Learning from the 'informal city'

Slums are becoming tourist destinations, there is ‘slum tourism’. Why? There is so much innovation happening there in the midst of resource crunch, that’s why!

Developed nations can learn directly from developing and emerging economies how to create innovative solutions from limited resources and challenging environmental requirements. There are projects such as that in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya – often cited as the largest slum in Africa – where a community cooker designed by local firm Planning Systems runs by burning waste: members bring their collected waste in exchange for use of the cooker, to cook a meal or boil water. Green energy initiatives, from biogas from human waste to solar schemes are many. Many off-grid, micro-generated renewable energy are happening in the slums.

But championing slum innovations tends to romanticise the conditions, and ignores the poverty, crime and disease that slum inhabitants face daily.

In 2010, the UN estimated that 830 million people lived in slums worldwide, and predicted the number to rise to 900 million by 2020. In Latin America, almost 80% of the population live in urban areas; in Dhaka, Bangladesh, an estimated 3.4 million people live across the city's 5,000-plus slums. These are huge numbers living in dangerous conditions.

Yet people like Alfredo Brillembourg, Columbia University professor, feel that the formal city cannot survive without the informal city. “… in the slums I discovered a whole new social geography … I began rethinking my whole profession, unlearning what I had learned, and then re-focused on adaptation and reuse and using scarcity as a resource."

It became his life work to not only improve the conditions within slums, but to highlight the aspects that function better than the formal city around it. "Number one: slums are more resilient," he explains. "Why? Because they work in approximation, they work organically, they grow and adapt together. Number two: they produce less trash than the regular city. They use fewer resources.”

He isn't the only urbanist who argues that while improving the conditions must come first, the innovations that arise from slums should not be ignored. Others see slums as symbolising both the individual and the collective. “Composed of incredible individual effort, [the houses] retain this incredible sense of community because they are connected in incredible ways. This cohesion, the new urban village, is the greatest innovation that I see coming out of what you call a slum, but they call their home."

Learning from adversity has always been advocated. And while improving the slums, if we can pick a few lessons in living with less, why not?