism since the majority of the built structure in Haiti is of the same quality.

2.

Its growth can be explained by the pre-disaster pressure on the housing market;

3.

Canaan fits very well into the existing development patterns of Port au Prince;

Understanding Canaan’s Growth

Many people were surprised by the emergence of Canaan. However, it should not have been surprising for the following reasons:

Almost one million people were displaced after the earthquake, but initially most people only moved short distances from their homes. Most of these people were labelled ´Internally Displaced Person´ (IDPs), which made the international community responsible for them through the camps coordination and camp

management cluster (CCCM). The cluster is good at establishing camps and providing services to people, in many cases the service level in the camps was higher than in their neighbourhoods of origin. As a consequence, more people moved to the camps and their population peaked seven months after the earthquake.

The camps in the city soon became overcrowded, and were deemed unsafe. The Haitian government and the international community then decided to build a new camp outside the city limits in a ´safer´ location. The government of Haiti supported the idea by declaring a large swathe of land eminent domain; actually, much larger than needed. The general public perceived this governmental territory as ´their´ land, and in

Self-settled sites (camps) as seen from the sky © IOM

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combination with the provision of services in the formal camp (which external people could benefit from as well), the areas adjacent to the formal camp started to be settled as well.

Another crucial factor responsible for the growth of Canaan was the large, pre-existing pressure on the housing market. Research showed that there was a demand for 200,000 housing units to be provided in the period 20102014. About 115,000 units were delivered (although often in the form of ´transitional shelters´) by the international community.

This left a deficit of 85,000 units.

Probably half of this deficit was met in the area of Canaan.

Nevertheless, these numbers do not include renters and other people living in sub-optimal conditions, nor investors who already live somewhere but want to invest in Canaan in order to make money.

In fact, Canaan cannot be considered as an exception in Port au Prince. From the 1940s until 1968 urbanisation was tightly regulated because of dictatorial rule but afterwards the city exploded through the growth of informal neighbourhoods. So Canaan is quite normal, as there are many similar developments, for example, in the southern area of Port au Prince.

Learning from Canaan

The case of Canaan poses some crucial questions on how to intervene within a post-disaster context. Often, the donor wants

00 OrUSD/roadside ad... build a roadside ad for US$500 © Ben Noble

One can spend US$30,000 on a complete house © Haut Damier, Emile Manigat 2013

to see brightly coloured houses with happy kids in front of them.

However, is this the most useful thing you can do with aid money?

Or the most fair, equitable thing? the professional role is more about bringing relevant actors together in a coordinated effort Several criteria can be thought of, but the notion of equity needs to be highlighted. It is not often considered because it implies the need for compromises. If one wants to spend money in an equitable way, so that everybody affected by an earthquake has access to the same amount of support, the quantity and/ or quality of the support that is provided will be compromised.

Source:

Ben Noble

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Thony Saincius

•

US$ 30,000 on one perfect (but small) house;

•

or US$ 4,500 on a transitional shelter which will last about 5 years;

•

or US$ 200 for an eight-week masonry training course, with the question of whether the skill learned can/will be applied in practice;

•

or US$ 500 on a road sign advertisement for safer construction methods, where you reach a lot of people but without an overview of the impact.

This is not an easy decision to make.

In addition, some other criteria also seem to be crucial for post-disaster relief. The process should: (a) be Or rather spend US$4,500 on a transitional shelter © Cordaid 2011

Or organise construction training >200 /person... courseUSD for US$200 © Thony Saincius

Source:

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To give an example, one can spend:

36

participatory; (b) have a multiplier effect, affecting more than just housing; (c) be sustainable, so that the intervention is able continue after the external support is gone.

On the basis of Canaan’s case, two major conclusions can be drawn.

First, the definition of informal neighbourhoods as the opposite of a ´planned´ neighbourhood makes sense, but leaves room for a large variety of types of informal neighbourhoods. It is crucial to understand the drivers for informal growth in each particular case.

Understanding that will help greatly in devising a strategy for intervention or reconstruction.

