*Celebrating Spatial Planning at TU Delft: 2008-2019. Edited by Stead, Bracken, Rooij & Rocco

Urbanism . TU Delft 95
Confronting Informality
Symposium
ROBERTO ROCCO
The Confronting Informality
Symposium is a student-led
event sponsored by the Chair
of Spatial Planning and Strategy at
the Department of Urbanism.
The Symposium happens once
a year and gathers experts, policy-makers,
practitioners, and others
to discuss informal urbanisation,
its political, economic, and environmental
implications, and the tools
to tackle it.
This Symposium, which has had five
editions, is a result of the Faculty’s
and its students’ awareness of the
impacts of informal urbanisation
on issues of social, economic and
environmental sustainability, and
spatial justice in cities today.
By informal urbanisation we mean
the informal unregulated spontaneous
processes of urbanisation
that happen mostly (but not only)
in countries of the Global South
resulting from economic and social
exclusion of groups or communities.
We do not dispute the many positive
aspects of informal urbanisation:
it is a gateway to the city and a
force from the grassroots, enabling
the fostering of strong communities,
and providing families with
livelihoods. The entrepreneurship
of people in informal settlements
is remarkable and many informal
settlements around the world are
the source of employment, culture,
and hope.
However, informal urbanisation
has crucial drawbacks. In the way
it happens in most countries,
informal urbanisation is socially,
economically, and environmentally
unsustainable in the long run. More
often than not, it has not been able
to provide most households with
a decent living environment. Many
informal settlements around the
world face unimaginable challenges
that threaten the health, safety, and
prospects of informal settlers.
Improvement only happens when
there is concerted collective action
between the public sector, the
private sector, and civil society (not
least, citizens themselves) in order
to deliver improvements to informal
communities in the form of better
housing, services, sanitation, infrastructure,
public space, and so on.
Spatial planning and design is,
sadly, failing to deliver sustainable
solutions that address the needs
and wishes of citizens living in informal
settlements.
We recognise the importance of understanding
the processes behind
informal urbanisation, as well as its
relationships with other issues, such
as poverty, racial discrimination,
gender inequality, social segregation,
and economic inequality.
The goal of the Confronting Informality
Symposium is to shed
light on the drivers and impacts
of informal urbanisation, and to
discuss the planning and design
instruments used around the world
to tackle the challenges associated
with it, and to deliver healthy,
safe, inclusive neighbourhoods and
communities. The ultimate objective
is to establish a platform to debate
informality and its challenges for
spatial planning and urban design.
We invite scholars and practitioners
to partner with us to do research on
the topics above. In 2018, there was
an ideas competition that aimed
to foster debate, but also to look
for practical ideas and solutions
for the creation of public goods in
informal settlements, while keeping
the identity and livelihoods of the
community.
To know more, please visit https://
confrontinginformality.org
Fig. 59: Favela Paraisópolis, São Paulo. Photo by R. Rocco.