Informal Cities workshop challenges students to design for uncertainty

The annual Informal Cities workshop, now in its 13th year, welcomed WashU students to participate in speculative urban design challenges for three days this fall. The one-credit charrette is open to students in the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design and a requirement for first-semester Master of Urban Design students.

“Informal Cities aims to offer students a glimpse into the world of self-built environments — the most common form of building worldwide — and challenge them to reflect on their roles and responsibilities as designers,” said Matt Bernstine, director of the Sam Fox School’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice.

The workshop was led by Tanzil Shafique, an urban designer and faculty at the University of Sheffield. Shafique introduced students to a thin wetland in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that acts as a border and a bridge between a large informal settlement and a wealthy enclave. The landscape, Shafique shared, “refuses stability — at once natural and urban, formal and informal, planned and improvised. The question at the heart of this workshop is simple but open-ended: how can we imagine inhabiting this in-between space in the future?”

Following Shafique’s opening lecture and conversation, undergraduate and graduate students began work sessions that focused on imagining inhabiting this in-between space for the future. In three distinct but iterative phases, they explored new ways of thinking through model-making and drawing: attentive seeing, world-building, and storytelling. Their design challenges included producing a fable that showed how human, ecological, and material actors coexist; a brief narrative describing everyday life in an assigned speculative future; a series of drawings; and a conceptual model that embodied a key moment from their fable.

Nate Light, MArch/MUD candidate, shared that the workshop allowed him to explore larger themes and ideas that are apparent in Dhaka along with cities in the U.S. “My group specifically explored power dynamics in Dhaka and the distinction between having power over something and having the power to do something,” he said. “While these displays of power were shown clearly in our speculative future of Dhaka, they are factors that continually shape the urban environment here in St. Louis.”

At the conclusion and final review of the workshop, students had gained a greater understanding of how to translate observations into material and graphic stories, a sensitivity to ecological and social entanglements in unstable environments, and a new lens for design approaches rooted in uncertainty, humility, and imagination. In their closing dialogue, they discussed how their perceptions of instability changed, what they learned about storytelling through making, how their work communicated uncertainty, what forms of coexistence or care might emerge in their future worlds, and more.

“The workshop was my first real exposure to urban design, and it helped me see a side of the city that isn’t usually talked about,” Elizabeth George, MArch candidate, said. “It taught me a lot about collaboration, resilience, and left me with a more nuanced understanding of informal settlements.”

Tanzil Shafique is a lecturer in urban design and director of postgraduate programs at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape. Previously, he taught at the University of Melbourne and the University of Arkansas. His research looks at southern urbanism, pluriversal architectural practice, and informal planning, particularly by climate change-impacted communities. Additionally, he runs Next50, a translocal knowledge-to-impact bridging hub. Shafique recently published the monograph “City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh.” He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and M.Arch in ecological urbanism from Rensselaer Polytechnic in New York.