Re-imagining Africa's cities (1)

Images by Kim Gurney - Getty/AFP

STANDING UNDER A CAPE TOWN FLYOVER offers an unlikely view of the city’s potential future. This gritty, voluminous space is punctuated by tall columns supporting the highway and the reverberating percussion of tyres passing overhead.

It forms part of the de-industrialising hinge of Maitland, with its polluted Black River and crumbling industrial infrastructure bisected by an economic spine called Voortrekker Road, which connects the northern suburban node to the central business district. A sleek rocket marks a scrap-recycling centre.

It’s a vital signal of the repurposing spirit at this area’s heart, in turn captured by a design scenario that re-imagined three emblematic sites for future living. The selfsame flyover morphs into a pop-up Pentecostal church, complete with baptismal pool and adjacent market. This took its cue from businesses that on weekends became temporary churches.

“It’s a suggestion of how to use the demand people have, in a cool way, to activate an otherwise dead area of Maitland,” said workshop participant Andrew Fleming, a senior researcher at Cape Town Partnership, a non-profit organisation working to transform the city. This approach of observing people’s current use of neighbourhood space, which often involves repurposing existing infrastructure, uses the logics of the existing city rather than inventing something from scratch.

This approach is evident elsewhere – for instance, UK architectural group Assemble, shortlisted for the 2015 Turner Prize for contemporary art, has repurposed a disused motorway undercroft in the East End of London as an arts venue and public space that included cinema, performance and a play (Folly for a Flyover). The temporary re-imagining of the site’s past led to permanent infrastructure investments. One of Assemble’s first notable projects was its conversion of a petrol station forecourt into a pop-up cinema in 2010.

Back in Cape Town, turning from the Maitland flyover and walking into a large adjacent parking lot offers a panoptical scan of the city’s economic transition, according to Edgar Pieterse. He heads the African Centre for Cities (ACC), an institute generating knowledge and networks about urbanism from a Global South perspective. Competing signage in this 360° city snapshot includes auto-electricians and motor spares, an electrical store, fresh produce, a hotel, a Jesus Saves sign and a clothing factory.

“The whole story of Cape Town is around us,” Pieterse offers, as students pile out of a college door. Pan-African street-side entrepreneurial hubs, working-class retail, fast-food franchises, churches and warehousing are all markers of recent change in the area. “In the planning ideal, there is always talk about ‘mixed use’ but it’s always a very romanticised idea. Maitland is already mixed use – the problem is, there is no articulation between [its components],” Pieterse says.

That problem was solved in some futuristic design scenarios called Density Syndicate, run last year by the ACC together with International New Town Institute (INTI). In addition to the pop-up church, disjointed public space in this node was addressed with shipping containers repurposed for student housing, pavements reactivated and the railway station becoming high-rise.

The main idea was to acknowledge that challenges like population growth require densifying existing areas rather than exacerbating urban sprawl, Fleming told Ogojiii. Interviewed at a public exhibition showing the design scenario results, he said it was also to innovate inclusive opportunities across income spectrums to avoid displacement. “These are just suggestions to say: how can we create structures that are cost-effective, that help make public spaces more people-scaled, that also tie in to existing economic structures of the area? This is just one step out of many in considering what bold options we should play with.”

Cape Town, he noted, has a very polarised development and formalised planning structure, and a

very informal reality for different parts of the city. “As we densify, one of the challenges is to bridge those two and use the informal aspects of our urban development to our advantage and ... activate the very creative aspects of informal living in a truly Global South way.”

Like Maitland, many African cities face a challenge where the scale and form of the urban fabric need to be reoriented for a contemporary context, says Pieterse. Speculations like the Density Syndicate are important to understand how to achieve greater resource efficiency and also social integration – to get people from different class backgrounds to live in proximity and have a richer quality of life, he adds. “Any city that is going to be successful over the next 10, 20, 30 years will have to confront these questions; they will be the leading cities and will weather the economic and ecological storms that are coming.”