3 minute read
Professor Nnamdi Elleh (Head of School
Professor Nnamdi Elleh Head of School School of Architecture and Planning
University of the Witwatersrand
This call for papers is about documenting our immediate experiences, feelings, memories and thoughts about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as it has been experienced in the SoAP and WITS’ community. It is understood that experts from various fields will continue to study COVID-19 for years to come. Nevertheless, tapping into immediate memories and ongoing everyday experiences can register primary resources that might never be recouped if the current understandings are allowed to fade away, only to be recollected later.
On the 20th of February 2020, we opened the SoAP’s Theory & Practice Annual Exhibition Series with the work of Boogertman & Partners. All the seats in the main lecture hall (A1) in the John Moffat Building were taken, and patrons were sitting on the floor at close proximities. By then, we had all heard about the COVID-19 virus in China. The last thing on anybody’s mind during the large gathering was the anticipation of a national “lockdown” and presidential proclamations about national health concerns persuading South Africans to “self-isolate” if they had recently returned from certain countries, or if they suspected that they had contracted the virus.
University-wide, the academic year began on 3rd February 2020, and both students and staff were still settling into the routines of postinductions and campus culture, involving lectures, studying, assignments, exams, and extra-curricular activities. The announcement that was issued by WIT’s Senior Executive Team (SET) on Monday the 16th of March 2020, is analogous to how weather forecaster’s issued warnings to residents of North American Atlantic coastal lands that a hurricane is coming, and at some point, it finally arrives with a deluge that blows everything away.
SET’s announcement brought the mid-term break forward for recess starting on Tuesday, 17 March 2020. All “academic activities,” and prior to that, previously scheduled graduation ceremonies were postponed. The anticipated reopening date on 30th March
2020 was extended to 20th of April following presidential announcements. Students were ordered “…to vacate their residences within the next 72 hours.” From 17th March 2020, things began to move so fast that it felt and still feels like we are all riding at top-speed in one pandemic prevention vehicle called COVID-19.
This essay call asked students and staff of SoAP to tell us about the impact of this pandemic: how it had disrupted or encouraged teaching and learning and overall plans for the year? As lecturers and students in the fields of planning and architectural education, and whose interests lie in making spaces and places for people, be it social or physical, how should we understand “social distancing” and “self-isolation?” We invited original thoughts and essays from any perspective on the impacts of COVID-19 on students and staff, their family and friends, and on society at large. We asked what we, as Wits’ authorities, and the national government, might have overlooked that should be addressed during this crisis?
The contributed essays challenge everything we have learned about space from diverse perspectives, but together they pose one crucial question: we may have found ‘the vaccine’ or vaccines for the Coronavirus, but what might we invent that could stop human beings from causing harm to their environment and to one another? Todes, Harrison, and Rubin’s piece interrogates urban density and shows that there is no readymade answer. The model of urban density that was presented in the mid-twentieth century is now contradicted by emerging global experiences and nation building projects in South Africa. Gaule’s essay and soul-penetrating photographs remind us about the ephemerality of everyday life, while Felix’s piece is about teaching, learning, and finding solutions for the ‘unknowns’, regardless of how imperfect the answers may be.
Alexander Maré’s essay proposes design solutions among the experimental presentations by several students. Sihle Pasurayi’s essay brings all the propositions together: it exposes human beings as violent, prone to alcoholism, and the most dangerous species on earth. Sihle’s piece reminds us that there is no ‘vaccine’ that could cure humanity of its failings. In this sense, while the attention to containing COVID-19 is real and necessary, scientists, political and social leaders are yet to address the threat that humankind represents to itself, and to the environment.
