Challenging Practice Seminar - Architecture Sans Frontières

On the 27th of May I attended a two day seminar in London run by Architecture Sans Frontieres, titled ‘Challenging Practice’. The challenging practice programme seeks to ‘enable built environment practitioners to engage reflexively with the challenges of inclusive and sustainable urban development.’

For me personally, the course was an opportunity to gain an insight into ASF’s methodology and ethos, as well as to meet other built environment professionals who are interested in or work in the field. The two days were split into two strands; informality and disaster relief. We worked through a case study on each day. The day started with an in depth presentation of the case study in terms of its context, social and political issues as well as urban issues. We then participated in a series of activities in smaller groups to break down the case studies and most importantly to challenge ourselves as well as each other.

For the purpose of my personal interests and the nature of this blog I am going to focus on the case study relating to informality. The case study was Woodstock in Cape Town, South Africa. Woodstock is one of the oldest suburbs in Cape Town and a Post Industrial suburb. It was one of very few areas to escape apartheid and remain integrated.

We were shown a film called ‘Not in my hood’ which was a stripped back documentary comprising of a series of interviews with different residents, old and young. Residents who ran local businesses in the town were being forcibly evicted or driven out to the peripheries of the city. These were argued as acts of spatial violence due to the direct negative impact on citizens’ access to services, isolation and education.

With house prices increasing by 40 to 60 percent in areas responding to the market forces that are bringing in a new wave of people. Industrial buildings are becoming occupied by offices and studio spaces and the original ‘Makers’ are being pushed out of their spaces. There was a statement which said that this new wave of business owners and residents were ‘rescuing’ heritage buildings and transforming their use, creating market value. This is a repeatedly echoed notion which the Londoners like myself reading will find all too familiar. This is gentrification. A concept which admittedly I have had many beer fuelled arguments over. What is clear is that much urban development is driven by economic forces and therefore this outweighs social goals and development. Social profit is rarely seen as a tangible one, however by pursuing the strings of economically led economic forces, deep fractures begin to appear in the city. These social divides are a product of gentrification.

When it comes to government intervention in terms of informal settlements, there is the RDP scheme. The RDP scheme is the Reconstruction and development programme which was a socio economic policy framework implemented by Mandela’s government in 1994 after consultation and discussion with the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party. Its aim was to address the socio economic problems which were a result of the Apartheid regime. The RDP made money and plots available for residents to build a house. However beneficiaries of the programme have been adding rooms and structures to the back of their plots, commonly known as ‘Backyarding’. During the 1990s more new tenancies were created in the informal than the formal sector, most often in the form of backyard rooms. The 2001 census counted 460 000 households, or about 2.3 million people, living in backyard rooms. Back yarding has resulted in an increased housing density and urban sprawl yet due to its density it has full access to existing service and infrastructure. The most attractive benefit of Backyarding is that the owner of the primary dwelling is able to derive income from their property in the form of rental or enterprise, increasing its asset value. With rapid urbanisation, people are demanding to live close to city centres which are hubs for the growth of enterprise, access to education and in close proximity to jobs. Rental housing in Cape Town has seen substantial increase and therefore Backyarding deals with the issue of proximity, rental and income generation.

Backyarding is an informal tactic of dealing with the increases in the rental market and the desire to stay close to the city and to generate income from ones land. However those forcibly evicted in the case of Woodstock are being forcibly evicted to makeshift settlements on the peripheries of the city. They lack adequate services and are far away from schools and jobs on the peripheries of the city. This means that the young especially, are not gaining access to education and resources due to a physical constraint. There is also the added issue of stigma attached to location which results in social marginalisation.

So how does one address this? There are citizens who feel that they do not have a right to the city and are seeking social and spatial justice. They have been pushed to the edge of the city and lack access to basic services and to jobs. The seminar went through a series of exercises breaking down government, private, municipal, and civil relationships, looking at incentives of all parties if they are to invest in a programme which addresses the displaced and the informal. Evidently, the top down approach came with much complication in terms of interests and a bottom up approach led by residents and the NGO seemed much more pragmatic and rational, yet it is evident that the two would come under constant conflict. This brings in the role of the architect or the built environment professional who has an ability to pull different strings of all hierarchies together, to act as a mediator and to challenge their own role and responsibility. Often the building of the physical is not an immediate goal, but building capacity of all players; the beneficiaries, politics, civil bodies.

The case study helped to break down the scenario and to understand political relationships with much more depth. As I have seen before, it is easy to get entangled in red tape bureaucracy, and even seeing the different perspectives and intentions of the other workshop participants was interesting. Some purely wanted to open their mind to an unknown. Being involved in such a field brings little of the glamour that was promised in architecture school and the idea of the architect being a catalyst and a translator for a marginalised community seemed foreign to some. I personally think an architects role is not just to build. The physical building is venerated far too much. We translate, we pull together threads relating to community, society, urban form and politics.

It was incredible to meet such diversity of people and reassuring to meet those whose feet were firmly embedded in development. Next stop, Cape Town.