MAKING AN URBAN AFRICA
citizens of this continent to respond to these critical conditions with appropriate and agile solutions. We must explore radical new tools, strategies and ways of thinking on how to address rapid urbanisation with care and intentionality, in order to make African urban in a sustainable, just and equitable way. This contribution to the 2024 South African Science Forum describes how design-research work can be conducted with these objectives in mind, by bridging countries and institutions. These panels show how three colleagues have come together across geographies and disciplines, using tools and methods from the social sciences and architecture, to centre people and their social realities in urban design and development. Working
Contemporary African cities are experiencing rampant urbanisation processes, occurring at unprecedented scales and speeds. Particularly since the 2020 pandemic, these phenomena have increasingly had a negative impact on urban life: from housing shortages to austerity policies, from fraying of the social fabric to environmental damage and rising inequality, the urban crisis resonates across nations and generations in places like South Africa. Yet while the urgency of shaping these complicated urban environments is widely recognised, the skill set required to do so is often far removed from the educational training of built environment professionals. Planners, designers and policymakers have a responsibility to the
The African City of today is one of pronounced individuality and agency, marked by constant negotiation and the volatility of people’s social realities. And in South Africa, the challenges faced far outnumber the resources and capacities of the state. The abundant technical expertise of highly trained professionals cannot be effectively employed, so people take matters into their own hands. There is a massive degree of complexity, and plethora of activities, that conventional research methods are illequipped to grasp. It takes meticulous, engaged and long-term urban research to uncover the forces that are shaping South African cities and regions –and provide the insight necessary to formulate effective policy responses.
“Is there an alternative to seeing the formal and the informal as competing forces in our cities? What are useful ways in which these can be brought into the framing of legitimate city futures?”
“There is a need for scale-sensitivity to enable our analysis to calibrate between the extreme scales of urban geography (where townships connect to the inner city and centres of opportunities), neighbourhood dynamics and the micro-context of people, practices and objects.”
Many of our projects over the years have uncovered a problematic investment in large-scale infrastructure projects, an insufficient understanding of the value of social networks and social capital, and inability of the state and markets to fully address the pressing problems with which cities and regions are confronted. We are convinced that urban research methods – from mapping to qualitative research methods and participatory processes – have a great potential to better inform policy, value science, and include people in shaping vibrant and imaginative urban futures. We seek to find concrete applications for our research, as well as moments of reciprocity between research and the participants we engage with. Yet
these are not skills that have been traditionally taught in architectural and urban design education. One of the key issues we therefore face in our teaching, both in South Africa and Switzerland, is transmitting the value of understanding broader social, political, and economic forces for design work, and developing the methods with which to assess this with and for students.
Urban research increasingly indicates the importance of connecting theory with real experiences, of establishing an active dynamic between deciphering the world around us and conveying what we discover, as something both distinctly tangible and broadly generalizable. Just as we aim to bring tools from research
and design practice into collective teaching, we also seek to determine the value our tools can have for policy. In doing so, we soon reach the precipice of what we know, and reach over the edge into what we are only beginning to comprehend.
Africa has much to teach the world in regard to shaping more equitable urban systems. To actively address this enormous task, we must engage a diversity of actors across multiple places. In our teaching and research, we have developed methods to reconcile thes cultural and geographical fault lines through a set of tools. These are broadly described as: Immersion, Conversation, Storytelling, Data and Imagination.
VOLUNTEERING GEOGRAPHIC
Mind map of everyday mobilities by a participant in the 2019 study entitled “Families
IMMERSIONS INTO THE EVERYDAY
Delving into everyday life reveals the ways in which citizens navigate and negotiate the circumstances of place. If we deeply involve ourselves in their rhythms and movements, their experiences and struggles, we understand cities and regions in a completely different way. These understandings can be documented in a range of possibilities, each with its own biases and nuances.
Lindsay Blair Howe utilises the methods of participant observation from the social
sciences, combined with ethnographic interviews and mobility tracking with volunteered geographic information (VGI), to comprehend and visualise everyday spatial practices.
Thireshen Govender adds to the idea of conducting “immersions” as a method of urban research through ethnographic drawings of shebeens. He illustrates his observations of people and sites through drawings and sketches: methods conceived for architects and urban designers. His in-situ observations
about the daily rituals, occupations and infrastructures within a space come to life through visual methodologies. They reveal the relational dynamics between people, spaces and the social contracts that emerge to produce a specific typology within South African townships. Collectively, these immersions use scientific methods to capture empirical evidence about how our cities work. Taken together, such fragments can provide deep insight into the relational whole of urban systems.
Interactive communication and active listening between people and researchers is paramount to the field of ethnography, as well as the social sciences more broadly. Furthermore, expressing thoughts, feelings and ideas requires trust.
