Informal Settlements of the Global South by Karunaratne, Gihan;

Short description:

Bringing together case studies, including the US-Mexico borderlands, the Calais encampment in France, refugee camps in Kenya, Uganda and Bangladesh and ‘informal’ enclaves in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, this book challenges the thinking about the governance of human settling, mobility, and placemaking.

Long description:

Bringing together case studies ranging across the globe, including the US-Mexico borderlands, the Calais encampment in France, refugee camps in Kenya, Uganda and Bangladesh and contested ‘informal’ enclaves and communities in the cities of India, China, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, this book challenges current ways of thinking about the governance of human settling, mobility and placemaking.

Together, the 15 essays question the validity of the conventional hegemonic divisions of Global North vs. Global South and ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’, in terms of geographic presence, transborder performances and the ideological inter-dependence of Northern and Southern spaces, spatial practices and the uniformity of authoritative enforcements. The book, whose authors themselves come from all over the world, uses ‘Global South’ as a methodological apparatus to ask the ‘Southern’ question of settling and unsettling across the globe. Crucially, the studies reveal the sentiments, resourcefulness and the agency of those positioned by the powerful within the dichotomies of formal/informal, legitimate/ illegal, privileged/marginalized, etc., who are traditionally identified within the dominant development discourse as mere numbers or designated by intervening institutions as helpless recipients.

By focussing on hitherto invisible events and untold stories of adaptation, negotiation and contestation by people and their communities, this volume of essays takes the ongoing North-South debate in new directions and opens up to the reader’s fresh areas of enquiry. It will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, planning, politics and sociology, as well as built environment professionals.

Table of Contents:

Introduction. Section 1: The emergence of ‘global south spaces’ in the north. 1.Diasporic Urbanism. 2.Temporary Sheltering, Empowering Design, and The Jungle: A Case for Architects. 3.Wireless borders: illegal bodies and connected futures. 4.Connecting the Camps: Spatialising the ECHO Mobile Library in Greece. 5.Digital and physical spaces in informal settlements: Migrants, Refugee Camps, and Mapping. Section 2: Seeking Refuge in Global South Camps. 6.Accommodating Informality in the Spatial Planning of the Kalobeyei Refugee Settlement, Kenya. 7.Understanding the Everyday Movements of South Sudanese Refugees in Uganda. 8.The Ephemeral as an instrument of Urban Design and Planning. Section 3: Informal responses of the Informal Settlements in the Global South. 9.The Invisible beyond Visible: The Perils of Urban Regeneration in Colombo’s Slave Island. 10.A Note on the Door: Symbolic Erasure and Representational Resistance in Rio de Janeiro. 11.Organic Urban Regeneration: An Inclusive Urban Design for Rural-to-Urban Migrants in Residential Neighborhoods of Ningbo, China. 12.Towards a ‘hybrid’ governance approach: The way out of the urban development crisis in Lagos, Nigeria? A critical assessment with Makoko as a case study. 13.Embracing in[formal]ity: An exploration of grounded architectural practice in Cape Town. 14.The Why? How? What? and What-ifs of mass slum rehabilitation housing in India. CODA 15.The Pandemic and Informal settlements. Index.