2023SPRING CHENYAN WANG
INFORMALITY
Urban farming and Foodscape in informal settlements
Eli Lotar, Aux abattoirs de la Villette, 1929
Informality, as the aggregate of objects, conditions, and influences that constitute the indistinct social space, has become an increasingly prominent urban phenomenon in southern urbanism. The discourse on informality, narrates many crucial contemporary issues, from environmental crisis and global inequality to the unclassifiable urbanization process. Informality reveals an anchorless generality beyond space, even time.
The term “informality” matured in the 1970s, initially proposed by the International Labor Organization (ILO) in 1972, which was used to characterize labor in Ghana and subsequently in researches of self-built housing in Latin America[1]. Approximately 1 billion people live in informal settlements across the globe, most of them located in the countries in the Global South. If current trends persist, the number of informal settlement dwellers is projected to reach 2 billion by 2030 and further increase to 3 billion by 2050[2]. Our focus on the informal city is not to build an idealistic utopia wi
The notion of “informality” underscores the intricate and ever-changing character of social structures and emphasizes the significance of conscientious contemplation concerning the principles, standards, and power dynamics that mold our existence. On one hand, “informality” is a way of overcoming both failures of statistical conceptualization and policy impasses, romanticizing bottom-up autonomy; on the other hand, “informality” fuels incremental factors of social instability, leading to unauthorized urban sprawl.
Informal housing was embraced and rejected simultaneously- as it links housing, environmental crisis and immigration in new and disconcerting ways. It’s worthwhile to bring contemporary discussions on interdependence between infrastructures, humans and nature into the “informality” discourse. The informal settlements need a new narrative, precisely, is why they function as geological, biopolitical and cultural keystones for us to understanding the southern urbanism.
Body as infrastructure
The informal urbanism is tied to "the modern movement". Infrastructures, as fetishized forms of broader social relations, comprising modes of (re)production, and reflect the illusory desires of capitalist modernity. The visibility and invisibility of infrastructure networks are perceived differently in the process of informal urbanization.
Infrastructure, as interpreted beyond dead matter, such as pipes, roads and tunnels, is turning to emphasize the flows (of finance, resources, labor, care and repair) needed to sustain these lively materialities.[3]That is to say, infrastructures can not only be the material embodiment of structural violence, but also reveal how networks of food, waste, and energy operate through political economic structures that exclude the marginized body from equitable access. Infrastructure framework function as a critical tool for re-understanding the space that made out of the social relationships of the people and the physical structures that come with that.
Seeing people as infrastructure is beneficial to capture the mobile, flexible and informal ways in which everyday practices reproduce life in the urban.[4]As Simone proposed that, “people as infrastructure indicates residents’ needs to generate concrete acts and contexts of social collaboration inscribed with multiple identities rather than in overseeing and enforcing modulated transactions among discrete population groups”.[5]
Commencing with a focus on bodily metabolism, we delve into the intricate interplay of energy inputs. These inputs, sourced from food that is intricately entwined within a complex web of colonial and capitalist production networks, give rise to uneven bodies.[6] Or in other words, the functioning of the body, regarded as a form of infrastructure, is marked by unevenness, contestation, and incompleteness. It encompasses both the realms of production and social reproduction.
In this context, "space of food production and consumption" serves as a measurement of power that is accessible to a select, privileged social group, obtained and safeguarded with the underlying principle of denying access to subaltern. Privilege weaves into a vast web, trapping marginalized groups with slow violence, that “an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”[7].That is to say, less privileged and marginalized social groups are forced to spontaneously occupy the spaces assigned to them, exist in a state of mobility.
Take the street vendors as an example. street vendors are always involved with informal food systems, which refer to the combination of food chains that contain informal activities. Informal food vendors frequently serve as a vital resource for daily sustenance among urban low-income households in various sub-Saharan African cities, such as Nairobi, Kenya.[8]Similarly, small-scale farming and local food vending that support the lower socioeconomic population groups in China are ignored by legislation and urban planning.[9]
It is a common phenomenon that food systems involve the informal sector in developing countries[10]. The primary driving force behind this phenomenon is rapid urbanization, which combines with a gradual shift of poverty from rural to urban areas.[11]For example, over the past few years, the crisis within China's food systems has become increasingly intense, stemming from the inherent conflict between urban expansion and agricultural land use. Some migrant workers and the urban poor living in “urban villages” rely on informal food production and informal food vending for survival. Here, we step outside the grand narrative of political economy and consider the body as an important and intimate dimension of infrastructure, allowing insight into the multi-scalar spatial relationships associated with bodily infrastructure practices[12]. From the work of women's bodies maintaining waste infrastructure in Dakar[13], to gendered social labor in Cairo[14], and the networks of care through which women secure water in Delhi[15], we rethink the role of the body as an infrastructure in a spatial sense from the perspective of the foodscape and energy recycle.
