During the BRPI fieldwork, we built a photographic archive, Ji[Daruna], cataloging the urban informalities that shape daily life along the Karantina–Bourj Hammoud corridor: barriers, encroachments, makeshift installations. In 2023, apprentices in Studio Madane's Learning Program repurposed that archive for a different audience and a different purpose. 

The rationale was reach and advocacy: the BRPI architectural intervention served one corridor, but the same body of research, repackaged into media, could carry the same urban critique into every neighborhood in the city facing comparable dysfunction.

The Urban Informalities Campaign turned the Ji[Daruna] photographic archive into an audiovisual public-awareness campaign. It was a series of short shareable videos that took the documented informalities and walked viewers through their multifaceted nature: who builds them, who benefits, who is harmed, what the surrounding regulatory environment is or isn't, and what a citizen can actually do about any of it.

The campaign deliberately resisted the dominant framings (chaos, blight, eyesore) and replaced them with a more granular reading, that an informality is a symptom of a regulatory vacuum, and that the resident has more agency in shaping that vacuum than the dominant rhetoric admits. The audiovisual format was a strategic choice: deteriorating built-environment conditions are often described in technical, abstract terms that don't travel beyond the planning sector. By using ethnographic documentary technique and short-form video distribution, the campaign got the urban critique into the same media space where residents actually live their public discourse, relatable, scrollable, repeatable.

The Urban Informalities Campaign integrates advocacy, archive curation, audiovisual production, ethnographic documentary technique, and short-form video distribution under a single communications brief. It uses that integration to convert fieldwork into civic agency rather than into a report. It’s a reference for civic media strategy, particularly the kind that reaches audiences outside the planning sector, that is youth, residents, and viewers who encounter their cities through social media rather than through policy briefs.