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Informal settlements are consistent areas in Latin America which exhibit distinctive urban and social dynamics. However, despite their size and impact, these settlements have been traditionally overlooked in terms of the contribution that they make to the city and to any place branding strategy. These areas are commonly seen as having nothing more to offer than poverty and constraint. However, literature and research shows their possibilities beyond those traditional limits, and arguably they can actively contribute to branding cities in Latin America. The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the contribution that informal settlements can make to a fairer, more real and authentic branding of cities.

The discussion is based on two ongoing research projects, one in urban planning and the other one in business, together with a first‐hand knowledge and engagement with informal settlements in Bogotá.

Informal settlements can contribute positively to branding cities. Trying to “hide” these areas from visitors' views is not only impossible because of their size, but also not desirable because of how they can enrich a branding strategy. However, there are also major downsides which need to be taken into consideration.

The value resides in the attempt to link two themes that traditionally have been nearly opposite (informal settlements and branding cities), and the elaboration on the outcome of this relationship.

The “unplannable” is a welcomed exception to the formal order of urban planning. This opinion article explores some examples of informal urbanism and discusses its ambiguous relationship to public space and unplanned activities in the city. The informal sector offers important lessons about the adaptive use of space and its social role. The article examines the ways specific groups appropriate informal spaces and how this can add to a city’s entrepreneurship and success. The characteristics of informal, interstitial spaces within the contemporary city, and the numerous creative ways in which these temporarily used spaces are appropriated, challenge the prevalent critical discourse about our understanding of authorised public space, formal place-making and social order within the city in relation to these informal spaces.

The text discusses various cases from Chile, the US and China that illustrate the dilemma of the relationship between informality and public/private space today. One could say that informality is a deregulated self-help system that redefines relationships with the formal. Temporary or permanent spatial appropriation has behavioural, economic and cultural dimensions, and forms of the informalare not always immediately obvious: they are not mentioned in building codes and can often be subversive or unexpected, emerging in the grey area between legal and illegal activities.

The New Urban Agenda has catalyzed discussion across academia and practice on how to responsibly position ourselves as key players in the making of the future of our cities. With questions such as what is the right to the city? Who has those rights? What is a city? What is formal and who defines informal? These questions may prompt a need for departure from, or at least a reconsideration of the narrative surrounding formal and informal urbanism. This paper presents a pedagogical approach to addressing these and other questions within the framework of the new agenda. It reviews pedagogical approaches to understanding and learning to design within an informal context. It also foregrounds the process with the theoretical framing of Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language and Timeless way of Building as lenses through which to understand and identify common languages and intersections across the global spectrum of representations of informal urbanism. It then outlines the resultant process and products of a one-week intensive master-class and design charette of international scholars and students focusing on the Informal City.

It reviews pedagogical approaches to understanding and learning to design within an informal context. It also foregrounds the process with the theoretical framing of Christopher Alexander's Pattern Language and Timeless way of Building as lenses through which to understand and identify common languages and intersections across the global spectrum of representations of informal urbanism. It then outlines the resultant process and products of a one-week intensive master-class and design charette of international scholars and students focusing on the Informal City.

The paper conclusively presents new nomenclature for informality that strives to shift the semantic lens from its current negative connotations to more productive, proactive and positive ones. It also presents an Informal City Manifesto, a call to arms of theoretical framing of how we think about the formal informal divide.

The paper, in part, outlines the results of a single studio with a small student number. Although diverse in its composition the student body is small.

This new framing could potentially allow us to best leverage lessons and mitigate challenges of the informal city condition, as our human settlements continue to urbanize.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the contribution of informal settlements to a tourism strategy and to city branding. It takes the case of Medellin, Colombia, which in recent years has developed several projects in their barrios using a policy called: “social urbanism”.

The paper is based on a case study, that of “social urbanism” in Medellin, and the relationship with what is called slum tourism and city branding. After a brief theoretical exploration about informal settlements in Latin America, slum tourism and city branding; the paper presents the urban and social transformation of Medellin's dangerous and stigmatized barrios with the “social urbanism” policy. Then the relationship between social urbanism, informal settlements and city branding is discussed.

Medellin, perhaps without noticing or anticipating, has found a role for informal settlements in branding the city, and promoting tourism to those areas. With “social urbanism”, it is also helping to build an image of the city more authentic and distinguishable from other cities in Colombia and Latin America.

The paper explores two themes that are considered nearly opposite: informal settlements and city branding. It discusses how a city in Colombia might have found a way to link them together with interesting results.

While a substantial amount of study of informal settlements has been undertaken, they remain largely unstudied in terms of urban form. In this analysis, the purpose of this paper is to set forth a conceptual framework, which considers the context in which informality takes place, the settlement itself, the houses contained therein, the dwellers of those houses and the process through which a settlement is designed and transformed over time.

This is a literature review.

This framework aims to be sufficiently flexible to be deployed across diverse national settings. Its formulation is important because informal settlements are a permanent fixture of the global urban landscape, and are increasing in scale.

Any sustainable strategies to improve informal settlements depend on a better understanding of their urban space, as well as of the producers of this space – the residents themselves. Finally, professional designers may be able to learn from this contemporary urban vernacular grammar – perhaps the only one left in the era of sanitized, contrived and prosaic urban design.

