Rapid Urbanism Resources support you in delivering practical action, by bridging the gap between academic knowledge and professional work. They can be used for self-study, professional training, and academic teaching.
Introduction
Rapid Urbanism Lectures are structured to address key issues across demand, finance, supply, and governance, as they are framed in Rapid Urbanism’s problem tree, which informs the Rapid Urbanism Framework.
The hands-on lecture series is completed with multiple sets of case studies.
A final section informs on our approach to urbanization and science/research.
Demand (need, preferences, affordability)
- The Magnitude of the Need during Rapid Urbanization
- Household demand (qualitative): understanding needs
- Household demand (quantitative): assessing affordability
Finance of demand
- Financing demand: funding low and middle-income housing
- Subsidizing demand: efficiency, equity, and resilience of fiscal support options
Supply of land, infrastructure, and housing
(moving across spatial scales from large to small, and through the value chain from upstream to downstream)
- City scale: considerations for unlocking the access to adequate land
- Neighborhood scale: mixed-use, mixed-infrastructure, mixed-housing developments for cross-subsidization and inclusion
- Cluster scale: minimizing public costs and nudging community-driven development
- Building scale: on incremental dwellings and starter prototypes
Governance
- Integrated multi-sector, multi-level governance (pending)
Case studies
(aggregated summaries)
- Case Studies on the Finance of Habitat and Housing
- Case Studies on the Supply of Habitat and Housing
- Case Studies on Preventive Resettlement (grey literature)
Backgrounder, education and research
The Rapid Urbanism Framework. This slide show doubles as a tentative introduction, but is quite complex to follow without voice-over by a lecturer.
Rapid Urbanism’s Research Framework. This is a backgrounder on Rapid Urbanism’s approach to science / research, originally designed to discuss the preparation of master’s theses with students interning at Rapid Urbanism/IAUAI.
Rapid Urbanism Course. This hands-on workshop is based on iteration between (short) lecturer inputs and (extensive) participants’ co-creation within an urbanization project simulation game. The sample syllabus is taken from a one-week seminar taught in the Master of Science in Urban Management Program at TU Berlin; it may be adapted to other contexts, such as technical trainings and executive education, easily: e.g., it was delivered to train UN-Habitat staff in Sri Lanka and to prepare an EC call for proposals.
Disclaimer: unless prior rights prevent this, most the above material is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 Int. License: feel free to share and adapt for any non-commercial purpose, as long as you attribute the work; you may not legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. (In case you use our material, we are happy to receive feedback through the email provided on the contact page.)
Acknowledgements
The Rapid Urbanism Pattern Language does not only include (i) physical planning and design tools but also (ii) economic and financial strategies, (iii) social organization and administrative policies, and (iv) legal and regulatory patterns. The work heavily relies on outstanding work of other practitioners and scholars, particularly but not limited to: Reinhard Goethert/SIGUS/MIT (incremental housing, settlement design, slum upgrading and participation), Deidre Schmidt/One Roof Global and the Affordable Housing Institute (housing microfinance and housing finance), Martim Smolka/Lincoln Institute, Carlos Morales-Schechinger/Institut for Housing Studies and Claudio Acioly/UN-Habitat (urban fiscal and planning policies, particularly land value capture and land value taxation), Bimal Patel and Shirley Ballaney, Environmental Planning Collaborative (conceptual work on land management and urban planning reform, particularly Land Pooling and Land Readjustment), Bijal Brahm Bhatt/Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (urban poverty alleviation, incremental home improvement, slum upgrading, basic services and housing microfinance) and the larger SEWA, WIEGO and SDI/ACHR/ACCA community networks on community-driven inclusive urban development (particularly life-affirming livelihoods and curative and preventive precedence-setting housing projects).
Lastly, I want to thank the Loeb Fellowship Program, the Graduate School of Design, the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, as well as the Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement, the Department of Architecture and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the unparalleled resources made available to me when developing the Rapid Urbanism framework that is rooted in and inspired by the professional experience and intellectual knowledge of many. Without this support, I would not only lack the ability to dedicate time but also the access to invaluable information, without which this work could never be done.
PS: a set of peer-reviewed draft working papers has been developed in collaboration with UN-Habitat. We are currently working on updating the existing papers to get them published as well as are looking forward for complementing them with further papers (a big one in the pipeline with the World Bank) to publish a series.