Designing the interface: The role of urban design in reconstructing apartheid villages, towns and cities

Abstract

To highlight the role that urban design can play in mediating the bringing together of urban activities that have been isolated from one another over the past 40 years. This process is not confined to the physical and spatial, although this is where the process is most obviously experienced, but embraces the social, economic, symbolic and spiritual as well. A key issue in this process will be mediating between the edges or gaps of the many urban interfaces, for example, between: land-use activities; differences in levels of living between communities; ecological processes; and sensitivities in the urban land market. The paper will also show that the schisms that must be healed are not due only to apartheid, but also in some measure to the adoption of modernist town planning principles, which were best practiced throughout the world in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. The paper will briefly describe the centrifugal urban forces of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, built on the twin pillars of apartheid ideology and modernist town planning, which pulled South African urban areas apart. It will then sketch the current contradictory socio-political context in which reconstruction and restructuring are being attempted. Highlights will include the fact that concerns about urban quality are heard at the highest level, including the President's opening of Parliament speeches. Lowlights will describe how urban aspirations, previously governed by racist issues, are now being replaced by classist concerns. This has resulted in recently developed urban environments in the new South Africa being little different to the old. The main body of the paper will include a range of urban design principles and illustrate their application in a number of case studies. These case studies are notable for the extreme and contradictory positions that stakeholders have taken around redevelopment. The paper will conclude with thoughts on how urban design, in particular, detailed physical design and realistic three-dimensional (3-D) illustrations, can play a crucial role in allaying the fears of Councillors and major stakeholder groups and create supportive conditions for projects that will heal the interface.