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From Informal Practices to Collective Living: Assembling Incubators for the Domestic Economy

Student: Radosavljevic Emily ann

Supervisor: Anastasia Smirnova

Faculty: Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism

Educational Programme: Advanced Urban Design (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2018

While a resurgence of interest in ‘informal cities’ in recent years focuses on developing industrializing contexts, ‘the informal’ is also an increasingly important part of life in post-industrial economies in Europe and the US. Post-industrial informalities pose challenging and under-examined questions about the organization and possible future typologies of labor, space and governance as we move towards a digitized knowledge-based economy that increasingly depends on networks and collective initiative, blurring the lines between work, leisure and learning. Against the backdrop of the more conventional casting of “informal urbanism” as a phenomenon in developing countries, especially in South America and Africa, this investigation uses a set of rather different examples from the Netherlands. The goal of this work is to understand l the emergent and hybrid informalities that arise through complex aggregations of people, labor and resources circulating within well-regulated post-industrial information economies. Disrupting the coordinated centralizing governing logic of the industrial model of social organization, emerging waves of informalities based on internal contact and exchanges are forming new ways of living.  This trend is augmented by the financial crisis and needs for economism, flexible identities and mobile lifestyles, informal resources and their networked, collective reconstitution. Anticipating paradigmatic governance shifts in the foreseeable future, this investigation explores informal networks in order to shed light on how life and labor may be organized if we consciously apply models found in informal networks in design practices.

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