Second, although urban planners and architecture professionals love to think about what things will look like (i.e. make designs), their role seems to be more about bringing relevant actors together in a coordinated effort. This means focusing on building systems and an enabling environment rather than anything else.

Camp and surroundings in the Canaan area © Ben Noble 2013 48

revisiting urban informality dr. diego sepulveda carmona is specialised in regional development with experience in infrastructural development and socio spatial integration. He has a particular interest in the conditions necessary to integrate local levels in the metropolisation processes. Lately his work is defined by the integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies in a developing economic context.

Last but not least, along with the nine practice-orientated professionals, the stage at the ‘Confronting [In]Formality’ symposium was given to Dr. Diego Sepulveda. Diego is assistantprofessor at TU Delft, specialised in regional development with experience in infrastructural development and socio-spatial integration. At the event he brought forward key conceptual notions and reflected on the theme of

urban informality, as discussed throughout the conference.

During the presentation, Diego outlined the urgency for planning professionals to understand and recognise informal systems as part of the socio-economic and spatial organisation of global cities.

are a reality planning professionals have to deal with. Urban informality has diverse expressions and thus it requires consideration of large territorial transformations with particular attention to different urban functional scales: local, urban and regional.

Intro

Starting from the situation in Chile, Diego sees the issue of informality as part of the contextual daily system of its inhabitants. There

Informal urban and economic systems are increasingly confronting the world and its institutions. They

Informal settlements worldwide Š UN-HABITAT 2005

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Contrasting urban developments © D. Kozak

informality can be easily recognised in every part of society. In fact, within the Southern hemisphere informality is a very common condition and there is no way that the existing current development models can give a clear explanation of the functioning of the system.

However, the projected image of the Global South is that by 2020 six out of ten people are going to live in poverty. So understanding the urban system as a formal/ informal whole is an urgent necessity; most of all, because it is a (disturbing) reality, which is expressed in the highly contrasting formal and informal urban developments as divergent worlds.

Its importance and scale notwithstanding, informality itself is a social construct which societies and its actors constantly redefine.

At the same time, it has a clear and particular spatial expression that should be considered by any urban development model.

Still, for those excluded people who live with informality, a way out of the deplorable economic and living conditions connected with their situation is offered. This way out requires a recognition of the diverse and ongoing acts of socio-spatial construction which make up the informal process.

If it is considered in this way, it

could be a process which urban planners can operationalize within a strategic planning framework.

The Economic Necessity of Informality as an Ever-changing Process

A good starting point for trying to understand informality is Manuel Castell’s definition (1983): a social construction based on our definitions and the notion that state intervention defines the rules. Therefore, informality is something that is constantly changing. It is responding to particular historical developments and local characteristics and specific urbanization processes. Every single city and every single society expresses informality differently.

Nevertheless, the developing world shares a common situation of lacking institutional maturity to react to informality, leading to more extreme expressions of it. Looking at Latin America, informality is very much present across all parts of society, especially in land ownership, land use and land regulation (Carrion, 2010).

In Argentina, for example, 40% of the gated communities are in violation of the formal regulations, and these are usually the areas inhabited by the rich. On the other hand, for the poor, the weakest groups in society, informality is

primarily expressed as an economic condition. In this sense, when one speaks about the extremely poor, one speaks about survival strategies which refer to 60 percent of the economy of the global system.

This is a system which needs to be recognized through a contextual approach of comprehension.

While doing so, understanding economic income is the key factor of analysis (Clichevsky, 2000).

Additionally, informal settlements tend to be located in areas ‘at risk’ or in stagnation – the parts of the urban tissue which do not seem to have a functional value and so also express a lack of physical or functional connection with the rest of the city (Janches & Sepulveda, 2009). So, attention should also be paid to the impact of the diverse spatial, functional and infrastructural conditions on informality.

Informality, Space and Actors

Now let us think about these factors in the light of the current developments of the global south.

