Conference Proceedings
CITIES TO BE TAMED?
Section 1 | Places of informality

As a growing number of regions are presently embroiled in the process of urbanisation, informal settlements develop unabated in the territories of the ‘global South’. In the last fifty years, design-related disciplines have informed a multitude of practices and conceptual frameworks exploring ways to qualitatively transform these sites. An enduring and highly disputed problem, however, has remained the difficulty in assessing within which processes, and to which extent, the production of design strategies can acquire agency and have significant leverage effects within the informal sectors of contemporary cities – thus effectively contributing toward the feasible amelioration of living conditions for their inhabitants.

What role do design-related disciplines currently play, in relation to the self-produced transformative logics that shape informal cities across the world? What place might be accorded to design products and processes, at the crossroad between the social and spatial dimensions of urban poverty and inequality? Under which conditions and at which scales can design have a strategic function, and contribute to producing structural modifications on the longer term?

PRACTICES

Chair: Maddalena Falletti
Discussant: Nabeel Hamdi, Oxford Brookes University

• The Transnational Dimension of Contemporary Urban Landscape in Morocco
Alice Buoli
• Pragmatic Planning. Extending Water and Electricity Networks in Irregular Settlements of Lima, Peru
Laure Criqui
• Lessons from ‘the Other Side’. Post-Colonial Ideals and Everyday Inhabitation in the Michenzani Blocks, Zanzibar
Annelies De Nijs
• Collective Activity as a Traditional Knowledge behind the Physical Design. The Case of Urban Kampungs in Indonesia
Adiyanti Sutandyo-Buchholz

POLICIES
Chair: Lina Scavuzzo
Discussants: Colin Marx, University College London,
and Agostino Petrillo, Politecnico di Milano

• The Mischievous City. The Kolkata Poor and the Outsmarting of Neoliberal Urbanisation
Antarin Chakrabarty
• (Ir)rational U(dys)topias? Sites and Services in Nairobi
Bruce Githua
• Re-envisioning Informal Settlements and HIV and Aids Together
Colin Marx
• (Re)designing Land Tenure to Meet Housing Needs of theUrban poor. Implementing Community Land Trusts in Kenya
Emmanuel Midheme
• Informal Growth of Housing in Belgrade under the Impact of Transition to Global Economy
Sanja Simeunčević Radulović, Biserka Mitrović, Miodrag Ralevic, Mladen Ðurović

DESIGN PRICIPLES
Chair: Beatrice De Carli
Discussants: Camillo Boano, University College London, 
and Viviana D’Auria, University of Leuven

• Visioning How Small Scale Projects Could Be Strategically Extended to Large Scale Long Term Interventions. A Lesson from Uganda
Elena Archipovaite
• Socio-spatial Patterns: The Backbone of Informal Settlement Regeneration
Carmen Mendoza Arroyo
• The Power of the Informal Settlements: the Case of Dar es Salaam
Maria Isabel Rasmussen
• Context in Urbanism. Addressing the Intrinsic Aspirations for Strategic Urban Design in Small Cities in Bangladesh
A.K.M. Sirajuddin
• Using Parametrics to Facilitate Collaborative Urban Design. An Attempt to Overcome some Inherent Dilemmas
Nicolai Steinø, Karima Benbih, Esben Obeling
• Development Aspects of Formal and Informal Urban Types
Dick Urban Vestbro