Informal City

Book Download: https://publications.iadb.org/publications/english/document/211203_bid_disenoecologico_Ingles_LIBRO_DIGITAL_en_baja_pdf.pdf

According to the United Nations, approximately three out of every five cities in the world with at least 500,000 inhabitants are at high risk of a natural disaster. If no better work is done on mitigating and adapting cities, in the future they will be more populated, hotter, and less biodiverse. The environmental and climate crisis accentuates inequality, given that the most socially and economically vulnerable groups are more exposed to natural risks and generally have less access to infrastructure and ecosystem services. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the most vulnerable populations often reside in informal, precarious or popular settlements. In recent years, important advances have been made in rethinking these settlements, developing intervention strategies to improve the quality of life, safety and opportunities for their inhabitants. Today it is essential to effectively incorporate climate criteria into urban interventions. Ecological Design measures the impacts of the climate crisis in the most vulnerable areas of our cities - the informal city - while reflecting on how to protect those who are most strongly affected by the consequences of climate change. In addition, it provides new lenses to analyze risk and design nature-based solutions in precarious, informal, popular, vulnerable urban settlements, to make the informal city a more resilient city in the face of the climatic pressures that will come in the coming decades.

Illegal parcellings are a unique case within urban sprawl processes. Th ey are characte-rised by originating against urban planning and by a lack of basic infrastructure. It is a phenomenon that has not been studied in much depth, and its typological aspect has been the least discussed element. Th is article analyses the illegal parcellings in the municipality of Cordoba, Spain, where their area has reached 4,606.88 hectares-this, compared to the slightly more than 2,800 hectares occupied by the consolidated city, gives an idea of the signifi cance of the process. Th e main objective is therefore to present its territorial scope and, secondly, to propose a methodology for its typological classifi cation. Ilegalna stanovanjska gradnja je edinstven primer znotraj procesov nenačrtnega širjenja urbanih območij. Zanjo sta značilna nastanek v nasprotju z urbanističnim načrtovanjem in pomanjkanje osnovne infrastrukture. Ta pojav doslej ni bil proučen zelo poglobljeno, njegov tipološki vidik pa je bil tisti element, o katerem se je naj-manj razpravljalo. Prispevek analizira ilegalno stanovanjsko gradnjo v občini Cór-doba, Španija, kjer je površina tovrstne gradnje dosegla 4606,88 ha. Če to primer-jamo z 2800 ha, kolikor jih zaseda konsolidirano mesto, dobimo predstavo o pomenu tega procesa. Glavni namen prispevka je potemtakem predstaviti teritorialni obseg obravnavanega pojava ter predlagati metodologijo za njegovo tipološko klasifikacijo. Raziskave kažejo, da je to vprašanje pomembno za pravilno oceno pojava in da mora biti ustrezno naslovljeno s strani relevantnih administracij.

Weaving an Open World / Experiencing Urban Utopias Theoretical Foundations for Urban Experiments in the Spirit of Tim Ingold

Referring to Reinhart Koselleck and his arguments, this article discus- ses the changing nature of utopias in terms of their categories and meanings, while using dialectics to explain their phenomenon and historical attempts to implement them, as well as the rise-and-fall process of utopias and dystopias. Following in the footsteps of Tim Ingold, the author asks whether ‘dwelling perspective’ (in contrast to ‘building perspective’) and radical rejection of the Western hylomorphic mo- del may be useful to understand two contemporary, and yet contradictory urban trends: self-organising (informal) cities and spectacle cities. Can the former be re- cognised as utopias in the context of the latter losing their urban values (dystopia)?
Key words: utopia/dystopia, Tim Ingold, informal cities, spectacle cities, urban space

Space, a concept so widely studied by physics and philosophy, is the foundation upon which operates the actions taken by architecture. Beyond the difficulties of developing any conceptual approach in this regard, and in order to access its understanding, is identified in space a very specific dimension: the habitable dimension. This is how the space stops being extended and indeterminate to become a specific place where the concept of identity plays an essential role in this process of determination.

Talking about the notion of place the exploration centers itself in a conceptual construction from the review of two fundamental situations: the original construction of the place and the successive construction of place. Multiple spatial dimensions emerge in this process resulting expressions as field, region, territory and landscape (understood as scene).

The exploration leads the theoretical assumptions to a projective plane that questions about the elementary operations that shape the place. Then, from the manipulation of specific spatial devices, and following patterns of repetition and difference, the exploration goes slowly recreating milestone situations, fabric, edge, center and in-between, also a various soil categorizations scheduled. These initial operations are revealing other elementary operations that ultimately constitute a projective catalog.

At the end the exploration highlights the notion of place, proposing three specific approaches: the place as content living space, the place as relational living space and place as memorial space.

Exhibition at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shenzhen, China, December 4, 2015 – March 1, 2016.

Collective City, explores spatial, organizational, and material ingenuities born out of the forces and pressures of the contemporary city, answered by the architectural amateur, and used by everyone.