Up to the 1980s, there was a very concentric urban model with a closed economic system. The migration process and its complex regulation created the first state of informality, expressed spatially on 50

a dichotomy between the centre with its valuable functions and the disconnected periphery, creating a spatial fragmentation. After the 1980s, globalization has brought a completely different division of labour, where various urban areas react differently to the new economic paradigms. Particularly in this condition of social-spatial fragmentation, informal settlements tend to lack any possibilities to connect functionally with the formal city. The late 20th century economic system created societal conditions that almost entirely disconnected the very rich and the very poor, except for in limited ways such as laundry or domestic services. Still, it is worth mentioning that both the context of urban development and the actors involved are constantly changing, as are its spatial expressions. This always allows a way out of the current situation. Looking into causality, processes on three urban scales can be distinguished: •

•

•

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Within the emerging metropolitan urban structure, cities interconnect in continually evolving ways, although only 0.05% of the people of the world are included in these global networks (Sassen, 2001).

On the level of the urban structure, there is a correspondingly selective development, which leads to extremely contrasting and separated functional networks, making the equilibrium of urban tissues completely neglected (Janches & Sepulveda, 2009).

Then, in the local expression, livelihoods create microsystems so the informal settlements are extremely fragmented spaces due to their survivalist environment and structure.

This defines a contemporary reality where the structure in the urban form is not responsive to the survivalist strategies present in society. What is more, the capacity of the state to react has been gradually reduced due to the current neoliberal model.

The current trend in institutional responses to informality consists of in situ slum upgrading and single interventions, which tend to be expressed as a stamp urbanism model and where an emphasis on housing needs and shelter do not consider working or social conditions (World Bank, UNHABITAT). These are approaches which do not consider the particular situation of the poor inhabitants nor the access to urban goods that meet their needs and demands.

Instead, the value that the urban structure provides as a basis for socio-economic opportunities tends to favour the highest and richest segment of the population.

These models do not support the people with the highest need and to consider those needs is critical. Unfortunately, there is no institutional platform or approach that urges for continuous empowerment of the most vulnerable groups of society.

Perspective for Socio-spatial Integration

In response to the absence of an answer to informality in the current development system across the Global South, it is necessary to look for a strategic approach where the opportunities for development have a common ground: the urban space. It should not aim for a revolution but a progressive transformation, where professionals use what is present and enhance it.

The expression and value of the local economy in the urban structure is inevitable, it possesses an enormous potential. Large investments and their effective integration at the local level

should also be considered, as large investments tend to be linked with the interests of large economic actors at the level of emerging regional systems). An assessment of the urban poor in terms of their particular demands needs to be considered; not as a burden but in view of their opportunities and potential, so within an integral development perspective. the urban form is not responsive to the survivalist strategies present in society

Firstly, this requires a coconstructed consensus. There is a need for a constant review of the demands and capacities of the diverse urban actors, leading to a common consensus that is part of a broader stakeholder arrangement that expresses and recognizes the current formal/informal dichotomy.

Secondly, this requires concrete but dynamic analytical criteria and an understanding of the particularities of each location: both of the urbanisation processes and the different scale levels where the diverse economies and realities are expressed.

If the planning professionals reflect upon their position as the creative class, they are in the unique position of being invited into the global(ised) and selective decision-making process. Through the perspective sketched above, urbanists can recognize both the values and particularities of informal settlements and (re)connect them to the urban structure by recognizing and valuing their spatial expressions. For this purpose, they need to urge the creation of a co-constructed decision-making platform. Here, with a continuous

approach, the key issue of the daily urban system of informal survival by the poor and the logistical system of the global economy can strategically meet and define common development synergies.

References Carrión Mena, F., 2010. Ciudad, memoria y proyecto. Quito: OLACCHI. Castells, M., 1983. The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clichevsky, N., 2000. Informalidad y segregaciónu Urbana en America Latina. Una aproximación. [pdf ] Naciones Unidas. See: repositorio.cepal.org Janches, F. and Sepulveda, D., 2009.

Multi scalar analysis as a tool for urban development consensus. IFOU, Shanghai Sassen, S., 2001. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Sassen, S., 2014. Expulsions - Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

An example project, the community reimagining of abandoned spaces in Villa Tranquila (Buenos Aires) see: www.bjc.com.ar © BJC Blinder Janches & Co and Max Rohm arqts.

