Editorial / Reto Bürgin

Polis / Rapid Urbanisation and the Rise of Informal Settlements Reto Bürgin / Editorial / 1 Fabienne Hoelzel / Infrastructure, networks, and alliances: Approaches in Editorial / Reto urban slum regeneration in West Africa. Case study: Reto Bürgin is an urban geographer Lagos (Nigeria) / 3 Bürgin and urban sociologist. He is a passionate urban researcher and editor of Christiane Rudić / several books related to urban issues, such as urban planning, urban Understanding housing- social movements, and urban resistance. finance strategies of informal He is a PhD student in economic geography at the Institute of Geography settlement dwellers in at the University of Bern and a research The city I grew up in is a very small one. Basel. It is tiny compared assistant at the ETH Wohnforum – Dar es Salaam / 9 ETH CASE at the ETH Zurich. to the big towns mentioned in this volume of Polis. Less than Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert the He enjoys extensive city walks and is 200,000 people live there. But it is a city, and indeed city for me. a passionate urban photographer. Klumpner, and Alexis It is the place that makes my heart beat faster the closer I get and where my heart will always belong. But why am I talking about heart Kalagas / Close Encounters: and city? Like a heart, a city has its own pulse, like every single Architecture and Community one of the thousands of cities in the world. Some pulsate faster and in Khayelitsha / 13 others slower. With regard to Basel, the nexus of city and heart also has a further dimension for me. As an innocent student, Eefje Hendriks / Catalysing Basel was the place where I began to dedicate myself wholeheartedly informal community to the study of cities – in Switzerland and in the global arena. development after natural As a geographer, I enjoy extensive city walks. Yet, it is more than disasters / 17 just walking; we might more aptly call it “exploring”. How can Kirtee Shah / Housing the we better try to understand a city than by taking the time for a walk, Urban Poor in India – An to ponder our urban surroundings and to discover new phenomena in the urban jungle? Exploring new cities and their everyday life Approach with Promise / 21 helps us better understand our own city. Observing and comparing Jin Zhu / Where is our housing help us get beyond our preconceptions – and this is important. coordinate? The current We can study different cities in different places and learn from their specific contexts. And this is exactly what this third volume status and alteration outlet of Polis tries to convey: it seeks to offer selective insights into processes of housing in Shanghai / 28 | downloaded: 4.10.2021 of rapid urbanisation of pulsating cities on different continents. Varsha Bhagat-Ganguly / It is devoted to the issue of the housing shortage in the informal settlements of rapidly growing cities and is driven by the Diminishing Vibrancy: question of how to create and how to improve living space in these Process of Informalisation liminal urban spaces. This volume has a focus on informal housing, in the Walled City housing construction, and ecological, economic, and social sustainability. Special attention will also be paid to the material of Ahmedabad / 33 conditions of these housing estates and to the collective supply Charlotte Malterre-Barthes / systems (transportation, water, electricity), which play a decisive The Good, the Bad, and the role in the development of informal settlements alongside different (social) regulatory systems or arbitrary legal conceptions. Ugly: Cairo’s Informal Urbanisation, Vanishing https://doi.org/10.7892/boris.105947 1 Agrarian Lands, and the Role of Planners / 37 source: Our cities are growing rapidly and seemingly unstoppably, as on case studies of specific instantiations of this phenomenon. mostly in Africa and Asia. Within a few years, small fishing As a consequence, it will become possible to illuminate similarities and farming villages have developed into large metropolitan areas, and differences as well as regionally distinct issues across various whose names most of us have never heard before. This has cultural contexts. Will you find them by reading the articles? Infrastructure, networks, caused a wealth of new challenges that these urban environments A large proportion of the authors in this volume are architects are now facing. Land is becoming increasingly expensive, affordable and/or development specialists. Some of them are among the living space is scarce, housing prices are on the rise, and the world’s leading experts and practitioners, who try to improve housing construction of housing often cannot keep up with the speed of and the everyday life of the poor with their tireless commitment. and alliances: demographic change. In response to this, numerous informal Others are young architectural researchers, doctoral students, settlements are being established at the outskirts of these