Skip to content
Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) logo
Status: activeType: 🔬 researchCountry: Australia 📍 Show on map Website: infur.msd.unimelb.edu.au/
Status active
Type 🔬 research
Country Australia
Location ~ near Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia · Show on the Democracy Map →
Website infur.msd.unimelb.edu.au/
RSS feed infur.msd.unimelb.edu.au/feed/
Last activity 2026-09-27 dod
Latest post: Co-design across the Global South and North roundtable writeup

Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-)

The Informal Urbanism Research Hub (InfUr-) is a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne's Melbourne School of Design. It describes itself as "an assemblage of researchers and projects focused on the role of urban informality in the creative production of cities of both the Global South and North."1

Its governance angle is self-organisation. The hub says it "embodies a shared interest in how power is practised as a form of self-organisation, and in the struggles of marginalised populations to assert their right to the city."2 It treats informal urbanism as neither illegal nor separate from the state: it "intersects with the formal structures of state regulation and control."3

The hub runs a regular seminar series, and its co-directors are Kim Dovey, Crystal Legacy, Patrick Cobbinah and Ashraful Alam.4

Why it's in the Landscape

InfUr- is a research counterpart to the Landscape's practitioners of participatory and co-operative governance. It studies how communities govern space when formal systems leave them out.

It also studies participation mechanisms directly. Its September 2026 roundtable on participatory design set out to "examine co-design as a process of listening, learning, negotiating and sharing authority", moving "beyond consultation".5 Sharing authority rather than consulting is the same idea behind the Landscape's deliberative practitioners, such as MosaicLab and the newDemocracy Foundation.

Its fit is narrower than most entries. It is primarily an urban-studies group, and most of its seminars are about cities first and governance second: housing, infrastructure, streets and planning. It was first assessed as a weak fit and added once that co-design roundtable made the governance angle explicit. Readers looking for democratic reform itself will find more at the Landscape's governance-focused research groups, such as the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance.

Connection to DOD

Anitra Nelson, one of the hub's scholars, spoke on DOD and 888 Co-operative Causeway's International Day of Democracy panel in September 2026.

  1. "InfUr- is an assemblage of researchers and projects focused on the role of urban informality in the creative production of cities of both the Global South and North." InfUr- – Informal Urbanism Research Hub, University of Melbourne. ↩

  2. "The Hub embodies a shared interest in how power is practised as a form of self-organisation, and in the struggles of marginalised populations to assert their right to the city." InfUr- – Informal Urbanism Research Hub, University of Melbourne. ↩

  3. "It is not separate from but intersects with the formal structures of state regulation and control" InfUr- – Informal Urbanism Research Hub, University of Melbourne. ↩

  4. "Co-Directors: Kim Dovey, Crystal Legacy, Patrick Cobbinah, and Ashraful Alam" InfUr- – Informal Urbanism Research Hub, University of Melbourne. ↩

  5. "Moving beyond consultation, the presentations will examine co-design as a process of listening, learning, negotiating and sharing authority." Co-design across the Global South and North: Participatory Design within and beyond Australia | InfUr- Roundtable, InfUr-, 9 September 2026. ↩

History