Urban Informality and the Built Environment

An innovative collection that explores how informal urban structures, from unauthorized residential areas to unregulated economic activities, shape urbanity through insights from architects, planners, political scientists, geographers, and urban theorists.

Urban Informality and the Built Environment demonstrates the value of greater and more diverse forms of engagement of built-environment disciplines with what constitutes urban informality and its politics. This collection lays forth a range of new methodologies to the study of urban informality, by exploring case studies from multiple geographies, including the creative place-making of street artists in Accra, the morphological evolution of urban Tirana, urban agriculture in la Habana, and social reproduction in Greece. Together these case studies offer ways to promote cross-fertilization between disciplines, lenses, geographies, and methodologies. Drawing on recent research by architects, planners, political scientists, geographers, and urban theorists, this book brings a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of informality and the built environment in diverse contexts.