1 Penultimate Draft: in: Bannerjee, T. & Loukaitou-Sideris, A. (eds) The New Companion to Urban Design, New York: Routledge, pp. 139-51. INFORMAL SETTLEMENT AS A MODE OF PRODUCTION Kim Dovey ABSTRACT Informal settlements are neighbourhoods developed largely without state control that currently house over a billion people globally. Not to be confused with ‘slums’ or ‘squatting’, informality is the means through which a substantial portion of the global population have managed the transition from rural to urban life, transforming many cities across the Global South in the process. While some would hesitate to call this urban design or planning, it is where the action has been happening in urban development. With few exceptions, informal settlements will not, could not (?), and need not, be erased and replaced – the task is one of incremental redevelopment in situ. Yet traditional forms of urban design practice – focused on top-down regulation and the production of fixed designs and master plans – have proven inadequate to cope with the dynamism, complexity and adaptability of informal urbanism. This chapter outlines some ways of rethinking this issue through a theoretical framework of assemblage thinking. Informal and formal urbanism are not binary opposites but intersect to form complex alliances, contradictions and possibilities. Urban 'informality' can be understood as a mode of production that works both with and against the formal structures of the city. It works to produce new spatial structures and neighbourhood morphologies that need to be understood as assets held by the urban poor. And it works to produce particular kinds of place identity that impact on the image of the city and political struggles over the right to the city. INTRODUCTION Much has been made of the fact that most of the global population is now urban; cities are primary centres of economic opportunity and rural-to-urban migration continues unabated. It is not so often noted that most of this new urban population has been accommodated through the expansion of informal settlements in cities of the Global South. Under circumstances where the urban poor cannot secure access to formal housing, they settle wherever they can in the interstices and on the margins of the formal city. Such settlements are never informal in every way and are always enmeshed in complex relations with the formal structures of state planning. Depending on how such settlements are defined, they now house over a billion people. There is little prospect that anything more than a small percentage of such settlements will be demolished and replaced in a wholesale manner. The disciplines of architecture, urban design and planning have traditionally focused on the formal order of the city – on formal protocols, procedures, plans and design outcomes through which the city is transformed and governed from top-down. The challenge of engagement with urban informality requires fundamentally different modes of thought and practice. While the construction, services and open space are often low quality (by formal design criteria), and occupation may be illegal, a key part of this challenge is to move beyond the labelling of