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Confronting Informality
Shizhe Ma Ferya Ilyas Yilin Lai
A word from the group FERYA ILYAS, SHIZHE MA, YILIN LAI, UNIVERSITY OF STUTTGART, GERMANY
W
e are three students of University of Stuttgart from Pakistan (Ferya), China (Ma) and Taiwan (Yilin) Ferya is a journalist from Karachi; she has a bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication with specialisation in print journalism. She worked for a newspaper for six years during which she reported on urban issues prevalent in Karachi. Ma is an environmental engineer currently doing his master’s in Infrastructure Planning. His academic interests lie in how to implement blue-green infrastructures to address climate change in cities. Yilin is a landscape architect, focusing on planning and designing green infrastructure. She has work experience in planning and construction fields and was inspired to study urbanism after travelling to 11 brilliant cities in different parts of the world. For us, informality is organic, ingenious and complex. While at first we were introduced to informality as something bad, over the years we have learnt that there’s more opportunity than threats in informal urbanisation. Due to the severe lack of
infrastructure, uncontrolled growth and intense inequality, informality is probably the most urgent task faced by planners for sustainable development. But it is also the most beautiful example of co-creation; how people come together to address their needs in a city which doesn’t care much for them. Given the magnitude of this phenomenon - dense population, limited resources and unofficial development, the topic deserves a closer inspection with the simple aim of making people’s lives better. While training new planners in how to address informality, the academia must take a multidisciplinary approach to understanding informality. Informal urbanisation is like a city within a city, with its own political, social and economic dynamics and that’s is exactly why it needs to be seen holistically, rather than just as a spatial configuration. Most importantly, people’s wellbeing should be at the centre of all discussions, interventions and recommendations for informality and this just not means keeping them in mind when planning for informality but asking them for solutions.
They are the experts of their habitat and they should be the one guiding the process of changing conditions for better. Going into the specifics, studying informality should deal with real-life cases, actual interventions and long-term planning. Each context is different and by providing students the opportunities to work directly in informality, educational institutions can equip students with the right skills, knowledge and understanding needed to work in this ever growing field of urbanism. Also, since majority of the informality is in the ‘Global South’, it is important that students are not advised to apply planning practises of the ‘developed world’ to the ‘developing countries’ because their realities are poles apart; since there seems to be a gap in terms of research done on informality in the ‘Global South’, students should be encouraged to dig deep in the topic and develop new theories and frameworks that can help further research and future planning.