The Biennale is curated by Aaron Betsky, Alfredo Brillembourg, Doreen Heng Liu, and Hubert Klumpner and their official statement reads: “Featuring over 75 exhibitors from six continents, 2015 UABB will be set around the central theme ‘Re-Living The City,’ enabling the participants to explore how the reimagining, repurposing, and remaking of our existing urban spaces and architecture can improve the way people experience cities. It will open in Shenzhen on 4 December 2015, and will take over the former Dacheng Flour Factory in Shekou, Shenzhen, one of China’s first Special Economic Zones, while the Xipu New Residence in Longgang District will act as an affiliated venue.”

Special thanks to: Aaron Betsky, Hubert Klumpner, Si Liu, and the University of Shenzhen.

With the generous support by: Frank O. Carlson & Co. and the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Exhibition Catalog: Re-living the City: UABB 2015 Catalogue

Press:
“Collective City Exhibition Opens at Shenzhen’s Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture,” Designboom, by Nick Brink, January 2016.
“Collective City,” UrbanNext, by Marta Ariza, February 2016.
“Review: Shenzhen Urbanism\Architecture Bi-City Biennale 2015,” DesignCurial via Blueprint, by Herbert Wright, February 2016.
“2015UABB策展人导览短片,” Shenzhen Biennale on Urbanism, video interview with Hubert Klumpner, January 2016 (Collective City is “both an introduction and end point to the exhibition.” minutes: 13.35-15.15).

Among the broad array of land uses in North American cities, community garden is one of the least defined, both spatially and institutionally. Community gardens exist in a wide variety of physical settings and institutional contexts. They are found in vacant lots, utility corridors, and other residual spaces in a city, as well as formalized parks and other urban open spaces. Occupying undeveloped sites, they are often considered as impermanent use, eventually to be replaced by a higher-value development. Even in formalized contexts, community gardens appear often as a result of temporary agreement between different government agencies and jurisdictions, subject to political and institutional change. As a result of such temporary nature, community gardens frequently consist of makeshift structures and fences, and lack permanence and formalized characters. The organic aspects of plant growth and seasonal changes in the gardens further reinforce the informal character of community gardens and its associated perceptions.

The informal dimension of community gardens has been both an asset and a challenge for community gardeners and supporters. On one hand, as an informal urban open space, community gardens provide a low-cost way for communities to turn underutilized urban lands into productive open space. They enabled communities to mobilize and take on collective actions to address issues of improvement, crimes, food production, and need for green open space. On the other hand, the persistence of impermanence and lack of institutional and regulatory support often put gardens at risk of displacement and relocation. The significant volunteering support that gardens require also puts a heavy burden on individuals within the community. As community gardening gains increasing attention and popularity in the United States, attempts to incorporate community gardens into the formalized institutional framework present additional challenges for planners, designer and policymakers.

This chapter reviews the overall issues of informality facing community gardens in the United States, focusing on the social, spatial, and institutional dimensions. Using Seattle as a case study where both institutional support and grassroots organizing have both been important in the development of community gardens, it examines the balancing act between institutional frameworks needed to sustain and support community gardening and informal mechanisms that are required for community gardens to maintain their distinct vitality and characters. It will conclude by offering a series of suggestions on how conventional land use regulations should change to support community gardens as sites for community building, food production, demonstration of urban sustainability, and citizen-driven placemaking.

Num país pobre e desigual como é o caso de Cabo Verde, onde os grupos dominantes apropriam-se e controlam os dispositivos produtores dos recursos, relegando os dominados para segundo plano, surge obviamente situações de exclusão e marginalidade. Sendo assim, uma parte significativa da população caboverdiana, como resposta, vê-se obrigada a buscar estratégias urgentes com vista à sua sobrevivência. A existência de uma forte economia informal, particularmente na cidade da Praia, faz com que algumas crianças e adolescentes em situação de rua vejam asseguradas a sua sobrevivência quotidiana, na medida em que esse sistema lhes possibilita a angariação de recursos que de outra forma dificilmente conseguiriam obter. Neste artigo pretende-se perceber as dinâmicas dessas crianças, sobretudo as chamados “crianças de rua" dentro e nas imediações dos principais mercados a cidade, assim como identificar as actividades económicas por elas desempenhadas e o seu papel no total funcionamento do sistema informal da Praia.

