Although much is said about the disproportionate expansion of our cities due to the production of low-income housing by developers, it is true that the largest amount of housing and urban space is done informally, understood as a "tangle of social rules, economic processes, political arrangements of urban development and everyday experiences, and although more apparent in low-income settlements, it nonetheless permeates all forms of urban production” (Gilbert, De Jong 2015). If we take Mexico City as an example, 60% of what is built is done informally to varying degrees of intensity, from the center of the city to the outskirts. However, this mode of urbanization is not only occurring in large cities, but also in intermediate and smaller cities.
It is important to understand, therefore, that “peripheral urbanization is notoriously widespread, occurring in many southern cities, regardless of their different histories of urbanization and political specificities” (Caldeira 2016). If we manage to overcome the stigma that informal settlements are places of marginalization, with high crime and poverty, disorganized and inefficient, and understand them at the same time as "subversive" expressions of city production with high permeability to individual and local needs , as opposed to development schemes “from above”, normalizing, stereotyped, limited by filters of representativeness. “Here the idea of a city is of an elastic urban condition, not a grand vision, but a “grand fit” (Rahul Mehrotra 2010). We could be facing an alternative for housing and city production with inherent ingredients to the modes of operation of developing countries and less determined by the distant socio-political, legal and economic realities of the developed West. We are facing the understanding of a housing and city development scheme, which although it has been around for a long time, we have not been able to recognize its possible advantages to the extent that it is capable of integrating innovation, knowledge, flexibility and operational improvements. Furthermore, formality and informality are largely intertwined in a "logic of dialectical urbanization” (Gilbert, De Jong 2015’).
In any case, these modes of spatial production have been present, continue today and will be in the various imaginable futures for decades to come. The monetary, human and material resources with which this informal city is produced will follow its flow to a greater or lesser extent depending on the political, regulatory and economic conditions.
It is completely necessary then to design and implement schemes of intensive and massive involvement of architects in this context of spatial production. The mere conception of the executive architectural project as we know it today would have to be evaluated with a view to extending the impact that the architect's skills can offer. The rigidity of a scheme that corresponds to an orderly and predictable legal, political and productive environment is not capable of containing response tactics given the economic and temporal conditions of the informal city. Is it possible to conceptualize an operating model with which a large number of architects and multidisciplinary teams with different degrees of experience and lines of thought intervene in the informal city? Is it possible for design thinking to make a massive contribution in a rapidly changing context? Is it possible to generate shared intelligence in massive spatial production? Is it possible to change our professional conception of the project to a more responsive and immediate one in which we may not foresee its materialization exactly? Is it possible that digital interaction can be used to catalyze participation in these environments? Is it possible to maintain the difference and the multiplicity of particular architectural solutions on a large scale?
We know that only a very small percentage of construction is carried out with the participation of architects and multidisciplinary professional teams. Current urban planning protocols are only able to have an impact in very limited areas, which some have called pole urbanism. It is necessary to design and implement models that influence the participation of the necessary actors in the spatial production and housing material of the informal city.
Today, a majority of urban settings in the global south are occurring with variations of informality. If we think that a large number of spatial decisions can be positively influenced in matters as simple as natural lighting, ventilation and heat gain or as complex as the layout of public spaces or risk areas, the impact in social terms, quality of life, security , health and urban resilience would be huge. We can take action or remain spectators.
