Emergence (H. Sheiz)

"The term emergence is critical for understanding informality as a natural phenomenon. Informality emerges, in the beginning as something undefined and it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that the term emergence resembles to the term genesis. Both these terms seem to imply that an output is not the outcome of a process where a creator or a set of creators produce something from scratch but it is an innate property of things (therefore also of space) that preexists in the realm of he possible pending for activation before being actual. Therefore, any kind of informal practice is to be considered as an activation that brings informality from the realm of the possible to the realm of the actual. [...]

What is critical to understand is that the phenomenon of emergence takes place in an evolutionary way because emergence is a cumulative process and I dare to say that this is not something detached from the formality itself. The combination of formalities and certain necessities is the activator for the growth of informality.

Emergence, no matter that is taking place in the field of the informal is touching both the formal and the informal and seems to be the active connection of the two fields as if the one is the cause and the other the effect with these two roles changing all the time, which means that the cause could be a formality which would have as an effect a particular informality and vice versa. Certainly, there could be a huge discussion about this interrelation and how it works practically, meaning, how formality perceives informality in real and in what extend formality allows informality to grow and inform the formal. But contrary to the actual situation where the formal excludes the informal, formality and informality are in true connected, at least this is how it should be.

Evolutionary dynamics are not an exclusive property of informality, but informality seems to be much more into this process of evolution because of the number of "agents" that participate and also because of the active roles they play. In general, informal emergence is a rather decentralized autopoetic process while formal development is much more centralized which means that any kind of formal production has to go through the filters and controls of an authority or processes of decision making that reduce the number of the active participants and impose technical ends (goals, aims). During the process of the emergence, everything that happens, exists, is or has been produced, no matter if it is formal or informal, function as a latent origin, as a genotype that informs the particular development of the thing, the phenotype, in a dynamic way. The output itself functions then as a possible new origin for a new production. It is as if there is a tank of characteristics that informs every new production and is in turn informed by the new product."

Read the complete article.

Sheiz, Hari (2008) "Emergence – Becoming (informality as a natural process)". In: The Nature of Informality. http://in-formality.blogspot.com.