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Introduction 6.1
Strategies towards inclusive architecture & negotiation 6.2
The following recommendations respond to the nature of power dynamics of various urban stakeholders (both active and active actors) in shaping what city futures may look like in future. Whilst understanding local contexts and applying the appropriate design strategies is important, the key towards transformative urban imageries and inclusive architecture lies in strategic processes of engagement between various stakeholders.
Strategic and inclusive processes of engagement in the design of urban infrastructure and architecture present an opportunity to affirm ‘the right to the city’ of marginalised stakeholders as well as to create the opportunity for innovative intervention resolutions that are responsive or complementary to local context.
Engagement with relevant urban stakeholders (active &passive) 6.2.1
Participatory and complex processes of engagement and negotiation
The challenges of effective stakeholder engagements between active and passive urban actors in South African cities, especially in the case of informal traders and city is that the “perception of each of the “other” is one of mistrust, crime, and grime of - a hangover of apartheid and the Group Areas Act (Dobson, 2015). The suggested approach towards intervention should be neither bottom-up nor top-down but rather collaborative, with stakeholders working alongside each other, as modelled in the Regeneration Project of Warwick Junction in 1996 where specific trader sectors were identified and designed for according to their specific design needs, as evident in the design of the Bovine Cooks facility.
In addition to the identification of the stakeholders directly affected is the challenge of identifying adequate methods of communicating intervention design details and implications between built environment professionals, city departments and the end users (Dobson, 2015).
104 The consultation process of built environment professionals working on city government developments is often limited by time, budget or social facilitation restraints in engaging more in-depth with end users, the collaboration with mediators such as NGO’s with in-depth knowledge and established trust with end user communities becomes critical.
Contextual design principles 6.2.2
The Warwick Junction Urban project (1996) has also modelled an Area based management approach for development having provided the framework in which the vision of development could be negotiated between the multiple stakeholders. Such negotiations of urban visions were made on projects that distinctly affirmed local collective and cultural identities in the area by supporting the production of cultural services and goods in the area through the provision of infrastructure, as evident in the design of the Herb market. Through dignifying economic and cultural practices with the appropriate design intervention, the image of diverse cultures in Durban can be identified as an asset in place making.
Working towards common spatial objectives for development 6.2.3
Lastly, the success of the process of inclusive transformation in Warwick can largely be attributed to the identification of common spatial objectives, through interdepartmental collaboration within local governance of the Area Based Management team, along with local informal trader sector organizations.
Common spatial objectives can be represented in a number of local values, broadly categorized as social and technical, where the two are used together to negotiate evolving values as suggested by Dobson in saying, “City is about a concentration of resources, hard (infrastructural) and soft (social, and cultural preferences) giving an opportunity for trade this is the epicenter of attraction… people in Warwick Junction are self-managing” Dobson, 2015.
Conclusions 6.3
The purpose of this dissertation was an inquiry into the visualisations of globalised cities and their implied exclusive urban contexts. With the research being grounded in the South African context, it was necessary to establish the implications of apartheid history on Durban as a city. Following which, the key research question
105 was directed at understanding how the fantasy visualisations could be better grounded in reality at an architectural and street scale, questioning the strategies by means of which architectural design could become more inclusive.
At the beginning of the project, the researcher had assumed that strategies of inclusive architectural design could be easily sought out, by a series of site visits to the case study area of Warwick Junction, Durban observing patterns in the way informal spatial practices operate in Durban. From these observations, the researcher deduced patterns, which formal developers and urban designing agents could use to apply to produce more locally sensitive architectural design interventions by responding to local need.
The research findings however implied that of superior priority to creating inclusive architecture through understanding local needs, a theoretical approach which emerged from the African context (Global South) rather than that which is external to it as from Western borne theory preferences. Specific to post-apartheid Durban, this implied a necessary understanding to the socio economic and structural urban framework established by apartheid systems and its effect on urban exclusion and economic disempowerment, which if untransformed, would continue to limit the aspired image of development of the city in future.
The study focused understanding the principles of informality, based on the observations made regarding the practices of informal traders. The principles sought to illustrate African Urban logic as a response to contextual needs. In turn, this brought to the foreground the representation of the urban poor in imaginaries of urban futures, as a ‘right to the city’ and how that is represented in built form.
In arguing the need for local perspectives in the imagining city futures in Africa, it was necessary to understand the broader ideologies of global development, which dominate a common approach to urban development in local cities. Whilst evidence showed that local governments in African cities relied on the economic sector and global capital to bring about local urban change, there was little evidence showing commitment to ensuring the intended development would bring inclusive and transformative change for urban majority of the population.
106 For South African cities, the nature and extent of inclusion, and what this means to citizens in terms of access to opportunities and resources for the urban poor was largely underpinned by apartheid history, and its definitions of citizenship – based on
‘rights to the city’, and who had these rights. Having prejudiced a large ‘black population’ on access to urban economy, safety, affordability and urban integration by limiting their access to property ownership, and occupation of public space and, it was evident that investment into the design quality of public spaces as spaces of structural, political, economic, social and cultural spaces of production were critical in facilitating access to the city, a key to inclusive city making.
However, with power and space being inextricably linked, the absence of space equates to the absence of power. Therefore the cultivation of inclusive vision of African urbanism required the collaborative strategy of both formal institutions and contextualises community values from the street in order to bridge the politics of inequality in visions of future development. Such negotiations of power from those create exclusive urban visions would necessitate particular methodologies (based on observation, and emersion into contexts) in order to better understanding the stakeholder representatives of those whom they intend to include.
Furthermore, the literature showed evidence of the continued existence of informal urban living, such that it was a need for African urbanism to be rethought “from the slums”, as continued trajectory of urban growth in the absence of the capacity of cities and political institutions to accommodate them. It was therefore critical to learn to contextualise urban development interventions that would support local informal economies as it did the formal economies.
The complexity of African urbanism was such that the lack of reliable provision of infrastructure meant that the informal economy was largely supported by the organisation of people networks, to facilitate growth and mobility of the sector. Self- organisation articulated in the informal economic social networks is widely acknowledged as a technical agency in collaborative city-making, yet is evidently innovative and responsive to urban infrastructural needs at scale. Thus, the tactic of self-organisation could challenge homogenised forms of spatial development through the appropriation of space.
107 The strategies of inclusive and transformative architecture therefore illustrate the need for processes of designing interventions which respond not only contextually, but respond to temporal needs of urban space, through interventions which can be adapted to suit users over time, or alternatively incrementally developing intervention.
Insurgent African urbanism become sustained through incremental growth contrary to typical modernist typologies with closed and fixed planning, where architectural interventions ought to contain a level of incompleteness, or adaptability, phased over time. True accessibility to the through design is leveraged through participation and occupation of the marginalised, making the built form a catalyst for future growth, rather than responding to immediate need alone.