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As member of the discussion panel, we are proud to present dr. Alexander Jachnow. He has worked in informal settlements in Mexico, Brazil and lately in Bangladesh on diverse levels, such as housing improvements, favela upgrading and reconstruction. He leads different projects that focused on dealing with slums and informality in an inclusive way. He believes in encouraging people to work on place- and city-making beyond the widely constructed dichotomy of formal vs. informal.
David is restless inhabitant, architect and co-founder of Straddle3, a multidisciplinary team that work with open source environments. He is also an active member of Arquitecturas Colectivas network. Next to their current projects including a private house self-built by its owner out of recycled materials, they are also working on free software tools for collaborative architecture and urban transformation.
Jaap is urban designer, architect and partner of Posad-Rosa Estratégias Espaciais, Spatial Strategies. Since 2008 he carried out various projects in Brazil in the formal and informal city. He believes that good spatial strategies render the formal/informal dichotomy irrelevant.
“In the past years I have worked in various Brazilian communities and grass-root projects, but also for formal clients. During the TU Delft informality meeting I would like to focus on how dealing with informality is inescapable when doing projects in Brazil. Questions on how to deal with informal processes in the city always pop-up, also while working formal clients as municipalities. This leads to interesting situations and solutions that attempt to bridge the gap between what is often seen as a dichotomy. I will explain this showing a project we have recently done for the municipality of São Bernardo, which asked us the devise a strategy to improve the quality of their sidewalks.”
Giorgio Talocci is a Teaching Fellow in the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (University College London), where he teaches the modules ‘Critical Urbanism Studio II’ and ‘Urban Design for Development’ and coordinates the DPU summerLab workshop series. In the last years, Giorgio and the MSc BUDD team and students have been working along with urban poor communities, grassroots organisations, networks of professional and academics. Treading on the multiple thresholds between Global North and South, formality and informality, doing and not doing, design as activism and design as research, they endeavour toward a collective, shared and people-driven production of space and knowledge in nowadays’ contested urbanisms.
International Symposium ‘Confronting [In]Formality’
Location: Berlagezaal, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology
Date: 11th December 2014
* The initiative is sponsored by the Chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy (TU Delft) and Motiv.
Abstract
There is a growing attention for informal settlements and economies as important urban phenomena worth the attention of urban planners, designers and policy makers , We are witnessing a big raise in studies and projects on informality by architects and urbanists. There is a general belief that these informal structures possess an untapped potential to contribute to urban development.
Nevertheless, there is a substantial lack of knowledge on concept of informality. In the first place informal systems are strengthened by the public sector’s neglect of socio-spatial exclusion in cities. At the same time the incorporation of the informal structures in the formal urban development framework can erase the unique qualities and opportunities which informality brings to urban life.
Description
The symposium focuses on how informality is understood by contemporary practitioners in order to confront the shortcomings of urban planning and design. Responding to the current lack of discussion on this perspective at TU Delft, we would like to invite professionals, academics and students to discuss the diverse approaches in practice and academia towards different geographic and socio-economic contexts.
For a complete overview of the programme, see our website https://confrontinginformality.wordpress.com/
Join our LinkedIN group on http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Confronting-In-Formality-8190018?home=&gid=8190018&trk=my_groups-tile-grp
Thanks for sharing!
Todor Kesarovski, Yos Purwanto, Daniel Radai, Belinda van Zijl
Graduating masters students in Urbanism, TU Delft
Informal Urbanisation: Understanding and Mitigating a Global Phenomenon
confronting [in]formality 