In recent years, the cyclical population explosions connected with an illusory economic boom have determined an increased demand for housing in many cities of Latin America. This was followed by uncontrolled expansion of many cities, with the birth of marginal areas characterized by informal urbanization, strong qualitative deficits and complex phenomena of social exclusion and economic marginalization. On this topic a research group has been formed with the aim of providing a proposal capable of mitigating the housing problem of informal urbanization in South America; the research, starting from the case study of a Colombian city in the department of Boyacá, has concerned the design of a mono-cellular modular living unit, aggregated in order to form several residential typologies. The living unit, connoted by a high degree of flexibility, is manufactured using a construction system of reinforced masonry, prefabricated on site by low skilled labour in a kind of controlled self-build process. As part of an international agreement between the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre University and the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts of Universidad de Boyacá Tunja the research included a design workshop held in Colombia: the experience allowed the integration of the research with surveys and direct comparisons with operators, professionals and local scholars. Furthermore, due to the meetings with the inhabitants of the marginal areas, it was also possible to draw up an updated overview of
the community needs.
The design of the living module arises from a socio-economic, urban and typological analysis of the urban fabric that has led to the design of the house and its construction system. The paper presents a summary of the research development and proposes outcomes and results focussing on the housing module; finally, the paper provides the results of the crowdfunding campaign aimed at financing the construction of two residences in the district of San Lazáro in Tunja.

L’étude des recensements des baracche se prête à de multiples analyses. Dans notre cas, nous avons exploité cette source pour étudier la posture des institutions politiques et administratives devant l’augmentation du nombre de baraques dans la ville de Rome. Leur décision de mener des enquêtes ad hoc ainsi que les objectifs de ces recensements témoignent de leur perception singulière du phénomène. Mais c’est surtout leur volonté de définir les baraques comme objet d’enquêtes, ou même l’absence d’une définition claire des critères retenus pour les enregistrer, qui en disent long sur les problèmes qu’a posés, de façon répétée, cette réalité sociale.

Censuses of shacks (baracche) in Rome can be studied via numerous analytical approaches. In this article, we use this type of source to gain deeper insight into the attitudes of the political and administrative institutions dealing with the spread of shantytowns in the city of Rome. Their decision to carry out specific censuses, and the objectives of these operations, testify to their singular perception of the phenomenon. Above all, it was their desire to define the shacks as an object of investigation, or the very absence of clearly defined criteria for registering them, that tell us much about the recurrent problems posed by this particular social reality.

What is the anthropological contribution in the analysis of the formal / informal when thinking about the
urban territory? What is (or can be) the contribution of this analysis to rethinking the urban intervention?
Can the informality contribute to innovate the urban intervention and normalise the right to the city?
In this paper, we introduce a theoretical discussion that aims to uncover some of the intermediation that
hides behind the formal and informal pairs and argues the interest in innovating certain formalisms of urban
intervention (Menezes, 2013, 2013a). To (re) invent urban practices and develop studies related with
the anthropology field of transformation of urban space (Biase, 2012), we are interested in:
• To understand the contemporary socio-cultural aspects that influences the production of the city
and living in it.
• To recover the inhabitant’s spatial initiative in order to (re)think the ways cities are made.
• To learn how people respond to their daily needs, inventing new spatialities and new services.
• To understand the various aspects that constitute the field of relationship between technical intervention
solutions, social welfare needs, and socio-cultural adaptation capacities to contexts.
In this perspective, we discuss the following aspects:
• The various dimensions of the relationship between technical solutions of intervention and “informal”
models of spatial socio cultural occupation.
• The social micro-processes of adaptation, innovation and invention of kinetic spatiality and social
settings - that follow the experiences of informal occupation of urban space.

Hasta los años 1980, la estrategia de Brasil frente a los asentamientos informales y las favelas fue la erradicación y el reasentamiento involuntario. La Constitución brasileña de 1988, marcadamente progresista, incluyó un capítulo sobre política urbana, con «el objetivo de ordenar el pleno desarrollo de las funciones sociales de la ciudad y garantizar el bienestar de sus habitantes». El 14 de febrero de 2000, la Enmienda Popular de Reforma Urbana reconoció el acceso a la vivienda como un derecho social. En 2001, el Estatuto de la Ciudad –ley federal que regula el capítulo constitucional– incorporó el «derecho a la ciudad» en la Constitución, exigió la participación ciudadana en el proceso de planificación urbana y promovió la urbanización de las favelas. En 2003, se creó el Ministerio de las Ciudades para coordinar programas de elaboración e implementación de una política urbana inclusiva y sustentable, dirigidos principalmente a la población pobre. El discurso político y académico del siglo XX planteó una oposición entre favela y ciudad. La innovadora legislación terminó con la invisibilidad oficial de las favelas y empoderó a sus habitantes para participar en el proceso democrático. Durante las dos últimas décadas, los proyectos de urbanización –mejoramiento de viviendas, desarrollo de infraestructura y acceso a los servicios sociales– han mejorado la calidad de vida en las favelas y fomentado la inclusión social. Esta ponencia explora los proyectos de integración urbana que, en cuanto mecanismos de participación en el foro democrático de la ciudad, permiten la implementación efectiva del derecho a la ciudad.

