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Paper short abstract:

From an urban development perspective this paper presents what might be gained when local informal communities are understood as self-driven laboratories of various kinds of problem-handling and solution-model development.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents initial work arriving when local informal communities are understood as self-driven laboratories of various kinds of problem-handling and solution-model development.

Coming from the anthropological tradition of understanding local common knowledge and informal practices as resourceful models of problem-solution that are important and valuable to the sustainability of local lives, the paper initially argues that local communities have always been self-driven laboratories of problem-handling. However, they have not been recognized as such and consequently their models of problem solution have largely been overlooked.

Based in the local context of social housing estates in Denmark the paper exemplifies how these contain unimagined resources of social and environmental problem-handling developed informally by the communities over time. What this local problem-handling amounts to are often socially and environmentally sophisticated solution-models to urban problems which are fully developed but most often invisible to actors of e.g. urban planning due to the informal and sometimes dubious legal character of the models.

Through a concrete example of the very cleaver yet partly illegal garbage handling model at a Danish social housing estate the paper exemplifies what might be gained by recognizing local informal communities as self-driven labs of problem-solving and model development.

The paper speculates if the local informal solution-models can be collected, and used in other local or global contexts in developing urban solution-models to solve social and environmental problems arising from intensified urbanity now and in the future.