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Urban informality in practice reflection on confronting [in]formality across the world This publication is a reader of the individual narratives told during the symposium on working with and/ or observing urban (in)formality. Per definition, informality is impossible to be fully recognised by formal systems, yet urban informality is used by people and confronted by professionals.

This leads to the question: what are the possibilities of working, as a professional, with informality?

Looking at all the practical examples together offers the chance to see if there are overarching patterns in this collected set of shared knowledge.

As we as editors did not experience the projects first hand, the physical and intellectual distance from the presented situations has to be kept in mind. Accordingly with the professional focus of the symposium, the aim of this concluding part of the publication is to discuss similarities between professional approaches and to generate some grounded assumptions for further working with urban informality.

This reflection sees urban informality as those spaces and processes in the city which society and government do not recognise and/or accept. This definition is based on Diego Sepulveda’s interpretation of Manuel Castells’ description of informality. The method of reflection is also indebted to Diego’s call to consider examples of urban informality in the particular circumstances of their context. See the summary of Diego Sepulveda’s presentation for more on both accounts. The basis of the reflection itself is a focus on two aspects within the diverse narratives: the degree of (in)formality of the project context and the activation of actors by design and planning professionals.

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Method of Reflection The symposium purposefully gathered a diverse range of cases. To deal with this richness in difference the reflection looks for a common basis: the actions of design and planning professionals to realise their projects. These actions are discussed within the contextual characteristics of each project, as this is necessarily reflected in the way professionals operate. This defines the logic behind the reflection, i.e. it starts with the project context and from there unravels the professional approach towards each particular case. A description of the situation and the project intentions forms the basis for an analysis of the relation between achieved result, professional actions and the activation of actors.

As all professional approaches confronted urban (in)formality in different ways, the main avenue of investigation is the relation between project and contextual degree of (in) formality. The latter is expressed through an ‘axis of (in)formality’, which indicates an increasing degree of informality towards the left. Due to the indefinable character of urban informality, it is problematic to accurately position different situations on this axis. Therefore, the examination of the individual cases focuses on the process of the project.

Since the reflection analysis looks at the professional approaches through their relation with the situational context and the involved actors, the informality axis is applied to both aspects; respectively, in horizontal (context) and vertical (actors) directions. The main aspect of investigation, the project context, is expressed by the horizontal axis. The (in)formality axis represents the varying degrees of (in)formality that a project

context can have. As a result of the (intended) impact of the professionals’ involvement, the context of the project is indicated to move left or right to show an increased or decreased degree of informality in the context. The vertical axis illustrates the different positions of the involved actors, as professionals tend to work simultaneously with actors who express themselves spatially in formal and informal domains. The activated stakeholders in the examined projects are therefore placed along the vertical axis considering their role and behaviour in the project. The differences between actors are further investigated by indicating the project protagonist in each case, i.e. the person or group who is the project’s leading initiator.

The analysis of project context and actors on their degree of informality gives an overview of similarities in professional approaches. This overview allows the actual reflection, which assembles some assumptions about spatial professionals’ actions in respect to working with different degree of urban (in)formality.

The reflection analysis of project context and actors according to their degree of informality gives an overview of similarities in professional approaches.

This overview allowsLEGEND for further reflection and the construction of grounded Protagonist assumptions about spatial professionals’ actions with respect to working Idea with different degrees of urban (in)formality.

Labour-Force

LEGEND

Materials

Protagonist

Funding

Idea

Planning & Design

Labour-Force

Laws, Regulations & Guidelines

Materials

Research

Funding Planning & Design

Having the idea formulated, the youngsters approached Straddle3 as design professionals with an enquiry to transform their vision into reality.

Straddle3 from their side developed a methodology to turn the project into a laboratory for cultural and urban experimentation and succeeded in convincing the city authorities to support the initiative. Two main provisions were supplied by the city government: (1) land with permission to build upon and (2) support in securing some financial resources.

