The Wall
As urban populations grow, access to affordable housing declines, pushing people to build informal settlements outside legal and formal construction systems. These settlements often lack access to essential infrastructure—water, sanitation, and electricity—even as they house a large share of the population in developing countries.
Current models of governmental aid designing for informality exist as top down approaches that ignore lived realities at the scale of the home. They focus on planning and urban development levels. These are incongruent with informal lifestyles, and undermine the sense of belonging that comes with rituals of self-authorship in space making that exist in such settlements.
This thesis proposes an alternative: reposition governmental aid for informal housing as a wall—a tool to articulate growth through cluster-level, collective infrastructure that delivers minimum essential utilities (water, electricity, drainage, sewage) for domestic stability, while enabling self building of homes along the wall, preserving inhabitants’ belonging and ownership. It also imagines the wall as a way to introduce public amenities such as play areas, work areas that such organically growing settlements lack.