growing and aspiring architects. The authors in this volume had the oppor - cities, where a rural depopulation is in full swing. tunity to freely choose the form of their contributions. Thus, In the search for work, because of hazards, or with the hope some of the articles are academic in nature while others take the form Approaches in urban for a better life, innumerable people are leaving their homes of opinion pieces or project descriptions or ponder the personal and are moving into cities, but the housing supply of the arrival city role of a young architect in this emerging field. may not be prepared for this. The pursuit of happiness may be This volume is inspired by the book Metropolis Nonformal (2015) by a long journey and a never-ending one for many. Access to jobs and Christian Werthmann and Jessica Bridger and by the No Cost Housing slum regeneration adequate housing is not granted to everyone, and increasing social Conference, which took place in summer 2016, organised by inequality fundamentally changes the ways in which people the ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE and Urban-Think Tank of ETH are experiencing everyday urban life. Slums, mainly located at the Zurich. During my work as the curator of this large international outskirts of cities, are growing rapidly, and urban growth is conference, I had the possibility to dive deeply into the topic in West Africa. Case study: expanding more and more into former rural areas. As a consequence, of low-cost, affordable, and adequate housing from an architectural more land is clutched by the city. But does expansion resolve the perspective, even though I am not an architect myself. But it has pent-up problems, and does it reflate the search for a satisfied life? aroused my interest. Recently, informal settlements such as barrack towns It was a great pleasure and honour for me to be the editor of Lagos (Nigeria) / or slums have been bursting at the seams and have come to be the this third volume of Polis. I would like to thank Christa Ziegler, first points of contact for countless migrants. These dwellings Georg Rutishauser of edition fink publishers, and, of course, all the are swiftly set up at the outskirts of cities and, more often than not, authors for the fruitful collaboration that has resulted in this book. Fabienne Hoelzel is professor of without the influence of state planning or the know-how of profes- During the process of editing this volume, I have redis- Fabienne Hoelzel urban design at the Stuttgart State sional planners. The inhabitants themselves take their fate into covered the “explorer” in me. Reading the contributions to this volume Academy of Art and Design and the founding director of FABULOUS their own hands and build their own four walls rather than waiting has reminded me of the exciting life of the curious and highly URBAN, a design, research, for a top-down housing construction initiative by the government. passionate researcher of cities, who explores a new and unknown and planning agency for less developed Today, more than one seventh of the world’s population part of the cities of this world. I hope you can also discover your regions, after working for one of In the light of the enormous challenge that urbanisation processes in West Africa Latin America’s largest slum- is living in such informal settlements, sometimes beyond the state’s own, inner curious urban traveller by reading the following lines, upgrading programmes as the head interests, control, and influence. It is now up to all of us to better by breaking up the dualism of formal and informal. represent – urban growth driven by poverty (not opportunity), a big and of the urban design and planning understand the conditions of rapid urbanisation and to create oppor- growing number of settlements without infrastructure (sanitation, access to safe team at the Social Housing and Urban Development Authority of São Paulo, tunities for decent, affordable, and adequate housing. It doesn’t water, health services, affordable housing, and so on) against the backdrop of very Brazil, which was awarded the matter if we are architects, sociologists, geographers, developers, limited funding, and overwhelmed governments at all governance levels – UN Habitat Scroll of Honour in 2012 engineers, or urban dwellers – new strategies can only become fruitful for its pioneering work. From 2008 there is a need for fast, effective, and affordable planning approaches to improve to 2010 and from 2013 to 2017, if ideas and desires can be reconciled with reality. Fabienne held a research and teaching the living conditions of the residents in urban slums, the predominant local urban position at the Institute of Urban This volume of Polis approaches the issues involved in informal pattern. These solutions need to be poverty-focused – most people live on Design at the ETH Zurich. She lectures and writes on a regular basis.

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