Incremental production of urban space: A typology of informal design

Highlights

• We have developed a typology of incremental design and construction, identifying typical increments of extend, attach, replace, divide, connect and infill. We have also explored the underlying informal codes or customary rules guiding generative processes with regard to extension and attachment.

• Increments of change are at once the materiality of the productive capacity of informality and the expressive manifestation of resistance and anticipation.

• While informal codes or rules are proscriptive and work through negotiation and consensus, they cannot necessarily prevent the emergence of slum conditions.

• We need a change of mindset, not only from outcomes to codes and processes, but also from rigid to supple codes that can encompass the makeshift and temporary.

• Enabling the productive capacities of incremental urbanism and constraining its destructive aspects are equally important when we wish to sustain adaptive capacities of informal settlement over time.

Abstract

Informal settlement is a form of incremental urban design and planning that seems set to remain a primary mode of urban development in cities of the global South. Yet, we know very little about how incremental urbanism works. In this paper, we suggest a typology of increments as a conceptual lens for understanding the emergence of informal settlement morphologies. We consider the ways residents extend and renovate buildings at micro-spatial scales and identify typical increments of ‘extend’, ‘attach’, ‘replace’, ‘divide’, ‘connect’ and ‘infill’. We also explore the informal rights and codes that govern the ways in which some increments encroach on public space – ‘rights of way’, ‘air-rights’ and ‘the right to light and ventilation’. We engage with the paradox that while every increment is a form of upgrading, informal settlements often produce slum conditions. We suggest that the most effective knowledge base for slum upgrading practices lies in a better understanding of informal settlement as a mode of spatial production.

Introduction

Anyone who has spent much time in informal settlements in cities of the global South will notice the high levels of incremental adaptation of buildings – multiple single-room additions with verandas, roof terraces, balconies and stairways are added and subtracted as part of a continuous transformation. One of the key contrasts with a formal construction process is that the increment size is far smaller, and the number of adaptations is far larger. While each increment is insignificant, the emergent morphology and spatiality that we broadly identify with informal settlements is produced by such incremental adaptation processes. Construction is often makeshift, but there is always a spatial logic and often significant levels of design ingenuity as different forms of livelihood are supported through design and construction. While every increment is a form of upgrading, without the constraint of formal design and planning regulations, such adaptations can escalate into slum conditions. This is not inevitable – informality is a mode of production while ‘slums’ or substandard conditions are one possible outcome (Dovey, 2019). Since the demolition and replacement of most informal settlements is now widely regarded as both impossible and unnecessary, a better understanding of how informal settlements are designed and planned has become a high priority. This study of the forms and rules of incremental adaptation in informal settlements is a step in that direction. What is at stake here is that the livelihoods of the urban poor are intimately connected to capacities for incremental adaptation as the means through which housing is produced and upgraded. Attempts to produce replacement housing often damage such capacities for adaptation and produce dependency. Any initiative to engage in an upgrading process must first understand that incremental production is always already an upgrading process.

Informal urbanism, ranging from informal settlements to informal trading and transport, has become one of the critical global challenges, yet integral to the ways in which cities of the global South work, housing about one billion people (UN-HABITAT, 2006). Informal settlements are by no means marginal to the city (Perlman, 1976) and they are here to stay. Wholesale demolition and displacement do not work since informal settlements are located to access jobs and opportunities. With few exceptions most informal settlements can be upgraded incrementally on the same site to avoid displacement. Such processes of upgrading then rely on a sophisticated understanding of the ways the morphologies and incremental processes of change work in informal settlements. Informal settlements remain in a process of incremental change even after practices of upgrading and formalisation. In this paper we analyse micro-scale adaptation as a dynamic process and the informal codes or rules that mediate these processes of change in informal settlements. While all informal settlements involve incremental development processes, here we focus on small-scale increments of one room or less. We also seek to understand the relations of incremental change to transformational change through an accumulation of increments.

Most academic literature on informal settlements comes from social sciences, geography and planning focusing on the issues of governance, poverty, policy and socio-economic processes at the macro scale (M. Davis, 2006; Bayat, 1997; De Soto, 2000; McFarlane & Waibel, 2012; Roy, 2005; Roy & AlSayyad, 2004; Appadurai, 2001; McFarlane, 2012). The morphologies, micro-spatialities and dynamics of change have remained underexplored although there is an emerging body of research exploring the morphologies of informal settlements (Dovey & Kamalipour, 2018; Dovey & King, 2011; Jones, 2019; Kamalipour, 2016; Kamalipour & Dovey, 2018; Ribeiro, 1997). Analysing generative codes and socio-spatial patterns has been a line of inquiry in urban planning and design thinking with a focus on traditional cities and vernacular settlements (Alexander et al., 1977; Hakim, 2007, 2008, 2014). Arefi (2011) suggests that the logic of informal settlement is an implicit order, based in rules or patterns that are fluid, adaptable and not easily detectable. However, we know very little about the morphogenic processes through which informal settlements change over time.

