2. INTRODUCTION

Tariq Toffa and Jabu Makhubu- Elective Leaders

This book is the story of a journey. Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman (2008a), argued that true growth—what Victorian English writer John Ruskin called “the lamp of truth”—developed through encountering some sort of “resistance,” when faced with and engaging a condition of difficulty or strangeness that one’s knowledge or skill had not adequately prepared one for. However, more than simply stumbling upon problems and ‘learning from one’s mistakes’, a “probing craftsman” (Sennett 2008b) did more than that; he or she created such conditions precisely in order to know them. For the academy, its educators and students, the national student protests that first emerged in South Africa in 2015 (and concurrently in many other parts of the world) presented precisely and profoundly one such challenge. To some a challenge, to others a wellspring of courage, it brought into focus a range of fundamental questions about education and the university. In giving ‘voice to the voiceless’, in ‘putting the last first’, it would provide sharp ethical, economic, political and discursive critiques of westernized and corporatized universities.

How would the academic community as a whole respond? For university management, would they attempt to make it disappear as quickly and as cheaply as possible? For academics, would it become a new currency of commodified goods? Or would the academic community identify with its concerns and embrace its relevance? We, the authors and our students, chose the latter. It would mean that we would all become both teachers and students. We would become ‘probing craftsman’ of our designerly—but ultimately unscholarly—disciplines, an approach at odds with the primacy of value it places in the representational image and the product.

THEORISING PROTEST | protest by other names

Voluntarily bringing together our architectural and urban design training, technical and discursive tools and resources, and collaborating between Design and Theory course modules, in 2017 we named our collaborative studio by the somewhat daring name, ‘PROTEST CITY’. First, our starting point sought to understand the causes of protest, their ethics or their theories of social change that they articulated through collective action. As cocreator of Occupy Wall Street, Micah White (2017), put it:

“Sometimes, the people march. Other times we hold general assemblies, tar and feather opponents, occupy pipelines, go on strike, dance in a circle, riot in the streets or pray together. In each case, behind every act of protest is an often unarticulated theory of social change: a story we tell ourselves about why the disobedient behaviour we’ve chosen will usher in the change we desire.”

Second, our primary innovation at this stage was to bring this normative social discourse into a dialogue with students’ own value bases and ethical foundations from their own positionality and lived experiences (which have limited spaces for authentic expression within the academic project). The topicality introduced into the studio emerging from such lived experience was extensive and varied; issues ranged from government, the school system, homelessness, race, feminism, class, ‘black tax’, domestic violence, xenophobia, abortion, bullying, hair, spirituality and environmental concerns.

This twin approach (normative/social and personal/ experiential) brought the concerns and ethics of ‘us over here’ (in the academy) with those ‘others out there’ (on the streets) much closer together. Within such a convergence, what then was ‘protest’? Within the course of the studio, protest came to mean not the ‘violent’ action of ‘others’, but something much broader and more identifiable, as mobilizations of ethics, values and lived experiences that

could take on a diverse number of forms – including an academic one. The picket line thus was no longer in the streets, they extended to the studio, from the loud-speaker to the lectern, both the choir and the classroom.

Third, we quickly realized that all of these phenomena were very often spatialized; that “no social or cultural phenomenon can be torn from its spatial context” is already a kind of mantra in what some have called ‘spatial turn’ (Warf and Arias 2009, i, 1-7). Similarly, Judith Butler (2015) similarly expressed the importance of the “infrastructural’ conditions” for popular mobilization; that,

“all of us depend on the platforms from which, on which, we speak and act, and that we are not exactly separate from that platform.”

These three insights drove our approach in the first quarter of the year. Bringing all the strands together, on precinct and architectural scales, in groups and individually, students were asked to design space that would facilitate for the nature of their causes and ethics. Whether these ‘spaces of protest’ occurred in the conventional or non-conventional sense was entirely in the interpretation and prerogative of the student and topic. These explorations are documented in Part 1 of this book, ‘THEORISING PROTEST’.