ABSTRACT
Until the 1980s, the strategy in Brazil for dealing with informal settlements and favelas was eradication and involuntary resettlement. Brazil’s 1988 highly progressive constitution included a chapter on urban policy, ‘aimed at ordaining the full development of the social functions of the city and ensuring the well-being of its inhabitants’. On 14 February 2000, the Popular Amendment for Urban Reform recognized access to housing as a social right. In 2001, the Estatuto da Cidade – a federal law regulating the constitutional chapter – embedded the notion of the ‘right to the city’ in the constitution, required citizen participation in the urban planning process and promoted the urbanization of favelas. In 2003, the Brazilian Ministry of Cities was founded, to spearhead and coordinate programmes for the elaboration and implementation of an inclusive and sustainable urban development policy, predominantly targeting the low-income population. Throughout the twentieth century, both political and academic discourse has posited Brazil’s favelas in opposition to the city. Brazil’s innovative legislation put an end to the favelas’ official invisibility, while empowering their inhabitants to participate in the democratic process. Over the last two decades, rights-based policies and community-led urbanization projects – in-situ upgrading, development of urban infrastructure and access to social services – have improved the quality of life in Brazil’s favelas and promoted social inclusion. This paper will explore how these urban integration projects, together with equitable distribution of resources and opportunities, foster participation in the democratic forum of the city, to achieve effective implementation of the right to the city.

Ponad połowa światowej populacji żyje w miastach, a do 2030 roku 2 miliardy ludzi (z szacowanych pięciu) zamieszka w slumsach. Rozrastające się dzielnice wykluczenia społecznego wypełnia nieformalna, tymczasowa architektura, budowana byle jak i z byle czego, przez ludzi pozbawionych trwałego i bezpiecznego schronienia, łatwego dostępu do wody pitnej, infrastruktury wodno-kanalizacyjnej. Agresywna urbanizacja, duży przyrost naturalny oraz masowe migracje ludności pogłębiają rozwarstwienia społeczne, z którymi nie radzą sobie władze miejskie oraz planiści i architekci. Brak spójnej i zrównoważonej polityki mieszkaniowej (budowanie tanich mieszkań komunalnych), wykluczanie z działań urbanizacyjnych dzielnic nieformalnych (koczowiska, getta, obozy uchodźców) oraz ignorancja deweloperów przyczyniają się do tworzenia w mieście linii napięć i konfliktów, zamiast budowania punktów stycznych,​ ​ połączeń​ ​ i​ ​ wzajemnej​ ​ komunikacji,​ ​ społecznej​ ​ inkluzji. Mike Davis alarmuje, że " nadwyżkę " ludzkości przyjmą jedynie slumsy czyli architektura nielegalnego osadnictwa. " Na obrzeżach miast nowi przybysze muszą zmierzyć się z warunkami, które można określić jedynie jako ​ marginalizację marginalizacji lub ostrzej, słowami mieszkańca slumsów w Bagdadzie, jako ​ połowiczną śmierć​. Ponury świat podmiejskiej biedy, odcięty zarówno od solidarnych więzi społecznych samowystarczalnej wsi, jak i od kulturalnego i politycznego życia tradycyjnego miasta, stwarza zupełnie nowe formy nierówności. To kraina banitów, nowy Babilon ". Morze slumsów nie zalewa jedynie krajów 1 rozwijających się, problem nasilającego się nielegalnego osadnictwa (skłotingu) dotarł do Europy. W każdym większym mieście istnieją zmarginalizowane dzielnice nędzy, przeźroczyste dla ludzi z pełnią praw obywatelskich. I problem narasta. Od początku tego roku drogą morską nielegalnie dostało się do Europy ok. 137 tysięcy osób. Koczujący imigranci u wybrzeży Grecji, Włoch i Hiszpanii oraz Romowie zamieszkujący drewniane baraki (w Polsce we Wrocławiu, Poznaniu i Gdańsku) milcząco " domagają się " nowego podejścia do projektowania miasta, w kontekście walki pomiędzy jednostką a warunkami (politycznymi, społecznymi, ekonomicznymi, fizycznymi), w które jest uwikłana. W kontekście prawa własności podważanego przez powstawanie tymczasowych i nielegalnych mias napędzanych walką o przeżycie.

SITlab_Heliopolis: Smart Informal Territories Lab, Heliopolis Slum, Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2012
by Carlos Leite, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Sao Paulo with participation of Brian McGrath, Parsons the New School, NYC, and Amsterdam Academy of Architecture and Urbanism

Responding to an international trend that regards the state as an oversized, unsustainable and uneven jurisdiction that cannot effectively intervene in the economy to promote development objectives, nor impose a proper presence over its territory and population, the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991 installed local development as one of the primary strategies to recuperate the nation-building project in Colombia. Bogotá has greatly benefited from the introduction of this normative framework: within the spatial limits of its jurisdiction, Bogotá has been able to achieve a remarkable level of community engagement, measured urban growth and financial stability, as well as high per capita levels of education, health and public utility provision. However, the successful decentralization of state activity in Bogotá has implied an intensification of the systemic violence that traditionally accompanies nation-building projects. Through practices of classification, demarcation and disciplining of space and subjects, Bogotá has used a cartography of legal and illegal urban spaces in order to circumscribe its developmental target. Reflecting upon the contradictions that arise from the encounter between the weaknesses of Colombia's sovereignty and Bogotá's successful development, this paper examines the relationship between development and sovereign consolidation through the multiplication of levels of governance and the creation of increasingly smaller, more accountable sub-national jurisdictions in Third World states.

