Confronting Informality

PRESERVING COMMUNITIES AND CREATING PUBLIC GOODS IN INFORMAL SETTLEMENTS

TU Delft, in partnership with universities all over the world, is launching an ideas competition for students from any discipline concerned with the built environment and sustainable urban development. The question we wish to answer is: how to create healthy, safe and resilient living environments in informal settlements, while preserving livelihoods and social networks? How to create public goods in informal settlements while avoiding displacement?

We live in an urban world, but unplanned explosive processes of urbanisation in developing countries mean that informal settlements are growing in population and size, often without infrastructure, access to sanitation and good quality public space, without easy access to jobs and services, and many other challenges.

This ideas competition addresses the challenges of slums, as defined by UN-Habitat and addresses the need to promote sustainable, fair and inclusive urbanisation based on the principles of the New Urban Agenda.  

We wish to create a platform for discussion and exchange of ideas. We also wish to connect to students and teachers everywhere working on these topics and to foster a community of people who together will face the challenges of urbanisation in the Global South.

The winners of this competition will earn 3000 euros and be invited to showcase their work in the Rethink the City MOOC.

Please, visit our website for more information on how to participate and the prizes. https://confrontinginformality.org/competition/

This is the 2015 annual report for the BLOG “Confronting Informality”. Most of our visitor come from Brazil, followed by the Netherlands and the UK.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,000 times in 2015. If it were a cable car, it would take about 50 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.