(Dossier Colin Rowe) A turn to the South: recontextualising the collage city to reconceptualise the informal city

Abstract

This essay presents a re-reading of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter's theories of the collage city from the perspective of the Global South-East and, in particular, from its informal cities and neighborhoods, where 'the apparent combination of the schizoid and the inevitable' actually encloses the city-making experience of its bricoleurs. The informal cities represented as collective structures fluctuating from scaffolding to everyday accident. Authentic collage cities in an experiential continuum process: a plurality of molecular practices, of events driven by collective imagination and adaptation. Urban habitats of an immaterial density that is captured and revealed in its urban fragments 'assembled in collision': material entities or forms of expression and knowledge with which its inhabitants, under diverse forms of relationships and understandings, interact with each other and with their environment. Approaching these informal urban habitats of complex and self-organized structures under a spontaneous order confronts us with an entangled and elusive reality, a network of 'experienced' places, decodable only if joining together myth and logos. Apprehending the logics or patterns that construct these collective artifacts will require mapping the interactions of the geographical space and the existential space of their bricoleurs using technological, scientific and methodological tools.