Tanya Zack submerses herself in her sites of research by connecting with people on a human level, learning their stories and interpreting them for urban research. Through these engagements,
highly nuanced and often hidden ways of life can emerge. This provides us with insightful new clues as to how our cities are produced, and how they are experienced by a diversity of users. Her subjects have varying degrees of legitimacy in regard to existing policy, which is often regressive in the face of the challenges facing urban areas today. Furthermore, her work suggests that there are tensions, disjunctures and ruptures in our urban systems. If
we can identify them, then we can invite responses in the form of programs, policy or infrastructure interventions. Often, the practices and experiences from these engagements provide significant value to the emergent cultural assets within our cities. They include new actors, languages, practices and spatial relations that would otherwise remain anonymous, unrevealed and subject to undetermined conditions that cannot adequately be captured with other methods.
REFINING A CRITICAL LENS
It is trite but true that a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words. Visual representation is an important tool for capturing urban life and the people who create it. Mark Lewis’s photography transports us into sensitive, intimate spaces that can only be accessed through trust-building, and expresses vulnerabilities that must be treated with great care. It allows us to communicate beyond the constraints of linguistic precision and delineation. These visual records also assist us in understanding,
firsthand, the lived realities of citizens, their spaces of operation, their relations and experiences of place.
Photography necessitates nuanced forms of recording – managing the ethics and power relations between photographer and subject. This is especially relevant in the complex social setting of South Africa. As a result, new methods of immersing oneself into lived sites through the lens of a camera becomes necessary. Altering methods, and questioning the
relationship between subject and object, is explored through the discipline of photographic documentation.
While planning and design professionals often utilise photography as a tool to quickly capture their impressions of a site, the artistic dimensions of connecting between people and spaces is often lost. Mark Lewis’s photographs convey an intimacy of space and person otherwise difficult to capture if not approaching this medium as an art form.
Crafting meaning out of research is not only a matter of collecting information, facts or statistics. Working with data also requires deep understanding of places and people. This is particularly true when engaging with environments like South African townships, where people may be conducting the activities of their everyday lives in transversal or even illegal ways.
Thireshen Govender collects data to provide a long-term view essential to grasping these liminal spaces that
actually generate a significant portion of the South African economy. Data assists in measuring the consequences of our deliberate or unconscious actions. Through critical reflection of looking at this data, we are able to develop anticipatory insights as to how urban systems would work, based on real evidence. This reading and evidence allows for more acute feedback to shaping policy for a rapidly urbanising continent. Capturing and synthesising
data in a nuanced and spatial manner creates new readings of how spaces work and reveal (both legal and illegal) hidden systems of how our urban environments are produced. The documentation of these systems is done using architectural and ethnographic tools, which assist us in defining anatomical elements of the system –creating opportunities to recreate these situations more deliberately.
Once we comprehend people, the challenges they face in their lives, and how they shape their surroundings as they go about them, we have the information necessary to begin devising ways to elicit change. Methods from the fields of architecture and urban design, from drawing and model-making to collaging and rendering, provide students and practitioners alike with the tools to visualise how their imaginations strive to engender the positive transformation of urban environments.
In a context where the capacity to imagine can be compromised by your level of precarity, imagination becomes politicised. Drawings then become instruments to build consensus, stimulate the imagination and provoke discussion as to what is possible.
The interventions that are contemplated sometimes need to be conceptualised and implemented without having consensus. When this is the case, the idea of an indeterminate infrastructure
allows for users to co-produce their desires onto this framework, creating an outcome that is beyond the imagination of the authors of the infrastructure.
In rapidly urbanising Africa, clues to our future are often embedded within the logics of emergent urbanism. Through a careful and rigorous study of these patterns and relations, the possibility of imagining urban futures based on these systems promises a resilient and inventive set of urban conditions.
Each semester, Lindsay Blair Howe leads a design studio engaging with methods of urban research for the Liechtenstein School of Architecture (LSA). Every fall semester, she brings a cohort of students to Johannesburg, in order to simultaneously advance research pursuits and the education of young, primarily European, architecture students. The expectation is for students to conceive of a project based on utilising the qualitative, primarily ethnographic, research methods our posters describe.
They are invited to participate in a “seminar week”, in which they travel from their home base in Vaduz, Liechtenstein, to Johannesburg, South Africa. They are expected to use urban research methods to grasp how people shape their own environments. What fosters the creative adaptation of space? How can it be supported and expanded?
For two semsters, we have engaged with the centrally-located neighbourhood of Bertrams, east of the famous Ellis Park Stadium. “Makers Valley” was our
particular focus for the 2023 and 2024 semesters that spanned across our collaboration.
In this space, artists, practitioners, urban gardeners, carpenters, shoemakers, designers, and many others, live and work. We engaged with its evolving community culture, identifying forms of creativity, sharing, giving, learning, participation and positive change – and imagined how we might translate this into urban and architectural design.
