Improvised Urbanism

1. Auflage 2027
ISBN: 978-1-041-27790-3
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 374 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design

Improvised Urbanism examines how cities are shaped by adaptive, informal, and incremental spatial practices, moving beyond conventional binaries like formal/informal and planned/unplanned. The book highlights improvised urbanism as a critical framework for understanding how communities navigate uncertainty, inequality, displacement, and environmental change.

The book explores how inhabitants transform space through acts of occupation, repair, participation, resistance, and care. Case studies span diverse contexts, including refugee camps, informal settlements, street markets, Indigenous territories, and peri-urban landscapes, revealing resilient and socially embedded forms of urbanism that challenge dominant planning paradigms. Engaging with themes like resilience, tactical urbanism, climate adaptation, and spatial justice, the chapters investigate the structural conditions driving improvisation while foregrounding collective agency and creative capacities. Advocating for reflexive and participatory approaches to urban planning, Improvised Urbanism reimagines planning as an adaptive, inclusive process responsive to the complexities of lived urban realities.

Drawing on perspectives from architecture, anthropology, urban design, and political science, this book will be of interest to researchers, students and professionals.

Zielgruppe

Academic, Postgraduate, and Undergraduate Advanced

Autoren/Hrsg.

Karunaratne, Gihan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Städtebau, Stadtplanung (Architektur)

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction (Gihan Karunaratne) Part 1. Improvised Urbanism in Contexts of Displacement and Precarity 1. Resourceful Urbanism in Queensland: Adaptive Practices in Remote Indigenous Communities (Ali Cheshmehzangi) 2. Laid Out by Eye: The Improvised Urbanism of the American Travelling Circus Lot (Devin Jernigan and Alan Plattus) 3. An Open-source Urbanism Platform as a Mediator Between Top-down and Bottom-up Design in Urban Village Renewal Participatory Urbanism (Lin Ruofan and Rudi Stouffs) 4. Taking Up Space: Youth, Space and Power Politics in Mathare (Rachel Sittoni) Part 2. Informality and Resistance: Everyday Negotiations 5. Improvised agency, resilience, and resistance among South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda (Ryan Joseph O’Byrne) 6. Invisible by Necessity: Tactical Disappearance and the Embodied Politics of Survival in Dadaab (Fabienne Hoelzel) 7.Resistance and resilience in the context of Kingston, Jamaica (David Howard) Part 3. Against the Odds: De-homing and Re-homing 8. Improvised Urbanism in Times of Collective De-Homing: The Case of Resilient Inhabitation/Antifragile Urbanity. (Avisa Yazdani and Nashid Nabian) 9. Landed Overnight: Gecekondu and Makeshift City in the Zeytinburnu District in Istanbul (Arzu Kusaslan) 10. The enduring transience of Tekna homes (Alvaro Velasco Perez and Rim Cherkaoui) Part 4. Participatory and Embodied Practices 11. Participatory Interior Urbanism: A Typology of Actions in Jakarta’s Street Vending (Anak Warakanyaka, Tania Lopez-Winkler and Graeme Brooker) 12. Touching the Lion: Four Dimensions of Anomalie G2025C4599 as a Record of Urban Intervention (Floris Paalman) 13. Improvising the City from Below: Spatio-Tactical Practices in the Kizilay Night Market (Deniz Kesici and Tanzil Shafique) 14. Embodied Threads: weaving memory and traces through the landscape (Angeliki Sakellariou and Vicky Spanovangelis) Part 5. Emergent and Incremental Urbanism 15. How to grow a city (Ed Parham and Dr Francesca Froy) 16. Hurry Up and Wait (Sampath Pediredla and Matthew Rosen) 17. Urban Strange Attractors: The Fragmented Logic of Bucharest’s Development in the 21st Century (Luigi Pintacuda) 18. In-situ Urbanism: People in Transition in Sri Lanka (Gihan Karunaratne, Jagath Munasinghe and Nusrat Jahan Mim) 19. Patient Development for Impatient Cities (Alex Yuen)

Über Autor(innen)

Gihan Karunaratne is an architect and academic whose work critically engages with contemporary issues in architecture, urbanism, and spatial practice. Integrating design research, urban theory, and socio-spatial analysis, his scholarship examines how cities evolve through ongoing physical, economic, and social transformations. His research focuses on urban transformation and its effects on marginalised communities, with particular attention to informal settlements, urban precarity, and the “underbelly” of the city. Through this lens, he explores questions of resilience, spatial justice, and the adaptive strategies that emerge within conditions of uncertainty and instability. Karunaratne’s work is situated primarily within the Global South, where rapid urbanisation and entrenched inequality produce complex and contested spatial conditions. He approaches informal urbanism not as a condition of deficiency, but as a dynamic site of social and spatial negotiation. His publications contribute to broader debates on informality, resilient urbanism, mapping practices, and spatial justice.