WELTSTADT

© 26’10 south Architects
by Anne Graupner and Thorsten Deckler, 26’10 south Architects

At a time when the thinking about housing in South Africa is shifting towards upgrading versus the eradication of informal settlements, the need for suitably experienced professionals, community planners and officials who can engage in a process of participative planning is becoming increasingly urgent. Although notions such as Participative Actions Research (PAR) and ‘Designing for the Other 90%’ have been on the agendas of universities and professional bodies for some time, the immense complexity and contradictions revealed through real-world engagements across social and economic classes certainly challenges this goal significantly. The dominant realities of cities, especially in the global south, demand that academic and professional institutions engage with this set of challenges, not least of all the transformation on the institutions themselves.

Top-down vs. Bottom-up

As part of South Africa’s larger housing debate, the conscious challenging of the relationships between the state and informal settlement dwellers implies a momentous shift in the previous exclusive emphasis on top down ‘delivery’ by the state, to that of bottom-up and grassroots community-driven change. The informal Studio Marlboro South was a university course on in-situ upgrading developed by 26’10 south Architects in collaboration with the Goethe-Institute at the University of Johannesburg in 2012. During a seven-week period, fifty-one architecture students worked with ’community planners’ living in the informally settled former industrial buildings and on the open plots of Marlboro South (MS), and industrial buffer strip between Alexandra Township and the City of Johannesburg at large. The project epitomises the beginnings of a model in relation to this shift, by focusing on the education of future professionals that are sensitised and skilled to support and take part in people-drive initiatives towards development.

The Case of Marlboro South

Notwithstanding sever deprivations such as inadequate daylight and ventilation, dangerous electrical supply and a lack of water and sanitation, the industrial area of Marlboro South is slowly being transformed by churches, crèches, shops, traders, bakeries, restaurants, social and medical services as well as many informal industries operating alongside the remaining formal businesses. The city’s intention, however, is to create an industrial park over most of the area, yet is decade long effort to ‘clean up’ has resulted in protracted battles being fought in the streets of MS and the law courts of our city. With the recent court interdicts against the city’s evictions, the area is in limbo with neither the business owners, nor residents benefitting.

Making a Deal: University of Johannesburg and the Community

Over the past 20 years MS’s status as an apartheid buffer has been gradually eroded by people making their homes on vacant plots and in dis-used or ‘hijacked’ former industrial buildings. The result is a squatted industrial no-man’s land with an estimated 1,545 households living in precarious conditions, without adequate municipal services and under constant threat of eviction. A deal was made between UJ and the community: namely, that the course outcomes would include a detailed and accurate land-use map; a conceptual spatial development framework; and proposals for short and longer-term spatial and infrastructural strategies. All of these deliverables seen together would articulate the potential for the area to become an integrated neighbourhood, offering safer, healthier and affordable housing for its current residents. The outcomes were envisaged as an instrument with which the community and the NGOs could table valid information and proposals around which to ultimately engage city authorities.

Immersive, Responsive, Respectful

During the project a form of engagement that is immersive, respectful, principled and ultimately transformative of the institutions and individuals involved was argued for. Whilst this process is by no means simple or benign, it holds the promise that cities, however flawed, can and should be modified by ordinary citizens. Central to this promise is the necessity that professionals and the institutions that educate them, shift towards modes of education and practice that become more responsive through meaningful engagement with the realities of a larger segment of the population.

A central premise of the course was to support an existing development process, driven by residents and aided by NGOs and community-based networks. Throughout the course, students and residents, collated up-to-date information on the actual land-uses in MS which then formed the basis for strategies for the short, medium and long term. Settlement options together with collected data provide residents with plans (they have co-produced) as a tool for continued engagement with the city.

An exhibition covering the entire project was opened in the Goethe gallery in February 2012. Rather than delivering defined solutions this exhibition delivered on portraying and celebrating human engagement across a divide of one of the most unequal cities in the world. It recorded the contradictions and discomforts but also the tremendous potential which exists in seeing, and acknowledging each other as part of the solution.