Just building a loose collection of links on this topic. I believe that informal settlements are information-rich places and probably my ideal kind of place to live. We had some aspects of an informal settlement in the RV park in Austin, and I have created some aspects of informal settlements in my house and yard where I live now.
Unfortunately, despite the economic and social collapse that is in progress as we speak, the extractive institutions of industrial/capitalist culture always seems to reserve plenty of energy to meddle with the beautiful and community-building improvisations of informal settlements. The only leverage we really have against “them” (centralized PTB) is labor. They need our labor.
Still, at this juncture, the fact that it’s really hard for people to keep a roof over their head at today’s rents does not induce government to allow people to build their own simple structures on the margins and collect their own water and so on. This guy is a very real topic that we probably have not talked about enough in Degrowth and Deep Adaptation circles. Centralized institutions are failing to meet people’s basic needs, but when people try to route around them — build a parallel grassroots economy to meet their basic needs their own way (including many of the techniques we learned in Permaculture design class) — the boot of centralized authority (code enforcement, zoning, compulsively cop-calling neighbors etc.) comes down very quickly.
•Theresa Williamson: “Sustainable Favelas: The Key to Climate Justice and Thriving Cities?” (a keynote presentation at The Nature of Cities Festival 2024). Dr. Williamson is director of an organization called Catalytic Communities. My favorite takeaway from her presentation (and I had many! as her presentation, and informal settlements in general, are right up my alley) is, “An overly managed city is a dead city.” She talked about the sweet spot, where government is helping without quashing creativity and innovation. I believe the presentation recording is only available to people who attended the festival. However, you can find lots of Dr. Williamson’s work online.
• A quote from one of Dr. Williamson slides at TNOC 2024: “Could it be that those favelas that reach a ‘sweet spot’ of complexity and are then able to solidify their qualities without escalating into dysfunction hold a key to vibrant and sustainable urbanization?”
•Another of Dr. Williamson’s slides from her keynote from TNOC 2024 lists the qualities of Rio’s favelas that urban planners struggle to achieve. The list includes high use of bicycles & transit, pedestrian-centered “no cars, no strangers,” high rate of entrepreneurship, efficient & responsive architecture, affordable housing in central areas, low social isolation, strong mutual-support networks, mixed-use development, intense cultural incubators.
• YouTube video by Cities@Tufts: “Rethinking the future of housing worldwide: Favelas as a sustainable model, with Theresa Williamson”. BTW Cities@Tufts does a lot of good webinars.
• Searching on informal settlements reveals many good articles and videos. Here’s one from a past TNOC. “They are not ‘informal settlements.’ They are habitats made by people.” (Lorena Záwate, Ottawa; April 2016, on the TNOC website).
• Informal settlements, or decentralized habitats, are places of great cultural richness and living skills. But they tend to be criminalized, as Lorena Záwate explains in the article linked above: “In academic and government documents, “informal settlements” is the label typically applied to these areas. That those communities are not in compliance with building norms and property and urban planning regulations is often given as the main reason for qualifying them as “informal”. Also defined as “irregular”, they can easily be called “illegal”, and their inhabitants subsequently criminalized, displaced, and persecuted. From India to South Africa to Ecuador, legal and administrative changes have been made in recent years to give special/ad hoc inspection and demolition powers to local, provincial, and national governments to deal with these neighborhoods and, in theory, to prevent them from growing (in many cases, environmental laws and regulations or urban projects are used as excuses for destroying these settlements).”
• Festivals, such as the Kerrville Folk Music Festival and some small regional Burner events (I’m just naming ones I have directly experienced, although there are many more, such as Bonnaroo, Glastonbury, the main Burningman, and so on), have been joyful experiments in creating what I realized were temporary cities. There’s no reason why they couldn’t be permanent. There are many important caveats to help keep things from descending into the bad kind of chaos. But when it works, it really works. People build a wide array of regenerative skills both “hard” and “soft” at these festivals. Skills ranging from conflict resolution, NVC, acupuncture, counseling; to improvising shade structures, harvesting rainwater, gardening, arborculture, flood-control micro-earthworks, and generating electricity.
• Christiania Free Town in Copenhagen Denmark is a longtime famous informal settlement/anarchist community. I heard that in recent years, though, they found themselves overwhelmed with drug dealing and other violent crime, and they ended up calling in the police and other central authorities to try to manage things. This may have just been a reflection on the creeping authoritarianism in greater society. Fear drives us to seek central authority. I even feel the tendency in myself at times. On a personal note, when I was living in Tokyo in the early 1990s, I met a wonderful couple who had come from Christiania. They were so creative, open-hearted, and compassionate.