Transcriber: When I was six years old, growing up in Medellín, Colombia, I made one of the most impactful
decisions of my life. I asked my mother to change my school, to the school where she was teaching. To my surprise, she said yes. So I switched from a rich, private
Catholic school to a public school where 99 percent of the students
live in a condition of extreme poverty. The only meal some of my friends ate a day was the one that was given in school. My friends and I lived
close to each other, but worlds apart. I lived in a neighborhood
with a museum, a library, parks, and they lived in a neighborhood with the lack of the most
basic necessities, such as potable water or electricity. More importantly, they lived in
a place surrounded by danger, from guns to landslides. Their suffering was not unique. Up in the mountains,
in Medellín informal settlements, thousands of families
were having the same problems [as] my friends and their families, fearing that the police or the rains
would take their homes away. I learned so much from my friends, but what continued to surprise me the most
is their resilience and optimism in the face of adversity. Growing up with people that I care [about] is what had led me to the story
of informal settlements. I teach now at the University
of Colorado, Boulder, in the program of environmental design. I study informal settlements because even if they are
invisible to most of us, they represent one of humanity's
biggest challenges. And yet they provide great insight
in how cities develop and innovate. There are three crucial things that I have learned
about informal settlements that I want to share with you today. The first one is that informal settlements
are a widespread form of city making. The second one is that by making visible populations
in informal settlements, we can save their lives. The third one is that we pay
more attention to the creativity of people
who live in these places, we could be aware of innovations
that can save the planet. Informal settlements
can be broadly described as self-built neighborhoods
outside of city regulations in conditions of extreme poverty. Nowadays, more than a billion people
live in informal settlements all around the world. By the year 2050, one in three people on the planet will live in one of these places without potable water,
adequate sanitation and in condition of extreme poverty. This makes informal settlements,
what some call the slums, the most common form
of urbanization of the planet. The paradox of informal settlements
is that they are vast and common. However, the people and the places
in which they live are the most invisible. There is much that we don't know
about these places and that ignorance creates barriers
to develop tools to help them. A first step to make
visible these populations is to record the conditions
in which they live. However, many countries
where the informal settlements are do not have the resources
to map these populations. And the countries who have the resources sometimes have legal restrictions
that impede the state organizations to support the work
on informal settlements. These unknowns create vacuums
to understand informality and support the dissemination
of misconceptions about the real challenges
and opportunities of informality. As I started to learn more
about the informal settlements, I realized the scarcity of data available. Most of our understanding
about informality comes from separate
and unreliable sources. There is not a single database that contains all the informal
settlements in the world. To try to aid in such a puzzle, I created alongside hundreds
of collaborators the Atlas of Informality. The Atlas is a creative attempt
to visualize these invisible populations in an effort to understand
the unique process of informal city making. A crucial question
that we wanted to resolve here was how these places evolve over time. This was important not only to understand the past, but more importantly,
the future of informal settlements and the future of all world cities. We at Environmental Design Program created a protocol
with open-access software, remote sensing tools and direct mapping to identify and map
the change of informal settlements over the last 15 years all over the world. The key was to develop a tool
that was simple to use and that allows us to reach
most of the planet. A tool that allows to compare
these places at the same level. We have now mapped more than 400
informal settlements all over the world, and we have realized how each one of them
is changing and expanding as a result of the arriving populations. We discovered things expected. Regions are expanding at different rates. Informal settlements in Latin America
and Africa are expanding more rapidly than those in Asia. More importantly, we discovered that the entire sample continues expanding at a rate
of 9.85 percent. But what [does] this obscure number mean? It means that every year 2,300 square kilometers
of informal settlements are created out of the expansion
of existing ones. This expansion means that every year, at the informal settlement, a slum, a city larger that some
of the largest cities on the planet, such as Moscow, Houston or Tokyo, is created out of the expansion
of existing settlements. As these places continue
to grow in darkness, we are blinded to what happens
in the cities emerging every day. This is why I have dedicated my life to the co-production with communities
that live in informal settlements. Not only to try to improve
their conditions of living, but to learn from them about the unique process
of informal city making. Working with families and community
members over the last 10 years, I have learned that to solve the informal settlements
most challenging problems new cutting-edge strategies are needed. And that the source of that innovation resides already within the knowledge
of these communities. I have learned that for each problem there is a community-based solution
spearheaded by the people living there. For example, we learn fascinating things
from communities like Carpinelo or Manantiales de Paz in Colombia, who organized themselves
to build infrastructure improvements. They call these “combites”. These infrastructure improvements go
from the creation of water systems to stairways, to roads. At the family level,
we find incredible financing mechanisms. Like they're renting of rooms
to pay for home expansions or the creation of micro businesses
tailored to the surrounding populations. One of my goals now is the emulation of those
strategies at larger scales. Creative informal solutions
follow a disruptive process that breaks away with traditional ways
in which we think about cities. Planners, city officials and architects
tend to operate in cities in similar ways as those set up
at the beginning of the 20th century. What forced them and us to think about the informal
settlements as a pathology, as a disease, as something that needs to be eradicated. This old-fashioned way
of looking at slums forces the use of obsolete strategies. As a result, slum eradication programs
have left millions homeless and have only displayed
the problem to other places. In unbelievable contrast, the resources of informal dwellers
for these populations to find unconventional ways
to solve the same problems. Their solutions are less
environmentally impactful and rely less on the need of big
infrastructure improvements. These solutions could be as physical as the creation of pedestrian-friendly
compact neighborhoods, or as strategic as the setup of community-based
banking systems. These solutions could work both for informal settlements
with less resources and to cities in the search
of more sustainable development. Making these places visible is not only essential
to help impoverished communities, it's also vital for the rest of us. These populations living in scarcity
are forced to innovate and create these disruptive
urban products. Informal communities have always thrived, finding new opportunities
out of necessity, from unofficial moto-taxis,
private vehicles that serve the public, a response for the need for affordable
transportation systems, or like the renting of rooms
to pay for home expansions, what makes homes in informal settlements
a self-sustainable urban model. Think about how radical this idea is. That instead of getting a loan
to pay for your home, your home is the business
that pays for the place that you live in. Of course, I don't want
to romanticize these solutions, as they are the result of innovation
out of dramatic suffering. But what I want to say is that there is
much that we could learn from them. In fact, I think there are some
that are already learning. I argue that today, some of the most
disruptive urban products, such as the ride apps, similar to the moto-taxis, or the home-sharing economy, similar to the self-financing
urban model in informal settlements, started decades ago in the confines of informal settlements. If we pay more attention to visibilizing
these invisible populations, we will not only have the opportunity
to support the effort of billions, but we could learn from them
how we can change the planet. Now, thinking back about my schoolmates, the communities which I collaborate with and the billions living
in informal settlements, there are three things
that we all need to do. The first one is that we need to make
these communities more visible. They are part of our cities, they deserve to be respected
and accounted. Second is that we need to pay
more attention to the creativity and innovation that happen
in these places. The next billion-dollar business, the next urban sustainable solution
has already been invented in one of the thousands informal
settlements around the world. And finally, we need to apply
what we learned there. For the future one third of the planet and for our cities that need to be safe. Thank you.
