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Paper short abstract:

A relative freedom with respect to the building process, urban deregulation, coupled with scarce resources, create a more unique, democratic and sustainable aesthetic in the sovereign informal city.

Paper long abstract:

When discussing the contemporary city and its visually-driven society, the importance and role of aesthetics is often disregarded.

Over time, security and urbanist agendas have organized the city, resulting in progressive standardization of the urban fabric and its spaces.This standardization has allowed various improvements including in mobility, safety, and reduced manufacturing time and cost. However, it has had a great impact in terms of social control by shaping individual and collective relationships and perceptions. Every urban element has become engaged to an aim-given aesthetic which informs its content and purpose. Through stereotyped aesthetic principles one can depict spatially-located social groups, understand the public/private status of spaces, and draw borders between the formal and informal city. Urban policies and laws,alongside extreme design, have withdrawn individual expression and appropriation by limiting the range of aesthetic, let alone physical, possibilities.

If this is true regarding the formal city, deregulation, fortuitousness and scarce resources, compose an entirely different context within the informal realm. In fact unofficial sovereignty allows local (popular) culture to emerge. This is shown by the broad architectural and material solutions found throughout these frugal cities, where aesthetics meets function.

I will argue that through new aesthetic conceptions and liberties, some already present in the informal city, we can re-interrogate our habitat -the city.Acknowledging scarce planetary resources and huge (urban) population growth and inequalities, aesthetics are an interesting gateway to rethink relationships with space and "place",with politics and policies,with the human and natural environment, and with society as whole.