Flint Shongwe

Civic Protest

Flint Shongwe- 3rd Year Diploma

Protests are usually filled with so much violence. In most instances the violence is very much avoidable. The middle man between the protesters and the powers being protested against is almost always some sort of law enforcement, be it local security guards, police or in severe cases even soldiers of the country. The issue I uncovered is that most of the time the officials (parties being protested against) hide behind the law enforcement without themselves addressing the issues that the protesters bring forth in protests. These officials are almost always kilometers away from where the protest would be happening and they’d be giving the law enforcement orders without knowing what is happening on ground, such as in the case of Marikana.

My project aims at primarily bridging the gap between protesters and officials by removing law enforcement in the form of ‘corruptible’ human beings and replacing it with architecture. Secondarily, but more important, is to cause an always present surveillance into the offices of the officials so as to insight the feeling of always being watched so as to insight the feeling that a protest could start much closer to them at any particular time, and that hopefully encourages them to always work better and in the interest of the people.

In this instance the authority in power/official is the department of education. The recent fees must fall protests as well as the student march in June 16 1976 were a major driver for this project. We are always losing our youth as a country to not only these protests, but to drugs and other issues. My thinking is that if we could make government more liable for how the education system is run in our country, that we could possibly diminish the levels of illiteracy in the country, and ultimately abolish violent crimes and poverty in our context. We could even reach a time where education, (higher education more especially) is made free in our country.

The intervention aims at stationing an extension of the department of education (which currently resides in Pretoria) in Braamfontein, at the foot of the Johannesburg Civic Center. The idea is to situate the extension in the basement of the north face of the main building. The façade of the department of education would be doubled up as seating and steps into the courtyard of the building. The repetitive lines have a heavy reference to the brutalist nature of the existing building and its steps that run throughout the buildings outside. In opposition to how brutal the building feels to the passer by, the contrast in my proposed extension however, is that the shadows cast by the façade become brutal towards the Department on Education and the actual steps become something of comfort for the regular passerby. In addition to the department of education, the building program accommodates a public library and a day care center. The library becomes the actual addition of premise to the public wifi that the municipality of Johannesburg has installed at the civic center. These building surround the new courtyard which become the common area between the workers of the department, the children in the library, the users of the library and the wifi and the public at large.

This intervention might not be the cure to all our ills as a country, but I strongly believe it is these kind of spaces that are going to insight dialogue between different role players in situations similar to this one to encourage social change.