The UGEC Symposium: A Decade of Urbanization and Global Environmental Change is now on YouTube!
You can also watch other UGEC videos, including the panel session from our 2014 Conference on our YouTube Channel: The Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project
Recorded and edited by Mark Ahn Creative Services.
Cities in developing countries have grappled with spatial planning, infrastructure, housing and, more recently, fragmented and “runaway” development. Spatial plans largely remain at a strategic level and less at the neighborhood scale, where there is a disjuncture between the envisioned urban layout and the actual development (Lwasa, 2013). The coupling of these multiple challenges has rendered planning a failure, resulting in a continued organic development of “informal” cities with diverse infrastructure and services that contrast with centralized systems used as the benchmark for measuring progress of a formal city. In this article, I postulate that the “informal city” is actually the city. Continue reading