Personal Background and Motivation

• Speaker switched at age 6 from rich private Catholic school to public school in Medellín, Colombia where mother taught
• 99% of students lived in extreme poverty
• Only meal some friends ate daily was at school
• Speaker lived in neighborhood with museum, library, parks vs friends in areas lacking basic necessities (potable water, electricity)
• Friends faced constant danger from guns, landslides
• Thousands of families in Medellín informal settlements feared police or rains would take homes away
• Friends showed remarkable resilience and optimism despite adversity
• Experience led to lifelong study of informal settlements

Current Position and Research Focus

• Now teaches at University of Colorado Boulder, Environmental Design Program
• Studies informal settlements as invisible yet representing humanity's biggest challenges
• Settlements provide insight into city development and innovation

Three Key Insights About Informal Settlements

1. Widespread Form of City Making

• Informal settlements: self-built neighborhoods outside city regulations in extreme poverty conditions
• Current population: >1 billion people worldwide
• 2050 projection: 1 in 3 people globally will live in informal settlements
• Lack potable water, adequate sanitation, live in extreme poverty
• Most common form of urbanization on planet

2. Visibility Can Save Lives

• Paradox: settlements are vast/common but people/places most invisible
• Ignorance creates barriers to developing helpful tools
• Many countries lack resources to map these populations
• Countries with resources face legal restrictions preventing state organizations from supporting informal settlement work
• Creates vacuums in understanding informality, spreads misconceptions

Atlas of Informality Project

• Created with hundreds of collaborators to visualize invisible populations
• Addresses scarcity of reliable data on informal settlements
• No single database exists containing all world informal settlements
• Most understanding comes from separate, unreliable sources

Research Methodology

• Environmental Design Program created protocol using:
  • Open-access software
  • Remote sensing tools
  • Direct mapping
• Tool designed to be simple, reach most of planet, allow comparison at same level
• Mapped 400+ informal settlements worldwide over last 15 years

Key Findings

• Each settlement changing/expanding due to arriving populations
• Regional expansion rates vary:
  • Latin America and Africa expanding more rapidly than Asia
• Overall sample expanding at 9.85% rate annually
• Annual creation: 2,300 square kilometers of informal settlements from expansion
• Yearly expansion equivalent to city larger than Moscow, Houston, or Tokyo

3. Community Innovation and Solutions

• 10 years working with families/community members
• Cutting-edge strategies needed for challenging problems
• Innovation source resides within community knowledge
• Each problem has community-based solution led by residents

Examples from Colombian Communities

• Carpinelo and Manantiales de Paz organized "combites" (infrastructure improvements)
  • Water systems creation
  • Stairways construction
  • Road building
• Family-level financing mechanisms:
  • Room rental to pay for home expansions
  • Micro businesses tailored to surrounding populations

Disruptive Urban Innovation

• Creative informal solutions break from traditional city thinking
• Planners, officials, architects operate using early 20th century methods
• Traditional view: informal settlements as pathology/disease requiring eradication
• Slum eradication programs left millions homeless, displaced problems elsewhere

Informal Solutions Advantages

• Less environmentally impactful
• Rely less on big infrastructure improvements
• Physical solutions: pedestrian-friendly compact neighborhoods
• Strategic solutions: community-based banking systems
• Work for both resource-limited settlements and cities seeking sustainable development

Innovation Examples

• Unofficial moto-taxis: private vehicles serving public (affordable transportation response)
• Room rental for home expansion: homes as self-sustainable urban model
• Radical concept: home as business paying for living space (vs traditional loans)
• Modern parallels:
  • Ride apps similar to moto-taxis
  • Home-sharing economy similar to self-financing urban model
  • These innovations started decades ago in informal settlements

Call to Action

Three Essential Actions

1. Make communities more visible
   • Part of our cities
   • Deserve respect and accounting
2. Pay attention to creativity and innovation
   • Next billion-dollar business may emerge from thousands of informal settlements worldwide
3. Apply learned lessons
   • For future one-third of planet living in informal settlements
   • For cities needing to be safer and more sustainable