Architectural designer and urban researcher Nada Nafeh is re-thinking the role of the architect, urban designer, and citizens in the context of improvised settlements. Her research examines how sustainable urban growth and community empowerment can be optimized by transforming architecture from a focus on the “design of products” to the “design of processes” to create a more circular green economy across the array of conditions within the contemporary urban fabric.

In response to the growing juxtaposition of formal and improvised urban practices, the research of Nada Nafeh presents a new typology: Improvitecture© [4]. This hybrid of improvisation, improvement and architecture is proposed as the architecture from, and for, informality and a catalyst for sustainable development. Improvitecture© offers a sensitive response to reconnect traditional barriers in architecture, urges a rethink of the adopted architecture typologies that are appropriated without reflection, and creates a platform which allows planning and improvisation to co-exist. The proposed model creates an alternative to binary, “either-or” perceptions of informal and formal fabrics, and the policies and practices that are inherent to that perception. Areas of contemporary vernacular offer a unique toolkit and lessons for designers and architects to learn from, with their endless forms of improvisation, complexity, and patterns waiting to be unlocked. 

After winning a Holcim Awards Next Generation prize in 2017 for (In)formal Pattern Language in Egypt, Nada Nafeh received a Research in Practice Grant (RPG) from the Holcim Foundation in 2018. The project extended her initial research undertaken at the University of Waterloo in Canada and The American University in Cairo, Egypt to propose an open-source, replicable, and transferable process and guide to empower citizens to take ownership of their built environment by using sustainable practices to optimize their socio-cultural and economic patterns.

Testing out the toolkit

To evaluate the toolkit, Nada Nafeh and an extensive team tested the approach at Ard El Lewa in Cairo – a district typical of the dense improvised settlements of the city, consisting of five-to-ten level concrete-and-brick-infill structures built without formal permits where the layout echoes the morphology of land use from agricultural parcels to dense urban fabric. The research produced a handbook and website that documents a range of architectural interventions across informal structures to improve land or structure use, create social resources or increase economic activity. 

With more than 22 million inhabitants, Cairo is one of the world’s most populated cities with a high population growth rate due to a birth rate more than four times the death rate – a demographic measure that is typical of emerging economies mega-cities [5]. Around two-thirds of Greater Cairo’s inhabitants live in improvised settlements, and that number is expected to dramatically increase in the coming years [6] – exacerbating already serious issues of overpopulation, land shortage, high unemployment, inadequate infrastructure, severe air pollution and environmental challenges.

Within the framework of an open-source website (www.informalpatternlanguages.com), workshops, collaborative sessions, and exhibitions, community members, architecture students and experts jointly documented and optimized patterns presented in the manual. The [in]formal Pattern Language manual catalogs a detailed array of possible design interventions for the [in]formal, improvised, and [in]complete.​​ Interventions seek to transform, adapt and retrofit the obvious, forgotten and ignored.

Proposals include optimizing the use of incomplete structures and urban voids to locate small-scale agriculture such as oyster mushroom farms and biogas generators. There are proposals for larger spaces that arise when land ownership disputes or finance shortfalls delay construction. Instead of being used as a carpark, the land can be temporarily transformed to more efficient use by deploying permeable structures that host markets, classrooms, and community spaces. In addition, the project identified small-scale aggregations of existing urban typologies using informal tactics that hold significant potential to improve living conditions. Balcony façades can be converted into a windcatcher that filters and channels air, provides privacy via louvers, and passive cooling throughout the structure.

Nada Nafeh’s research was inspired by Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Oxford University Press, 1977), where the architect offers a vocabulary of elements which can make people's experience in towns, neighborhoods, and buildings more explicit and easier to understand, thus enabling them to shape the development of their environment with their own hands. According to Alexander, “each pattern is a morphological law which establishes a set of relationships in space”. Nada Nafeh applied this approach to analyzing informal areas to link people’s microscopic needs and narratives to complex environmental and urban concerns.

Publication in progress

Nada Nafeh is currently seeking approval on a book proposal that develops the results of her research into a publication. Further information about the availability of the publication will be announced via the Holcim Foundation’s website and social media channels.

Supporting research in the field of sustainable construction

As part of the Holcim Foundation’s Research in Practice Grant (RPG) program, Nada received a grant that included mentoring by members of the Foundation’s academic network and USD 25,000 in 2018. The program aims to support emerging professionals to conduct leading edge, practice-related research in the field of sustainable construction. 

“The grants are a vital support for developing the knowledge needed to proactively meet the challenges facing the materials industry and the built environment,” explains Marilyne Andersen, Member of the Board of the Holcim Foundation and Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. 

In 2018, the Holcim Foundation also funded RPGs to further research the integration of construction material production facilities into rural communities in South Africa and advancing an infrastructure-landscape project for the generation of electric power by harnessing tidal currents in Argentina. 

References

• [1] UN-Habitat. (2015). International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning. (accessed 26 May 2023).
• [2] Mahabir, R, Crooks, A, Croitoru, A & Agouris, P (2016). The study of slums as social and physical constructs: Challenges and emerging research opportunities. Regional Studies, Regional Science 3(1), 399–419.
• [3] Jones, P (2017). Formalizing the informal: Understanding the position of informal settlements and slums in sustainable urbanization policies and strategies in Bandung, Indonesia. Sustainability 9(8).
• [4] Nafeh, N. (2015). [in]formal pattern language: A guide to handmade Improvitecture© in Cairo. [Unpublished master’s dissertation]. University of Waterloo.
• [5] Cairo’s birth rate is 30 births/1,000 people and death rate of 7 deaths/1,000 people in 2023. World Population Review: Cairo. (2023). (accessed May 5, 2023)
• [6] Angélil, M & Malterre-Barthes, C (Eds.). (2016). Housing Cairo: The informal response. Ruby Press.