Informal housing
Informal housing is built outside planning rules: without title, permit or services, on occupied or illegally subdivided land. In many cities of the Global South it houses a third or more of the population, and it is not an anomaly but the usual way the city gets made.
Favelas, villas, campamentos, colonias populares: the name changes, the process repeats. Ananya Roy proposed reading informality not as a lack of planning but as a mode of urbanisation the state itself tolerates and uses. Policies swing between clearance, relocation and in-situ upgrading.
Videos on this term (34)
- Housing
Jason Corburn and Street Science: Planning with the Neighbourhood
Jason Corburn proposes in Street Science combining technical knowledge with neighbourhood knowledge to plan healthy…
Jason Corburn 3 min read - Housing
Mike Davis: Risk Is Not Natural but a Construct of Power
Mike Davis argued that urban disasters are built before the emergency through segregation, speculation and unequal…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Housing
The Rent Gap: How It Reveals When Gentrification Has Already Begun
Neil Smith's rent gap measures the difference between current and potential land rent and shows that gentrification…
3 min read - Housing
Wacquant: Advanced Urban Marginality and Territorial Stigma
Loïc Wacquant explains how precarisation, social retreat and the penal state produce advanced urban marginality,…
3 min read - Urban ecology
Where Does Your Trash Go? Waste and Environmental Injustice
Household waste ends up burned or buried next to the neighbourhoods with the least power to refuse.
3 min read - Urban ecology
Water, a Resource Not Everyone Can Enjoy Equally
Who runs out of water first is decided by leaks, planning and distribution, not the climate. Cape Town's Day Zero.…
3 min read - Urban history
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture of the City
A summary of Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City (1966): the city as a historical artifact, urban…
Aldo Rossi 2 min read - Urban form
Michael Dear: Postmodernism and Critical Urban Planning
Michael Dear led the Los Angeles School and brought postmodernism into urban planning. What the postmodern city is…
Michael Dear 3 min read - Public space
Asef Bayat: Everyday Urban Activism and the Insurgent City
Asef Bayat explains in Life as Politics how the urban poor of the Middle East change the city without organising:…
Asef Bayat 3 min read - Public space
Latin American Urban Theory: Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Latin American urban theory reads the city through inequality, informality and social struggle.
2 min read - Housing
Di Virgilio: social housing and participatory urbanism
María Mercedes Di Virgilio on habitat, housing and the city in Latin America: precarious housing, social housing…
2 min read - Urban geopolitics
Mike Davis: Planet of Slums, Inequality and Megacities
Mike Davis explains in Planet of Slums how the megacities of the Global South grow without jobs or infrastructure,…
Mike Davis 2 min read - Urban economy
Tania Murray Li: Development, Exclusion and the Will to Improve
Tania Murray Li explains why development programmes produce exclusion by rendering political problems technical.
Tania Murray Li 3 min read - Urban ecology
Karen Bakker: Why Water Privatisation Failed in Cities
Karen Bakker showed that water is an uncooperative commodity and that neither privatisation nor bureaucracy solves…
Karen Bakker 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira and São Paulo: Growth, Inequality and Equity
Teresa Caldeira explains how São Paulo grew through self-built peripheries and split into fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban history
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, the History of London
London: The Biography (2000) by Peter Ackroyd tells two thousand years of London as the life of an organism. From…
Peter Ackroyd 3 min read - Urban economy
Poverty Capital by Ananya Roy: The Critique of Microfinance
Poverty Capital (2010) by Ananya Roy shows how microfinance turned poverty into a market. From Grameen to…
Ananya Roy 2 min read - Housing
Loretta Lees: Gentrification, Super-Gentrification and Displacement
Loretta Lees widened gentrification with super-gentrification, new-build and planetary gentrification.
Loretta Lees 2 min read - Infrastructure
Ash Amin: Everyday Life, Infrastructure and Social Cohesion
Ash Amin locates social cohesion in the ordinary: micropublics, lively infrastructure and services that treat…
Ash Amin 2 min read - Urban history
David Foster: Buenos Aires as Cultural and Political Stage
David William Foster read Buenos Aires as a text: Borges, Cortázar, the cinema of Torre Nilsson and Bemberg, Evita…
David Foster 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Indigenous Peoples in the City: Rights and Recognition
Indigenous peoples' rights in the city clash with urban expansion and planning. What Clara Irazábal and Raquel…
3 min read - Public space
Insurgent Citizenship: James Holston and the City from Below
James Holston's insurgent citizenship explains how São Paulo's peripheries won rights by building their…
James Holston 3 min read - Urban ecology
Right to Water and Environmental Justice: Swyngedouw and Davis
The right to water, recognised by the UN in 2010, is contested in the city. What Erik Swyngedouw and Mike Davis…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Forced Displacement in the Global South: A Growing Urban Crisis
Forced displacement in Global South cities grows through development, violence and climate. What Mike Davis and…
3 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Public Health: Policies for Healthier and Fairer Cities
Urban public health policies decide air, water, housing and transport. What David Satterthwaite and Julian Agyeman…
2 min read - Housing
Urban Warfare by Raquel Rolnik: Housing Under Financial Capital
Urban Warfare by Raquel Rolnik explains how housing went from a right to a financial asset and produced evictions…
Raquel Rolnik 2 min read - Housing
Planet of Slums by Mike Davis: The Global Urban Crisis Explained
Planet of Slums (2006) by Mike Davis explains why more than a billion people live in informal settlements and which…
Mike Davis 3 min read - Urban economy
Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser: Why Density Matters
Triumph of the City (2011) by Edward Glaeser argues that the dense city makes us richer, greener and healthier.
Edward Glaeser 3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Urbanization in the Global South: Simone, Pieterse and Roy Explained
Global South urbanization concentrates the world's urban growth without formal jobs or state capacity. What…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Teresa Caldeira's City of Walls: Segregation and Fear in São Paulo
City of Walls (2000) by Teresa Caldeira explains how fear of crime turned São Paulo into a city of fortified enclaves.
Teresa Caldeira 3 min read - Urban economy
Feminization of Urban Poverty: Causes and Policy Responses
The feminization of urban poverty explains why women bear more of the burden of poverty in cities.
2 min read - Urban psychology
Urban Violence and Insecurity: Caldeira, Wacquant and Davis
Urban violence and fear reorganise the city into gated enclaves and abandoned peripheries. What Teresa Caldeira,…
2 min read - Urban economy
Informal Economy and Informal Settlements in the Global South
Two billion people work in the informal economy and a billion live in informal settlements. What AbdouMaliq Simone…
3 min read - Urban form
Learning from Las Vegas: Venturi, Scott Brown, Izenour
A summary of Learning from Las Vegas (1972) by Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour: modernist functionalism…
2 min read
