Giovanna Astolfo

In the face of multiple, complex and contradictory urban phenomena, and the impossibility to define one kind of city/one urbanism, the present short contribution aims to reposition informal urbanism as one of the many existing legitimate processes that are contributing to city building. Over 1 billion people now live in 'slums' or 'informal settlements', a number expected to double by 2030, making what can be labelled 'informal urbanism' globally into the dominant expression of urban form. In our view, architects should formulate appropriate answers in the form of a responsive architecture, an architecture of engagement that has the capacity to reconsider and recalibrate design process within this contemporary urban condition, which could be called 'un-designed' or even 'un-designable'.

We witness today the multiplication, dispersion and diversification of urban borders and a vast repertoire of de/re-bordering processes. Simultaneous fortification and dismantling of borders, proliferation and virtualisation of others are some of the processes that characterise the current geography of division and are attributed in turn to globalization, neo-liberalism, welfare crisis, migratory flows, post-colonialism and the post-war on terror. International multidisciplinary community of scholars involved in the so called border studies has highlighted their changing nature in terms of location, function, texture and agency. Borders are considered today ubiquitous, performative and relational. Drawing from recent studies on (state-nation) borders, and at the same time challenging too settled conceptualisations, this essay aims to contribute to the current debate by introducing a new lens to look at urban borders: that of dispositive. New not in term of time of course as its genealogy can go back to Foucault who employs the term -  dispositif - analysing contemporary forms of power and governamentality, whose definition has been – more recently  being interpreted by Giorgio Agamben. What is a dispositif? What is the difference between Foucault's dispositif and Agamben's dispositio? What happen to urban borders when we look at them through such a lens? Is it possible to compare different border contexts and launch them in a global conversation? The paper attempts to answer such questions to sustain the work developed within the BUDD studio.

The role of architectural knowledge visa -vis urban challenges. Nurturing the dialogue between educators and future practitioners-… With more than forty-five participants, the workshop and training " People-centred design " held at Yangon Technological University (YTU) between 13 th-15 th February brought together students, community architects and academics from Yangon, Mandalay, Bangkok and London, consolidating strategic partnerships and adding new layers of engagement between DPU, YTU, Silpakorn University and the Asian Coalition Housing Rights – Community Architects Network. Stemming from a series of discussions emerged last year around the nature and the possibility of an equal partnership, the aim of the three-day multi-target initiative was to support YTU in building the capacity of young professionals and staff to understand and engage with current urban challenges, in particular low income communities' housing problems, while sharing theoretical and methodological insights in light of the three-year engagement with the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at DPU. People-centred design workshop – final group picture The initiative aimed at fostering the reflexivity of students and staff towards the identification of knowledge needs and pedagogical challenges. The workshop exposed the participants to low income communities, their technologies, practices and agency. While experiencing the city – the 'informal' self-built city – students were tasked to observe and document material and immaterial aspects; as well as reflect upon their positionality. Learning how to critically observe, listen, reflect and narrate ultimately led to re-questioning the role of the practitioner/architect, its attitudes and skills. The training helped participants to reflect on how the new urban question is calling upon the recalibration of the architectural practice, and how this reflects in architectural education in terms of skills/knowledge/attitudes across different pedagogies. Urban challenges such as rapid informal urbanisation and the reproduction of spatial injustice have to be investigated and tackled by embracing a new and radical mode of practice. If challenges are utterly complex, is the old-fashion market-driven technical-based knowledge sufficient? Architecture and urban design should be seen as a series of processes that engage with political and social realities. What type of spatio-political knowledge is required within a studio then? The failure of modern architecture and urbanism in addressing people's needs has shown the limits of thinking the built environment as an authoritative and autonomous discipline. Anyone can build. Anyone can be an architect. Whose creativity counts then? This calls upon re-questioning

The contemporary urbanisation of Amazonas is a geopolitical creation, and a recent phenomenon. For long time native communities have been living in sparse, often isolated, settlements. Adapting to the mutable conditions of the river, they created a system based on mobility, economic diversification and ‘multi-sited territorial appropriation’ (Peluso and Alexiadis, 2016). Current state-led relocation plans aimed at reducing flooding risk in informal areas are threatening the traditional spatial organisation of Amazon’s communities, negatively impacting the livelihoods system.

In the backdrop of the so labelled refugee crisis in Europe, recently the Jungle in Calais has been partially demolished leaving many displaced. Following the evictions in January and February, that attracted massive media attention and implied multiple forms of resistance the Jungle dwellers and the organisations/volunteers/activists operating in the camp have momentarily withdrawn from taking further action while awaiting for the forthcoming decision from the prefecture: will the northern part of the camp be evicted following the destiny of the southern and western part?

