Landscapes of risk and opportunity in informal settlements

Informal settlements are often part of bigger cities, and those cities tend to have designs on them. In the informal settlements, those designs can be welcomed, as improvement, but more generally, they come with new risks as much as opportunity. In a new paper on Monrovia, Liberia,, with Phillip Garjay Innis, we speak of riskscapes, and we study how new objects, new things, emerge in discourse in and about the informal settlements, and how these objects can become the focus of new rules, regulations, plans, the object of governance. This is not merely a matter of theoretical interest, and the construction of 'the slum'' in governmental discourse and municipal governance practice, has major implications for the daily life and the futures of the residents.

new Paper in Geoforum, with Phillip Garjay Innis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0016718522001580