Informal Cities Bibliozone

In February, Foresight For Development turns the spotlight on informal city futures .

Featured in Bibliozone this month is a collection of publications related to the future of informal cities. The selection of documents is partial and based on accessible material. Therefore, we would like to invite everyone to supplement our library with additional materials.

From our FFD library:

Here are the publications available in our library:

• South African Informal City Exhibition and Book
• The Informal City Dialogues project
• Squattercity blog & book
• Other “Informal City” futures resources

South African Informal City Exhibition and Book

The initiative is a survey of South Africa’s most relevant and innovative design and research projects, featuring explorations and interventions in the informal sector from across the country. The aim is to open up dialogue and discussion around the critical issues of informality and urban development. As such, the month-long exhibition was accompanied by a one-day seminar exploring the opportunities and challenges around informality.

The exhibition explores South Africa’s own conditions of informality by providing a showcase for the work being done locally to address these important issues; and it also provides a platform for comparison and an opportunity for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

• SA Informal City Seminar Downloads
• The SA Informal City Online Exhibition

The Informal City Dialogues project

The Informal City Dialogues is a year-long project supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and conducted by Forum for the Future. It homes in on six cities: Accra, Bangkok, Chennai, Lima, Manila and Nairobi. In each of these cities, it aims to foster a conversation about the informal urban realm, and how it can be cultivated and harnessed for the benefit of all.

• The Informal City Reader
• Features
  Read long-form dispatches from each of the six cities involved in the Informal City Dialogues.
• Workshops
  Through a series of workshops, participants in the Informal City Dialogues are envisioning how to make their cities more resilient and inclusive. Learn how the process works and what innovations they're developing.
• Pictures and Videos
  Explore the Informal City Dialogues visually, as their bloggers capture the informal city in photographs. And watch the stories unfold in our online documentary series, created with the award-winning filmmakers at Still Life Projects.

Squattercity blog & book

• Robert Neuwirth’s Blog: Squattercity
  Squatters and Squatter Cities Around the World
• Upside-Down Urbanism
• Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World by Robert Neuwirth
  In almost every country of the developing world, the most active builders are squatters, creating complex local economies with high rises, shopping strips, banks, and self-government. As they invent new social structures, Neuwirth argues, squatters are at the forefront of the worldwide movement to develop new visions of what constitutes property and community.

Other “Informal City” futures resources

• A City Where Energy Costs and Quality of Life are Tightly Intertwined
• African City: towardds a new paradigm - "chameleonic" urbanism for hybrid cities
• A peek into the future: Slums as innovation hotbeds
• Cairo’s Informal Areas: Between Urban Challenges and Hidden Potentials – Facts, Voices, Visions.
• Could a ‘Slum Technology Hub’ Lead the Way To Nairobi’s Future?
• Electrifying the Bottom of the Pyramid: Improving Access in Slums
• Informal City Dialogues Final Briefing Paper
• Integration of Informal Settlements in Maputo: Strategies and Challenges
• Knowledge and Innovation in Africa – Scenarios for the Future
• Learning from Informal Cities, Building for Communities
• Mapping Kibera: New Strategies for Mapping and Improving the Slum
• Moddeling Informal Settlement Growth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
• Modelling informal urban growth under rapid urbanisation
• Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Proletariat

• Prospective Slum Policies: Conceptualization and Implementation of a Proposed Informal Settlement Growth Model
• Reimagining the Future of Informality: Scenarios from the Global South
• Slums: A Catalyst Bed for Poverty Eradication
• Slums of the World: The face of urban poverty in the new millennium?
• State of the World's Cities 2010/2011 - Cities for All: Bridging the Urban Divide
• The Apocalyptic Informal - The big screen and glimpses of the future city?
• The challenge of the slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003
• The Future of Cities: Three scenarios for urban futures
• The Future of Slums: Rethinking Their Place in West Africa's Cities
• The future of townships
• The Urban Poor, the Informal City and Environmental Health Policy in Nigeria: Strategies Towards Social Harmony
• Toward an epistemology of the form of the Informal city: Mapping the process of informal city making
• Understanding Informal Urban Patterns By Integrating Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Cellular Automata (CA) Modelling
• Urbanization and (In)Formalization
• Urban squatters save the world

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