Off The Map:

Learning From The Informal City Case Study. Las Flores, Colombia

Resumen

Most of the urban dwellers live in communities that, while composed of buildings that range from simple shacks to permanent structures, belong to an urban geography that is literally “off the map”: undocumented, illegal, mobile, ephemeral, and generally beyond the reach of government services and infrastructure. Lacking even an agreed-upon descriptive term- they are variously referred to as slums, informal settlements, shantytowns, or unplanned cities – they are often seen as nothing but undifferentiated pockets of misery, wracked by poverty, crime and unsanitary conditions: in other words, an unfortunate but inevitable waste product of the uncontrolled urban growth that characterizes our time. This view is as unfortunate as it is misguided. While undeniably precarious in construction, informal cities exhibit underlying urban and architectural patterns of remarkable resilience, and that moreover reflect their inhabitants’ enduring cultural values. Built without the assistance of architects and/or planners, they are folkloric expressions of a given people worthy of study. To date, the informal city has largely been described in social, political and economic terms. Very little scholarship has been devoted to the study of these cities as works of architecture; and questions of representation- or how to map and record these sites- seem to be missing from the debate. While it is undeniable that Architecture represents only one aspect of a more complex reality; we believe that it the ultimate and verifiable expression of any given reality. To this end, the paper will present the work of the studio entitled: Off the Map: Learning from the Informal City. The group initially visited the ‘Las Flores’ informal settlement in Barranquilla, Colombia to learn from its existing landscape and see firsthand how it works. Students were asked to look nonjudgmentally at this environment by studying, mapping, and documenting its existing conditions.