Informal Space

Abstract

On the American urban scene — including the San Francisco Bay Area — everyday life contains both a formal and informal dimension. Such informal practices are not trivial, but rather constitute an essential factor that helps shape the structure of the formal societal system. To further ground empirically our theory of the centrality of the relations between informality and formality in the organization of the modern American city, let us attempt to analyze the anchoring of informal practices in the organization of urban space. The informal city needs an informal territorial infrastructure to anchor its informal practices in the organization of the urban space. Such informal space exists, and provides a basis for the carrying out of these kinds of action.KeywordsFormal SystemUrban LandFormal SpaceInformal SectorFront RegionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.