"(in)formal" Proposal

Independent research (Masters thesis)

Nov 2022

RMIT university, MLB

This project seeks to recognise the infrastructure as property in a way that allows for the transformation and advancement of these “informal” communities.
This is a layered investigation. While the project tackles informal settlements and a very real location, the research looks at the larger issue of existing value frameworks. Many of the problems the unsettled face are ones of rules and regulations we have created. This is an endeavour in the battle between the formal and the informal, the same for the valuable and invaluable (or otherwise the architecture and non-architecture).
The project tests the theory that it is our capacity to see value. Recognising the existing social value within informal settlements and acknowledging them as architecture awards them status, not only the formal value recognition they deserve but also ‘property or capital’. This project focuses on what architecture can do for us, thus that is what it becomes. Testing how much one piece of architecture can affect, creating a system of physical thresholds that hope to simultaneously activate social thresholds. This is often deemed a problem too big to tackle however the methodology proves that by working with the existing our starting point becomes somewhere in the middle; thus, we are already part of the way there.