Transformative imaginaries: strategies for inclusive architectural design in Durban towards a makers lab in Warwick.

Abstract

The ‘regeneration’ of materially degraded areas in African cities, such as the Point Development in Durban, has become microcosms of global development practices, where local identities of social capital and built form are overlooked in the expression of place-making, in favour of urban imaginaries that aspire to those of Eastern mega cities. In doing so, a vast majority of the inhabitants of the city, the urban poor, are rendered invisible in these exclusively represented ‘regenerative’ developments. South African cities present an already spatially fragmented urban context, due to the burdensome legacy of the apartheid regime. Approaches to the urban regeneration that defer to globalised fantasies and aspirations, as opposed to being locally grounded, are not only politically problematic, but can substantively exacerbate social, economic and political striations, as well as impede the future development of these cities. There is therefore an urgent need to reconceptualise the approach that we as Africans take in conceptualising our own rapidly urbanising and future-imagined cities. The rendered images we devise project values of urban lifestyles we imagine to be ideal. This study holds that there needs to be a critical realisation and evaluation of the readily available local resources found in our cities, of both material and social capital, which present a grounded local platform on which our cities might be built. The problem becomes the means through which the local values of a particular city, which reflect current and diverse urban practices of its people, as well as their collective aspirations, can be expressed in local identity and become materialised in architectural form. Such language of inclusion, once engaged, becomes the seed from which deteriorating urban sites can be spatially transformed to include the poor in development, instead of ‘regenerating’ the urban aesthetic. This thesis argues that in the case of South African cities engaging urban phenomena as a need for transformation in our theoretical conceptualisation of the future city. It contends the need for architectural design to affirm local identity in the face of globalisation. Its research aim to make an inquiry on the tools necessary to begin to build inclusive or transformed urban environments, examining the discourse presented by urban scholars of the Global South, including Jennifer Robinson, Edgar Pieterse, Abdou Malique Simone, and Achille Mbembe.