Smart and informal? Self-organization and everyday

With the aim to offer an alternative understanding of smart cities, this chapter explores the relationship between smart and informal characteristics, presenting a discussion of two concepts arguably found in both smart and informal types of urban development: self-organization and the everyday. For this purpose, this chapter discusses the social and spatial production of informal settlements-how these areas show high degrees of self-organization based on everyday actions and interactions. In line with Rauws (2016), observers can see smart cities as networks of knowledge, actions, and selection of choices; yet this view also aligns with the actions informal settlers in Latin America take to produce their own living environments via self-organization and everyday practices. The chapter suggests how smart technologies can utilize computational logics to help measure and interpret these self-organized systems, as well as help decipher everyday creativity, based on uncertainty, autonomy, and freedom. An urban area may possess no formal planning processes, yet residents’ bottom-up social and spatial initiatives give shape to their settlements and to the city. In this sense the use of smart technologies can bring heightened understandings to informality; therefore not only the smart but also the informal can undergo reconceptualizing. We suggest viewing the smart and the informal as collective and adaptive self-organized systems fuelled by everyday practices where the social emerges as everyday creativity.