Informal Urbanism & Indian Cities

Begin with a fact that reorders everything a formal planning education teaches: across much of the global South, the majority of urban fabric is produced informally, built incrementally by residents and small builders outside the formal system of plans, permits and titles. UN-Habitat has long estimated that a very large share of the urban population in developing regions lives in informal settlements or self-built housing, and in Indian cities a substantial fraction of residents live in areas the plan classes as unauthorised, unplanned or slum. This is not a marginal exception to the real, planned city; in sheer extent and population it often is the city. The word informal is a poor label, because it defines a vast, generative phenomenon only by what it lacks, official sanction, rather than by what it is. What it is, is a mode of city-making: land occupied or subdivided outside formal channels, housing built room by room as families can afford it, livelihoods pursued in the street and the home, and services obtained through improvisation and negotiation. It arises not from lawlessness but from a structural failure, the formal system's inability to supply legal, affordable land and housing at the pace and price the urban poor need. Faced with cities that offer them work but no formal way to live in them, people build the city they are denied. The first professional discipline, then, is to replace the reflex of contempt or pity with the effort of accurate seeing: to study informal urbanism as a serious and skilful response to real constraints, which is exactly what thinkers from John Turner to the researchers of Dharavi have urged.

Look closely at an established informal settlement and you find not chaos but an intricate, adaptive order. Housing is typically incremental: a family secures a foothold, builds a single room, and over years adds floors, rooms and finishes as income and security permit, so the settlement literally grows denser and more permanent with time. This is the logic John Turner captured decades ago in his argument that housing is best understood as a verb, a process controlled by dwellers, rather than a noun delivered as a finished product; when people control their own housing process, he showed, they invest, adapt and maintain far better than any top-down scheme achieves. The settlement mixes uses at the finest grain, the same structure often houses a family upstairs and a workshop or shop below, so home and livelihood are inseparable. Streets narrow into a capillary network of lanes and shared courts that carry intense social life and pedestrian movement. Services are obtained through a patchwork of shared standpipes, informal power connections and community arrangements, often precarious and unjust in their pricing, but functioning. Dharavi in Mumbai is the world-famous case, not because it is typical in its scale but because it makes visible what informal settlements can be: a dense, mixed, productive district with a recycling and manufacturing economy turning over enormous value, embedded in a fabric that formal zoning would never have permitted. Seeing this order is not romanticising hardship, the deprivation of poor services, insecurity and health risk is real and must be fixed, but recognising the skill and rationality in the fabric is the precondition for improving it without destroying it.

Informality is not only about where people live but about how the whole city is used, and here the street is the stage. Street vending, hawking, home-based work and the countless micro-enterprises of the pavement are the visible economy of the everyday city, providing affordable goods and services to all classes and a livelihood to millions who have no formal employment. Scholars of what is called everyday urbanism describe the city as continuously negotiated: the same stretch of pavement is footpath by day, a vendor's stall at rush hour, a sleeping place at night, its use worked out through informal rules, tolerance and constant adjustment among vendors, residents, customers and the authorities. This negotiated order is fragile and often unjust, vendors face harassment, eviction and rent-seeking, precisely because the formal system treats their essential activity as an encroachment rather than a legitimate use of public space. India took an important step to correct this with the Street Vendors (Protection of Livelihood and Regulation of Street Vending) Act of 2014, which recognises vending as a legitimate livelihood, requires cities to survey and register vendors, and mandates Town Vending Committees to designate vending zones and protect vendors from arbitrary eviction. The Act is imperfectly implemented, but its principle is exactly right: the everyday city should be regulated and accommodated, not erased. For the designer this reframes the street entirely. A street is not only a channel for traffic but a site of livelihood and social life, and good street design in an Indian city plans positively for vending, for the informal, for the negotiated uses that make the public realm work, rather than designing them out.

