Panel at the Conference of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN)
Kathrin Golda-Pongratz, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, kgoldapongratz@uic.es
Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art, f.urban@gsa.ac.uk

Informal buildings constitute a large portion of the urban fabric in most big cities and urban agglomerations and figure prominently in the classic accounts of John Turner, Janice Perlman or John Habraken. They constitute also a major field of research in urban planning, anthropology, urban geography, political economy and sociology, while, at the same time, they have so far led a shadowy existence in the field of architectural history and are at times deliberately excluded from the official urban and architectural history of cities and the related discourse.
We invite papers that take a perspective on informal settlements from an architectural historical point of view, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These include the cities of the Global South, where the differences between formal and informal in the different forms of favela, barriada, zopadpatti or “slum” are often blurry and have significantly changed over the course of the last 150 years. We also invite papers that look at the metropolises of Europe and North America, where informal architecture has attracted less scholarly attention, but where unplanned and unauthorised settlements in some contexts were just as prominent.
We particularly invite papers that take a critical stance on informality and its evolution. These can be papers that historicise, contextualise or question the idea of “informal architecture” and its intellectual underpinnings against the background of the architectural discourse.