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The study hypothesized that the absence of the governing authority during the growth and expansion of informal settlements caused a highly randomized dense social fabric that shaped their characteristics.

This research employs urban tactics and social theories to understand dynamic relationships in social consolidation in informal settlements in Jordan. The research adopted a mixed-methods approach, deploying qualitative and quantitative methods to understand the concepts, terms, perspectives, means and functions of open spaces in informal settlements.

The results identified that the land ownership of open spaces, gender and age have a significant impact on the relationships and social interaction of people. The results suggested that despite the informal morphology of studied areas being random, unplanned and chaotic, there is often an underlying logic to meet occupants’ needs.

This research explores informal spatiality to help understand the mechanisms of how marginal communities create and interact with each other in public spaces. This study is limited to the investigation of socio-cultural practices in public spaces, without an in-depth consideration of the roles of physical elements and features in the spatial configuration of these spaces.

The importance of the research is that the exploration of informal spatiality of this neighborhood morphology will enable to understand the mechanism of how marginal communities create and interact among each other and their public spaces in different cities.

This chapter presents the topic of the ‘new generation’ of upgrading initiatives in informal settlements in Latin America and the rationale for this book, its objectives and research questions, focusing on the issues of spatial justice and public open spaces in informal settlements. It also provides a short insight into the research setting, i.e. the social, economic and physical characteristics of the case study location, Comuna 13 in Medellín, including short descriptions about the three spaces that were investigated in detail. It also provides a brief overview of the research methodology applied.

This chapter examines the notion of spatial justice and its applicability in the context of informality. In the first part it examines the concept of informal urbanism in the context of informal settlements and experiences with upgrading programmes. Drawing on critical evaluations of some of the most well-known upgrading programmes, the chapter in the second part then theorises the notion of spatial justice. I argue for a multidimensional, fragmentary, context- and culture-specific concept, which encompasses equity, empowerment and recognition. As an operationalisation of the notion of spatial justice developed in this chapter and a conclusion to it, a framework is proposed to underpin the assessment of spatial justice in public space based upgrading programmes in informal settlements. It contains aspects regarding the quality of the material space, the integrity of its production process, issues of management and regulation as well as the use of space.

This chapter presents the concluding arguments. It explores the implications of the analyses for understanding open spaces in informal settlements in the context of spatial justice by looking at their material configuration and design, the process that led to their establishment, the ways they are used and the rules and regulations affecting their use. This work has found evidence for the continued and structural denigration of informal settlements and their inhabitants, which influence the upgrading initiative. At the same time it has established the ways in which the new open spaces and the processes surrounding their establishment have improved the quality of life for comuna residents. It thus confirms the importance of combing equity, empowerment and recognition as equal goals into understandings of spatial justice, and claims that the different aspects of justice are not interchangeable or hierarchical. This chapter draws on the empirical data presented in the preceding chapters to explore the potentials and limitations of the new generation of upgrading programmes in an abstract way, which makes the results of this study transferable and applicable to other cities.

Placemaking is an established practice and research field. It takes on a spatial dimension created through a socio-political process where value and meaning are assigned to settings. An emerging concept, sustainability citizenship relies on social actors creating sustainable urban settings by working, sometimes, “outside” formal planning; offering an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places. The purpose of this paper is twofold: examine one of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements to explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, and use this exploration as a means to argue the appropriateness of sustainability citizenship when investigating/realising settings in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

To address the paper’s aim, books, journal articles and monographs related to citizen/community participation, placemaking, citizenship (in Latin America and conceptually) and sustainability citizenship were collected and critically reviewed. Identification of these documents was achieved through a literature review of the library database at Deakin University and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the co-authors of this paper contributing to and reviewing submissions to the 2016 Routledge publication, Sustainability Citizenship. Field observation and engagement with the citizenry living in the informal settlements of Bogotá, Colombia were conducted at various times in 2013, 2014 and 2017.

Sustainability citizenship and placemaking are linked through their “process-driven” approach to realising places and use of the citizenry to enact change. In Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlement of Caracoli, public spaces are created outside formal planning processes through alternative path dependencies and the resourcefulness of its citizens. Sustainability citizenship, rather than placemaking, can work outside formal planning and manoeuvre around established path dependencies, which offers an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places in the global south.

