Towards an Informal Turn in the Built Environment Education: Informality and Urban Design Pedagogy

Abstract

Informal urbanism, ranging from informal settlements to trading and transport, has become integral, but not limited, to the ways in which cities of the global South work. At stake here is the role of the built environment professions in responding to informal urbanism where a poor understanding of the complexities of informality can lead to poor design interventions. Providing a better understanding of how forms of informality work is then a key task for the built environment education, which arguably falls short in this regard. With a particular focus on urban design, we suggest that it is critical to move towards an informal turn in the built environment education to address informality and engage with the dynamics of informal urbanism. We first investigate the scope of urban design and then explore the ways in which urban design education can respond to informal urbanism in its curricula by developing an urban design program on informality as an illustration. The suggested approach can be considered as an initial step towards an informal turn in urban design education. We conclude that while urban design alone cannot solve social and economic problems, including poverty and inequality, its capacity to address the complex challenges of urbanization cannot be overlooked. Urban design education cannot remain isolated from the questions of informality anymore.

Online Education and the COVID-19 Outbreak: A Case Study of Online Teaching during Lockdown

“…The primary aim of this subject is to introduce a range of research methods concerning critical questions in the field of urban design. It also seeks to enable students to deepen their methodological understanding and critical thinking in relation to those forms of urbanism that have remained underexplored [60][61][62] and to the ways in which urban places work at the intersections between spatiality and sociality [63], between the measurable and the non-measurable [64], and between urban morphology and streetlife intensity [65,66]. Figure 1 illustrates the RMT subject in relation to other subjects in the MA UD.…”

Negotiating Space and Visibility: Forms of Informality in Public Space

“…The aim is to explore the dynamics of street trading and the ways in which street traders negotiate their visibility and spatial claims to sustain livelihoods. Our attempt here is to avoid romanticizing such self-help activities or falling into either optimistic or pessimistic views on urban informality, but rather to explore how forms of informality work in a global context [14,15].…”

Informal urbanism in the state of uncertainty: forms of informality and urban health emergencies

“…This can range from action research and design research to research-based design interventions by drawing on a nuanced understanding of how forms of informality work before jumping into any conclusion regarding design intervention and its impacts. Moving towards an informal turn in urban design education is then critical as it has the capacity to challenge the constructed conceptions of informality and forms of reductionism (Kamalipour and Peimani 2019a ). Challenging the policy settings and conventional conceptions among students, governments and the general public remains a key task for educators and academics to provide a better understanding of how ‘self-organised city’ works through teaching and research (Jones 2020 ).…”

“…Street vending and informal transport also play a key role in informal economy and mobility by providing job opportunities, generating income for the urban poor, and filling the gaps of formal urban development by negotiating space and visibility in the public realm. While there is an extensive body of knowledge in planning, geography, and social sciences focusing on informal urbanism, forms of informality have often remained underexplored in relation to urban design (Chalana 2019 ; Mukhija 2011 ; Kamalipour and Peimani 2019a ). This paper lies in the intersections of studies on urban design, informal urbanism, and urban health.…”