Informal:Informing:Exformal
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reduced to an ambiguous condition; we can’t tell whether they’re dead or alive.” “So then,” Hara offers, “shouldn’t we make the world unknown?” I coined the term “exformation” as half of a conceptual pair, the other half being “information.” Exformation doesn’t mean “making known,” but “understanding how little we know.” . . . Is it possible to communicate not by “making known,” but by “making understood how little we know”? If we can recognize that we know so little, a method for finding out how little we know will become clear as well. We have some information. According to UN-Habitat, Mumbai, Calcutta and Bangkok “have over 10 million people and between one-third and one-half of them live in slums.” The Urban Age Project, in the book The Endless City (2007) estimates the number of people who will be added to major cities every hour by 2015: Lagos (+58), Dhaka (+50), Karachi and Mumbai (+42), and Kinshasa, Delhi, and Jakarta (+39). The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates there are 26,000,000 internally displaced persons worldwide. We know these things. But many of us have little awareness of how little we know about the plans, designs, and architectures created, built, and lived in by the world’s poorest and displaced persons. It is the author’s hope that this paper begins to address this gap, and this potential. So . . . these are the threads that flow through this paper: the pavement dwellers asleep in Mumbai, the doorway dweller in Buenos Aires, the porch dweller packing up and out in Flint, four architects, and the broader lessons available if we believe we have much to learn in informal settlements and from informal settlers. To begin this journey, it might be most appropriate and beneficial to not say what we already know or think we know, but instead, to understand how little we know, and to begin from there. 1.5 LESSONS A small and growing number of architects are moved to action. They understand that the built environments of the world’s poorest people evidence fundamental lessons about the ways in which local people conceive of and construct cities, neighborhoods, structures, and lives. And these architects, to their credit, are involved. In so doing, they find both societal and professional space for their architectural knowledge (head), willingness to work hard often under difficult circumstances (back), and belief that we have much to learn from and offer to the world’s most at-risk populations (heart). However, the sorts of lessons they offer are not always what might be expected, and as will be revealed in their comments, at times are certainly not what was expected or what he or she wanted to know. Admittedly, the alignment of this non-aligned group is based on the author’s interest in their works, either through conversations or lectures. As there is not time or space to give full coverage of the perspectives or work of any one member of this gathering (that is not the purpose of this paper) and as there is not much published or available regarding these or other such activist-practitioners (some don’t have websites or aren’t seeking publicity), a decision was made to select quotes that reflect both