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WHO ARE MY COLLEAGUES?
In combining the various areas of research present in this thesis: Afrofuturism, Paper Architecture, Shanty building methods, shantytown organizational structures, and the Kakuma refugee camp, one can identify a few precedent projects. The projects examined in this research include “Shanty Megastructures” by Olalekan Jeyifous, Warwick Junction in Durban, South Africa, “Agbogbloshie Makerspace platform” by Yasmine Abbas and Low Design Office, and “Fictional Futuristic Shantytowns” by Dionisio Gonzalez. These projects can be grouped into two categories – projects that deal with the scale of the building and projects that tackle the scale of the city. “Shanty Megastructures” and “Fictional Futuristic Shantytowns” are speculative works about how buildings in shanty towns could exist in the near future. Warwick Junction and “Agbogbloshie Makerspace platform” demonstrate how informal market spaces can act as urban anchors. Combined, the study of both scales could begin to create the basis for a design imagining the future of Kakuma Refugee Camp.
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Dionisio Gonzalez is a visual artist from Spain specializing in Surreal architectural representations. Much like the Paper Architects in Soviet Russian and the Afrofuturist writers, the whimsy in Gonzalez’s work creates a space for him to make “philosophical, political, sociological, [and] historical statements” (Dionisio González Archives, 2017). His project “Fictional Futuristic Shantytowns” was inspired by his extensive travels through the Favelas in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. His designs for these futuristic Favelas blend the patchwork nature of traditional shanty building practices with steel and glass elements from modern architecture to create a hybridized form of living. He describes his creations as architecture that combines “chaos and beauty.” A lot of his designs are driven by reimaging favelas as more structurally sound dwellings through the use of concrete elements. While introducing these new elements, he still preserves the old ones as an ode to their history and the people that built them.
OLALEKAN JEYIFOUS “SHANTY MEGASTRUCTURES”
Olalekan Jeyifous is a Nigerian-American Visual Artist based in New York. His works center around bringing to light injustices that Black people in Africa and the African Diaspora face. He accomplishes this by exaggerating them through Afrofuturistic imagery. His project “Shanty Megastructures” features a series of photographs showing Lagos, Nigeria built with these highrises constructed in the patchwork style of Shanty homes. The massive high-rises were created to shed light on the fact that those living in Shanty towns are often neglected in the city. “The dispossessed are given prominence and visibility, albeit through a somewhat dystopian vision, which highlights that these communities often suffer from a lack of appropriate sanitation, electricity, medical services, and modern communications” (Gibson, 2016).
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Agbogbloshie Makerspace platform
Agbogbloshie, Ghana is known as the world’s largest dump for electronics making it an environmentally toxic place for its residents. Architects Yasmine Abbas and Architecture firm Low Design Office set out to design a network of maker space structures for the people of Agbogbloshie. Their design centered around reframing the narrative used to discuss this community from one of pity to one of possibility. It was paramount to their design for the maker space to rebrand Agbogbloshie as an “urban-scale openair manufactory” (Potter et al., 2019) instead of an “e-waste dump.” The conditions that existed for this design include a large network of technicians in the area who refurbish the electronics that are sent there and then resell them to a larger market. The design aimed to create a modular structure that could serve multiple functions and aid in the organization of this open-air manufactory (Frearso, 2016).
At the core of the design, the maker spaces are created “ to assist grassroots makers to gather the resources and tools that they need for their specific area of production, to learn through shared practice and to produce better quality items in larger quantities” (Potter et al., 2019). The mobile workstation can be assembled quickly and efficiently, because it uses an iron truss frame and recycled tires. The architecture can stand alone or be replicated as a system throughout Agbogbloshie. The project embodies the duality of creating African futures by recycling the already existing building methods while sumutaneosly introducing new technology to elevate these existing systems. This design approach shifts from the usual “What’s the problem?” to “What’s possible?” (Potter et al., 2019). This is the kind of design thinking necessary to ensure that as a society, we are not labeling everything that did not originate in the Western world as intrinsically flawed but instead looking at the possibilities that it holds.
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Warwick Junction
Warwick Junction is South Africa’s largest commerce and transportation hub. It is composed of three different markets located on a repurposed highway. Historically, informal traders have been shunned and discouraged, especially under The Group Areas Act passed during Apartheid. In 1973, the Natal Ordinance was introduced, which allowed informal traders to operate their businesses under very strict rules and regulations. They could not legally sell goods in the same place for more than 15 minutes which limited the scope of products they were able to sell (“Warwick Junction Urban Renewal Project”, n.d.).
During apartheid, Warwick Junction served as the sole entry point for Black people into the city of Durban, which was considered a “whites-only” part of the city. Today, the area has “over 460,000 commuters pass through the transport node every day, making use of the main railway station, the five bus terminals, and nineteen taxi stands. Additionally, the area attracts large numbers of street traders: between 6000 and 8000 street traders engage in a variety of activities ranging from traditional medicine, clothing, food, music, fresh produce, arts and crafts” (Karssenberg et al., 2016, p. 243). All the areas of commerce are organized into nine different markets on the site. Although Warwick junction has existed for years, it was not until 1995 that there was an official governmental push to revitalize it into a commerce hub.
The redesign required planners to study the patterns of informal traders in order to create an effective community for them to thrive. The design was based upon how the traders interacted with each other, how they interacted with their customers, the kinds of goods they sold, and the ways in which they acquired these goods. Taking these factors into account allowed planners to create low-cost ways to organize the space. Some of the major changes they made were, increasing the size of pedestrian pathways, providing access to water and electricity, adding places for traders to store goods, and adding shading structures (Karssenberg et al., 2016).
