Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications
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ItemInformal Settlement as a Mode of Production(Routledge, 2019-05-29)The essays in this volume are organized in three parts: Part I: Comparative Urbanism; Part II: Challenges; and Part III: Opportunities.
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ItemIncremental urbanisms(Routledge, 2017-01-01)Those who have studied the micro-morphology include Arefi (2011), Bhatt and Rybczynski (2003) and Ribeiro (1997). Informal settlements are mostly undocumented (Patel and Baptist 2012; Robinson 2002), yet documentation is critical for any kind of integration with the formal city.
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ItemUprooting critical urbanism(Taylor & Francis, 2011)This paper engages the debate between assemblage thinking as an emerging body of critical urban theory and the desire to contain it within a framework of urban political economy. I take critical urban theory to mean the broad intellectual engagement with the ways in which cities and urban spaces are implicated in practices of power. Assemblage thinking moves outside a strict political economy framework and embodies different ontologies of power and place, yet this is not a shift away from criticality. Such thinking connects disparate threads of current urban theory as it opens new modes of multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary research geared to urban design and planning practices and therefore to potentials for urban transformation. To contain emerging assemblage theory under political economy is to neuter it and potentially produce conservative forms of practice. The framework of urban political economy brings enormous explanatory power to our understanding of cities and will develop most effectively if it does not consume its offspring. © 2011 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
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ItemDharavi: Informal Settlement and Slum Upgrading(Melbourne University Publishing, 2012)
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ItemPlacing Graffiti: Creating and Contesting Character in Inner-city Melbourne(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2012-02-01)Debates over definitions of urban graffiti as either 'street art' or 'vandalism' tend to focus on either contributions to the field of artistic practice or violations of a legal code. This paper explores the place of graffiti as an urban spatial practice-why is graffiti where it is and what is its role in the constructions and experiences of place? Through interviews and mapping in inner-city Melbourne, the paper explores the ways that potential for different types of graffiti is mediated by the micro-morphology of the city and becomes embodied into the urban habitus and field of symbolic capital. From a framework of Deleuzian assemblage theory graffiti negotiates ambiguous territories between public/private, visible/invisible, street/laneway and art/advertising. Graffiti is produced from intersecting and often conflicting desires to create or protect urban character and place identity. It is concluded that desires to write and to erase graffiti are productive urban forces, while desires to promote or protect it are problematic. © 2012 Copyright Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.
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ItemInformal urbanism and complex adaptive assemblage(LIVERPOOL UNIV PRESS, 2012-01-01)Informal urbanism, from informal settlements to economies and street markets, is integral to cities of the global South - economically, socially, environmentally and aesthetically. This paper seeks to unfold and re-think this informal/formal conception using two interconnected theoretical frameworks. First is assemblage theory derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in which a series of twofold concepts such as rhizomic/tree and smooth/striated resonate with the informal/formal construct. Second is theory on complex adaptive systems, in which dynamic and unpredictable patterns of self-organisation emerge with certain levels of resilience or vulnerability. These approaches are drawn together into the concept of a complex adaptive assemblage, illustrated with brief snapshots of urban informality drawn from Southeast Asian cities. The challenge is to develop multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar methodologies to explore the ways in which informality is linked to squatting, corruption and poverty on the one hand, and to growth, productivity and creativity on the other.
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ItemAssembling Architecture(EDINBURGH UNIV PRESS, 2013)
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ItemInformalising Architecture: The Challenge of Informal Settlements(Wiley - John Wiley & Sons, 2013)Abstract Transgression is often driven by the power to exercise choice and consciously cross the line. As Kim Dovey, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Melbourne, explains, informal settlements, which have grown up globally out of immediate need for shelter and community, and are legally precarious, transgress established codes of ‘land tenure, urban planning, design and construction’. Their condition requires transgression, even if they are subversion through necessity rather than by design. So what is architecture's future role in informal settlements? And what can be learnt from this more ad hoc and incremental model of urban design?
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ItemInformal Urbanism and the Taste for Slums(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2012)This paper explores the aesthetics and politics of slum tourism – what are the attractions and what are the dangers of aestheticizing poverty? We first present eleven images of slums and informal urbanism in south and Southeast Asia and suggest a complex mix of attractions for Western tourists. On the one hand informal urbanism can be picturesque with elements of nostalgia and a quest for authenticity; on the other is the shock of the real, the spectacle of intensive labyrinthine urbanity and an uneasy voyeurism. We suggest the attraction is more the anxious and awe-filled pleasure of the sublime than any formal beauty. The paper then changes scale to connect such imagery to the political economy and geography of the city where the visibility of slums and urban informality is linked to state and market ideologies. Informal settlements generally have negative symbolic and political capital; the developing state paradoxically needs tourists yet seeks to control the urban image for purposes of branding and to signify law and order. The slum is often hidden from the public gaze in a manner that is complicit with the reproduction of poverty. While the voyeuristic gaze of the Western tourist produces an aestheticization of poverty this does not depoliticize so much as it opens up new connections and potential transformations.
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ItemTeaching Informal Urbanism Simulating Informal Settlement Practices in the Design Studio(TAYLOR & FRANCIS INC, 2013-07-03)Informal settlements have become dominant forms and processes of urban development in many cities, yet the task of helping students engage with design issues in such contexts is fraught with difficulties of access, safety, and complexity. Drawing on detailed fieldwork, this article explores ways in which informal settlement formation can be taught in design studio through the use of games that simulate incremental practices of room-by-room accretion and prospects for transformation. The pedagogical goals are to effect a blurring of authorship and authority, to undermine top-down thinking, and to nourish forms of design imagination that unite process and form.