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AGENCY has been awarded a residency fellowship at The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. They will be working on compiling an analytical research text entitled Informal Urbanisms. Stay tuned to AGENCY’s blog for updates and case studies.
Project Description:
Throughout the modernizing world there are marginalized populations, displaced by the rapidly expanding, productive circles of industrialized, and globalized society. Refugee camps, nomadic populations, social housing blocks, shanty towns, and entire cities in developing nations, invent ways to construct informal environments that operate outside the legal, political, and societal frameworks that have otherwise ignored them. Demonstrating a unique ability to turn apparently overwhelming disadvantage into a unique combination of self-expression, subversion, and subterfuge, these neglected social enclaves can provide an alternative to the historically failed models of explicit urban planning.
We propose to compile an illustrated research text outlining our interpretation of these improvisational environments. By investigating the physical and perceptual constructions of these fortuitously disadvantaged urban assemblies, we hope to outline a new model of “bottom-up” infrastructural and architectural development, producing a catalog of self-organizing developmental techniques in direct contrast to the failed and failing insistence on “top-down” utopian prescriptions of modernist planners past and present.
Absolving architectural designers and urban planners of the burden to impose a uniform image of urbanity for populations that do not share the same dream, and cannot fulfill its expectations, these strategies instead allow for multiple images of the city to emerge – where the built environment is responsive and representative of the people it serves, and the global economy of which it is part.
[Refugee Camp Distribution v. Population Density in SubSaharan Africa. © A G E N C Y]