This paper provides insight into the use of placemaking when explaining the realisation process of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements. The paper’s contents also explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, which in terms of the latter is a new citizenry dimension that can be used to provide new insight into the realisation process of public spaces in Bogotá’s informal settlements.

This chapter aims to discuss the segmented city in the less developed world, focusing on its informal settlements. The main assumption is that the walls of informal settlements change from rigid to fuzzy ones, as they are analyzed using finer scales. In order to show this change, this chapter is divided into four sections. The first section analyzes the changes in two types of urban structure model: the segregated city model and the segmented city model. The second section describes the changes in governmental intervention models for informal settlements in Latin American cities, emphasizing what has been happening in the city of Recife, Brazil. The third section investigates the fact that, despite the changes in terms of governmental intervention models for informal settlements, there are still limits on the official city maps that effectively impede any appropriate representation of them. In order to show the gaps between the official cartographic representations and the reality of informal settlements, the last section of this chapter analyzes in more depth the walls of one specific informal settlement in Recife called Brasília Teimosa. This finer scale analysis allows us to see that its walls are even more fuzzy and permeable than the walls of the many formal settlements.

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.

This paper introduces a conceptual lens for leading social change in slums and informal settlements. In line with this aim, the purpose of this case study is to describe the public problem-solving approach of a social change organization situated in an informal settlement through the lens of adaptive leadership, complexity theory and social change leadership (SCL).

This paper follows an engaged reflection tradition. First, the author-practitioners describe an informal settlement case hereafter called ISC in southeast Iran where many people have historically remained undocumented and uneducated. Using complex adaptive systems theory, adaptive leadership and SCL as the conceptual lens, the paper analyzes ISC as a complex adaptive context in which the community and the government are in tension in solving problems, particularly illiteracy. The instrumental case study draws from participant observation and document analysis to describe and examine the endeavors of a community office operating within ISC. Through this reflective analysis, the authors illustrate how a social change organization can effectively tackle public issues like illiteracy within informal settlements.

This paper applies complexity leadership theory to a social context. The study illustrates how social change organizations can support the transformation of informal spaces into adaptive spaces to enact social change.

This paper reflects on engagement activity near the insecure borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. By extending an organizational-level theory to the public sphere, this paper contributes theoretically to the complexity theory literature. Moreover, it provides a practical insight for community development and slum upgrading projects.

This chapter is the first of three analytical chapters which explore the research findings. Drawing on data gained through community guided walks and mental maps workshops, the chapter examines the diversity of everyday spaces in Comuna 13 and the practices of use the inhabitants develop in them. It establishes them as important social spaces, defined by their material configuration and the activities taking place in them. Streets, paths and stairs, front gardens, sports fields, play areas, squares, parks, green setbacks, leftover open spaces and leftover landscape are presented as the main categories of open spaces, some of them developed formally, while others established informally through the residents of Comuna 13, and some of them more publicly usable, while others more private. Additionally, other important community spaces mentioned in the data-gathering activities are portrayed.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of place-making on the quality of place through community-organised art festivals, with two case studies in urban informal settlements or kampungs in Indonesia.

Findings presented here are based on data collected and 39 in-depth interviews conducted in 2017 in two kampungs, namely, Kampung Dago Pojok, Bandung and Kampung Bustaman, Semarang.

This paper argues that place-making can happen through temporary practices, such as festivals, and improve the quality of place in informal settlements. It indicates and analyses the kinds of activities that increase the aesthetic value of spaces and build a positive image of the kampungs. The study concludes with the finding that place-making through temporary interventions has the potential to permanently change and reshape public space. At the core of these activities is the collective and voluntary work known as kerja bakti that is done by the kampung communities and the civil society organizations involved.

The paper offers a fresh perspective in the context of understanding the implications of place-making in the Global South. Assessing the development of public space, the paper provides insights into the use of grassroots festivals as a tool to permanently reshape urban spaces and engage the local community throughout the process.