However, what the photographic experience teaches is how much urbanity is already present in these districts, emanating from the formidable capacity of the inhabitants to make it happen between the intimacy of habitats and the conviviality of public spaces. Naturally, securing the neighbourhoods against hydrological risks, stabilising the soils and slopes and improving the habitat and the connections are necessary horizons and involves interaction on a new basis with the long hostile spheres of administration, investment and regulation. Through the inventiveness, perseverance and unfailing aspiration of their inhabitants to create the conditions for a decent life, these neighbourhoods no longer represent the trace of a failure, but rather a potential source of inspiration for the city as a whole. In other words, informality does have a form, urbanity from below is one of the strongest and most resilient expressions of urbanity in general. The buildings themselves no longer represent the stigma of illegality, but rather signs of pragmatism and urban belonging.

The image of marginality can be tempered by the innumerable signs of the inhabitantsвЂ™ integration into the life of the urban ensemble as well as by the deployment of daily life on the scale of a sensitive humanity and sense of community. Photography makes it possible to shift the gaze and question the very categories by which these districts have been seen. A closer attention to these urban fragments however, reveals another dimension: that of interstices which, in contrast to the city of congested avenues, concrete extensions, exclusive shopping centres or business districts and closed residences, offer persistent paths of urbanity. Many dimensions in these neighbourhoods, often located on the side of tropical torrents whose floods are ferocious, are in fact not viable, first and foremost exposure to the deadly risks of flooding. The perception, both local and global of IndonesiaвЂ™s slums has long been shaped by the stigma they are subjected to: the social marginality of the inhabitants, the fragility of the buildings, the moral, legal and morphological denunciation of informality, illegality and spontaneity.

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