What is worth discussing here is how to map “foodscapes” in informal settlements within an environmental justice framework and how people exceed and resist the ways in which their bodies are produced as racialized and gendered infrastructures.
From Kitchen, Beyond Kitchen
The site and ecological conditions within informal settlements indicate a range of injustices related to location, such as limited access to water, inadequate sanitation, transportation challenges in terms of availability, accessibility, and affordability, as well as a lack of other essential social amenities. For example, at least half of the Johannesburg's shantytown periphery's non-white population lives in informal settlements in areas of toxic waste and unstable, contaminated soil.[16]Food, as a thread connecting important environmental issues such as indigenous cultivation, waste management, sanitation and water supply, needs a new narrative and spatial image.
The concept of a "foodscape" can be expansive and inclusive, encompassing various aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption at different scales.[17]It interconnects food, places, and people throughout the entire process. The humanitarian response typically prioritizes addressing food availability and food security concerns, often overlooking the significance of food production and consumption spaces within informal settlements and their broader socio-economic and environmental impacts.
Let’s start with Kitchen. Compared to the excessive and obvious flavoring in informal settlements, the space of food production in formal neighborhood has evolved into flavorless, minimal, and austere in the process of gentrification. The strong smell of kitchen fumes and waste indicates the reliance on traditional biomass. The kitchen not just function as a place for cooking, but also the only source of heat in informal settlements.
The presence of kitchens and cooking stoves strengthens the bonds of kinship, friendship, and alliances, transcending boundaries of settlements, races, and classes. Private kitchens are more easily transformed into a public network within informal settlements. By expanding and turning the act of cooking into a communal endeavor, these kitchens openly exposed the economic connection between reproductive labor and the broader economy.
The kitchen, as an allegory of urban metabolism, is occupied, conceptualized, capitalized, displaced, deconstructed and reimagined.
Introduced in Germany by left-wing groups in the 1980s, KüfA’s kitchens served as an act of resistance against top-down and green-washed political strategies, such as the far right ‘eco-strategy’ which dismisses the influence of urban activities on global warming while endorsing gentrification and unsustainable agriculture in Germany.[18]KüfAs provide us with insights into ecological care as a form of resistance, fostering connections among individuals from urban and rural domains, and emphasizing the political influence of food systems. Also, for southern countries, community kitchens have the potential to blend traditional culinary customs with a systematic approach to utilizing local flora[19], which contribute to local environmental system. The strategies of communal dining can assist us in designing for a critical ecological transition.
Source: Angelo Dal Bo
Exterior
view of Food after the renovations, 1971–2Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone papers, circa 1860–2011, bulk 1940–2011, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Food served as a vital gathering point for a neighborhood experiencing significant social transformations.
Informal Settlements as “Urban Kitchen”
Since the pioneering insights of Patrick Geddes, urban theorists have consistently acknowledged the importance of preserving a green matrix of unspoiled ecosystems, open spaces, and natural services for both environmental efficiency and public well-being. They recognize that cities must form a symbiotic alliance with nature to effectively recycle waste materials and transform them into valuable resources for farming, gardening, and energy production.[20] While, most of the informal settlements, are systematically encroach on their environmental support system. Urban agriculture, in this context, has become a more visible land use type and play an important role in exploring ecological balance and sustainability within informal settlements. Meanwhile, it is crucial to establish connections between urban agriculture and the prevalent informal(street) economy observed extensively in the global south.[21]
Discussions on urban agriculture, which indicates its great potential on the local economy and food security, might provide a possible way out of that vicious circle. Instead of an architectural framework that can “upgrade living system”, an infrastructural one is more needed to empower the informal settlements.
If the informal settlement can be perceived as “urban kitchen”, the architects will undoubtfully function as the cook. In a process of incremental development, not only a corpus of systematic interventions that respond to informal urban expansion, replication and regeneration was developed, but also new clients and architects are created. Architects, who become initiators of social processes, not necessarily aligned with power and capital has emerged in this scenario where residents are recognized as stakeholders, remodelers, and active participants in shaping their neighborhoods.
Terms like “globalization”, “deglobalization”, “neoliberalism” as metanarratives in postmodernity, are also spatialized in architectural interventions. As Lyotard proposed that metanarratives should give way to petits récits, or more modest and "localized" narratives, which can ''throw off" the grand narrative by bringing into focus the singular event.[22] What kind of "localized" narratives” do we need in the specific case of urban agriculture and food production within informal settlements?
The Fire Foodies Club, an installation for the Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture in Shenzhen, China by Atelier Bow Wow.
Image credit: Zhang Chao
Venice Biennale 2012: Torre David, Gran Horizonte / Urban Think Tank + Justin McGuirk + Iwan Baan. In the serene, high-art setting of the Corderie, this pop-up restaurant establishes a dynamic, Venezuelan social hub. Food, as a powerful social equalizer, facilitates the exchange of ideas in the most “convivial” manner.
