PLEASE NOTE THIS BROWN BAG HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE AS UCT STUDENTS ARE PROTESTING FOR FAIR FEES.
In this brown bag, Dr Rick Miller will be giving a talk on informal settlements in Mongolia.
Overview
This talk will begin by introducing informal settlement in Ulaanbaatar – the ‘ger districts’. I will start by noting how Mongolia’s forms of informality are unique, with the actual housing type of the ger being an accepted and even valorized emblem of domesticity, and the ger district settlement pattern itself pre-dating much of the core, fixed structures of the city. But Mongolia-specific characteristics aside, the issues of informal settlement in Ulaanbaatar may still provide a more generalizable model for extending urbanization in other cities struggling to house their citizenry, particularly for recalibrating legal regimes for making informality part of a solution to housing.
Bio
Rick Miller’s approach to studying informal settlements across cities of the developing world is informed by his training as both an architect and a social scientist. Rick is a travelling faculty member of the School for International Training program on Cities in the 21st Century and a lecturer in the Department of Geography at UCLA, from which he received his PhD.