Negotiating difference in post-apartheid housing design

Abstract

This article considers the visual qualities of design practice in post-apartheid housing for the poor. We specifically address the visual power of social mapping within the context of a ‘coloured’ housing development in the Cape Town suburb of Mitchells Plain. Considering South Africa's history, expanded design practice helps to commence the undoing of apartheid's embedded and lingering impact by mitigating power differentials between planners and designers, on the one hand, and informal housing residents, on the other.

Keywords::

• design
• housing
• rights
• social mapping
• post-apartheid
• South Africa

Notes

^1. Fabricus wrote: ‘These urban islands, like those of the earth's waters, have formed according to several genealogies and geologies. Some, like continental islands, share a history and underlying structure with those around them, as if they have collectively broken off from a land mass. Others, like volcanic islands, seem to develop independently and suddenly from more isolated and turbulent forces. Still other favelas, like coral atolls, build slowly on an underlying urban structure’. Significantly, Fabricus continued, ‘These metaphors show how favelas differ in their relationship to their surroundings – their seemingly insular status belies the fact that submerged structures tie them to the city’ (2008, p. 2).

^2. ‘Coloured’ is a tricky term in South Africa. It is a racial designation particularly tailored during the apartheid era. The regime clumped into a single category ‘mixed-race’ peoples descended from Malay speakers brought to South Africa in the eighteenth century as slaves, as well as South Africans descended from aboriginal Khoisan peoples. The apartheid narrative failed to formally acknowledge that these peoples mixed with black Africans and whites as well. When apartheid forced South Africans to racially designate themselves, families split along racial lines, as apartheid forced something like race, especially malleable in a place with South Africa's history, into discrete categories. Today, while some legally designated ‘coloured’ during apartheid at the term and identity which they claim is not solely defined by apartheid's racism, others see the term as irredeemable. One colleague and friend who took up arms against apartheid from the age of 16 actually pours salt on the table – i.e. salt in the wounds inflicted by apartheid – even when we use ‘coloured’ in air quotes. He identifies as ‘black’, which gained currency in the 1970s with the rise of the Black Consciousness Movement championed by Biko (2002), as a term not just bringing together black Africans but all those (black African, ‘coloured’ and Indian) not enjoying the apartheid racial privileges afforded to whites. In this article, we use ‘coloured’, always in quotes, when referring to residents of Mitchells Plain and particularly residents of Freedom Park. In Freedom Park, some self-identify as ‘coloured’, some as ‘black’ and some as both. That we use 272 words in an endnote to begin discerning racial difference in South Africa says much about the place.

^3. ‘Suburb’ is another fraught term not so much for those we engaged in this study as for some academics who prefer ‘township’ to describe the community highlighted in this article. (While some academics think that ‘township’ can be redeemed in the fight for housing rights, we think that it is as redeemable as ‘kaffir’, i.e. better left in the dustbin as black communities seek the formality whites have enjoyed.) Those living in the housing development we study would never refer to themselves as residents of a ‘township’. They use ‘suburb’. Further, and interestingly, our Mitchells Plain interlocutors in the housing development more commonly think of black Africans as living in ‘townships’ even when the physical conditions of a predominantly ‘coloured’ community like the one we study are comparable or even more informal than the physical conditions in black African communities like Cape Town's Gugulethu and Khayelitsha. (Of course, we describe in broad strokes when, now, ‘coloured’ suburbs like the one we study has a very upmarket mall just down the road and a shebeen within it.) All of which goes to show the complexities of not only Cape Town in particular but also South Africa in general. For this study, we use ‘suburb’ – never ‘township’, ‘location’ or ‘area’ – because it is the official designation used by the City of Cape Town. Also, progressive housing activists working with the community that we study do not just prefer ‘suburb’, they exclusively use ‘suburb’. And, most important, ‘suburb’ speaks to the aspirations of the community that we have come to understand over several years.

^4. We use ‘self-organisation’ as it is a term used by professional housing advocates in Cape Town to characterise their community organising work. In many respects, the way that they use the term has echoes of the Foucauldian use of ‘self-governance’ (see Foucault, 1991), except that, instead of ‘governmentality’ as insidious exercise of power, ‘self-organisation’ emerges in the state's absence and it is empowering to subaltern communities seeking formality and visibility.

^5. On apartheid-era laws, see Horrell (1982).

^6. On the civic association movement, see Lanegran (1995) and Burnam and Schärf (1990).

^7. For details on this process, see DAG (2003 a,b, 2004).

^8. Keywords in DAG's own unique approach to implementing the PHP include the following: ‘capacity building’, ‘community control’, ‘women's involvement’, ‘housing support center support’, ‘group savings’, ‘choices in home designs’, ‘choices in township layout’, ‘choices in building materials’, ‘use of second-hand materials’, ‘use of skilled and semi-skilled builders from the community’, ‘transparency’ and ‘high quality products’. Also see DAG (2003 a,b).

^9.Grootboom came to be through the persistence of Irene Grootboom, a resident of Wallacedene, a Cape Town suburb about 40 km from the Cape Town CBD. The Constitutional Court, the nation's highest court, found that the government was not protecting the rights of citizens by not providing services for the Wallacedene informal settlement. Irene Grootboom died in 2008, still residing in a shack.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kai Wood Mah

Kai Wood Mah is a licensed architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at Laurentian University School of Architecture in Sudbury, Canada.

Patrick Lynn Rivers

Patrick Lynn Rivers is a political scientist based in Cape Town, Chicago, and Northern Ontario.