Informal Urbanism, city building processes and design responsibility

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’. The text uses two vignettes of projects that greatly contributed to the legitimisation of informality as urbanism. The first, Favela-Bairro programme in Rio de Janeiro (1994-2006), and the second, PREVI plan in Lima (1965-75). They entertain a reverse relation with informality. The first aims at formalising the informal, while the second at ‘informalising’ the formal. The PREVI, although conceived as a formal plan, is not detached from the overall logic of informal urbanism; it rather opens a dialogue between self-organisation and architectural discourse. Although different, both narratives embraced informality as a sine qua non condition to work with and learn from