Urban Informality Essay

2. CONCEPTS THAT DEFINE URBAN INFORMALITY AND ITS MANIFESTATION
The previous unit pointed out that there are different concepts of what incorporates and gives rise to informality. AlSayyad (2003:23), defined urban informality as a sequence of informal socio-economic processes that shape the formal urban setting into informal urban environment that would cater for some people to be part of the formal urban setup (AlSayyad, 2003). As mentioned earlier, there are various reasons that pulls people to cities but the significant reason being socio-economic related; however, those urban promises are not always achieved since the cities can’t always cope with the influx of people who move there, thus resulting in urban poverty, homelessness and lead to urban informality. For the purpose of this exercise it will be useful to examine the urban informality in terms of activities/concepts that contribute/underlying to it and analyze each activity as below;

2.1 Urban Informal Economy (Retail And Production Spaces)
There are different but related terms which are used to define the informal economy. According to ICLS (1993 , 2003), it refers to

According to Yapi-Diahou (1994), informal settlement originated from difficult problems of housing, immi¬gration rate, politics, physical planning, landlessness, land tenure system, and employment, especially in the urban areas. Lack of employment and the scarcity around resources has also push people to live in informal and poorly constructed structures. According to Turner (1980), the evolution of informal settlements was blamed on the tendency of the private land market to marginalize the