Informal settlements, complexity and urban models. Is there any order in autopoietic urban systems?

In 1961, Jane Jacobs depicted the city as a problem of organized complexity, endowed of inner unpredictability. Urban planning tools are expected to reflect this nature of the city, what is not that obvious. The sunset of the golden age of urban modelling, based on a rational comprehensive approach, has revealed the difficulties in pursuing such purpose according to a deterministic logic, thus opening the way to a stochastic approach, under the idea that unpredictable elements and random variables deeply affect the city functioning. In this broad framework, the configurational analysis of urban space, first pioneered by Bill Hillier, has gained momentum, assuming the urban grid as the primary element in the phenomena that occur within the city and in the urban dynamics as well. In so doing, it has brought to light key underlying structures in the city, showing that also autopoietic urban systems seem to materialize the equilibrium between environmental, economic and socio-cultural forces. Informal settlements appear an ideal testing field of the configurational approach. Fostering the idea that informal communities actually drive the evolution of such settlements, this paper aims at using the configurational analysis to make their hidden order to emerge, in order to face the matter of the upgrading of these “forgotten places”, overtaking the idea of an impossible removal. The Baseco Compound, in the center of the mega-city of Metro- Manila, hosting no less than 90,000 people in an area of about 0.6 square kilometers and doubled in size over the last 15 years, appears an ideal case study to implement the configurational techniques in order to reveal and identify an order and a spatial logic where order and logic are supposed not to be.