Do it ‘Yourself’ Construction Manual is a project motivated by the fact that today, self-construction is still a major method through which a substantial part of the built environment is produced. With this in mind, Marco Ferrario along with the mHS CITY LAB team conducted an explorative

Formal

Design Professional

Context

?

Formal

Remarks

Protagonist: Local Skaters Start: Bottom-Up / Local Skaters connect with the Design Professionals to facilitate their idea(s) Follow-up: Collaborate with the Government Result: Established successful collaboration

Local Skaters

Informal

This established a workable framework for the project which was successfully carried out through a collaborative process, coordinated by the involved design professionals. This included the adaption of the initial programme proposed by local inhabitants, the collection of recycled materials,

securing a necessary budget, and the utilisation of alternative methods of construction, based on the combination of self-construction workshops with participants of varying degrees of experience, with interventions by professionals and experts.

study, working with low-income dwellers and masons practicing selfconstruction across India, particularly in the urban context of New Delhi.

is especially designed for masons and homeowners engaged in selfconstruction. Its goal aligns with the ambition of mHS CITY LAB to enable the creation of socially inclusive cities by delivering architectural and engineering knowledge to the urban poor.

Based on this exploration, the research team managed to create an innovative, illustrative and easy-to-understand technical construction manual. It

Do It ‘Yourself’ Construction Manual

Design Professional

Informal

Municipal Government

EMPOWER LOCALS

Role

Construction Professionals

Informal

Formal

Role

Sk8 + U

SK8 + U is a project which originated as an initiative of a group of children and teenagers between the ages of 11 and 17. Their proposal comprised of the construction and maintenance of a skate park in Arbúcies (Girona, Spain).

Although they had a good idea about how this skate park should look from the beginning, the enthusiasts did not know how to process the project formally.

Context

Formal

FORMALISE PROCESS

The intention of the manual is also to establish a collaborative link between low-income communities and construction professionals via formal (authorised) support. Although the manual has clear potential to disseminate safe and good construction practices, only when the manual is distributed via a sufficient number of informative channels throughout India, can it can be examined whether an effective connection has been established.

Remarks Local Inhabitants

Informal

Protagonist: Design Professional Start: Top-Down / Introduction of construction manual to be used for assisting bottom-up constructions Follow-up: Apply the manual to the locals Result: Intentition to establish a link between Construction Professionals and Local Inhabitants

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So what does the municipal vision mean for people living in slums? Rohan mapped Back Bay Slum’s urban fabric and its functions, and showed the architectural diversity present within. Although densely built, the buildings are seldom higher than three floors. This enables Back Bay’s population to use (adjacent) street spaces for production, commerce and living. In contrast, the new apartment

Piazza of Porto Fluviale is a project which was undertaken as part of the summer lab of the Development Planning Unit of the Bartlett UCL. It brought together university students and squatters of a former army barracks in Rome to collaboratively work on the possibilities for the transformation of the complex’s courtyard into a public

Local Professionals

DP

Context

Informal INFORMALITY CONTINUATION

MANIFEST SPACE

DP(s)

Local Inhabitants

Informal blocks are inflexibly mono-functional, disconnected from the street and hardly allow any light or air in.

By mapping and identifying typologies Rohan characterises the meaning of

square. The idea was originally initiated by the local community’s leaders.

The task of the project was to open the barracks’ courtyard to the general public but at the same time to avoid it being transformed into a conventional square with many commercial activities.

In order to deal with this complicated assignment, the design students

Piazza of Porto Fluviale

Formal Remarks

Community Leaders

Sqautters

Informal 55

Context

Formal Remarks

DPU

Informal

back bay slum

REDev

Role

Formal

Formal Mumbai Government

Role

A majority of the population of Mumbai live in slums, although slums only occupy 9% of the urban land. The municipal urban vision reacts to this reality by aspiring to the ideal of an international global city. Real estate companies are free to redevelop 2/3 of a slum area according to this ideal, if they create replacement housing on the remaining 1/3. In reality, this means further densification of areas already heavily used by people.