The growth of Latin American cities in recent decades has happened mainly on the sidelines of formal planning, producing an "informal city" which does not follow the urban model defined and promoted by institutions. Urban planning in such a context is focused mainly in re-urbanizing this informal city, following criteria which often modify, or even destroy, the informal city's functional logic. In the following article these conflicts are summarily reviewed, with examples drawn from Bogotá and Medellín, in Colombia. These are then put in contrast with European practices, where intervention in the existing city has become the pivotal element of urban planning, but in a very different cultural, social and institutional context.

Undergrowth Urbanism is defined as an urban dynamic generated autonomously by the inhabitants and independently of official planning mechanisms. By analysing the nature of these dynamics, an attempt is made to demonstrate how they are essential for the functioning of the city even though they have no direct link to the conventional channels. Because of the level of consolidation and evolution it has obtained, Paraisópolis is taken as the main case study and representative of many dynamics existed in the informal city. The most relevant phenomena are identified to distinguish the invariants and variables, the points of convergence and divergence of actions taken, and the possible shared principles and phenomena that might be useful for a comparative analysis. The results of this process is a matrix that enables comparison of different cases by referring to constant parameters that bring out the components and the disturbances of the system. The significance of the matrix is to bring out social dynamics and tactics for self-administration that can be used reactively in the regeneration process. The aim is to arrive at the identification of sensitive points where regeneration projects could have more success.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city, with a focus on off-grid urban spaces in the Global South, and on how the off-grid functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the off-grid urban context in South Africa, we contend it is necessary to question the assumptions of the "off-grid" concept in urban geography in terms of its implications for conducting research. We thereby identify four areas for further conceptual and empirical elaboration. The first area concerns the importance of continuing to redefine academic and practical understandings of the "grid", ultimately moving to redefine its meaning in the city. The second is a need to decolonise and decentre the relationship between global and technocratic urban development "standards", practices and discourses, and the 2 granular off-grid context. The third area is the imperative of critically engaging with narratives of inadequacy and imperfection as often applied to off-grid, informal urban spaces. The fourth is the priority of moving towards a needs-based approach to off-grid development, with a focus on coproduction of urban knowledge with local communities to ensure their needs and interests are met.

Num país pobre e desigual como é o caso de Cabo Verde, onde os grupos dominantes apropriam-se e controlam os dispositivos produtores dos recursos, relegando os dominados para segundo plano, surge obviamente situações de exclusão e marginalidade. Sendo assim, uma parte significativa da população caboverdiana, como resposta, vê-se obrigada a buscar estratégias urgentes com vista à sua sobrevivência. A existência de uma forte economia informal, particularmente na cidade da Praia, faz com que algumas crianças e adolescentes em situação de rua vejam asseguradas a sua sobrevivência quotidiana, na medida em que esse sistema lhes possibilita a angariação de recursos que de outra forma dificilmente conseguiriam obter. Neste artigo pretende-se perceber as dinâmicas dessas crianças, sobretudo as chamados “crianças de rua" dentro e nas imediações dos principais mercados a cidade, assim como identificar as actividades económicas por elas desempenhadas e o seu papel no total funcionamento do sistema informal da Praia.

This chapter analyzes the rise of community development in Colombia, and the impact in the making of informal city in Cartagena. I will go on to demonstrate that the community action councils in fact became a pivotal instrument for members of the popular classes actively to participate in the remaking of their communities. Indeed, I will argue that this type of community development amplified the creative capacity of thousands of Cartageneros, who lived in the city’s margins and lacked the basic means to achieve a decent way of life, to improve their situation. As we have already seen in the case of San Francisco, these marginalised residents utilised the very councils designed to depoliticise their demands to confront the state institutions that failed to attend to their needs. Furthermore, they used the community action councils to engage with multiple political actors, ranging from brokers and mainstream politicians to radical agents who sought to capture the residents’ hearts and minds. As I will go on to argue, the priests and union leaders who joined the San Francisco demonstration in 1969 fall into this latter category. All of this is to say, as I will ultimately demonstrate, that patron–client relationships do not fully explain the political experience within the councils

By describing an experimentation carried out on a 'informal' settlement in the far north east outskirts of the Municipality of Rome, the paper aims to demonstrate in which way outskirts can become an extraordinary opportunity to activate processes of smart urban regeneration. The paper describes a project developed on the area of Tragliatella in Rome, with the aim of developing a codified design methodology for the recovery of unauthorised residential settlements in the outskirts of the city, lacking primary urbanization works and essential services, and requiring redevelopment processes in order to ensure their liveability. The project proposes a smart model linked not only to the energy performance of the buildings, rather to all the other environmental parameters of the urban settlement (i.e. soil permeability, heat island effect, micro-climatic comfort in outdoor spaces, etc.). The experimental design approach, outlined in this paper, could be effectively transposed to other fragmentary suburban settlements, characterized by the low quality level of the houses, whose origin is not necessarily spontaneous. In this paper the term " informal city " refers to those areas, part of the outskirt of large cities, developed in unauthorised fashion.

