Reintegration of Slums by Employing the Concept of Rhizome

Slums are dilapidated urban systems that suffer from a significant number of challenges due to the clear absence of a holistic irreducible organic approach. This indicates an inevitable need to find an appropriate approach for reintegrating slums with the broad urban system. This challenge motivated the researchers to return to studying urban systems from the perspective of complexity science and natural systems. One of the plausible contemporary nature-based theories that view the city as a complex interconnected man-made system is the Rhizome. Therefore, this research aims to build a holistic theoretical framework employing the Rhizome as a holistic irreducible approach to reintegrating slums. The research is conducted by reviewing several specialized urban studies and theories that help to elucidate contemporary urban complexities, in addition to analyzing one of the practical projects. The significance of the research is manifested in contributing to the reintegration of slums depending on their spatial properties that are compatible with the viewpoint of the Rhizome theory. The research asserts that studying the Rhizome as an urban-social approach to building a theoretical framework draws upon three principal sources: botany, philosophy, and urban studies and theories. The most pivotal finding of the research is that the reintegration of slums into the broad urban system of the city using the Rhizome approach is achieved by increasing the urban entanglements between the newly incorporated structure and the pre-existing structure through several methods, the most important of which is utilizing appropriate mechanisms of pattern generation and benefiting from the organic growth of slums through time to mitigate the pronounced separations between structures.