The Bartlett Doctoral Informality Network (DIN)

The Bartlett Doctoral Informality Network (DIN) brings together people and ideas from across the Bartlett and the wider UCL community to stimulate new ways of engaging with the contexts and processes associated with informality, the everyday struggles that are pursued and/or the structural conditions that are sometimes considered to lie at its core. While it is primarily a network of PhD students, we encourage participation from members of faculty and staff from across UCL. 

It is evident that ‘informality’ relates to many issues and is important in different ways in different contexts. In developing countries, informality is a ‘way of life’ for the majority of the population defining their housing, livelihoods, movement, and governance. In developed countries, informality takes different forms and sometimes emerges in similar ways to those of developing countries. Despite the centrality of ‘informality’ in everyday life, it is a contested concept and there is merit in sharing conceptualisations, methodologies and theoretical frameworks across different disciplines.