INFORMAL CITY OCCUPANCY: (RE-)THINKING URBAN PLANNING PRACTICE FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE MARLUCI MENEZES (original) (raw)
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“Tactical urbanism”, “do it yourself”, “urban hakers action” are bottom-up processes that creative communities or urban makers carry out to focus attention on requirements and needs of contemporary living city, often ignored by local authorities, but suffered by people who lives daily degraded, marginal and peripheral buildings and areas. This informal architectures and artistic performance is produced by inhabitants that rediscover “waste landscapes” through new social relations, culture, values, economy to resolve hardships and practical difficulties in urban sites. Actions considered initially as illegal invasions of public spaces are now being recognized as opportunity for sustainable development, in respect of environment, local identity, people. Legal buildings and spaces that often don’t have the role of socialization and sharing sites, taking functions related to economic well-being rather than life quality of inhabitants, are replaced, today, by new social places that, through creativity, self-organization, problem solving and collaboration, respond better of top down projects to ideas and needs of community, social welfare requirements and sustainability. From self-construction processes, typical of southern communities, that through practical and economical solutions adapt living space to needs and demands, initiatives ephemeral, temporary works, recycle projects prove to be viable alternatives to solve contemporary city problems. From a illegality position these practices become legal, recognized and encouraged by government as alternative possibilities for city shared management.
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'.