2.1. Approaches to urban informality
The origins of informality theory relating to human
settlement4 have been located in the Chicago School’s
descriptions of massive urbanisation in ‘Third World’
cities in the 1950s and 1960s (AlSayyad, 2004). ‘Urban
informals’ were a type of new city migrant condemned
to marginal status (Abrams, 1964), often seen as passive
members of a ‘culture of poverty’ (Lewis, 1967),
reinforcing the association of informal housing with
‘delinquency, breakdown and general social malaise’