Rethinking urban informality and the planning process in Egypt

Soliman, Ahmed M.

doi:10.3828/idpr.2010.04

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…My concerns, from a background in urban design, are mostly with the ways in which urban informality plays out at the level of everyday urban life with a focus on informal morphologies -the forms of informality (Dovey and King, 2011). While there are many highly insightful studies of both informal settlements and urban informality in general (Davis, 2006;Neuwirth, 2006;Huchzermeyer and Karam, 2006;Roy and Alsayyad, 2004), the complexities of informality remain under-researched and under-theorised at micro-spatial scales (Soliman, 2010). A range of writers from Turner (1976) to Brugman (2009) and Brand (2009) onwards have embraced the productivity of informal urbanism, yet we do not have any well-developed theories of how such urbanism works.…”

Section: Figure 1 Bangkokmentioning

confidence: 98%

Informal urbanism and complex adaptive assemblage

Dovey

2012

International Development Planning Review

219

107

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Informal urbanism, from informal settlements to economies and street markets, is integral to cities of the global South -economically, socially, environmentally and aesthetically. this paper seeks to unfold and re-think this informal/formal conception using two interconnected theoretical frameworks. First is assemblage theory derived from the work of Deleuze and guattari, in which a series of twofold concepts such as rhizomic/tree and smooth/striated resonate with the informal/formal construct. Second is theory on complex adaptive systems, in which dynamic and unpredictable patterns of self-organisation emerge with certain levels of resilience or vulnerability. these approaches are drawn together into the concept of a complex adaptive assemblage, illustrated with brief snapshots of urban informality drawn from Southeast asian cities. the challenge is to develop multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar methodologies to explore the ways in which informality is linked to squatting, corruption and poverty on the one hand, and to growth, productivity and creativity on the other.

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Section: Figure 1 Bangkokmentioning

confidence: 98%

Informal urbanism and complex adaptive assemblage

Dovey

2012

International Development Planning Review

219

107

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“…As Roy and AlSayyad (2004: 5) famously argued, ‘If formality operates through the fixing of value, including the mapping of spatial value, then informality operates through the constant negotiability of value and the unmapping of space’. Informality facilitated by the state or planning professionals could be incorporated into formal housing development as a way of alleviating poverty, compensating for the lack of state housing strategy in the urban sprawl (Fairbanks, 2011; Soliman, 2010). Therefore, neither legalizing nor penalizing illegal land occupation can offer a full solution to deal with informality (van Gelder, 2013).…”

Section: Processual Thinking In Urban Informalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Polarizing informality: Processual thinking, materiality and the emerging middle-class informality in Taipei

Chien

2019

Environ Plan A

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In recent debates, it has been argued that urban informality is a way of living. It is the consequence of people negotiating with building regulations, limited resources and their living environments. However, as some researchers have pointed out before, informality is not just the experience of subalterns; in some cases, it has become the shared experience of people across different classes. This paper therefore employs processual thinking and materiality to demonstrate how urban informality was formed and has been transformed through negotiations between people, local authorities and political realities. By thinking about Taipei’s informality as a negotiating process, informality can thus be understood as the co-production process of squatters’ struggle for a living in the city and the state’s attempt to mobilize political support. As new construction materials have prompted varied illegal construction forms, attracting new people to build illegal constructions, the demographic change has also changed the people–state relations. The state’s governance of illegal construction therefore has been leaning towards private property owners with illegal add-ons, leaving squatter settlements vulnerable to demolition. In the case of Taipei’s transforming urban informality, this paper argues that informality is not merely the result of poverty, and should not be romanticized as a way to live outside the housing market or the modern planning regime. On the contrary, it should also be examined for its impacts on the existing class differences and inequality in urban populations.

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“…Unlike residential units in informal areas, an ‘ex-formal’ or ‘hybrid’ settlement consists of housing units in formal areas, which have already been built illegally or have acquired degrees of informality over time, such as the illegal increase of building heights. 6,10 The Egyptian Unified Code for Construction states that the minimum street width for urbanized areas is 10 m and that building heights must not exceed 1.5 times the street width, with a maximum height of 36 m. 11 Illegal building heights occur in larger Egyptian cities within their formal contexts, where they exceed three to four times the street width, leading to a catastrophic high-density situation. The hybrid settlements cause a significant threat to the housing market and to urban development, in addition to other complications in sanitation, health, environmental facilities and infrastructure.…”

Section: The Problem Of Daylighting and Energy Consumption Within Hybmentioning

confidence: 99%

A multivariate regression to predict daylighting and energy consumption of residential buildings within hybrid settlements in hot-desert climates

Ayoub

2018

Indoor and Built Environment

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Over recent decades, Egypt has experienced unprecedented growth of urban residential regions causing deterioration to indoor environmental quality. This research is a part of an ongoing study of building performance with different physical configurations and façades. It aims to quantify the daylighting and energy consumption of residential buildings in the hot-desert hybrid settlements of Alexandria. The methodological approach involves performing computational simulations to construct a dataset covering several influencing factors, which are exploited to develop multivariate linear regression models. This yields five equations used as proxies for predicting building performance in the early stages of the design. The developed models are validated and the predicted data, accompanied by insignificant errors, are found to be in a good agreement with simulation results, indicating that these models can explain the variation in the building performance. These measures, supported by an additional analysis of residuals, confirm the strength of selected variables and suitability of developed models to fit the dataset. This can aid architects and decision makers to assess a preliminary building performance by considering factors of heavily obstructed environment and façade configurations without the need to perform exhaustive analysis.

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Rethinking urban informality and the planning process in Egypt

Cited by 16 publications

References 2 publications

Informal urbanism and complex adaptive assemblage

Informal urbanism and complex adaptive assemblage

Polarizing informality: Processual thinking, materiality and the emerging middle-class informality in Taipei

A multivariate regression to predict daylighting and energy consumption of residential buildings within hybrid settlements in hot-desert climates

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