We feel that the word ‘informal’ has now become another catchword that can be affixed to all kinds of terms to give them a superficial edge: informal settlements, informal networks, informal cities, informal design. The term has not been adequately thought through and glosses over many dimensions of lived reality.
If we want to describe the cities of today, especially the parts that fall out of the grid or creep through it, we need to invent new terms that express not so much their form but rather the way they evolve. That is why we would rather describe MG Road as being constantly ‘in-formation’ rather than informal.
Saying that a habitat is ‘in-formation’ doesn’t necessarily mean that it is incomplete. Instead, the term echoes Kevin Lynch’s description of cities as “evolving learning ecologies” (1981 p.115) and seeks to capture the capacity of certain urban spaces to evolve continuously and adapt to the context. The hyphen between ‘in and ‘formation’ is there to emphasize the dynamic production of urban forms and its perpetual incremental improvement and conservation.
The terms in-formation also invokes the word ‘information’ in its systems-theory sense as “any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of other patterns” (Wikipedia). If urbanists, architects, policy-makers, self-helpers, users and commentators, can stop describing some neighbourhood as ‘informal’ (and therefore in need of formalization) and understand how economic, social and cultural patterns influence the formation of physical habitats in planned as well as unplanned neighbourhoods, we will be that much closer to solving some of the most important challenges of our urban world.
Examining and learning from the way fellow humans use space across geographies and histories is without any doubt the most exciting trigger for creative intervention and architectural innovation.
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April 22nd, 2010 at 3:54 am
I think there might be some focus failure here. Urbanization questions has a depth and a diversity that probably doesn’t exist in any other fields and explaining this to others who doesn’t have any interest or knowledge about the subject is sometimes difficult. Although titles of different parts of the urbanization problem is important it can sometimes be more confusing than helpful. As the cities and its inhabitants constantly evolve so does the different parts and our perceptions of the problem, which creates new possibilities for a better change. But change also creates confusion which makes the problem difficult to take in. And to change titles of the problems diverse parts once again will now create chaos and trying to create change out of chaos is far more harder than creating change out of confusion.
BUT I do how ever get what you mean and do my own work with the word respect as a leading phrase but as much as urbanization is an ever changing subject we can not change “titles” and names just because they become a “catchphrase”. One word can still never explain the complexity of urbanization.
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Thanks for this heartfelt comment. I guess the point we are trying to make is that the term informal doesn’t help reducing the confusion, quite on the contrary.
If we could understand better the urban dynamics at the ground level, we could not longer call is chaos or mess. If we were not so confused we would not see chaos, but complex order.
New terms such as ‘in-formation’ help us out of this confused state which sees chaos everywhere.
April 23rd, 2010 at 3:38 am
Despite being new to the urbanist fields, I also get the sense that informality is trending right now. In my Sociology studies I ran across the informal economy stuff by people like Hart and Granovetter(can you recommend other influential scholars/works?).
Like any catchword (”sustainable”?) there is definitely an ambiguity that allows the term to be co-opted for its emotional/aesthetic connotations and used to gloss over or disguise the workings of something rather than reveal and analyze them.
However I’m not so sure that “informal” as “in need of formalization” is the dominant sense today quite so much as it was in the past. It seems like more urbanists esp. current/incoming grad students like myself are picking up on the term as it conveys the promise of something new that can be learned from: ‘Informal’ as something containing/suggesting new/alternative forms. Actually in this sense I can see informality gaining some of the opposite bias related to urban ecology, in the romantic sense of something “natural”, “needing no fixing or tinkering”.
So when something is informal does it need to be ‘re-formed’, taught and disciplined, or does it need to be left alone and learned from? I think this question shows that the concept of informality is ultimately entangled in power relations and the point of view of the “expert” urban agent. Whether the informal is invoked more as something that needs to be tamed or something that needs to be protected/promoted, in each case it is the expert (be it architect, planner, etc..) that gets the volition.
The same thing could be said for “participatory” as it relates to the level of citizen control. even something ‘highly participatory’ still places “nonexperts” in a subordinate position.
Take Arnstein’s ‘ladder of participation’; as a conceptual tool its point of view centers on the expert: 7 rungs describe different stances experts can take (informing, placation..) and only the last rung is devoted to a vague “citizen control”. Imagine a conceptual tool that instead incorporated the relative stances that citizens could take against experts; perhaps it would include things like exploitation, declaration, adaptation.
I think this speaks to the heart of what you are saying, that we need to embrace tools (linguistic/conceptual and technological) that can be wielded from multiple perspectives. Of course there isn’t one model that can explain the total “complexity of urbanization”, as humans we always need to simplify to some extent in order to make choices and act; but we can likely still achieve a far higher level of detail and flexibility than we have now, and certainly part of that is finding new ways to talk about things, new lenses.
unfortunately, even though you stress that ‘in-formation’ does not mean incomplete, I did kind of get that sense on first reading and so I’m not sure the term itself will sound the way you intend to everyone without an explanation.
Regardless, the concept you put underneath it is fascinating, that is, “the dynamic production of urban forms and its perpetual incremental improvement and conservation”. ‘informal’ misses the nuance.. it seems like what you want is a word that expresses the interaction of different classes of systems including the so-called informal but also formal; one might say (in)formal but the pomo punctuation is a little wearisome.
in any case the idea reminds me of a great example from Portland, Oregon that would make a good blog post. One of the cities informal monuments was “The Pyle”, a pile of children’s bikes chained together outside a pizza place downtown. Every month the Zoobombers, a group of bikers, unchains the bikes and rides them down the large hill by the zoo (hence the name). This tradition got a lot of notoriety, but the city would often threaten to remove the bikes from where they were chained since businesses complained about the obstruction and presumably saw it as an eyesore. The bikers were persistent and the pyle became such a beloved local symbol that it was ultimately left alone; but about a year ago the city decided to authorize an official monument for the bikers where they could chain their bikes (http://www.sustainableportland.org/mayor/index.cfm?c=49518&a=247852), thereby formalizing an informal institution so to speak, since in the new spot it was no longer illegal or obtrusive to chain the bikes in a large pile:
“For a number of years the mini-bikes that were piled somewhat haphazardly near the intersection of W. Burnside and 10th created a stir amongst business owners. But where there is tension, there is opportunity for collaboration and creative ways of addressing both the concerns and the cultural relevancy of the Zoobomb mini-bike “Pyle.”"
The last time I checked though there were still many bikes still chained in the old spot as well as the new monument.
So did the city tame something chaotic and informal? Didn’t the biker’s system have to be pretty “formal” (organized/functional/planned) in the first place to become so recognizeable as to eventually be monumentalized?
I think this kind of successful collaboration of different urban actors and their systems is great in the way it works with overlapping urban structures and institutions; and notice how difficult it is to ascribe the terms formal/informal to it since it vacillates between and contains both. There have to be some other ways to describe this kind of thing and maybe ‘in-formation’ is one.
February 7th, 2011 at 3:51 am
[...] While URBZ is located within Dharavi, a lot of their work addresses the wider implications of living in cities that are ‘in-formation‘. [...]
July 3rd, 2011 at 5:08 am
[...] spent most of the last two weeks with contractor Amar Madhukar Nirjankar in a neighbourhood “in formation” in Bhandup in the north-eastern suburb of Mumbai. Utkarsh Nagar, like many of the so-called [...]