Towards an informal turn in the built environment education: Informality and urban design pedagogy

Kamalipour, Hesam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7216-7115 and Peimani, Nastaran ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1945-2181 2019. Towards an informal turn in the built environment education: Informality and urban design pedagogy. Sustainability 11 (15) , 4163. 10.3390/su11154163

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Abstract

Informal urbanism, ranging from informal settlements to trading and transport, has become integral, but not limited, to the ways in which cities of the global South work. At stake here is the role of the built environment professions in responding to informal urbanism where a poor understanding of the complexities of informality can lead to poor design interventions. Providing a better understanding of how forms of informality work is then a key task for the built environment education, which arguably falls short in this regard. With a particular focus on urban design, we suggest that it is critical to move towards an informal turn in the built environment education to address informality and engage with the dynamics of informal urbanism. We first investigate the scope of urban design and then explore the ways in which urban design education can respond to informal urbanism in its curricula by developing an urban design program on informality as an illustration. The suggested approach can be considered as an initial step towards an informal turn in urban design education. We conclude that while urban design alone cannot solve social and economic problems, including poverty and inequality, its capacity to address the complex challenges of urbanization cannot be overlooked. Urban design education cannot remain isolated from the questions of informality anymore.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL) Architecture
Publisher:	MDPI
ISSN:	2071-1050
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 August 2019
Date of Acceptance:	30 July 2019
Last Modified:	06 May 2023 03:29
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/124916

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