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Originally posted on

We are excited to announce the launch of the Urban Informality Interest Group. This was inspired by our dialogue at the MIT World Real Estate Forum earlier this year and is a collective effort of MIT Professor Dennis Frenchman, UC-ºù«ÍÞÊÓƵ Assistant Professor Jota Samper, MIT Ph.D. Student Rida Qadri, MIT Lecturer John Kennedy and myself, Kate Mytty.

We see an opportunity to develop and advance the research, practice and education around urban informality with a particular point of view: that of design, planning and urban development. To do this, we are establishing an interest group to build a collaborative working relationship across and within institutions. If you are working on something similar and interested in engaging on this, please reach out to create@mit.edu.

: Urban Informality Interest Group

Informal Settlements and the Informal Economy have traditionally been approached by scholars and agencies as spaces of scarcity — with insufficient services, goods, and even ideas. Modern approaches towards addressing urban informality dwell on the improvement of the inadequate qualities of such spaces. Be this, housing, products, markets, or services. While this is true at some level, this one-sided view erases a significant reality:

Informal settlements are serving as the urban solution to the incapacity of the formal market to provide housing to one-third of the world’s urban population.

The informal economy is the source of income for more than half of the world’s working population.

Given informal settlements are the most common form of urbanization and the informal economy is the most common vehicle for income generation suggests that Informality is not a pathology but the norm.

The reality of informality is then more nuanced. This context of scarcity and need creates the milieu for innovation in which products and services are invented without the ties to modern and cumbersome infrastructure or lengthy and problematic bureaucratic processes. This inventiveness, that we sometimes call ingenuity, is the result of the calculated process of the invention in response to scarcity and away from traditional structures of power. Products that result of such methods have the possibility of being tremendously transformative. In this twenty-first century, we see new products being developed that blur the line between formal and informal processes, regulations and markets. Products like Uber, Airbnb and the likes are challenging well-established markets by capitalizing on the flexibility of informal procedures. Cities around the world are grappling with how to respond to these flexible dynamics embodied by both large corporations and people-led development in informal settlements and the informal economy.

We at the Urban Informality Interest Group are interested in contributing to the knowledge of such development of new products, tools, and markets that can emerge from that ingenuity of communities working in these places, under special conditions that push them to invent out of the box solutions to the needs of our twenty-first century.