*DPU - Development Planning Unit *DP(s) - Design Professional(s) Protagonist: Community Leaders Start: Bottom-Up / Community Leaders connect with Local Professionals & DPU Follow-up: DPU Students (DPs) work with the squatters Result: The squatted settlement opens to the public realm

*REDev - Real Estate Developer *DP - Design Professional Protagonist: Local Inhabitants Start: Bottom-Up / reaction to a rigid (one-sided / monetary-based) top-town intention to produce housing through the construction of new high-rise buildings Follow-up: Formalisation failure Result: Continuation of the informal sprawl

the built form of slums. This opens up the possibility to compare the situation in Mumbai with similar cases around the world, and allows a better understanding by professionals of the impact of their work on slums.

defined as a main challenge the need to understand the community (not only its outspoken leaders) and its daily life. They did this through a variety of research explorations. On the basis of their findings the students elaborated different types of possible interventions on which the local community was invited to reflect. Successively, the proposals were collaboratively shaped and actual interventions were directly implemented or initiated by the squatters.

Essentially, the transformed piazza made it possible to invert the processes that had formed the occupation - emptiness and obsolescence - through an act of opening and re-programming. The way in which the design professional(s) interacted with the context reveals an intriguing notion i.e. despite the piazza being designed to promote inclusiveness and connection to the wider city, the introspective informal character of the ‘Occupation City’ was strongly respected and was used as a driving force of the project development.

International Aid

Context

Informal

Remarks

Local Inhabitants

Informal

The Estadio do Povo project has the ambitious objective to address a significant problem within favelas in São Paolo (Brazil). In most cases, the land on which these informal settlements are built is owned by the government or another party. This leads to a complicated situation wherein many city inhabitants have established their lives on land from which they can

be legally evicted at any moment. The serious threats that this status entails were revealed during the large-scale constructions (incl. stadiums) before the World Cup in 2014, when the expulsion of many citizens from their homes provoked tremendous riots.

The Makoko Floating School is an operating and successful prototype showcasing how it is possible to contribute to quality of life even in the

‘Estadio do Povo’ is a concept that intends to help slum inhabitants, land owners

Role

Estadio do Povo

DP(s)

?

Informal LEGALISE SPACE

Context

Formal Remarks

Local Inhabitants

Informal

Formal

MEET COMMUNAL NEEDS

concept was created through a series of model-based consultations. The main driving force was combining global and local technology to tackle sea level-rise.

Formal

makoko Floating school

Design Professional(s)

The school project was responding to a local demand, not trying to give an answer to poverty but rather to provide amenities that can serve the population regardless. The project started as self-initiated but eventually gained funding from the United Nations, which turned out to be the trigger for plenty of further partners. The final

Government & Land Owners

Role

Formal

In Africa, rapid urban growth combined with climate change effects creates an increased challenge for both formal, but especially informal settlements in many delta areas. The Makoko Floating School (a response to missing social infrastructure) shows how large scale problems such as sea level rise and lack of social infrastructure can be tackled through local resources, for instance a timber structure floating on replaceable recycled oil barrels. Such a self-sustaining (solar energy, rain water collection) configuration can accommodate different functions in an area of resource scarcity.

*DP(s) - Design Professional(s) Protagonist: Design Professional(s) Start: Neutral / Organizational idea to overcome the legal tensions between Local Inhabitants and Land Owners Follow-up: Bring Local Inhabitants, Government & Land Owners to work together based on individual benefits Result: Intention to establish a collaborative development

Protagonist: Design Professioanl(s) Start: Bottom-Up (Design Professionals & Locals) Follow-up: Bring International Aid Result: Empowered locals, meet communal needs, the district gets on the map

toughest socio-economic conditions, by adapting an object to its socio-spatial context and by developing it with the local community. The main question, however, is whether ‘we can accurately recognise the key opportunities and threats of our communities and cities on both a smaller and a larger scale’.

and local government work together to transform existing slums - using football fields as a catalyst - into sustainable neighbourhoods that structurally results in a win-win-win situation for all stakeholders involved. The interests of each of them are treated with respect and taken into account in a completely transparent and open participation process. The idea is to intensify the area around the football field by initiating a step-by-step, self-paced development process that will provide more space for schools, clinics, places to work and live.