There is also an extensive body of research on self-help housing, much of it stemming from the work of Turner who celebrated the productive capacities of an incremental architecture that is geared to the rate at which resources become available to the urban poor (Turner, 1967, 1968). There has been some documentation of the ways in which informal increments take place by exploring how rooms are constructed and extended through practices of self-help building over time (Ward, 2015, pp. 375–376; Ward, Jiménez Huerta, Grajeda, & Ubaldoázquez, 2011, pp. 468–470). The bulk of this research has been undertaken in the context of Latin American cities (Bazant, 2003; Peek, 2015; Peek, Hordijk, & d’Auria, 2018; Stiphany, 2019; Ward, Jiménez Huerta, & Di Virgilio, 2015; Ward, Jiménez Huerta, & Di Virgilio, 2014). Drawing on evidence from Egyptian cities, Soliman (2010, p. 136) has identified several steps in the process of incremental housing: construction of walls to demarcate plot perimeters, construction of a room to enable a de facto recognition of tenure, horizontal addition of extra room(s), vertical extension of existing buildings, and connection to electricity/water supply to enable a de jure recognition.

Thinking about the ways in which users can most effectively control the housing design, construction and management is central to Turner's conception of ‘housing as a verb’ (Turner, 1972). The larger questions about the capacities and limitations of self-help housing are very important (Gilbert, 1999; Wakely & Riley, 2011), however, they lie beyond the scope of this paper. We begin from a descriptive rather than a normative position – that incremental/informal/self-help is a major form of housing production. To define it as incremental implies that we study the increments. We argue that harnessing the productive capacities of informality relies on a more sophisticated understanding of how the incremental production of buildings and public space works.

In this paper, we introduce a typology of informal design and construction increments in order to provide a better understanding of the micro-spatial production and adaptation of space in informal settlements. Our focus here is on typical forms and processes across a broad range of settlements without any assumption that these are in any sense universal. We engage with three primary questions: What are the typical increments of change in informal settlements, how do they shape settlement morphologies, and what informal urban codes or rules emerge to mediate such morphological change? To address these questions, we draw on a range of evidence from multiple cities of the global South. What is at stake here is a better knowledge base, and therefore an enhanced ability to work with the productive capacities of incremental upgrading practices. We develop a typology of incremental adaptations as buildings are extended, replaced, divided, connected and infilled; and we explore the ways such adaptations are mediated by informal building codes or rules in three particular informal settlements. We also argue that a better understanding of such types and codes is critical to the success of design intervention.

The concept of urban informality has its roots in economics – the ‘informal sector’ as a mode of production that emerges outside formal markets (Hart, 1973). As a mode of urbanization, it has become multidimensional and difficult to define (Gilbert, 2004; Tonkiss, 2013). This difficulty is due to the fact that informality and formality are not binary conditions but always blurred and interrelated. Urban informality is often seen to cover the range of activities that take place beyond state control. Yet as Roy (2009) points out, informal settlement can also be seen as a form of deregulated urbanism produced by the neoliberal state; the state turns a blind eye to middle-class informality while erasing that of the urban poor. These larger issues of defining urban informality are complex and are not our focus here. However, it is crucial to what follows that we distinguish between informal settlement as a mode of production and the ‘slum’ as a substandard urban condition. The term ‘slum’, with connotations of overcrowding and poor sanitation, refers to a set of substandard conditions rather than a type of housing (Huchzermeyer, 2014; UN-HABITAT, 2010). The ways that informality may or may not produce slums is a key question we seek to engage here.

We also seek to engage with the ways incremental change is mediated by informal codes or rules – the customary rules guiding everyday design and construction decisions in informal settlements. While formal urban codes have been a key theme of study in urban planning and design (Ben-Joseph, 2005; Marshall, 2012; Talen, 2012), informal settlements have rarely been explored in this context. A key distinction in the literature is that between proscriptive or generative codes on the one hand and prescriptive regulations on the other. While a proscriptive or generative code will focus on prohibiting certain undesirable outcomes, it will leave the actual outcome open; a prescriptive code will determine or control a formal outcome (Baer, 2011, p. 279). Hakim has argued that the informal rules or codes that governed traditional Mediterranean urbanism were proscriptive or generative, enabling the huge diversity of formal outcomes (Hakim, 2014). Generative codes can be complex procedures and sequences of decisions framed by prohibitive principles (Alexander, Schmidt, Hanson, Alexander, & Mehaffy, 2008; Talen, 2009, p. 152). There is also a body of knowledge on the formation of traditional settlements through generative processes (H. Davis, 2006; Hakim, 2014). Alexander's work on socio-spatial patterns as generative codes is also seminal in this regard (Alexander et al., 1977; 1987; 2008). Our concern with codes in this paper is with the ways in which they control incremental change in informal settlements, but also with their failure to prevent an escalation onto slum conditions.

Foster (2009) has argued that the challenge of informal settlements is linked to what Hardin (1968) has famously referred to as ‘the tragedy of the commons’ where private interests lead to an exploitation of common resources over time. Ostrom (1990) has argued, against Hardin, that self-organization often works well. While we engage with the challenge of harnessing the productive capacities of informality, we also argue that there is a dark side to generative processes of change in informal settlements where the pursuit of private interest takes over and escalates to the point that public space becomes dysfunctional.