Sustainable development goals and the climate change agenda are becoming widely promoted topics of research for the 21st century. The role of cities is increasingly recognised as central to investigating these topics. Yet, the field of informal sector entrepreneurship which so many urban entrepreneurs in developing countries depend upon is seldom considered. To redress this imbalance, this study aims to develop a decision model in accordance with institutional theory (IT) and resource dependency theory (RDT) for city managers to deploy. The model identifies and prioritises optimal strategies to address the three areas of sustainability requirements environment society and economy within the study context of Bangladesh.

This study used a mixed methods research design. In the qualitative part, the authors identified the three areas of sustainability requirements (i.e. environment, society and economy) and their corresponding strategies involving the informal sector that operates within the urban environment. In the quantitative part, the authors applied fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) integrated with the 0-1 non-linear optimisation technique to identify optimal strategies.

The findings show that strategies such as legitimate frameworks, waste management, allocation of urban public space and training programs contribute in important ways to the three areas of sustainability requirements.

The proposed decision model will assist policy-makers and city managers to prioritise sustainability requirements and implement optimal strategies to address those requirements.

Through the integration of IT and RDT, the decision model developed in this study is unique in its application to urban-based informal entrepreneurship in the context of developing countries. The effective application of the fuzzy QFD approach and the optimisation model in the context of urban-based informal entrepreneurship also offers unique contributions to the field of study.

The purpose of this study is to inform policy and contribute to the existing literature on low-income housing.

In this study, a case study approach was adopted, and data were collected through secondary data collection that is literature survey and through empirical data collection by conducting face to face interviews and survey of key stakeholders, citizens, and government authorities, and in some cases supplemented by on site photography. The data collected from the field was analysed using quantitative and qualitative techniques. The questionnaires were coded for scientific analysis of data. The information was presented in a structured way that permits for in-depth analysis of the data.

In this study, many paradoxes were noted defying common sense, but nonetheless, they require a solution. It has been concluded that, while efforts to improve settlements and anticipate future ones are becoming more common, the desire for eradication persists in many towns in Botswana.

The major limitation of this study is that it was done during the period of COVID-19 induced movement restrictions. As a result, the preferred face to face interviews with key informants were not possible.

This research informed policy on low-income housing in Botswana. The Government of Botswana can use the findings of this study to formulate policies which help in alleviating challenges currently faced in practice when implementing low-income housing projects. The concept of low-income housing has been adopted by many developing countries including in Africa. As such, results of this study can also be applicable in other developing countries where they can be used as a starting point for evaluating the success of policies and the practice of low-income housing.

This work made original contribution to knowledge by putting the plight of housing the urban poor in Botswana will in perspective.

This paper aims to offer Sitio San Roque, an informal settlement in the Philippines as a case study to explore long-term "forgetful" urban development planning in the Philippines, and the renewed visibility of the urban poor under COVID-19 lockdown. It connects scholarship on informality to issues of housing and political rights in Metro Manila to further investigate how vulnerable communities in the Global South are faring in the pandemic.

This is an exploration of Sitio San Roque, an informal settler community in Metropolitan "Metro" Manila, Philippines. This paper refers to recent journalistic reports pertaining to the community's ongoing evictions and arrests while under Metro Manila's "enhanced community quarantine." Furthermore, it converses with literature from disciplines including health-care policy, urban studies and recent studies on COVID-19 and vulnerable communities to critically discuss the plight of the urban poor in the pandemic-stricken Metro Manila.

The urban poor and members of informal communities such as Sitio San Roque are especially vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 because of precarious livelihoods and housing instability. The creation of informality in Metro Manila can be traced to political tensions, economic agendas and development planning since the time of Marcos' administration and also to global restructuring during the 1990s. However, also important to note is that under Metro Manila's lockdown, informal settlers are further disenfranchised and stigmatized via ongoing demolitions and evictions, as well as by processes of policing and criminalization by the state. The use of military and police personnel as a way to enforce lockdown in the metropolis further impedes on the rights of informal settlers and the urban poor.

Recent scholarship and reports discuss the challenges for informal communities and the urban poor in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly due to their housing conditions and loss of economic stability. This paper contributes to a critical understanding of these issues by adding the dimensions of political and housing rights. It refers to the case study of members of Sitio San Roque, who have experienced continuous threats of demolitions and arrests by state police for protesting the lack of government aid under lockdown. Both military approaches of governance and housing informality work in tandem to expose the vulnerabilities of the urban poor in Metro Manila's pandemic. Finally, this paper extends on urban studies scholar Gavin Shatkin's concept of “forgetful planning” (2004) by applying his discussions to the current context. Informal settlers have long been “forgotten” by the state's development plans, but are now remembered and deemed more visible in Metro Manila's ECQ.

In Iran, the frequent occurrence of disasters has always been a major problem. In recent decades, disasters have created considerable challenges, especially in cities. Hence, understanding the levels of urban resilience (UR) and planning for addressing vulnerabilities plays a key role in the era of increasing risks and uncertainties. The present study aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of resilience of Iranian cities.

A systematic literature review method was used to determine how resilient Iranian cities are. To find relevant studies, the authors searched Iranian and international databases such as Scopus, ScienceDirect, SID and Magiran. There was no restriction on the inclusion date, meaning that all papers published up until September 16, 2021 were considered for inclusion. The PRISMA framework was used for literature search and selection and, finally, 153 studies focused on 52 cities of Iran were selected for the systematic review.

In general, the results showed that the level of resilience was low in Iranian cities. Also, informal settlements, worn-out urban fabrics and the central parts of cities showed lower resilience than other parts.

The results of the study can be used to inform municipal authorities, urban planners and non-governmental organizations of the actions that need to be taken to enhance the resilience of Iranian cities.