Within this concept, the local inhabitants can contribute by constructing their own homes while the formal authorities (e.g. the government and real estate agencies) can lead the project development by introducing larger construction projects that deliver public and commercial services. In short, the project envisions an environment where the local passion for football and quality of life go hand-in-hand.

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The initial objective was to address affected population’s immediate needs by providing flood resistant low cost housing. Furthermore, the transitional shelters aimed to ease the

The shelter camps’ population in Port au Prince peaked seven months after the earthquake so the international community decided to build a new compound outside the city limits on government land. As a testament to the general housing shortage and the high level of services provided by the camps in Canaan, people settled

Formal

International Aid

as Technical Advisor

Context

Informal BUILDING SHELTER

Informal

on government owned land around the camps. This shows that formal (emergency) relief efforts can prompt massive unplanned urbanisation.

the Haitian government. Nevertheless, the locals managed to establish numerous schools, churches, markets and other amenities on their own, in sharp contrast with the crippling costs of formal housing provision.

Except for the camp, the whole development of Canaan did not receive any support from international agencies or

Formal INFORMAL SPRAWL

Design Professional

Remarks

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Remarks Protagonist: Affected Inhabitants Start: Urgent necessity for the Affected Inhabitants to rebuild their lives Follow-up: Bring the instituational support of Government(s) and International Aid incl. Design Professionals Result: Intention to establish a collaborative (re-building) development process

tools for building the transitional shelters were utilised. This gave the affected population the possibility to make a land plan which dealt with internal social tensions in order to establish safe and stable living arrangements within the transitional shelters.

Context

Local Inhabitants

Informal

Formal

process for people to rebuild their lives. In this project the design and planning professionals bridged the gap between the formal top-down actors and the affected locals by advocating for the latter’s needs in order to reduce the social and economic impact of the disaster on communities. In this particular case, community planning

International Aid

Protagonist: Local Inhabitants Start: Bottom-Up / reaction to a top-down development of the Government and International Aid Follow-up: Rapid uncontrolled sprawl Result: A new mass slum

?

Affected Inhabitans

Government

Informal

Flood emergency Response

Design Professional

Role

canaan sprawl

Formal Government

Role

During late 2012, heavy monsoon rains fell across Pakistan causing widespread loss of life and destroying livelihoods and infrastructure - an estimated 2.8 to 5 million people were affected.

Approximately 60% of the affected population were located in Sindh Province. Due to the physical condition of their homes, many families were forced to leave their communities and seek refuge on roadsides, in neighbouring villages or in informal settlements. In order to help disaster affected families, Cordaid and Catholic Relief Services provided transitional shelters. The project was designed to target households whose homes were either totally destroyed or severely damaged and uninhabitable.

The case of Canaan raises some crucial doubts on how to intervene within a post-disaster context. Among others, it opens conversations on equity.

What is better to spend; $30,000 on a perfect house or $200 for eightweeks of practical masonry training?

What seems to be valid is that the process should (a) be participatory, (b) have a multiplier effect (affecting more than just housing) and (c) be sustainable. It is crucial to include the government in order to prepare for the time when external support will no longer be available. Furthermore, the professionals’ role seems to be more about focusing on systems, bringing relevant actors together in a coordinated effort rather than designing.

Reflection Analysis The presented cases can be grouped in two, based on the impact that the project has on the context, taking it in either an informal or formal direction.

The methods of the first group are linked to the possibilities of informality: self-built urban growth in Haiti, the versatility of use of space in a Mumbai slum and the Arbúcies skaters’ resolve to have a place for skating. In these cases the design professionals make efforts to clarify the value, include or even build upon informal use of space. The approaches of the second group range from community process facilitation (Pakistan and Brazil) through the social initiatives of Porto Fluviale’s squatters (Rome) to practice-based technical assistance (New Delhi) and active adaptation of informal building technology (Lagos). In these projects, the informality of the context requires the support of the formal processes.

