‐ Page 1 ‐ Tracing the Urban Informal : Mutual Self‐help to ExNihilo Sarosh Anklesaria, Assistant Professor, Syracuse University Paper submitted for :THE 4th BIENNIAL SUBTROPICAL CITIES CONFERENCE BRAVING A NEW WORLD: DESIGN INTERVENTIONS FOR CHANGING CLIMATES Figure 1 PREVI Experimental Housing at Lima, Peru. 2013 Figure 2 Aranya Housing at Indore, India. 2013 Figure 3 Villa El Salvador, Lima, Peru. 2013 Figure 4 Networked Neighborhood [Slum Networking Project] Indore, India. 2013 In next twenty years subtropical and tropical countries will account for 95% of urban growth and a large portion of this growth (nearly half) will be driven by non‐formal architectures. Already by 2006, a billion people or a third of the world's urban population lived in squatter settlements (variously called slums, favelas, geckecondus, bidonvilles, or barriadas) 1 . A recent study by the UN has indicated that this number "might triple (to three billion) by 2050 if no policy framework is established to address this issue" 2 . At the same time, it is well acknowledged that architects today contribute to only 3% of the world's built environment. 3 With the emergence of neoliberal, late-capitalism, architectural discourse has moved away from addressing the 'crisis of mass housing' - a subject that was clearly canonical during postwar modernist reconstruction. In the decades following postwar reconstruction the site of the 'crisis of mass housing' progressively shifted territories, to the global south. It became increasingly apparent that the prototypical postwar housing block typology, originally formulated in Europe, was not only prohibitively expensive for the global south but was also hopelessly inadequate in dealing with the sheer scale of the housing deficit. Furthermore 'Structural Adjustment Programs' (or SAPs) by the IMF and the World Bank favored free market liberalism encouraging Third World governments to relinquish ambitions of mass public housing in favor of privatization and market oriented reform. The work of eminent scholars of the time across disciplines echoed this sentiment. John Turner’s advocacy of self-help/ community driven housing with minimal government involvement and Hernando De Soto’s advocacy of property rights as a way of bringing informal economies into the folds of mainstream market economy, in turn influenced neoliberal agendas and policy of the World Bank from the 60's to the 80’s. 4 Learning from self-help housing experiences in Peru, Turner believed housing is best left to those who are going to live in it and favored self-build to centrally administered housing solutions. It was under these circumstances that self-help housing emerged as a preferred alternative to mass public housing from South Asia to Latin America - a move which corresponded to an increased reliance on the urban informal and informal tactics of housing now vindicated through a degree of government sanction. Self-help housing promised to integrate the design and planning expertise of the professional (the architect/ engineer/ economist) with the innate benefits of harnessing community resources and drastically reduced costs of construction. As self-help evolved it encompassed a broad spectrum of typologies with varying degrees of involvement from architects.