Informal Urbanism

Stub note: created at the Becoming Places ingest; requires fuller treatment as further informal-settlement sources are ingested.

Definition

Informal urbanism names the global production of intensely local places outside the formal control of the state — the settlements the policy vocabulary calls "squatter," "slum" or "informal," each a term of lack ("a squatter lacks land tenure; a slum lacks space, durability, water or sanitation; and informal implies a lack of control over planning, design and construction," Dovey & Raharjo 2010, p. 79). Dovey's redefinition: informal settlements "can be defined as urban assemblages that operate outside the formal control of the state" (p. 80), "best defined as irregular rather than illegal since the tenure is generally in dispute rather than clear" (p. 80). The scale claim: "Over one billion people now live in 'squatter', 'slum' or 'informal' housing settlements globally; this population is expected to double by 2030, making it the major form of urban design and development globally" (p. 79).

The concept's core findings, from the Yogyakarta kampung study (Sidomulyo/Kricak) — the first detailed morphological mapping of a settlement usually treated as a policy problem, not a place: (1) the settlements are planned, by their inhabitants — "life in the slum is based on the planning and strategic action of the slum-dwellers themselves" (Evers & Korff quoted, p. 80); "Each house that is built contributes to the overall plan without any formal systems of control in place" (p. 87); (2) morphology as tenure strategy — "In the absence of secure land tenure residents pursue symbols of permanence and security through house form and materials – the quest for secure tenure is transferred from the legal field to that of urban semiotics. The heavier the material the greater the image of permanence" (p. 93); (3) the smooth/striated mixture — "everywhere striated but profoundly smooth; another [way of saying it] is that it has an excess of smoothness when it comes to land tenure" (p. 96); (4) the formalization paradox — "Such instant formalization may be a greater current threat to informal settlements than forced eviction" (p. 83), since market-based titling is "a form of coercive eviction with the unintended effect of stimulating new informal settlements elsewhere" (p. 83); (5) visibility as a double-edged asset — the state targets visible settlements for eviction, yet Gondolyu's painted houses "turned visibility from a problem into an asset" and made it "one of the most secure of squatter settlements in Yogyakarta" (p. 99).

Key Thinkers

• Kim Dovey (with Wiryono Raharjo) — the concept's morphological theorist in this wiki: the Yogyakarta mapping; the tenure-as-semiotics thesis; the de Soto critique; the prospect "that they develop through… informal processes… into healthy, well-serviced, well-connected, if relatively informal neighbourhoods" (p. 100) — later systematized in the Atlas of Informal Settlement (2023).
• Hernando de Soto (not yet paged — see log) — the antagonist position: informal property as "dead capital" to be formalized into individual titles — the argument Dovey audits and rejects as coercive displacement.
• Ananya Roy (not yet paged — see log) — the representation critique: the "aestheticization of poverty" as "an ideology of space" — engaged and qualified by Dovey (see aestheticization-of-poverty).
• John F. C. Turner (not yet paged — see log) — the upgrading tradition (Housing by People) in the response spectrum from neglect to demolition/eviction (p. 81).

Related Concepts

• aestheticization-of-poverty — the representation trap: the settlement as "the symbolic resource for aesthetic production" (p. 97) versus Gondolyu's strategic self-aestheticization.
• assemblage — the ontological frame: "extraordinarily complex socio-physical assemblages… a rhizomatic order of accretion rather than hierarchical control" (p. 85).
• smooth-and-striated-space — the spatial diagnosis: "it is everywhere striated but profoundly smooth" (p. 96); formalization as striation.
• deterritorialisation — the tenure axis: "Any attempt to formalize and legalize territories can lead to deterritorialization and reterritorialization as government land" (p. 95).
• social-capital — the settlement's wealth: "Informal settlements generally have high levels of social capital due in part to the solidarity of poverty" (p. 84); "The public spaces are materially poor but socially rich" (p. 96).
• loose-parts — the everyday material register: stored construction materials "banked" in public space pending the next build (p. 93).
• gentrification — the displacement mechanism: coercive displacement as "a variation of gentrification" (p. 82).
• terrain-vague — the interstitial ground informality colonizes: the Bina Karya derelict land as "smooth space or terrain vague" behind an incarcerating wall (p. 100).
• everyday-life — the practice register: domestic life spilling into public space; the city "of infiltration" and "quiet encroachment" (Alsayyad, p. 80).

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the concept's founding source (Ch. 6, pp. 79–102): the definitions and UN scale claim; the three process models and territorial types (pp. 80–81); the tenure/eviction/displacement analysis and the de Soto critique (pp. 81–83); the visibility dilemma (pp. 83–84); the Sidomulyo/Kricak morphology (footprints, entrances, densities of 60–260 households/hectare, materials hierarchy, loose parts, the river — pp. 86–96); the tenure-ambiguity functionality thesis (p. 96); the Roy engagement and Gondolyu (pp. 97–99); the prospects (pp. 100–101).
• Buildings Without Architects (May & Reid 2010) — the vernacular precedent: non-pedigreed architecture as the design tradition the informal city continues.

Open Questions

• Dovey's wager is that the billion-strong informal city "will become prosperous through the same informal processes by which they were invented" (p. 100). What would a design discipline look like that works with those processes rather than replacing them — and does the wiki's adaptive-reuse and spatial-agency cluster contain its instruments?
• The tenure paradox cuts both ways: ambiguity protects residents and landlords and the state. Is there a tenure form that preserves the settlement's productivity without the ambiguity's extraction ("officers… extract a profit for their tacit agreement to do nothing," p. 95)?
• The chapter's gender finding is brief but pointed ("Leadership remains a male preserve; women work behind the scenes") and the girls' reduced visibility is noted. How does informal urbanism look through the gendered-space lens — the Kampung's porches, laundry networks and river as female infrastructure?