Masterplanning the Adaptive City

For decades now the debate around and approaches to the informal city 
have been profoundly despatialized. Since the mid-1990s, however, a new
generation of policies, programs, and projects for the informal city have
returned to the role of architecture and design in addressing the scale of
informality and of the social needs associated with it. A rich spectrum of
experiences of different scales and ambitions has emerged, but no systematic
assessment of their significance and impact has yet been undertaken. This
short text reflects on some of the arguments of the recently created research
cluster on Urbanism and the Informal City within the Architectural
Association School of Architecture (AA) regarding the direction and
contribution of those experiences.
The concept of the “informal” emerged in the developing world in the early 1970s
to describe of a set of socioeconomic and spatial processes—predominantly
urban—which combined irregularity with very low levels of productivity in the
production of goods, services, and the built environment, in ways that were often
associated with conditions of poverty and destitution. The concept also related to
spatial configurations that did not conform to the expected and desired forms 
of the modern city. It referred to conditions which were not at all new and not
dissimilar to those which had existed in developed economies long before; what
was new was the expansion and growing articulation of these conditions with the
very processes of development and economic growth which were supposed to
eliminate them, and the perception that the spaces of informality were not devoid
of potential but in fact full of resourcefulness and creativity which required support
rather than eradication. Over four decades, the concept of informality acquired
enormous importance, gaining multiple forms and rapidly spreading in its
application far beyond the cities of the developing world, to become both a central
feature and a functional tool in the new forms of internationalization of capital at a
global scale. From Lagos to New York, the informal became increasingly
constitutive of the urban condition in general.
The fact that vast amounts of people, activities, and built structures central
to the life of cities across the world happen to be outside their rules and
institutions undoubtedly represents a massive challenge for policy makers, city
planners, and urbanists. Is this a threat, a reflection of the illegitimacy of current
institutions, or just another way of producing and “planning” cities? Can these
different ways of producing and appropriating cities, with their different logics and
sets of rules, coexist? What is the spatiality of the informal and of its articulation
with the “formal” city? Above all, can spatial strategies and design address both
the encounters of these different logics and contribute to the redesigning of the
urban institutions that frame such encounters?
The AA has played an important role in shaping the international debate on
self-produced informal cities and the formulation of strategies to deal with them.
The seminal works of Otto Koenigsberger and John Turner have been immensely
influential. Many others associated with the AA at different times and in different
CHAPTER 5
JORGE FIORI >INFORMAL CITY
DESIGN AS POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
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capacities have made important contributions to both analyses and policies
relating to the informal city. However, in line with much of the debate over the
years, these contributions were predominantly focussed on the social aspects of
informality rather than on questions of space and design. Recent work by the
Housing and Urbanism program at the AA Graduate School and by the AA
research cluster on Urbanism and the Informal City has sought to give continuity
to this legacy while focusing on the potential of architecture and urbanism as tools
of political engagement in the transformation of the informal city and the social
conditions associated with it. Central to this interest is not only the view that the
widespread nature of informality makes it a very important issue for urbanists
everywhere but also the belief that the informal city challenges the traditions of
urbanism and urban design. Masterplans, land-use plans, and all the conventional
tools of spatial planning are of limited use in the context of the informal city, and in
some cases are truly irrelevant. Addressing the informal city is ineluctably about
rethinking the discipline of urbanism itself—its methods, tools, and instruments of
spatial design and intervention. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why the informal
has attracted the attention of so many leading architects and urbanists. 
Seldom do new ideas and concepts translate quickly into policies. In the
case of informality, however, policies focussed on informal housing, informal
settlements, the informal economy, and so on, emerged soon after the concept 
was first formulated. Four decades of debate have been accompanied by four
decades of strategies and policies to address the conditions of informality. The
concept was soon appropriated by different disciplines, theoretical perspectives,
and ideological positions, leading to different understandings of the causes of
informality and to different policy and planning responses. However, in terms of
addressing the scale of the informal or of the social needs associated with it, we
can say without fear of error that, despite the considerable innovation in policy
approaches, there were also four decades of failure. The reasons for such failure
are multiple, complex, and far beyond the scope of this short text. However, we
believe that one contributing factor in this failure has been the almost complete
despatialization of the debate on the informal city and of the strategies for dealing
with it.
A critique of modernist planning and architecture that apportioned
considerable blame to design for previous failures in urban and housing policies; a
growing valorization of organic and self-produced cities “without architects” and
“without planners”; and the very pertinent emphasis on the socioeconomic and
political dimensions of informal processes have increasingly led to the fading
away of any preoccupation with space and design. The search for means of
addressing the scale of “the problem” emphasized, in line with the different
theoretical and ideological persuasions involved, the political, the social, or the
economic dimensions as being central to a logic of “scaling up.” In the 1970s,
policies that attempted to combine state-driven, low-cost “site-and-services” and
“slum upgrading” programs and projects with “community participation” led
almost invariably to introverted, disconnected, and fragmented interventions
devoid of any sense of urbanism or of the city itself. In the 1980s and early 1990s,
guided by the by-then dominant neoliberal orthodoxy, the focus shifted toward
institutional reform, deregulation, and minimization of the state in order to unblock
markets as the central mechanism for scaling up. Deregulation, in turn, would
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INFORMAL CITY

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