INTERNATIONAL WEBINAR SERIES 2021

The Paradox of Informal Urbanism:

A dialogue series with Simone, Brillembourg, McFarlane and Tonkiss

Studies of urban informality have a paradox at the core. On the one hand informality is often identified with illegality, inferiority and insecurity; with slums and squatting, with precarious neighbourhoods and practices, with deregulated markets and neoliberal urbanism. Yet it is also identified as a self-organized urbanism that adds vitality, affordability, diversity, creativity and adaptability to the city – a form of radical democracy that embodies the ‘right to the city’ and urban commoning. Informal urbanism works both with and against the formal structures of the state. How are we to engage with, or move beyond, this paradox?

* Venue: hosted virtually. Scroll below for zoomlinks.

* Attendance is free of cost.

* All Times are Melbourne Time (AEST)

Program Details

(All times in Melbourne time. Click here to convert to your time zone)

Session # 1

The Urban Extensions: Volatile simultaneities of spatial production

Both referring to specific territorial formations and impetuses of deterritorialization that can show up perhaps everywhere, urban majorities in South and Southeast Asia increasingly "find" themselves located in areas beyond the urban core. These areas hold a multiplicity of divergent trajectories, aspirations, and practices, which simultaneously generate strange socialities, and both elaborate and decommission logics of property, locality, and collective organization. What to make of these extensions and their implications for urban theory will be considered.

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Session # 2

Reboot the informal towards a new Architecture

This lecture will present the Urban Think Tank toolbox, which provides a working method for a new supportive architecture that empowers people at the margins of the global south's emerging cities and promotes sustainable development in informal areas. The broad goal is to eliminate the disconnect between design and its social impact and initiate a global discussion of the future role of architecture.

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Session # 3

The Crowd: Being together in a time of crisis

Urban life is predicated on urban densities and crowds. But while the former are typically understood and managed as problematics of urban governance, the crowd has more often been position as the city ‘in the wild’: unpredictable, suggestible, and a phenomena that might as much be generative of progressive urbanism as overbearing threat. The position of density and the crowd, and the relation between them, resonates with and exceeds the frame of formal and informal in urban thinking. This presentation reflects on how the pandemic has unsettled these relations, reflects on the position of the informal within them, and considers the implications for urban research.

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Session # 4

Idioms of Informality

A substantial share of urban form emerges from the work of nameless ‘designers’, unplanned development and the everyday investments that shape informal urbanism. This is well established in relation to poor-world urbanism, but is also characteristic of cities where state capacities are more developed, capital more abundant, and planning systems more extensive. Different modes of informal urbanism – while they vary markedly in terms of use, demographics, aesthetics and politics – share certain family resemblances. This session explores various idioms of the informal which put into question a distinction between the designers and the users of space; treat use as the instrument rather than the outcome of urban design; and employ design as a form of direct action in the city. Tactics of informality may have been strongly associated with the urbanism of the poor, but these design idioms run across disparate economic and political situations, and underscore the ways in which poor-world urban strategies speak to the spatial and social dilemmas found in many rich-world cities.

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Email here for any inquiries.

Hosted by InfUr-, the Informal Urbanism Research Hub at the University of Melbourne