March 08, 2023

Kim Dovey: Informal settlements and emergent urbanism.

1 hour 6 minutes

Season Two’s twenty-second episode features Kim Dovey, Professor and Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, speaking about his very wonderful body of work on informality, informal urbanism, place and placemaking. We discuss his forthcoming Atlas of Informal Settlement: Understanding Self-Organized Urban Design (Bloomsbury 2023, with, Matthijs van Oostrum, Tanzil Shafique, Ishita Chatterjee and Elek Pafka), Mapping Urbanities: Morphologies, Flows, Possibilities (Routledge 2018), and Becoming Places: Urbanism / Architecture / Identity / Power (Routledge 2010), and just one of his marvellous papers, Towards a morphogenesis of informal settlements (2020, Habitat International, with van Oostrum, Shafique, Chatterjee and Pafka).

Kim is fantastic, of course, at describing the most common form of urban form and housing type of all: ‘In a formal urban design and planning process, the urban design and planning comes first, and then the architecture follows. In an informal process, in the most informal of informal settlements, the architecture comes first, or tends to come first. So the people just build buildings. And if you like the, the street network is then an emergent phenomenon that comes out of the whatever's whatever spaces are left after the buildings are produced. But then, there's a lot of processes, which are much more mixed on that as well.’

For more like that, listen and learn.

You can get Mapping Urbanities andBecoming Places from the Routledge website here and here, and bookmark this link to the Bloomsbury website for August, when the Atlasdrops. Kim’s can be found on the Melbourne School of Design here, and on ResearchGate here. Kim co-leads the Informal Urbanism Research Hubtoo.