The informal urban is thought to be an ad-hoc eternally self-evolving and changing entity. The lack of consciously recognized order or method is what makes the informal informal. But to say that the informal is lacking in design is likely not doing the order that exists within the informal justice. Example after example has shown that the informal has a method to its madness, a controlled chaos in a sense. The informal city has a grain all to its own. That grain can be called the design of the informal. But that asks whether design can exist without the designer.

The designer creates and and invents. Designers vary in their methods and products. One type of designer or architect creates based on the inevitable set of contextual conditions that face the architect. The generic constraints are site boundaries, topography, environmental, programmatic  budget, political ect. All of these conditions must be righteously integrated into the design and the designer must be aware of all of the conditions. Thus the designer creates a comprehensive and effective design.

The informal city does not have the designer and the design rigor. But how then does the informal city creates it’s grain? How does it develop its “design”? The design is made naturally. The same way that the designer must think about the constraints the informal city must think about its constraints. When an informal city is built in the hillside and every structure sits along the hillside almost create topographical lines of the geography constraints that are being adhered to. The lack of a budget, this time meaning a lack of funds instead of a “money is not object attitude” causes the informal city to be the cheapest it can be. Thus the informal city creates its own typology and thus creates its own design. And this is done without the help of the designer.

But is it still designer even though the designer dose not exist? To answer this question the product of the design has to be thought about more. The final product is not where the design ends. the final product is really where the design begins. When the user of the design interact with the designed object and activates it it inherently changes. The designers’ control has been abdicated. Now the product is used as the user see fit.The object is not used as the designer intended. This is the point when the designed object is now the used object.

The informal city is a used object and thus is reconfigured ever evolving and ever changing. So once again one can claim that the informal city is the designed city even though there is no designer. Still begs though what the implication of this question is. It is to ask if the informal, the design liberated from the  designer,can be judged in the same way that the designer based design is. Really it is asking can something be learned form the informal and thus can this learning experience give the informal power?