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The Past And Future Of Informal Settlements

Posted by: Christian Peralta Madera

4 March 2007 - 11:00am

While urban growth is heavily regulated in industrialized countries, most of the world develops without a legal planning framework.

"While regulated, structured growth is the coin of the realm in the US and in many metropolitan areas overseas, informal land development - that is, urban neighborhoods built outside of a conventional property ownership and land market system -- is actually the predominant model of urban development and urban growth in cities in the developing world, says Lincoln Institute visiting fellow Claudio Acioly."

"Acioly, an architect and urban planner with the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies-IHS, The Netherlands, has studied the phenomenon of informality or informal settlement in Africa, Latin America, Asia and Central and Eastern Europe."

"In a recent Lincoln House lecture, Acioly showed how informal settlement persists despite housing programs, settlement upgrading and land regularization policies. Informal land development - in the form of illegally and informally developed housing and human settlements - typically accounts to 20 to 70 percent of urban growth in cities in the developing world."

"Informality may soon be knocking on the door of industrialized countries as well," remarks Acioly.

Full Story: Exploring informal settlement
Source: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, February 27, 2007
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Planners, architects, artists, and other community members can make the exploratory walk a key tool in re-making places, stemming from the emotions and atmospheres perceived by people who live there or visit them, and plan outward from the experiential, toward trajectories, shapes, and physical structures.
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