We can obverse a bit of a buffer, or a rebuff, to modern urbanism within informal settlements. We dig into a society's fundamental problems through the lens of a non-permanent and unstable spatial order. “Localized” narratives about informal settlements in southern urbanism are discovered ,formalized and consumed. The compelling narratives are encompassed and elucidated within conceptual frameworks, bringing together the "little stories" to form a complete picture, which is supposed to deliberately disturb the formulaic expectations that organized urbanism provide.
The truth is that, there is never one unified image of informal settlements which operates as a foil to the West formalized urbanism, but several, often contradictory ones. While, the global north is desperately thirsty for a resilient humanitarian imagination of southern informal urbanism to ease their anxieties about the global environmental crisis. What we need is, “a kitchen without hysteria”[23], which be a work in this transitional period of the global imagination. “The kitchen” is the aggregate of urban farming strategies, productive landscapes, and infrastructure framework that constitute the indistinct social space. “The kitchen” will lead us to find answers to the following questions: Can community-based urban agriculture generate an open infrastructural framework[24] in the process of informal urbanism? Or, can urban farming serve as a strategic approach to enhance social mobility within informal settlements, thus empower informal urbanism?
The future of an informal settlement lies in its past and present. Practices of urbanization do not necessarily result in the creation of a just city, and the research on urban issues never moves definitely from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. It is a ceaseless social war in regard to redrawing spatial boundaries and reexamining the urban immune system. Will informality, as a state of incompleteness in this social war, be an unpredictable surprise or a flawed sword?
[1] Nancy, Kwak. “California Formalising: A Story of Deliberately Designed Inequality.” Architectural Review, December 17, 2020.
[2] Mahabir, R., Crooks, A., Croitoru, A. & Agouris, P. 2016. The study of slums as social and physical constructs: Challenges and emerging research opportunities. Regional Studies, Regional Science 3(1), 399–419.
[3]Andueza, L., Davies, A., Loftus, A., & Schling, H. (2021). The body as infrastructure. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 799–817. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620937231
[4] See Simone’s conceptualization of “people as infrastructure” in Simone A (2004) People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3): 407–429.
[5] Simone A (2004) People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3): 419
[6] Rioux S,Capitalism and the production of uneven bodies: Women, motherhood and food distribution in Britain c. 1850–1914. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40(1): 1–13.
[7] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
[8]Tacoli, Cecilia, Hoang Xuan Thanh, Mensah Owusu, Leonard Kigen, and Jon Padgham. The role of local government in urban food security. International Institute for Environment and Development., 2013.
[9] Zhao, L. Exploring the spatial planning dimensions of urban informal food systems in Nanjing, China. Urban Agric Region Food Syst. (2021); 6: 1– 17. https://doi.org/10.1002/uar2.20012
[10] Argenti, O., & Marocchino, C., & FAO (2005). Urban food supply and distribution in developing countries and countries in transition: a guide for planners.
[11] Ravallion, M. (2002). On the urbanization of poverty. Journal of Development Economics, 68, 435–442. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-3878(02)00021-4
[12] Pain, Rachel, and Lynn Staeheli. "Introduction: Intimacy-geopolitics and violence." Area 46.4 (2014): 344-347.
[13]Fredericks, Rosalind. Garbarge citizenship: Vital infrastructures of labor in Dakar, Senegal. Duke University Press, 2018.
[14]Elyachar, Julia. "Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo." American ethnologist 37.3 (2010): 452-464.
[15]Truelove, Yaffa. "Gray zones: The everyday practices and governance of water beyond the network." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109.6 (2019): 1758-1774.
[16]Malcolm Lupton and Tony Wolfson, "Low-Income Housing, the Environment and Mining on the Witwatersrand," in Main and Williams, Environment and Housing in Third World Cities, pp. 1 1 5, 1 20.
[17] Ahmed, S, Haklay, M, Tacoli, C, et al. Participatory mapping and food-centred justice in informal settlements in Nairobi, Kenya. Geo: Geography and Environment. 2019; 6:e00077. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.77
[18]Gabriela, Aquije Zegarra, “Kitchen aid: care through collective cookery”, The Architectural Review, March 18,2021.
[19] Young, J. 14 March 2016. “A Community Kitchen in Mexico City.” Culinary Backstreets. https://culinarybackstreets.com/cities-category/mexico-city/2016/el-comunitario/
[20] Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2017). p.134
[21]Lindell, I. 2019. “Introduction: Re-spatialising Urban Informality: Reconsidering the Spatial Politics of Street Work in the Global South.”International Development Planning Review 41 (1): 3–21. doi:10.3828/idpr.2019.2.
[22]Lyotard, Jean-François. Introduction:The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1979: xxiv–xxv.
[23] Originally see “a theatre without hysteria” from Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 157.
[24] The concept of “an open framework” was originally proposed by Bernard Rudofsky in his 1964 book Architecture Without Architects, and by Giancarlo de Carlo in his 1970 essay “Architecture’s Public.”
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