Informal morphology: investigating the internal structure of spontaneous settlements
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Date
2016
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AESOP
Abstract
The urban outburst of the twenty-first century is mostly happening in the Global South, and yet it is still regarded according to western planning theories (Roy, 2005) with a truly design orientated view of urbanization. This reveals the inability of the urban disciplines to be adaptive and responsive to the alterations of the cultural and economic context of cities over time. As a matter of fact the emergence of a globalized, large-scale system of city production in the neoliberal economy, which Alexander has shortly named “System B” (Alexander, Neis, & Moore-Alexander, 2012), accompanied by the expanding power of administrative bureaucracies on urban life, has spread patterns of alienation and impersonality among urban residents (Weber, Martindale, & Neuwirth, 1958); and encouraged socio-spatial fragmentation and divides in cities (Watson, 2009).
Under this perspective, unplanned or otherwise informal developments around the world, emerged out of forms of less-planned development if not sheer improvisation, have often proven to result in positively underpinning vitality and prosperity in urban change at many levels (Landry & Bianchini, 1995). Current studies on informal settlements explore aspects of their social, economic and physical character, such as housing and community, land tenure, policies of occupation and acquisition, location, size, boundaries and quality of construction materials; however ‘there has been little effort to develop a model of the internal structure based on the Latin American urban experience’ (Griffin & Ford, 1980).
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Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the south
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