Informal urbanism: grassroots activities and city leadership

Informal or grassroots arts and cultural activities constitute an important part of urban life in showing an alternative to mainstream forms of cultural production, consumption and uses of public space in the city. Likewise informal transport, street commerce, and other sectors often support more responsive, vital urbanisms by interweaving and managing broad sets of urban spaces, practices, and populations at finer grained levels with greater flexibility. However, little is known about the ways in which grassroots organisations, informal practices and self-managed venues contribute to the city's everyday life and interact with formal institutions. Linking the work of the City Leadership Initiative on urban strategies and informality in planning with the investigations on informal urban culture at City University's Department of Culture & Creative Studies, will bring together experts to foster a critical debate about the relationship between the formal and the informal in contemporary urban life. The studio will in particular offer a window of engagement between the analysis of the cultural sector and of other dimensions of informality, as well as between these and the study of urban governance. The studio seeks to take up the challenge of capturing data for an evidence-based framework that advocates the value of informal cultural, transport, street markets to social life, the development of the creative economy and urban revitalisation.

The event, taking place over a full day of roundtables with over twenty experts aims to scope the encounter of the informal 'sector' and urban governance, questioning how informality challenges city leadership, and how city leaders should approach the encounter with the informal city. The workshop features commentaries by renown experts, Professor Nestor Garcia Canclini (Universiad Autonoma Metropolitana), Dr David Sattherwaite (IIED), and Professor Andy Pratt (City University London).

The studio is hosted by the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP) at University College London, and the Department of Culture and Creative Industries at City University London.

Image: Leake Street, London (Credit: Sabina Andron)