Essay On Urban Informality

21st century world urban growth is marked by developing countries rather than developed countries. Of the many urban transformations being experienced by the developing world today, Informality, which is the one associated with the ever-growing poor squatter settlements now seems to pave its way through the metropolitan. However, Many of the theories and their much rooted basis of how cities function have had their basis in the developed world and planning practices are constantly being borrowed and being replicated across borders. One of the main concerns here was about the practices being adopted to tackle urban informality in the recent years by various third world countries in response to the worldwide economic liberalization. Wirth’s in one of his seminars described urbanism as a way of life that can be approached from three interrelated perspectives, namely the physical structure, compromising a population base, a system of social relationships and a set of attitudes and ideas of individuals or groups engaged in or operating under forms of collective behavior or social control. This approach accounts for the demographic, economic as well as social parameters as per the suggested perspectives. (Wirth, July, 1938).

This was marked with a lot of discussions and debates about whether the time had come to shift from School of Urban Sociology and its theories that had gained tremendous attention in the decades around the mid twentieth century to Los Angeles School of Urban Geography.

the impoverished masses suffer from marginalization: a trait embedded in those who are living at the edges of two different culture and aren’t fully a member of either. However, this we is highly questioned. I believe that marginalization is nothing but a myth used for having a social control over the poor. These masses aren’t marginalized and are very much integrated in the societ. However they are excluded on economical, social and cultural