Thus, in these situations the aim of the design or planning professional is to activate the benefits of formal systems for (excluded) people. In general, it can be said that regardless of the approach used by professionals, a project can influence the context both towards a formal and an informal direction.

Except for the relation between design professionals and the position of the process on the ‘axis of (in)formality’, the description of the presented cases also reveals the relation between the design professional(s) and the project context itself. First, there are the clearly informal contexts such as Mumbai’s Back Bay Slum, the slums of New Delhi, Paraisópolis in Sao Paulo and the Makoko Floating Village in Lagos. Second, there is the skate park in Arbúcies which has a very formal context, as the development was commissioned and recognised by the local government. This leaves the cases of community shelters in Pakistan, Porto Fluviale in Rome and Canaan in Haiti as special contextual situations. In the case of post-flood shelter building in Pakistan, the community process was vital in bringing social tensions to the surface, tensions whose existence was difficult for the formal systems to

recognise on their own. Porto Fluviale is an informal enclave, which tries to find a connection with the daily affairs of the formal city, but on its own terms. The Canaan Region is defined by a formal aid camp, which turns out to be a growing nucleus for massive informal urban sprawl. In the end, the area becomes a formal enclave in a self-constructed informal district.

Conclusion The identification of an informal enclave in a formal context, and one the other way around, illustrates that formality and informality are inter-reliant. Then, it is logical to question if the link between the formal and informal has consequences for the discussion of project approaches and processes? To answer this question, it seems to be helpful to look at the role of the professionals involved in the process.

Traditionally, they tend to be agents of the formal system and as such, all their interaction with informality might be considered as a formalisation of process and context. However, the discussed cases demonstrate that planners and architects can act as a bridge towards informal processes, without eradicating the processes or making them lose their positive qualities. The act of bridging means that the professionals enter in to a relationship with expressions of urban informality. This relationship varies between the cautious appreciation for Canaan’s self-organised development, the pragmatic view on Makoko’s informal building strategies and the major reliance of Arbúcies’ Sk8 + U skate park on informal demand and building support. Regardless of the type of relationship that professionals establish with urban informality, all of the presented projects depend on the (in)formal position of the various actors to enable the development process. It seems that each situation is defined by a certain balance between the different actors and their positions. In response, professionals gain relevance by making new connections between actors and often also change roles of actors, either as project protagonist and/or as process facilitators. In this way, the professional positioning can often facilitate or even

enable a project by altering the balance between formality and informality.

In conclusion, this publication generates two main assumptions. The first is that appreciating urban informality and working with informal agents in the (re)development process, can enable a professional to find alternative paths for improving a situation, particularly paths which tend to be inaccessible through traditional formal systems. So by recognising a particular mix of (in) formality in a context, a professional can adjust their approaches to fittingly encourage and/or structure informal processes. Then it can be stated that the movement on the horizontal ‘axis of (in) formality’ represents the professionals’ observations of the situation and/or intentions to facilitate the provision of higher quality of life by making room for informal initiatives or introducing formalising tools. This leads to the second assumption: In order to enhance urban liveability, professionals tend to strive towards informalisation in relatively formal contexts, whereas in clearly informal contexts they inculcate a certain degree of formalisation. This notion provides an intriguing further direction for research based on the collected set of knowledge.

The presented cases and their analysis demonstrate that (in)formality can certainly be confronted in various contexts and in cooperation with numerous actors. Again, looking at the narratives, the necessity for this confrontation seems to be motivated by a desire and/or urgency to formulate new answers to the essential question: how can professionals work together with people’s capacities to improve local living conditions? In a century where we are simultaneously facing an increasing scarcity of available resources and an unprecedented growth of the global urban population within the context of climate change, it is urgent to better understand and thereby discover further possibilities to enhance the local quality of life. Therefore, as design and planning professionals we need to confront (in) formality and find alternative ways to enable urban (re)developments!

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for the recordings of the event visit our channel Impressions from the symposium Š Confronting [In]formality & Luis Montenegro

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