Book Launch

A conversation between RCA PhD alumni Bruna Montuori with Nusrat Mim, Nishat Awan and Gihan Karunaratne about Gihan's newly published edited book Informal Settlements of the Global South (Routledge, 2024).

Bringing together case studies ranging across the globe, including the US-Mexico borderlands, the Calais encampment in France, refugee camps in Kenya, Uganda and Bangladesh and contested ‘informal’ enclaves and communities in the cities of India, China, Brazil, Nigeria and South Africa, this book challenges current ways of thinking about the governance of human settling, mobility and placemaking.

Together, the 15 essays question the validity of the conventional hegemonic divisions of Global North vs. Global South and ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’, in terms of geographic presence, transborder performances and the ideological inter-dependence of Northern and Southern spaces, spatial practices and the uniformity of authoritative enforcements. The book, whose authors themselves come from all over the world, uses ‘Global South’ as a methodological apparatus to ask the ‘Southern’ question of settling and unsettling across the globe. Crucially, the studies reveal the sentiments, resourcefulness and the agency of those positioned by the powerful within the dichotomies of formal/informal, legitimate/ illegal, privileged/marginalized, etc., who are traditionally identified within the dominant development discourse as mere numbers or designated by intervening institutions as helpless recipients.

By focussing on hitherto invisible events and untold stories of adaptation, negotiation and contestation by people and their communities, this volume of essays takes the ongoing North-South debate in new directions and opens up to the reader’s fresh areas of enquiry. It will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, planning, politics and sociology, as well as built environment professionals.

Panel members:

Gihan Karunaratne is a Sri Lankan-born British architect and studied at Royal College of Arts and Bartlett School of Architecture. He has taught and lectured in Architecture, Urban Design and Interior Design in the UK, Sri Lanka and China. He writes and researches extensively on art, architecture and urban design. Gihan’s current research interests are in architecture and urban conditions within cities which are undergoing constant physical, economic or social changes in patterns of urban living. In many of his projects he has researched and explored the underbelly of the city in detail, specifically focussing on non-conformist marginalized communities. From urban transition courses and temporality in the Global South, he remains actively engaged in urban research with focus on informal settlements and communities.

Nishat Awan is professor of architecture and visual culture at UCL Urban Laboratory, the Bartlett (UK). Situated between art and architectural practice, Nishat Awan’s research and writing explore displacement, migration and border regimes. She is interested in modes of spatial representation, particularly in relation to the digital and the limits of witnessing as a form of ethical engagement with distant places. She led the ERC funded project, Topological Atlas, on the counter-geographies of migrants as they encounter the security apparatus of the border. Her book, Diasporic Agencies (Routledge, 2016) addressed how architecture and urbanism can respond to the consequences of increasing migration. She has written on alternative modes of architectural production in the co-authored book Spatial Agency (Routledge, 2011) and the co-edited book Trans-Local-Act (aaa-peprav, 2011).

Nusrat Jahan Mim is a Doctor of Design candidate at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on post-colonial, post-secular urban designs and human-computer interaction. By examining existing systems, she explores how different spatial and technical designs challenge or propagate social exclusions in the Global South. She designs alternatives for such marginal contexts. Her work has earned awards in leading design and computing venues including ACM CHI, Lafarge-Holcim, Laka International, etc. Prior to Harvard, she won the prestigious AIA Henry Adams Medal from Syracuse School of Architecture for achieving the highest academic rank in M.Arch. She also achieved citation for excellence in her M.Arch thesis titled Subaltern Virtualities. She achieved her B.Arch with distinction from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.    

Bruna Montuori is a designer and urban researcher investigating the relations between space, community development and autonomy through participatory methods. She was trained as a Product Designer at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) and holds a Masters degree in Architecture from Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo (FAU-USP). She is currently a PhD Candidate at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, funded by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).