InfUr-
The Informal Urbanism Research Hub at the Melbourne School of Design
InfUr- is an assemblage of researchers and projects focused on the role of urban informality in the creative production of cities of both the Global South and North.
This includes the many ways urban informality intersects with formal urban systems, and a better understanding of the logic and resilient capacities embodied in self-organised urbanism. The Hub embodies a shared interest in how power is practised as a form of self-organisation, and in the struggles of marginalised populations to assert their right to the city.
The built environment disciplines and professions have traditionally focused on the formally authorised frameworks through which the city is planned, designed, constructed and governed. Yet all cities are produced by both formal and informal practices. Informal urbanism is not necessarily illegal, rather it is self-organised. It is not separate from but intersects with the formal structures of state regulation and control, often in reaction to practices of displacement, marginalisation and exclusion.
The InfUr- acronym evokes the ways informal urbanism infuses the formal city and often infuriates the state. Informal urbanism is the original or Ur-form of the city and of citizenship – it puts the Ur back into urbanism.
Co-Directors: Kim Dovey, Crystal Legacy, Patrick Cobbinah, and Ashraful Alam
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Abstract: Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on research […]
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Abstract: Forms of urban informality have become integral to how places are being made, unmade, and remade, particularly within the context of what is commonly referred to as the Global South. In this presentation, I discuss my research, which aims to explore the intersections of urban design, informal urbanism, public space, urban morphology, and comparative […]
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This seminar took place on Thursday 13th June 2024 with professor Jennifer Robinson Abstract: Ideas about shared predicaments across the global South have framed thinking within concepts – such as informality and developmentalism – that hold potential, but also pitfalls in gaining traction in critical analyses of power. This talk will reflect on the possibility […]
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This seminar took place on Thursday 9th May 2024 with research fellow Sabina Andron. Abstract: Surfaces have taught me everything I know about cities. Using visual ethnographies of graffiti and public signage, this talk will examine public walls as typologies of urban in/formality and spatial co-production. Dr. Sabina Andron is a specialist in urban visual […]
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This seminar took place on Thursday 12th April 2024 with senior lecturer in social planning Dr. Ash Alam Abstract: The seminar will outline Ash’s work in informal housing sectors in Bangladesh to show how housing infrastructures in marginalised settings can be reworked by developing a new set of lexicons. Ash Alam is a Senior Lecturer in Social […]
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Kim Dovey and Reden Recio The view from the Board of Regents Room in Quezon Hall, the administration building of the University of the Philippines (UP) System, reveals the core of the UP Diliman campus as a beautiful and well-manicured place—a vast green lung within the dense and often intense Metropolitan Manila. As is less […]
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Recently InfUr- researchers Elek Pafka and Viviana Silva published an article in City Monitor: a platform for publishing articles examining the future of the world’s cities and global mandates for more responsible urban policy. Read the article here
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In December 2023 InfUr- co-director Crystal Legacy took centre stage at the State of Australasian Cities conference 2023 in Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington to deliver the Pat Troy Memorial Lecture. Crystal began her talk by reflecting on the legacy of Pat Troy and “his desire to provoke debate to progress more just planning. […]