Housing systems as environments of practice and information

In the urban core of many cities of the socalled Global South, most districts were an interweaving of upper poor, working and lower middle class residents. These districts exuded a plurality of incremental adjustments, adaptations, and small innovations that not only reflected a heterogeneous social body but were also a platform for intricate differentiations among people.

These were sensory, spiritual, cognitive, performance, and experiential environments in addition to being built and economic domains. In contemporary urban environments that are either over-designed or mass produced, and where technical operations are limited to particular forms of cost-accounting, risk analysis, and surveillance, the critical question is how urban majorities in these cities could now potentially take back the possibilities of creating information rich environments for themselves through the struggles for affordable housing, for rebuilding the abilities to use social relations as a means of collaborative action.