A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
Humanizing Urbanism. On Embracing Informality and the Future of Johannesburg
Abstract This paper aims to give an evocative rather than technically descriptive portrait of the city of Johannesburg, attempting to reveal how a logic which structured the city around control and segregation is disrupted more by the informal flows of life than by the rhetoric of spatial and economic transformation that characterizes the city since the demise of apartheid. In the face of a specifically engineered physical dispersion and segregation, and in tension with both physical realities and government policy, the urban poor have been re-territorializing the city, undermining the legacy of rigid apartheid spatial segregations. This is opposing the paradigm of a world shaped and controlled by power and rational social planning with one built around relational networks and basic needs, and characterized by informal practices. The paper argues that if liberated by the vocabulary of a hegemonic Westernized culture, informality can reveal itself to be a counter-strategy capable of generating a means of response to the failure of certain urban mainstreams tied to a market economy.
Humanizing Urbanism. On Embracing Informality and the Future of Johannesburg
Abstract This paper aims to give an evocative rather than technically descriptive portrait of the city of Johannesburg, attempting to reveal how a logic which structured the city around control and segregation is disrupted more by the informal flows of life than by the rhetoric of spatial and economic transformation that characterizes the city since the demise of apartheid. In the face of a specifically engineered physical dispersion and segregation, and in tension with both physical realities and government policy, the urban poor have been re-territorializing the city, undermining the legacy of rigid apartheid spatial segregations. This is opposing the paradigm of a world shaped and controlled by power and rational social planning with one built around relational networks and basic needs, and characterized by informal practices. The paper argues that if liberated by the vocabulary of a hegemonic Westernized culture, informality can reveal itself to be a counter-strategy capable of generating a means of response to the failure of certain urban mainstreams tied to a market economy.
Humanizing Urbanism. On Embracing Informality and the Future of Johannesburg
Mantia, Costanza (author)
2017-11-28
15 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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