The informal Garbage City founded by the Christian minority of Copts, who recycle waste, as a spatially and culturally separated “inner city” is an architectural phenomenon of contemporary urbanised spaces. The strong division into the sacrum zone, with churches carved in the rock, and the worker’s profanum zone filled with perfectly sorted rubbish, determines the spatial separation, but also the cultural symbiosis between them.

This Article studies the informal collaboration model adopted by the landowners and builders in the Un-Authorised Colonies of the Delhi to construct apartment typologies. This is a primary research on the topic as significant for the ingenuity of the model. Unauthorised colonies in Delhi accommodate about half of the city population. While these colonies are largely considered illegal in the planning theories they have emerged as informal housings providing relatively affordable options to the middle class population. It is interesting to know and study the methods and means through which these housings are constructed without any support of the formal framework. The clue to the future of these colonies also lies in such studies. The article based on the Ph.D. of the author focusses on the collaboration model which is one such informal method.

Bioclimatic and environmental redevelopment of suburban areas
Alessandra Battisti
- Learning how to interpret suburban areas
During the Fifties, Pier Paolo Pasolini filmed the suburban areas of Rome (where he chose to live) describing the costumes, society and city Rome was turning into and becoming, beyond its own walls and its own centre. 
“Tiburtino has gone by, here's Tor dei Schiavi, Borghetto Prenestino, Acqua Bullicante, la Maranella, Mandrione, Porta Furba, Quarticciolo, Quadraro […] Hundreds of other centres like the one at Tiburtino: with a mass of people under the traffic-light, gradually spreading out over the surrounding streets, as noisy as lobbies, with crumbling pavements and along colossal wall ruins with rows of hovels underneath.  And gangs of young kids racing each other on their scooters, Lambrette, Ducati, Mondial, half-drunk, with their oily overalls unbuttoned over their dark chests, or all slicked up as if they have just stepped out of a shop window in Piazza Vittorio. A big encirclement all around Rome, between Rome and the surrounding countryside, with hundreds of thousands of human lives swarming between their lots of land, their evictee houses and their skyscrapers» [P. Pasolini, 1995]1. 
These were the suburbs of “I ragazzi di vita” (aka “The Ragazzi) and this was the Roman suburban area until the end of the Seventies, with its infrequent bus service, its grey tower blocks, squatters and a tangible kind of loneliness. 
Towards the close of the Nineties, Peter del Monte in "Compagna di viaggio” (aka “Travelling Companion) once again aimed the movie-camera at the fields surrounding Rome.  New realities emerged, equally dramatic, in which the fields (that in some cases are still used by grazing sheep) were transformed into spaces/crossroads of different ethnic groups and cultures.  “I ragazzi di vita” fled from the suburbs, so immigrants and newcomers substituted them by repopulating the spaces that once belonged to those in flight, without anybody at least attempting to solve the problems that had led them into fleeing:  crowded suburban squatters, places of marginalization, gypsy camps.  The city becomes infinite not only in its urban structure, but also in its immense suburbs that are a threat to the centre. 
These phenomena reveal a new urban sociology, and require that we as architects and hence city operators answer a question:  «What kind of life project and future do these immense suburbs sustain?» and again «How can we let everything go adrift like this?».
Over the past few years, our eyes have become accustomed to old and new suburban populated areas, ordaining the disappearance of green and circulation areas (fertile substrate of the dialectical relation between city and countryside) in a horizon that thickens and becomes dense, solid and full. Full of real estate, apartment houses, intensive building, small villas, walls, fences, “keep out” signs, full of citizens in their solitary and chaotic flight, of immigrants in their solitary and chaotic arrivals.  The city without a face that becomes hostile in every one of its corners. Immense suburbs that grow like a shapeless and unknown matter2.  Suburbs swallowing that grey and levelling magma so dreaded by Pier Paolo Pasolini many years ago.
These images and situations beg for a project of social life for the suburbs, a space where social relations can be decrypted or where identifying signs can still be engraved, beginning with the division into districts, with residence regulations and putting into place visible signs of history and shared cultures. 
In the global world, the answer must still be given in spatial terms:  reconsidering the local.
As Marc Augè wrote in a recent article dedicated to the suburbs of great cities:  «Contrary to illusions disseminated via communications technologies, from television to the internet, we live where we live.  Ubiquity and immediacy still remain metaphors.  It is important to perceive means of communication as they really are:  means to facilitate life, not to substitute for it.  From this perspective, the task we should accomplish is enormous.  It is to avoid situations when information and image overload will cause new forms of isolation.  Solutions to halt this trend, which is already perceivable, will have to be spatial, local and, openly speaking, political, in the broad sense of the word» [M. Auge, 2013] 3.
We passively observe as large and medium-sized Italian cities explode into an array of separate settlements, called sprawls, villettopoli, città diffusa (widespread city)4 – euphemisms that since the end of the 20th century have been coined by experts to downplay this incurable disease afflicting our urban set-up.  Spontaneous building fabrics sprouting up all over, replicating one another without a name, with the same form or (better yet) the same absence of form, without any squares or parking areas, without any roundabouts, services or pavements.
But it is nonetheless true that severely critical judgements about the suburbs have laid down, over the course of time, an opaque layer of prejudice and resignation, a layer that not only has kept from carefully observing and interpreting their diversified features and intrinsic potential, but has also suffocated any sort of aspiration for change.    «Suburbs are the city of our times» wrote Giancarlo De Carlo [G. De Carlo, 1990] 5; a simple aphorism that should lead us into «thinking about the construction of a project in suburban areas in a subordinate way to the comprehension of the malfunctioning of these parts of the city» and suggests how important it is to «learn how to “interpret” the suburbs».
- Searching for “urban quality” through bioclomatic and environmental redevelopment
The field of research that has been the subject of the present volume aims at investigating into the urban quality to be restored to the suburban fabric through bioclomatic and environmental redevelopment capable of providing a key for the interpretation of the suburban set-up, through punctual and diverse operations describing the physical space, the biophysical one, the comprehension of bioclimatic phenomena – always lending an ear to the social space.  Over the course of research, the architect's task has been revisited as a social role that necessarily has to recover the sense of listening, the reinterpretation and exploration of the suburban space in order to lay down some shared and experimented assumptions that might be referred to in order to overcome (using scientific and analytical methods) contradictions and conflicts of great suburban areas.  Every overall transformation programme, every detailed project is expressed in this sense, associating different interpretations of place and considerations on possible transformation scenarios of the same with the aim of establishing (through a critical summary of the analysis) an innovative concept of the urban suburban environment that might converse with the consolidated city and that might link the redevelopment process to cultural, social and technological evolutions and transformations investing society and the urban form – tending to underline the necessity for new ideas, innovative models and pertinent examples.
As a general outline, analysis and assessments of the present research stem from the significance of the problems identified during the analytical stage; exploring the feasibility of interventions that might implement and achieve higher urban quality, also presupposing some verification processes. 
In this sense, four exploration paths were proposed regarding the subject, attaining to:
- capacity to measure up with the features of the places and the territory;
- environmentally sustainable and “eco-efficient” transformation/development;
- reconstruction/enhancement of the public space;
- necessity for the control, assessment and monitoring of architecture quality and the shape of the city.

