ABSTRACT
The preceding parts of this book have addressed a diversity of perspectives concerning the scope of extant informality in urban settlements, emerging forms of informal urbanism, the intricacy of processes involved from the agency of communities with varying strategies for survival, and experiences of social and dynamic resilience, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic – as well as wider societal perceptions, responses, and ongoing outcomes. Evidence from evolving cases of informal and formal settlements has spanned contexts across all the continents – from the Americas to the Caribbean, Europe, South-East Asia, Africa, and the Antipodes.
The types of case studies that have been presented in these parts ranged from singular in-depth and dual/triple comparative cases, within either the Global South or the Global North, to cross-regional comparative cases between countries across both the North and South – as well as top-down policy-led, bottom-up, and design-led experiments for rehabilitating existing settlements or constructing new structural templates. The cases have been characterised by the contributors’ diverse ontological perspectives of resilience arising from informality and corresponding approaches to data gathering and interpretive analyses.
Insights drawn from these case study findings highlight the critical roles played by a complex set of factors – including individual and collective agency across the types of informal livelihoods and street vending, within and beyond informal settlements such as Indonesian riverside kampungs, in terms of ties with, and services provided for, their internal and wider city populations. Other factors analysed in the preceding chapters include levels of co-production (where such processes exist) of infrastructures between grassroots, professional, and institutional actors – all within the context of resource distribution disparities and modernist planning paradigms underlying the spatial policies of local/city governance approaches.
We explore the implications of these insights by drawing on concepts set out in our introduction to the book, including notions of informal placemaking as a dialogue between urban citizens and groups having or lacking rights to the city, a hierarchy of formal political structures, and heterarchical informal governance mechanisms within the context of their decentered locality, neoliberal political economy, and aspirational city goals. We thereby further develop our preliminary framework outlined in the introduction for better characterising and integrating resilience perspectives within decolonising Global South planning and design, with potential lessons for the Global North and a call for spatial justice.
