The series of encounters entitled “The travelling Genius : Italians Art, humanities, science … in the world“, is a space for discussion and cultural dialogue that the Italian Cultural Institute has developed especially for young Italians in world. Italians who, beyond any orientation, are the bearers of knowledge accumulated in Italy and diffuse the following, even without their knowledge, a provision or a vocation of ancient origin: the generous exchange of culture, comforted by a keen sense of human comprehension.
February 20, 2018, 6pm Free Admission
Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Montreal
1200 Av. du Dr Penfield
Conference in Italian
The extraordinarily rapid and growing urbanisation experienced in developing countries is characterised by the proliferation of slums. 863 million people worldwide are estimated to live today in these settlements called ‘informal’, and their number is destined to increase, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The housing and urban policies implemented by governments in the past fifty years not only have not been efficient enough to reduce or limit this phenomenon, but have considered the emergence of slums as a ‘problem to eradicate’, often through eviction and demolition of entire communities. Hence, the living conditions in informal settlements and slums are very precarious, due to demolition risk besides a lack of infrastructure, water and sanitation, services, and to poverty and marginalisation. Particularly, in Kenya authorities have no adequate planning tools to improve slum dwellers living conditions, nor to promote a sustainable and inclusive urban development.
Despite extremely precarious living conditions, informal settlement communities resist over decades and consolidate in the urban fabric as complex societies, becoming critical components of the urban life, at the point that cities won’t be sustainable without them. So, slums and informal settlements continue to proliferate and grow to accommodate millions of urban poor through affordable housing and service solutions. Nairobi, for instance, presents a population of 3,4 million people, 70% of whom live in about 180 slums and informal settlements. We need to recognise these settlements as a solution and not as a problem, and as a way of city making of which we still know very little. How do informal settlements form and grow? What strategies of spatial organisation are adopted by the communities to adapt to, and survive in precarious living conditions? What insights can we absorb from local practices to guide urban development in African cities? We explore the Toi Market longitudinal case study, an informal market of about 2,500 stalls located in Kibera, the largest of Nairobi’s and East Africa’s slums. Here, we identify the processes of spatial organisation and the related strategies that have given shape to urban transformation in conditions of tenure insecurity at the community level. We also recognise the interrelations between spatial and social, political economic and legal factors related to land tenure issues that affect the dynamics of formation and extension of the market settlement. The longitudinal case study has been developed in Nairobi in 2004, 2007, 2008, 2011 et 2016. An intense investigation has been conducted in 2016 in a collaboration between Œuvre Durable, the Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, and the local community.
Italian architect living in Montreal since 2010, Georgia holds a Laurea in Architecture pursued at Università la Sapienza of Rome in 1997 with the thesis: «Requalification of infrastructure and services in the Roman South-West metropolitan region», supervised by Luigi Pellegrin. She worked at Luigi Pellegrin e Associati office in Rome from 1994 until 2002 and is co-author of the master’s most important publication. Registered at the Order of Architects of Latina, she is specialised in « Requalification of infrastructure and settlements for cooperation and development », master at Polytechnic of Milan (2004), and in «Urban Design and Housing», master at McGill University, Montréal (2011). She has worked 13 years in Italy as architect, urban designer and planner, including projects of urban renewal and recuperation of the City of Latina’s historical center and other quarters; and two years as architect assistant in Montréal at Ruccolo+Faubert Architectes firm. Here she has developed design for social housing and the new site of Projets Autochtones Québec à Montréal, refuge and transitional rooming for autochthones at risk of homelessness, built in 2016.
From 2004 she has been travelling all over the world: In Sri Lanka to supervise post-Tsunami reconstruction projects; and in Kenya, where she has been studying urban transformations and informal settlement formation. She has been speaker at several international conferences (Kampala, London, Nairobi, Montreal, Toronto, and Addis Abeba). In Nairobi, she has conducted six fieldworks in the informal market community ‘Toi Market’, adopted as longitudinal case study for her doctoral thesis and object of various publications.
Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate, and research and teaching assistant at the Faculté de l’aménagement of the Université de Montréal. She is member of the IF Research group (grif), UdeM; Innovation and Research for Reconstruction (i-Rec), UdeM; and the Canadian Disaster resilience and sustainable reconstruction research alliance (Œuvre Durable).
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