ABSTRACT
Over one billion people now live in ‘squatter’, ‘slum’ or ‘informal’ housing settle-
ments globally; this population is expected to double by 2030, making it the major
form of urban design and development globally (United Nations 2003). Yet informal
settlements are the black holes of urbanist discourse – largely invisible and unstud-
ied in morphological terms. Squatter, slum and informal are problematic and negat-
ive words, defined in terms of a lack: a squatter lacks land tenure; a slum lacks
space, durability, water or sanitation; and informal implies a lack of control over
planning, design and construction. This chapter is an attempt to understand such
settlements in terms of how they work as places or assemblages. While it is easy to
regard such settlements as unsustainable, they are the way in which one in every six
people sustain themselves globally and they are in no way temporary. Many such
settlements have developed over time into well-serviced neighbourhoods – no
longer ‘slums’ and with varying levels of tenure and formality. The prospect is to
understand how informal urbanism works as a basis for the transformation from
‘slums’ to decent housing and from squatting to secure tenure.
