Incremental urbanisms

Urban informality is a self-organised mode of urbanisation that encroaches, infiltrates and expands cities of the global south beyond the control of the state. This is a double process whereby the formal city becomes informalised and the informal becomes formalised. Formal and informal are not binary – there is often no clear distinction between formal and informal settlements; rather they are inextricably intertwined. Urban informality produces a range of different morphologies (as demonstrated in Chapter 13). While urban informality often emerges under conditions of poverty, it is also a means of adapting to poverty. At the micro-scale, informal means incremental – the scale of design, construction and adaptation is geared to micro-flows of capital. In this chapter, we zoom to this micro-scale to explore three specific incremental urbanisms