Demystifying informal urban design and planning

Insights from Asia

By: Mahyar Arefi

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Hardcover | 3 June 2025

At a Glance

Hardcover
320 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.6 x 13.8 x 1.9

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$214.49

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With more than half of the world's population living in cities, informal settlements, or slums, continue to expand. This book explores the informality urban design nexus, and asks why formal urban designers and planners have remained largely reluctant to address these challenges facing our cities.

What distinguishes the formal vs. informal urban design paradigm? While urban designers are able to identify and address specific problems like walkability, gentrification, or sense of place, informal settlement problems prove inexorably complex, and harder to fathom to begin with.

Therefore, seeking to demystify these epistemological ambiguities while difficult makes sense. The use of abductive reasoning, regulations, aesthetics, and design epitomise the formal, while informal urban planning and design is characterized by information, assets and adaptation. In support of these thematic differentiations, this book uses case studies to better contextualize and unpack the metaphorical distinctions of the two theoretical entities.

Conceptualising these two schools of thought this way, the book engages urban designers with these debates, and explores how informal settlement residents see themselves, act collectively, care about their settlements, and leverage opportunities.

Industry Reviews

The practice and pedagogy of urban design have long skirted the landscapes of abjection - slums and squatter settlements - home of some 1.1 billion population worldwide. In this remarkable book Professor Arefi offers original insights for designers to work with denizens to make such places livable. Drawing from his extensive experience in Iran, Turkey, India and UAE, he offers intriguing insights steeped in humanities, philosophy and practice. This book is an original contribution to the literature in urban design.
Tridib Banerjee, Professor Emeritus in Public Policy, Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California

Mahyar Arefi has written an erudite, scholarly and complex text. It challenges the very foundation of planning and urban design orthodoxy as it relates to formal and informal settlements in the Global South. Based on his own impressive empirical research in four countries, Arefi systematically deconstructs Planning and Urban Design fundamentals - the assumptions, terminologies, definitions and thinking in mainstream thought. The 'shock of the new' engages on every page.
Alexander Cuthbert, Emeritus Professor, University of New South Wales

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