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African Urbanisms>programme>session-20-van-greunen

Urban ‘Informal’ Settlement: the shaping of Public Space in the margins and on the peripheries

Session 20

Author: Phia van Greunen (The University of Melbourne)

Keywords: Informal Settlement, Public Space, 'Planning' in the Margins

Session 20: Planning from the Margins? Towards the Transformative Pathways in Planning

Friday October 25, 9:00–10:30, Far West Studio, John Moffat Building

Urban ‘Informal’ Settlement: the shaping of Public Space in the margins and on the peripheries

Abstract

In Southern Africa, informal settlement is the primary mode of urban production, yet it remains in the margins and on the peripheries. These neighbourhoods are veiled in negative perceptions because we approach them as service delivery- and housing challenges, and from the perspective of normative planning; but never as an alternative (or legitimate) way of city-making. We need a more fine-grained understanding of how they actually work. This presentation is about public space produced through informal settlement: informal settlement as a verb. Informality challenges our understanding of urbanism in various ways: appropriations, infills or even entire settlements that transgress both legal divides and normative urban processes. While the will of the planner is a repetition of property boundaries and fixed coding of use; the informal settlement is always in process. But how does public space (or an entire neighbourhood) emerge through informal settlement? What are the various influences (social and material) to their shaping over time? What are the various uses and meanings of public spaces that were developed organically? How is it defined in relation to private space? How is that threshold understood, negotiated, materially demarcated, and continually contested? What is the capacity of public space in its continued re-shaping; how does spatial appropriation at interface scale influence change at larger settlement scales and vice versa? The research explores these questions through three in-depth case studies in Namibia and South Africa. Because informal settlement is inherently social and emergent from life as it is lived, spatial qualities emerge and change incrementally in a highly social and contextual manner. Alternative urban processes have shaped public spaces that are novel in each instance: extending beyond spaces for play and consumption into spaces for livelihoods and social networks; places where the majority of Southern Africans practice everyday life.

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