In collaboration with the University of Cape Town, this three-week workshop will focus on the design of affordable and mixed-income housing in Woodstock and Salt River, two of South Africa’s oldest suburbs. Situated near the city center, adjacent to District Six and other neighborhoods that witnessed the brutality of the Group Areas Act (1950), both Woodstock and Salt River are home to a diverse community of Capetonians who rely on the many factories and industrial sites scattered along the railway. While the apartheid state failed to divide their lands and displace their inhabitants, rising property prices today continue to jeopardize their cultural and economic diversity.
For their narrow streets, Victorian row houses, and location at the base of Table Mountain have attracted several predatory developments that accelerated the grabbing of properties owned by working-class residents and small businesses. Raising the flags of gentrification are countless refurbishments, new developments, and ‘beautification’ projects that have, consistently, prompted the involuntary displacement of those who can no longer afford any proximity to their own heritage.
With housing shortage in Cape Town sounding the alarm of permanent displacement, the need for affordable developments (and policies that regulate access to them) is clear. But in the absence of substantive frameworks that reclaim the right to housing, this need has too often been mitigated by mediocre provision schemes that achieve affordability at the expense of quality and social/spatial justice. Such is the case of the infamous “Reconstruction and Development Program,” which dotted the edges of the city with poorly designed and executed single story houses (later known as the notorious RDP houses). This inability to generate convincing urban alternatives rallied under a banner of resistance several NGOs and activist groups that mobilized in the last few years for the provision of medium to high density social housing that is affordable, well-designed, and well-located. In 2016, the “Reclaim the City” movement succeeded in its campaign to earmark city-owned parcels for social housing, protecting them from the grip of pure profit. And by 2019, the City of Cape Town identified several sites in Woodstock and Salt River, with new housing typologies yet to be realized.
In building on these recent developments, the workshop will propose and design affordable strategies that leverage the potential of public-private partnerships. Through meetings and collaborations with stakeholders, community members, and housing experts in Cape Town, students will develop mixed-income and mixed-use approaches that champion the right to the city.
Together, these proposals will center on the role of housing in combatting involuntary displacement, generating new modes of social and economic mixity, improving the inner-city fabric, and providing equitable typologies that maximize spatial quality and opportunities for income generation.
The workshop will culminate in an exhibition, a public presentation, and a publication.
Travel to Cape Town June 12-July 4.
