Understanding Informality – Hypothesis (Haris)

Understanding Informality (in progress)

a. Informality is what is not formal. (the term “informal” contains both the field of the opposites of formal but also the field of the non defined as formal)

b. Informality is to be found in the realm of the social and the technical, not in nature since it presupposes a structure, an authority or a system that defines what is formal. (wide and large someone could say that there are the formal, the informal and the natural)

c. Informality emerges

d. Informality refers to practices, informal objects are such because of the nature of the practices that produce, constitute or situate them

e. Informality is context and scale specific. There are sets of exteriorities that define what is formal.

f. There are different kinds of informality

– Social

– Cultural (Social – Cultural)

– Political

– Economical (Political – Economical)

– Spatial

Spatial informality, is the material or immaterial spatial expression of other kinds of informality or combinations of them (cultural, social, political and/or economical informality). The nature of these combinations needs to be defined.

We roughly distinguish four general categories of spatial informality:

– performed

– applied

– appropriated

– constructed