STAGING PROTEST | the site as a question

In the development of the approach over the course of 2017—captured in Part 2 of this book, ‘STAGING PROTEST’—we would rely less on analyses of contemporary and historical local and international protests as catalytic elements to a process of surfacing student lived realities, values, voices and questions. Rather we relied much more on site and locality, where site was understood not merely a place for ‘site analysis’ and ‘design informants’, but site could itself present a powerful question and a catalytic template for surfacing ‘other’ values and world-views.

The role of site in this context was therefore nonconventional. Rather than site introduced at the beginning of a project and thus occupying discursive primacy of place in the architectural project, we reversed this norm. Site was introduced at a later stage of a process that progressed from discourse, to spatial concepts, to a site context introduced to facilitate and surface the discursive and conceptual terrain. In practical terms, it meant hybridising and reconciling the discursive value base, studying physical space and form on the city and architectural scale, and reading social and phenomenological dimensions of the urban landscape.

Thus subsequent selected sites of the studio in 2017 were the ANC’s Luthuli House headquarters in the Johannesburg CBD (foregrounding questions of social change, political action, worldviews, lived experience, values, social and familial bonds, gender, and security, comfort and intimacy in urban space) and the University of Johannesburg’s Doornfontein campus, (foreground questions of the place and role of education in the physical and social context of the city).

CONCLUSION | our challenge

Architecture is primarily a discourse that stands on fundamental assumptions of design orthodoxy that are consistently reproduced but rarely examined. Like Sennett’s notion of the “probing craftsman” of “resistance”, where one probes their discipline beyond what it has prepared them for ultimately in order to advance it, in seeking to break new ground the PROTEST CITY studio also plainly revealed obstacles to it. In place of self-interest,

self-benefit, profit, competition and individualism— all markers of the neoliberal project generally and in the academy, it was truths, justice, social cohesion, mutual assistance and a sense of service that were surfaced by students, not to mention aspects of humanity so integral to life but typically divorced from architectural discourse like love, respect and compassion. In practical architectural terms it meant the ‘probing’ of the technical, the representational and the product (all values of conventional architectural practice and education) by the foundational, the relevant and the ethical. To what extent can the latter exist within the former? For those concerned with such questions of hegemony, design researcher Yoko Akama proposes a ‘carving out’ of a space for other questions and answers as the most constructive course:

“… I attempt to carve out a space for heterogeneous practices and world-views that foreground concerns often omitted from design orthodoxy. Design theory from Europe and the US is continuously referenced in scholarship, so perpetuating dominance and establishing an assumed “model of the designer” … that shapes how we consider design, knowledge, and research. (…) [T]he dominant is unable to recognize its own power, privilege and penetration ... To confront this dominance is not necessarily to introduce alternative paradigms that displace it. Rather, it is to enable spaces in which to ask different questions that concern other world-views, like, what if we were to foreground respect, interdependence and responsiveness in design …” (Akama 2017).

One of the most powerful and humane messages from the University community during the 2015- 2016 student protests came from UCT’s Faculty of Humanities in September 2016. Its Extended Dean’s Advisory Committee (DAC) under the leadership of Dean Sakhela Buhlungu called for a “new normal” to emerge:

“The time has now arrived for … the University to embrace a flexible, pragmatic and humane approach; “… That … the ‘normal’ has changed irrevocably and that a commitment to a de-colonised academic environment is necessary for a new ‘normal’ to emerge. “… A return to ‘normal’ conditions without addressing the many concerns and problems that have been raised by protesting students as well as those raised by nonprotesting students and staff would mean accepting the conditions of injustice that underpin the current education project and its associated institutional culture.” (Buhlungu 2016)

Since all protests are neither sustainable nor desirable as a consistent mode of operation, the challenges is to build a ‘new normal’, a new culture. This ‘carving out’ and subsequent cultivation of a ‘new normal’ to emerge is perhaps our greatest challenge, though the obstacles are immense. The cultivation of an ethical and humane project for education would require the convergence of students trained to be ethically critical thinkers and academic leadership willing to be courageous. At this moment, however, our work as the coordinators of PROTEST CITY remains but one small labour of love; an intellectual compassion, an ethical imagination, a protest.