Public Lecture: The production of informal space

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Roberts Foyer.

Contemporary Italy is characterized by a plethora of informal/illegal housing practices: occupation of public housing units, unauthorized constructions in coastal areas, illegal subdivision of agricultural land, precarious settlements by ethnic minorities, and real estate development by criminal organisations. Despite their differences, all of these practices are characterised by complex connections with a variety of public institutions, which, in different ways, favour and shape such production of informal space.

The analysis of the Italian case is the starting point to rethink some aspects of the debate on urban informality (e.g. the unsatisfactory geographical conceptualisation of the phenomenon) and, at the same time, to clarify the epistemological contribution of informality to understanding some of the constituent characters of contemporary urbanism (e.g., the archipelago of unequal urban citizenship and the hidden politics of in/formality).