INTEGRATIVE CITIES: When art and architecture become strategic
Daniel Huertas Nadal
Director of research group [AAOO*] Occasional Architectures. University UFV Madrid, Spain. Department of Architecture.
Abstract

Building the 21st century city requires creativity and flexibility in the face of rapid change and scarce resources. Thus, in the “the Urban Age”, approximately 50% of the world’s population lives in cities 33% of which, some 827 million people, live in informal settlements (UNHABITAT report 2010/2011).  Recent European research has focused on the unplanned architecture of urban slums worldwide. One source of optimism for architects and artists lies in informal communities. Increasingly, and particularly in Latin America, informality is no longer viewed as a  design problem so much as a condition offering  its own solutions. The so-called Informal City, arising from informal settlements, alongside the Formal City, provides a complex and fascinating territory. Relations between the two are critical as is the need to formalize integration processes. The formal city plans, legalizes, before constructing. The informal city invades, occupies, inhabits, builds, and only ultimately seeks to legalize.  In order to define an inclusive city, how these dynamics overlap must be addressed.
Strategic projects, improving accessibility, services, and introducing formal city facilities and infrastructure to the informal city, raise unexpected, complex and interesting processes, far more effective than those of large-scale urban plans. Like acupuncture, such projects activate the city’s energy points, proposing alternatives to large‐scale centralized planning, based on the belief that minimal local intervention will provide the impetus for self organization.

