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