Outline

Illegal - irregular - clandestine - uncontrolled - slum - skid row - favela - barrio - bidonville - shantytown. Our common vocabulary for nonformal urbanism emphasizes its outcast nature, but not its formidable dynamic, moral legitimacy and ubiquity. Over the last hundred years nonformal urban growth has greatly increased and accounts for about one third of our urban population. In the coming decades non-formal cities will constitute not only close to half of our urban growth on this planet, but will house the majority of our young urban population. As global design practice becomes a common place, not many practitioners are prepared to be effective in the highly dynamic conditions of cities that grow to innate orders independent of conventional planning paradigms. As we experience the rise of the auto-constructed city in synchronicity with the ascent of global practice, a whole new generation of designers has to learn a set of new navigation modes. What constitutes the role of professional designers in cities where everybody is a designer?

The engagement of designers with non-formal urbanization is as old as the phenomenon itself, stretching from Haussmann’s slum clearances in Paris to John Turner’s self-help initiatives in Peru. However, attitudes, means and operations of designers working in non-formal cities have radically changed over the centuries and are continuously evolving. Today, a new generation of designers engages highly conflicted and incredibly dense urban territories through carefully calibrated infrastructure, urban and landscape interventions. Nonformal cities are not primarily viewed as a malfunction, but as a brave response of the urban immigrant to the government inability of providing shelter. Self-constructed cities are then carefully examined and investigated for their intrinsic design opportunities and openings.

Metropolis Nonformal traced the particular modes of operation of an emerging professional field. It took a critical look at a select number of design practices, academics and public agencies who work at the cutting edge of nonformal city engagement.  The conference focused on their particular modes of operation, - how they frame the situation, how they internally operate, how they interact with the communities and governments, and how they engage specific site conditions and political contexts through landscape and infrastructure design.