Keywords:  urban strategies, inclusive cities, networks, public space, informal city, right to the city, identity areas, social engagement

Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, the Colombian state and private agents joined efforts to turn Cartagena into an international tourist destination. To do so, they refashioned the city center to recreate the colonial landscape and promote Cartagena’s image as an untainted paradise frozen in time. This dissertation demonstrates that the city’s remaking was largely rooted in the systematic segregation of locals whose presence was deemed to be inconvenient for tourism development. As the city center became a historical district, certain uses and socio-economic practices –such as low-income housing, street vending, wholesale trade, etc.- were prohibited or discouraged by zoning regulations as they were thought to disrupt colonial aesthetics. Land grabbing, speculation, and slum clearance pushed dwellers further toward the periphery. Amid these changes, ordinary citizens mobilized to preserve the city as a site to assert their citizenship rights. In doing so, they resorted to multiple strategies, including community development, collective mobilizations, and alliances with actors across the political spectrum, from mainstream politicians to radical foreign and local activists, from labor unions to the Peace Corps. This dissertation tells the story of how the state, private agents, and citizens’ conflicting views drove the remaking of Cartagena. It also analyzes how intellectuals, journalists, politicians, and everyday people interpreted urban changes from a racial perspective, indicating that they widened the gap between whites and blacks in a city already divided along racial lines. As the city was remade, class, race, gender, and spatial structures came together to forge local identities and became instrumental for locals to make sense of this moment of urban change

There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city, with a focus on off-grid urban spaces in the Global South, and on how the off-grid functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the off-grid urban context in South Africa, we contend it is necessary to question the assumptions of the "off-grid" concept in urban geography in terms of its implications for conducting research. We thereby identify four areas for further conceptual and empirical elaboration. The first area concerns the importance of continuing to redefine academic and practical understandings of the "grid", ultimately moving to redefine its meaning in the city. The second is a need to decolonise and decentre the relationship between global and technocratic urban development "standards", practices and discourses, and the 2 granular off-grid context. The third area is the imperative of critically engaging with narratives of inadequacy and imperfection as often applied to off-grid, informal urban spaces. The fourth is the priority of moving towards a needs-based approach to off-grid development, with a focus on coproduction of urban knowledge with local communities to ensure their needs and interests are met.

There has been a resurgence in interest in the off-grid city, with a focus on off-grid urban spaces in the Global South, and on how the off-grid functions as a collection of places, lived spaces, and dynamic infrastructural configurations. As scholars and practitioners working in the off-grid urban context in South Africa, we contend it is necessary to question the assumptions of the "off-grid" concept in urban geography in terms of its implications for conducting research. We thereby identify four areas for further conceptual and empirical elaboration. The first area concerns the importance of continuing to redefine academic and practical understandings of the "grid", ultimately moving to redefine its meaning in the city. The second is a need to decolonise and decentre the relationship between global and technocratic urban development "standards", practices and discourses, and the 2 granular off-grid context. The third area is the imperative of critically engaging with narratives of inadequacy and imperfection as often applied to off-grid, informal urban spaces. The fourth is the priority of moving towards a needs-based approach to off-grid development, with a focus on coproduction of urban knowledge with local communities to ensure their needs and interests are met.

In recent years, the cyclical population explosions connected with an illusory economic boom have determined an increased demand for housing in many cities of Latin America. This was followed by uncontrolled expansion of many cities, with the birth of marginal areas characterized by informal urbanization, strong qualitative deficits and complex phenomena of social exclusion and economic marginalization. On this topic a research group has been formed with the aim of providing a proposal capable of mitigating the housing problem of informal urbanization in South America; the research, starting from the case study of a Colombian city in the department of Boyacá, has concerned the design of a mono-cellular modular living unit, aggregated in order to form several residential typologies. The living unit, connoted by a high degree of flexibility, is manufactured using a construction system of reinforced masonry, prefabricated on site by low skilled labour in a kind of controlled self-build process. As part of an international agreement between the Department of Architecture of Roma Tre University and the Faculty of Architecture and Fine Arts of Universidad de Boyacá Tunja the research included a design workshop held in Colombia: the experience allowed the integration of the research with surveys and direct comparisons with operators, professionals and local scholars. Furthermore, due to the meetings with the inhabitants of the marginal areas, it was also possible to draw up an updated overview of the community needs. The design of the living module arises from a socio-economic, urban and typological analysis of the urban fabric that has led to the design of the house and its construction system. The paper presents a summary of the research development and proposes outcomes and results focussing on the housing module; finally, the paper provides the results of the crowdfunding campaign aimed at financing the construction of two residences in the district of San Lazáro in Tunja.

Responding to an international trend that regards the state as an oversized, unsustainable and uneven jurisdiction that cannot effectively intervene in the economy to promote development objectives, nor impose a proper presence over its territory and population, the reform of the Colombian Constitution in 1991 installed local development as one of the primary strategies to recuperate the nation-building project in Colombia. Bogotá has greatly benefited from the introduction of this normative framework: within the spatial limits of its jurisdiction, Bogotá has been able to achieve a remarkable level of community engagement, measured urban growth and financial stability, as well as high per capita levels of education, health and public utility provision. However, the successful decentralization of state activity in Bogotá has implied an intensification of the systemic violence that traditionally accompanies nation-building projects. Through practices of classification, demarcation and...