Informal City

Urbanism & The Informal City research cluster was launched in October 2009 by Jorge Fiori, Elena Pascolo and Alex Warnock-Smith. The aim of the cluster is to explore the concept of the ‘informal’ as a parallel modality that shapes the urban condition. Previously associated with cities in developing or emerging economies, it is now a pervasive phenomenon spanning a spectrum of economies and cities. Is this a threat to formal processes of city formation and the institutions which govern them, or does it define an alternative response to producing and planning cities? Can these contrasting ways of producing and appropriating cities, with their different logics and rules, co-exist? With particular emphasis on spatiality, the cluster is looking for ways in which ‘informal’ processes contribute to a radical re-thinking of the space of the city and its institutions.