In a famous picture of Phnom Penh in 1979, two children stand in the foreground looking steadily at the camera, while behind them the city, once the 'pearl of Asia', is nothing but a desolated and spectral bunch of abandoned buildings. The urban history of the capital of Cambodia is demarcated by iterative evacuations and expulsions of its population.

The BUDD Fieldtrip engages with urban challenges in informal settlements in Cambodia by experimenting a different mode of design research. A mode that is embedded, relational, and therefore also active, reflexive and certainly collective. Embedded refers to the learning and knowledge production which is seen as a process integrally related to the practices and lived experiences of people in specific contexts. The work on the field starts from the understanding of the unique needs, abilities, aspirations, and forms of resistance of urban dwellers. Participants focus on how people shape and reshape space and how their specific forms of life shape and produce the everyday. As it is an immersion in life, the research is also necessarily relational ‐ recognising that knowledge production and learning are defined within relative positions, and in conversation with existing discourses, social and material processes. Active refers to a practice that is engaged with material conditions and social and political complexities, while reflexive acknowledges the contexts in which the research is produced and challenges hegemonic outcomes. It is precisely in the apparent contradiction between active and reflexive that an ongoing balancing act between withdrawing from taking action and engagement takes place. Withdrawing from taking action implies a humble, flexible and reflexive approach against the risk, inherent to design, to get trapped into solution‐ delivery, and prescriptive and exogenous plans. What follows is a visual account of the process to which BUDD students are exposed to and contribute to shape during and after the fieldtrip. It makes sense of the word collective, as the essential attribute of the above mentioned design research. The work developed during the fieldtrip is two times collective: in recognising that space is collectively produced by multiple subjectivities and therefore in pursuing the production of knowledge as a common endeavour. Embedded in the present text there are some students' notes developed during the fieldtrip and posted in the BUDD blog (www.tumblr.com/blog/buddesign1415) as part of the reflexive praxis of the course.

The journal Comparative Migration Studies has published a series of articles engaging with critiques of migrant integration. This piece wishes to contribute to such discussion, reflecting back on early critiques of integration as a concept and as a process, and reviewing more recent publications. The aim is to widen the reflection on decolonising the field by including urban postcolonial and southern instances, as well as insights from two funded projects.

The enhancement of dismissed military barracks is a big problem in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. The changed geo-politic conditions caused the abandonment of the numerous structures and the transfer of their property from State to Region and then to local municipalities. The regional government has not defined guidelines for their re-use and the work for the Patussi barracks, done to produce a re-use program, became a case study to explore possible strategies of intervention and the right method to adopt in order to give technical support to local governments. The paper describes the analysis, the scenarios, the proposal produced for the case-study.

Bernardo Secchi (1934-2014) was an Italian urban theorist, renowned urban planner, Emeritus Professor of Urban Planning at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura (IUAV) of Venice and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milano. For almost half a century, he was a central figure within European and Italian interdisciplinary debates on the contemporary city and urban design. His research was located within the wider discourses of space and societal transformations, influenced by post-’68 French theorists and nourished specifically by a wide investigation of European urban territories. In his practice, he developed plans and visions for small and large cities in Italy and Europe, including Milano, Jesi, Brescia, Pesaro, Siena, Ascoli Piceno, Bergamo, Prato, Pescara, Lecce, Madrid, Antwerp[1], Bruxelles and Moscow. In 2008 he was amongst the ten architects selected to develop a vision for Grand Paris[2]; his idea of ‘ville poreuse’ focused on the improvement of ...

The enhancement of dismissed military barracks is a big problem in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. The changed geo-politic conditions caused the abandonment of the numerous structures and the transfer of their property from State to Region and then to local municipalities. The regional government has not defined guidelines for their re-use and the work for the Patussi barracks, done to produce a re-use program, became a case study to explore possible strategies of intervention and the right method to adopt in order to give technical support to local governments. The paper describes the analysis, the scenarios, the proposal produced for the case-study.

Hospitality has become a dominant notion in relation to asylum and immigration. Not only is it often used in public and state discourses, it is also prevalent in social analysis, in its ambivalent relationship with hostility and the control and management of population. Grounded in the Derridean suggestion of hospitality as “giving place” (2000: 25), we offer a reflection on hospitality centered around the notion of inhabitation. Framing hospitality as inhabitation helps to move away from problematic asymmetrical and colonial approaches to migration toward acknowledging the multiplicity of transformative experiences embedded in the city. It also enhances a more nuanced understanding of the complex entanglements of humanitarian dilemmas, refugees’ struggle for recognition and their desire for “opacity.” This article draws on five years of teaching-based engagement with the reality of refugees and asylum seekers hosted in the Sistema di Protezione Richiedenti Asilo e Rifugiati in Bres...