By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Unfortunately, 70% of these urban migration, 3.5 billion people will likely live in informal settlements.

Current migration trends make us think more in depth about systems and solutions for the ecosystems where we live in, By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban environments testing every service to its limit. This phenomenon has a tremendous challenge for city planing and city’s budgets. In many cases, there will be not enough capacity to plan, nor resources to deliver basic services for migrants. As a result, migrants will end up settling on informal settlements.

This could be one of the worlds biggest challenge and it is imperative to explore cost-efficient and lightweight infrastructure systems to serve these needs. At the Media Lab, City Science Group, and guided by two fantastic instructors, Norman Foster, and Kent Larson we  came up with scalable solutions that have the potential of benefiting these complex scenarios in our increasingly urbanized world.

The team

• Mingya Hsu, Chinese architect from Berkeley University, and a grad student at Harvard Design School.
• Jairo Rodriguez, Colombian designer from George Washington University, and a grad student at MIT school of engineering and management.

Informal settlements are rarely well connected. Without access and connectivity, there is no possibility to improve current conditions and bring prosperity to these areas. We worked on improving mobility and we choose Ciudad Bolivar in Bogota, Colombia.

Learn more about the concepts we developed at: http://6xe.25c.myftpupload.com/portfolio/settlements-without/