Community Re-Enfranchisement: Illustrating a Displacement-Integration Cycle of Development

The re-integration of marginalized people and materials into the mainstream of socio-economic consideration in the Global South is a complicated and often abstract ambition, rendered increasingly more unintelligible by its lack of socio-urban verifiability. However more and more, the activities, materials and practices of the informal sector are given promissing dimension by the effectiveness of the homemade devices and built environments that characterize them. This curious development standard is illustrated in the chart above, which is meant to describe the process by which material, products and technologies move from formal obsolencence to informal reinvention, and the corresponding socio-economic and socio-urban forces and affects that inform this displacement-integration paradigm.

In order to represent the contended developmental affects of this rationale, several examples of small scale interventions are provided below that suggest how architectural solutions may be able to help legitimize informal activities and materials by providing a kind of "pro-forma" standard of program and location. In this case for instance, a "day labor" station, sited strategically in or around the sector boundaries of a designated city "formalizes" to a certain degree an informal demographic of user simply by virtue of the program having been considered and realized in the form of an occupiable structure.

Similarly, appropriating "informal" activities as legitimate pieces of architectural program could have as inductive an affect on re-enfranchising urban and peri-urban areas as the day labor station is assumed to have. For instance, providing outposts and structures for the cumbersome, homemade water purification systems that are so prevalent in African and Asian villages may in fact be a program with great emergence potential for certain areas if appropriate locations are designated to help bridge sector boundaries, and appropriate materials are employed and reused to keep both labor and products relavent.


Still another potential architectural program inspired by informal sector economic activity might be refuse or barter kiosks-- or places where people might be able to go to sell and trade the refuse items they mine or find from formal sector communities and infills. In this way, the informal, unregulated act of selling disposed electronics and used car parts on the sidewalks is given a socio-spatial dimension that may be the first step towards legitimate community and material re-enfranchisement.