When the state confronts an informal settlement, it faces a fork with profound human consequences, and the evidence strongly favours one path. The first path is eviction and clearance, often followed by relocation to distant resettlement colonies. This has been the default for decades and its record is grim: it destroys homes, social networks and, critically, livelihoods, because it severs people from the locations and clients their incomes depend on, pushing them into peripheral estates far from work, sometimes so unviable that families drift back to new informal settlements. The second path is in-situ upgrading, improving the settlement where it stands, providing secure tenure, water, sanitation, drainage, paved lanes, electricity and community facilities, while leaving the fabric and its social and economic networks intact. Decades of international experience, championed by UN-Habitat and the World Bank and rooted in Turner's insights, show upgrading to be cheaper, faster, less disruptive and far more humane than clearance, because it works with the enormous investment residents have already made rather than destroying it. A hybrid is redevelopment, rebuilding a settlement in place at higher density, as in Mumbai's slum rehabilitation schemes that cross-subsidise rehousing with market flats; this can deliver durable housing but often at the cost of the fine grain and ground-floor livelihoods, replacing a productive horizontal fabric with tenement towers that suit families poorly and micro-enterprises worse. The figure contrasts these approaches. The mature position is a strong presumption toward in-situ upgrading and secure tenure, with relocation only where a site is genuinely hazardous or essential public infrastructure requires it, and even then with rehabilitation that protects livelihoods and proximity.

Beyond the ethics of how we treat informal settlements lies a quieter, humbling proposition: that formal urbanism has a great deal to learn from informal urbanism as design. The qualities planners spend careers trying to engineer, walkability, fine-grained mixed use, active streets, high density without high-rise, adaptability, are precisely the qualities informal fabric produces spontaneously. Its buildings are close and low, so density is achieved on the ground where life happens rather than in isolating towers. Its uses are woven together at the scale of the single plot, so daily needs are a few steps away and the street is always overlooked and alive, delivering the natural surveillance Jane Jacobs prized. Its fabric is incremental and therefore adaptable, changing use and form as needs change, exactly the resilience that rigid single-use zoning forbids. Its streets are sized for people, not cars. None of this excuses the deprivation, and the lesson is not to build slums but to extract the transferable principles: the value of fine grain over superblocks, of mixed use over segregation, of incremental over finished, of the ground-oriented dense low-rise over the tower-in-the-park. Charles Correa built much of his career on exactly this reading, designing incremental, low-rise high-density housing and celebrating the open-to-sky, ground-oriented life of the Indian city; Balkrishna Doshi's Aranya housing in Indore offered serviced sites and starter cores that families completed themselves, a formal design that deliberately borrowed informality's incremental logic. To learn from informality is to let the most efficient urbanism most of the world actually builds inform the urbanism we design.

Everything in this lesson finally rests on an ethical foundation, because informal urbanism is not an abstract pattern but the homes and livelihoods of real people who are usually poor and often powerless. The governing idea is dignity and rights: that residents of informal settlements are citizens with a right to the city, to secure shelter, to livelihood, to services, and to a voice in decisions that reshape their lives, not encroachers to be managed off the map. The concept of the right to the city, associated with Henri Lefebvre and taken up worldwide, insists that those who make and use the city have a claim on how it is shaped. Practically this means several commitments. It means security of tenure as the foundation, because people who fear eviction will not invest, and secure households transform their own settlements. It means participation, not for informal residents but with them, treating their knowledge of their own place as expertise, a theme the next lesson develops. It means protecting livelihoods as fiercely as shelter, since a home without an income nearby is not a solution. And it means the designer approaching this work with humility rather than saviourism, aware that a plan drawn from above has repeatedly destroyed more than it built. Government programmes such as the housing missions and the Street Vendors Act reflect a slow official shift from clearance toward inclusion and upgrading; the professional's job is to push that shift further, to design with the grain of people's own efforts, and never to mistake the tidiness of a rendering for the justice of an outcome.