Thinking+out+of+the+matchbox,+Glen+Mills,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 07 July 2006
=Thinking out of the matchbox=


 * Glen Mills**

SA, ARGUABLY, is not known for its design culture. It is certainly not a fountainhead of good design. Take minimum-cost housing. It’s a disaster. This is a sector that is alive with design potential. Yet, from a design point of view, our housing fails on several counts. Here are a few to think about. First, urban form. Housing, from a technical point of view, provides one of the most important instruments for shaping urban form, for creating an urban culture and for enabling urbanisation. For that reason, housing design cannot be determined in isolation. It can’t be produced without regard for the other building types and spatial requirements that make for viable, vibrant and quality urban living environments.

In SA, housing continues to be designed and built in seclusion, usually in townships at the edges of the city, away from economic and cultural opportunities.

Second, integration. Housing needs to form part of mixed-use developments if it is to enable the building of integrated communities. Different building densities, a variety of humanly scaled public spaces and integrated transportation and movement configurations characterise those communities’ environments.

This is not the case in SA, where rigidly zoned housing developments, especially for the urban poor, sterilise spontaneous activities that build amalgamated communities.

Third, sustainability. Housing must be rooted in the fundamental principles of architectural and urban design. These principles have to do with city forms that are socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. For that to happen they need at least to be compact and pedestrian-friendly. Township sprawl is expansive and expensive.

Fourth, technology. Housing is, in effect, an intersection of different technologies, where technology may be regarded as a fusion of knowledge, skills and tools. Most technologies that affect the conditions of life and economic prospects of societies are systemic, in that they traverse disciplinary lines and consequently demonstrate strong complementarities among diverse design thrusts.

In SA we disrupt both the intersection and the complementarity of technologies by treating each in isolation. For example, a technology focused on, say, finance is treated separately from other technologies that affect design. This artificial separation is perhaps a significant reason why housing in SA is designed from a one-sided, as opposed to a holistic, point of view.

Reconstruction and development programme (RDP) houses might be viable, or so we are told, from a capital-expenditure point of view, but they fail badly on just about all other design counts. That’s no solution to the problem; it is a prominent feature of the problem itself.

Fifth, user involvement. Housing produced on a large scale must optimise end-user involvement. People need to be part of the design, construction, maintenance and management of their houses and neighbourhood spaces. This enables people to exercise choice, not just about design but about things like tenure as well.

Yet, in SA, user involvement is stymied because the bureaucratic machinery of commercial and political forces commandeers the housing delivery process. The outcomes are products valued mainly as marketable and political articles of trade, at the expense of other social and cultural values.

So, our housing designs are broke: they don’t work! Like the people it tries to accommodate, the country’s stockpile of 21st century housing, designed for, not with, the poor, is itself impoverished. There’s no evidence of design creativity in what is inherently a design-prone enterprise, one that lends itself to imagination and innovation.

We’ve therefore got to ask this question: is this the best that the battalions of politicians, consultants, bureaucrats, financiers, developers and contractors can do? After all, these are the “experts” who keep watch over what is produced. If this is their best, then we have a colossal economic and environmental burden that we, as well as future generations, are going to pay for.

Compared with our political past, it seems very little has changed in the way we imagine and innovate minimum-cost housing. We’re still reproducing yesterday’s dysfunctional township design. Visit any post-1994 city-rim housing estate, compare it with any apartheid-era township and you’ll see and sense the grim evidence of this: the pollution, the bleakness, the crime, the isolation, the separation, the lined-up rows of little boxes, the lack of design choice, the wasted opportunity.

But maybe something has changed. You see, from a purely quantitative point of view, we’ve certainly been busy chipping away at production targets. Big ones. And we are rolling it out at quite a rate, in row upon row of little boxes, sometimes in different colours. In fact we’ve planted more than 1,5-million of the things since 1994. Not only are we good at moving lots of people into lots of little houses, we also give those people lots of colours to choose from.

Now that’s different to what the previous bunch did, isn’t it? Sure, but there’s a catch. The shortage, or backlog, of subsidised boxes seems continuously to outpace the scorecard. No matter how fast we crank the stuff out, the demand, according to our backlog calculations of course, keeps on outstripping supply. This means we sit with two problems. First, from a quantitative perspective, no matter how hard we try, we still can’t crack the backlog. Second, from a qualitative perspective, we need urgently to dump our culture of bad design and invent a new tradition of design excellence. In other words, how can we produce both quantity and quality at the same time?

Maybe the clue to both solutions is in front of our face: the end users, or dwellers, themselves. Consider what John FC Turner, the internationally renowned housing specialist, said about user participation more than 30 years ago: “When dwellers control the major decisions and are free to make their own contributions in the design, construction, or management of their housing, both this process and the environment produced stimulate individual and social wellbeing. When people have no control over, nor responsibility for, key decisions in the housing process, on the other hand, dwelling environments may instead become a barrier to personal fulfilment and a burden on the economy.”

Turner’s observation confirms a solid planning principle about the intrinsic worth of dweller autonomy. Following Turner, “autonomy means interdependent self-management, not independent self-sufficiency”.

Dweller autonomy is thus the opposite of SA’s top-down approach that, because it imposes badly designed one-size-fits-all houses and townships on dwellers, it arrests “personal fulfilment and is a burden on the economy”.

However, dweller autonomy can only happen if political and commercial role players install the right support systems and enabling procedures. This is necessary for people to become “interdependent self-managers” and to realise their full creative potential.

The will and ability of dwellers to participate in the creation of housing is already there. Take a look at any informal settlement and you’ll see houses designed and assembled by their occupants all day, every day.

Whether this will and ability are matched by the will and ability of political and commercial interests is the burning question. The answer will, from a design point of view, determine whether it is business as usual or the beginning of radical change.


 * Dr Mills is a planning consultant in private practice.


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/opinion.aspx?ID=BD4A228541**

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