How informal settlements slums will reshape the world

when i was six years old

growing up in medellin colombia i made

one of the most impactful decisions of

my life

i asked my mother to change my school

to the school where she was teaching to

my surprise

she said yes so i switched

from a rich private catholic school to a

public school

where 99 of the students live in a

condition of extreme poverty

the only meal some of my friends ate a

day

was the one that was given in school

my friends and i live close to each

other but walls apart

i live in a neighborhood with a museum a

library parks

and they live in a neighborhood with the

lack of the most basic necessities

such as portable water of electricity

more importantly they live in a place

surrounded by danger

from guns to landslides

their suffering was not unique up in the

mountains in

medellin informal settlements thousands

of families

were having the same problems that my

friends and their families

fearing that the police or the reigns

would take their homes away

i learned so much from my friends but

what continued to surprise me the most

is their resilience and optimism in the

face of adversity

growing up with people that i care

is what had led me to the study of

informal settlements

i teach now at the university of

colorado boulder

in the program of environmental design i

study informal settlements

because even if they are invisible to

most of us

they represent one of humanity’s biggest

challenges

and yet they provide great insight in

how cities develop

and innovate

there are three crucial things that i

have learned

about informal settlements that i want

to share with you today

the first one is that informal

settlements are a widespread

form of city making the second one

is that by making visible populations in

informal settlements

we can save their lives

the third one is that we pay more

attention to the creativity of people

who live in these places

we could be aware of innovations that

can save the planet

informal settlements can be broadly

described as self-built neighborhoods

outside of syria regulations in

conditions of extreme poverty

nowadays more than a billion people

living in formal settlements all around

the world

by the year 2050 one in three people in

the planet

will live in one of these places without

potable water

adequate sanitation and in condition of

extreme poverty

this makes informal settlements what

some call is slumps

the most common form of urbanization of

the planet

the paradox of informal settlements is

that they are vast and common however

the people and the places in which they

live are the most invisible

there is much that we don’t know about

these places and that ignorance create

barriers to

develop tools to help them

a first step to make visible these

populations

is to record the conditions in which

they live

however many countries with informal

settlements are

do not have the resources to map

these populations and the countries who

have the resources sometimes have legal

restrictions

that impede the state organizations to

support the work

on informal settlements

these unknowns create vacuums to

understand

informality and support the

dissemination of misconceptions

about the real challenges and

opportunities

of informality

as i started to learn more about

informal settlements i realized the

scarcity of data available

most of our understanding about

informality come from separate

and unreliable sources there is not a

single database

that contains all the informal

settlements in the world

to try to aid in such puzzle i created

alongside hundreds of collaborators

the atlas of informality the atlas

is a created attempt to visualize these

invisible populations

in an effort to understand the unique

process of informal city making

a crucial question that we wanted to

resolve here

was how these places evolve over time

this was important not only to

understand the past

but more importantly the future of

informal settlements

and the future of all world cities

we at environmental design program

created a

protocol with open access software

remote

sensing tools and direct mapping to

identify

and map the change of informal

settlements

over the last 15 years all over the

world

the key was to develop a tool

that was simple to use and that allows

to reach

most of the planet a tool that allows to

compare these places at the same level

we have now mapped more than 400

informal settlements all over the world

and we have realized each one of them is

changing

and expanding as a result of the

arriving populations

we discover things expected regions are

expanding at different rates informal

settlements in latin america and africa

are expanding more rapidly

than those in asia more importantly

we discovered that the entire sample

continue expanding

at a rate of 9.85

but what this obscure number means

it means that every year 2300 square

kilometers of informal settlements

are created out of the expansion of

existing ones

this expansion means that every year

at informal settlement islam

a city largest that some of the largest

cities on the planet

such as moscow houston

or tokyo is created out of the expansion

of existing settlements

as these places continue to grow in

darkness

we are blinded to what happened in these

cities

emerging every day

this is why i have dedicated my life

to the co-productions with communities

that live in informal settlements

not only to try to improve their

conditions of living

but to learn from them about the unique

process of informal city making

working with families and community

members over the last 10 years

i have learned that to solve informal

settlements most challenging problems

new culinary strategies are needed

and that the source of that innovation

resides already within the knowledge of

these communities

i have learned that for each problem

there is a community based solution

spare headed by the people living there

for example we learn fascinating things

from communities like

carpinello or mananteles de pass in

colombia who organize themselves to

build

infrastructure improvements they call

these

competes these infrastructure

improvements go

from the creation of water systems to

stairways to roads at the family level

we find

incredible financing mechanisms like the

renting of rooms to pay for home

expansions

or the creation of micro businesses

tailored to the surrounding populations

one of my goals now is the emulation of

those strategies

at larger scales creative informal

solutions follow a disruptive process

that breaks away with traditional ways

in which we think about cities

planners city officials and architects

tend to operate in cities in similar

ways as those set up

at the beginning of the 20th century

what forced them and us

to think about informal settlements as a

pathology

as a disease as something that needs to

be eradicated

this old-fashioned way of looking at

slums

for the use of obsolete strategies

as a result islam eradication programs

have left millions homeless and have

only displaced the problem to other

places

in unbelievable contrast the scar

resources of informal dwellers

for these populations to find

unconventional ways to solve the same

problems

their solutions are less environmentally

impactful and rely less on the need of

big infrastructure improvements

these solutions could be as physical as

the creation

of pedestrian-friendly compact

neighborhoods or as a strategic

as the setup of community-based banking

systems

these solutions could work both for

informal settlements with less resources

and to cities in the search of more

sustainable development

making these places visible is not only

essential to help impoverish communities

is also vital for the rest of us

these populations living in scarcity are

forced to innovate and create these

disruptive urban products

informal communities have always strived

finding new opportunities

out of necessity from unofficial motor

taxes

private vehicles that serve the public a

response

for the need for affordable

transportation systems

or like the renting of rooms to pay for

home expansions

what make homes in informal settlements

a self-sustainable urban model

think about how radical this idea is

that instead of getting a loan to pay

for your home

your home is the business that pays for

the place that you live in

of course i don’t want to romanticize

these solutions

as they are the result of innovation out

of dramatic

suffering but what i want to say is that

there is much that we could learn from

them

in fact i think there are some that are

already learning

i argue that today some of the most

disruptive urban

products such as the ride ups

similar to the moto taxis or the home

sharing economy

similar to the sales financing urban

model

in informal settlements started decades

ago

in the confines of informal settlements

if we pay more attention to visibilize

these invisible populations

we will not only have the opportunity to

support the effort of billions

but we could learn from them how we can

change the planet

now thinking back about my schoolmates

the communities

which i collaborate with and the

billions living in informal settlements

there are three things that we all need

to do

the first one is that we need to make

these communities more visible

they are part of our cities they deserve

to be respected and accounted

second is that we need to pay more

attention to the creativity and

innovation that happen in these places

the next billion dollar business the

next urban sustainable solution

has already been invented in one of the

thousands informal settlements around

the world

and finally we need to apply

what we learned there for the future

one third of the planet and for our

cities

that need to be safe thank you