2019 Photography Contest: Urban Informality

Today, cities of the Global South are experiencing annual population growth rates sometimes exceeding three or four percent. Within the next three decades, they are expected to absorb an additional 2.2 billion people. The accelerating urbanization of these places follows a pattern not unlike what sociologist Louis Wirth observed in Chicago in the first two decades of the 20th century, except for one key difference: today’s expanding metropolises coincide with the proliferation of informality in all aspects of life.

On April 24, Penn IUR, the Weitzman School of Design, and Perry World House hosted a roundtable entitled “Why Cities? Informality as a Way of Life: Challenges to Sustainable Urban Development.” The roundtable aimed to align current research and initiatives to guide the course of the coming decade and beyond. Speakers considered how the varied interpretations of informality (e.g. a form of marginalization from formal society, a semi-integration into formal society, or a rational form of survival within state-sanctioned institutional arrangements) are shaping the efforts to pursue sustainable urban development over the next three decades, as expressed in global to local responses.

As part of the event, Penn IUR hosted a photo contest on the theme of urban informality, inviting people around the world to submit images that capture the ways that people in urban areas create or use informal systems to survive and thrive. We received photographs that reflected the diverse and often interconnected aspects of informality—housing, work, transportation, food production, education, and a variety of services—as well as a host of other facets of urban life. We received more than 300 submissions from photographers around the world, depicting the power, complexity and sheer magnitude of informality in urban life across the globe.

The winning photo, “Bamboo Slum” (above) by Mohammad Rakibul Hasan, depicts informal housing in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The photo is a striking image of children peering out the doorways of their homes, makeshift structures balanced atop tall bamboo reeds. Hasan writes of the photo: “Most of the slums around Dhaka are built illegally to accommodate low-income earners who come to seek opportunities from different parts of Bangladesh. Canals, open spaces and street sides are occupied by the floating people who are living in unhygienic conditions.”