Nic Coetzer relates how design can transform lives. “One of the key aims of the design was to identify water collection points that could be developed into safe nodes” – a decision that has made a difference in Monwabisi Park as shown in this article.
In the shifting sands of Monwabisi Park, Khayelitsha, it is difficult to settle down. Summer’s southeaster brings blasts of corrosive sand – and smells of the Indian Ocean just a kilometre away but feeling a million miles across the sand dunes that keep it out of sight. Nearly twenty years ago, people came to live here in the rough coastal scrub and sand that is the Cape Flats. With self-made houses built out of corrugated iron and other offcasts of industrialisation these new residents of Cape Town have made special places, pushing back the sand with neat rows of discarded car tires and bottles planted to consolidate their territory in this hostile desert. Others have grown neat hedges as windbreaks. In Monwabisi Park the closest you can come to a lawn is to lay disused carpets in the front garden – an endless cycle of sweeping and brushing.
But for the 24,000 residents of Monwabisi Park there are bigger things to worry about than daily battles with sand. There is the lack of services, of water and sanitation supplied to each house. Water is accessed at taps dotted randomly around the area as are communal toilets. With its labyrinthine spaces and lack of street lights, Monwabisi Park is plagued by violent crime. And when only 15% of children under six years old are looked after in Early Childhood Development Centres (we might call them crèches) then there are many children vulnerable to crime during the day when parents or caregivers are at work or running errands.
As part of the in-situ upgrade of Monwabisi Park the City of Cape Town has been working with an intermediary, Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood (SUN) Development using Violence Protection through Urban Upgrading (VPUU) methodology that is being successfully developed throughout the formal housing areas of Khayelitsha.
A key aspect in this multi-layered approach is to ensure that safe walkways are clearly defined, well lit and surveyed, with key public spaces built as landmarks to provide places of safety. Through close engagement with local community volunteers – Safe Node Areas Committee comes with the best acronym of SNAC – and a slow process of interviews, surveys and endless neighbourhood meetings, urban designer Katie Ewing developed a spatial framework whereby the crime prevention and safety ambitions of VPUU could dove-tail with the overall upgrade plans for Monwabisi Park.
One of the key aims of the design was to identify water collection points that could be developed into safe nodes. More precisely, it was the idea that waterpoints could become places where children who were not in school could play safely whilst caregivers did laundry. At the same time these places could be points where Early Childhood Development outreach could be managed – roving teachers with bags of learning toys who could ultimately Pied-Piper-like lead the children back into the nearby crèche and its increasing capacity for education and safety.
Over the past four years architecture students at the University of Cape Town – as initiated by local architect Luis Mira – have been designing and building water collection platforms in a nearby informal settlement in Hout Bay. With the ambition of testing ideas of design and place-making in a new context and through a stronger engagement with indigenous knowledge of resident community members, a team of academics led by Dr Tom Sanya in the Architecture Department received research funding from UCT at the beginning of 2012.
UCT’s Programme for Enhanced Research Capacity (PERC) with “Africanisation” as a tenet has a key ambition to encourage researchers to engage with “indigenous knowledge” and alternative approaches to development. By the same token, researchers are requested to be inclusive in their approach to knowledge production, seeking to draw on the understandings of local participants and also to draw them into the process of knowledge making. The process is not top-down nor is it dependent on international strategies that might be inappropriate in local conditions. The UCT team, through its connections with VPUU, was generously invited to join the SUN team in developing a small public place – a research in action project – in line with the overall safety and Early Childhood Development strategy underway in Monwabisi Park. Through extensive community meetings the idea of the “emthonjeni” – a water-and-washing gathering place in more traditional or rural settings – was further developed and interrogated. Through community participation design workshops and through other research action strategies such as the deployment of disposable cameras to participants, a key water collection point as well as design strategy was developed. Once the design had been workshopped the project was implemented by Jacobs Parker Architecture, Talani QS, and Bergstan Engineering and a locally sourced contractor.
The result is a modest concrete platform edged with low seating walls and lemon trees that facilitates the easy collection and disposal of water, the washing of clothes as well as the flow of people through what is being consolidated as a safe route through Monwabisi. At its recent opening, community members sang a traditional song with a simple message germane to the project: a tree is made up of many leaves. The song recognises the incredible complexities involved in designing and developing even such a seemingly humble project of some 50m2 that mirrors the ongoing challenges facing the VPUU and in-situ upgrade of Monwabisi Park. Its efficacy as a place of safety and engagement of children into more formal Early Childhood Development Centres can only be monitored in time. Similarly, the Monwabisi emthonjeni presents another research opportunity in the future for comparison with UCT’s student-designed and built water platform projects at Hout Bay.
It is debatable whether UCT’s emthonjeni has produced a significant “Africanisation” of knowledge about design. It is obvious that the idea of well-points as places of gathering and community integration are a near universal condition. Similarly, the idea of community participation in design is not a new strategy for architects and other role-players who lead or facilitate development of the built environment. And in the shift from the UCT team and its community participants to the implementing team of architects and contractor an inevitable loss in fidelity to design ideas occurred. The emthonjeni project does, however, point to a fundamental lesson learnt and deliberately applied in the VPUU project in its entirety. That the built artefacts of design – no matter how “Africanised” – are not in themselves powerful enough to make this part of the world a better place. Community participation, their ownership of a design project and their active involvement in managing the facilities developed are critical. To put it more bluntly – and metaphorically – without someone to sweep and brush the sand away, the emthonjeni, like any project built in under-resourced areas, will inevitably be covered over and rendered useless by the drifting sands of neglect and entropy.
Nic Coetzer is an Associate Professor in the Architecture Department at UCT. Other members of the UCT PERC team were: Tom Sanya, Fadly Isaacs, Liana Muller, Bob Osano, Doreen Kyosimire (Makerere University, Uganda), and Carol Dralega (Western Norway Research Institute, Norway).The trees were kindly donated by Just Trees.
Nic Coetzer: Place-making in the Sand: UCT Research and Community Participation Design in Monwabisi Park, Khayelitsha – this article first appeared in edited form in the Cape Times under the heading “An oasis of safety in the urban desert”.
