The event will explore the questions of what can planners and designers learn from the many forms of community-led design processes already embedded in informal settlements? And as planners, engineers, and designers, how can we contribute to the existing structures and community knowledge in informal settlements?

Rather than treating informal settlements simply as places in need of design intervention, the event asks us to consider the design practices and collective processes that already shape them, emerging through community knowledge, negotiation, adaptation, and systems of decision-making that may operate outside formal planning and design institutions.

This event is organized by The Majority City, a student-led research initiative and will bring together panelists to hold multifaceted dialogue around challenging the assumptions and learn from their experience learning from the communities.

Panelists:

Lawrence Vale, Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Associate Dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. For more than three decades, his work has examined the relationship between design and politics in both global and American context.

Laura Wainer, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at The City College of New York, CUNY. Her academic work analyzes the intersection between housing policy, design politics, and urban governance in Latin America and Southern Africa.

Ignacio A Cardona, Associate Professor, Wentworth Institute of Technology and Director at Spatial Opportunity Lab. His work examines how urban design can address spatial inequality and ecological transformation through the articulation of communities, institutions, infrastructures, and living systems.