How informal urbanism affects the way we think about formal urbanism is one of the crucial questions we ask here at Favelissues. And, since I began studying favelas and urbanism, I have noticed an increase in interest among designers, planners, and thinkers in actually reshaping our engagement with urbanism. But it has been a modest increase. Much too modest.

And certainly such reformulation of our approach has not reached the practice of planning in any significant way.

To understand why, we need to zoom out beyond the relatively narrow scope of urbanism.