27.04.2007

Once again we are back on site! At least the presentation went well last week, what we have to do now is prepare for the Council presentation on the 3rd. The work is starting to pile up, and we still haven’t started constructing anything yet, and the quotations we are getting for materials are way out of our budget! Union Tile seems to be interested in cutting us a deal though!
Guy and I have only briefly talked about the paired project, with all the work we are putting into our group projects it hasn’t left us much time to discuss our project, and the paired projects are to be presented to the Council on the third as well!

strokes of superstition

we arrived on site at 11:30am. the beerhall seemed quiet as though nothing had changed. well nothing had. the group split up to do community research. we handed out flyers in a search for skills and contact details. it surprised me that some people were hostile – they seemed to be the elders. i guess this was superstition and fallacy more than hostility. they had a reluctance to share information, particularly regarding the events leading up to the incidents of 1976. photographs seemed to be scarce and not ever publicized.

lunch was at 1pm at the library. the noise of the taxis was distracting and intense. the space we gathered in always seemed so cold and uncomfortable.

while sticking up the weekly kwa thema pages, we met artist, nico phooka. nico was instantly appealing and so stylish. he was enthusiastic and vibrant, so willing and positive about our projects. he told us of his work in kwa thema and his notes and strokes ventures. we all felt so encouraged. he filled out our flyer.

the sun was blazing. we headed out, pasting the pages on the way.

Dead dogs and hope

Today was disappointingly unproductive, though we got to site quite late after finishing our preparations in the CAD lab. We met our volunteers on site and talked through our ideas, but didn’t have a firm plan of action. The bodies of two dead dogs sticking stiffly out of checkers bags disturbed us. Ultimately we did use the time constructively, though, to explore the beerhall surrounds, introduce ourselves and our project to whomever we met along the way and exchange information with our ‘business-card/info-collectors’. These explain briefly what we’re doing and have a portion for people to fill in which gets torn off and kept by us so that we can later on contact people about the launch or for help. We met a dynamic woman called Lizzy at the take-way in the nearby row shops who bubbled on about making a difference and was generally very supportive. In the same shops, Guy and I also found a tyre supplier, Nelson, who will sell us old tyres for R10 each. We met up for lunch at the library with Hannah. The exciting breakthrough is that we seem to have found a youth councillor at the council offices, where we went to book a venue for next week’s presentations, who is able to get our site cleaned. Elmah promised us that she knew the right people ‘on the ground’ and that in a week the beerhall would be unrecognisable. This will hopefully remove one of our biggest hurdles and will mean that we can give up on trying to get help from Ekurhuleni and actually start on site when the programme specifies – which is in a week! While the others glued up the week’s newspapers, Kasia and I walked up Job Maseko Street distributing the flyers we’d made for our paired project. Our flyers (which, because of a wrong letter, read in isiZulu ‘Thandi the Tree’ rather than ‘Love a tree’ until they were corrected!) ask people to contact us if they would like to take care of a tree on the portion of pavement outside their homes. We want to plant one tree on either side of the road, creating some kind of zone of difference (and thus combining our two research topics, trees and pavement zones). Gratifyingly we immediately got an sms back from someone called Kibas who said he’d like a tree next to his stall – hopefully we’ll get some more over the next few days and then we’ll have to pick two ‘lucky’ tree lovers. Kasia and I also managed to sell an advert in next week’s newspaper to Pinky’s Fruit and Veg where I bought some beautiful ripe tomatoes before we met up with the others who had found some mural artists, Nico and Veli, painting at Ekasi who may well be able to help us.

Jumping hoops

This afternoon on the spur of the moment, and in a semi-comatose state after our essay hand-in, Guy, Kasia and I excused ourselves from history seminars in order to join Hannah at the next round meeting with the council. It felt really freeing to be leaving the environment of the university and driving to KwaThema. The meeting was held in the gloomy council chamber of the civic centre. The thin audience seemed unimpressed if nevertheless longsuffering when we got there, with Hannah, who had apparently arrived late, having difficulty setting up the projector, and the ward councilor, Mr Kwelamtini (probably the most important person to have presented to) absent. The projection screen, a tall narrow brown felt board, was inadequate. After Hannah’s presentation, which ended with a request for help to cut through the council’s red tape, it turned out that most of the audience had in fact been at the previous meeting, and that the crucial people – engineers and representatives of solid waste – had not made it. Question time deteriorated into a squabble over the correct procedures, consultations and channels for the project to gain approval. One grumpy man from parks, who seemed to have missed every nuance of what Hannah had said, lambasted us for not following the rules. Ultimately it seemed to be concluded that Mr Rambau would take it to his director who would take it to the arts and culture portfolio committee and then on to the mayoral committee – and that the housing man chairing the meeting would help to clear the way for this. One elderly gentleman had a fine time discussing apartheid planning with Hannah with no clear purpose; after he’d asked his fair share of questions, he simply got up and left. I wondered how anything was ever achieved with this morass of bureaucracy holding things up and the prerequisite meetings, meetings and more meetings eliminating any possibility of spontaneity. One participant warned us – with trepidation - to ensure that we had youth involvement; the legacy of 1976 certainly lingers: if the youth are not on your side, you are in trouble. Finally Mr Kwelamtini arrived, but sat in the back row and did little other than make a few hollow but politic statements about involving the whole community and following protocol. After the meeting was adjourned, Kwelamtini, distracted by the queue of people waiting to see him, lost interest in being briefed, and I went home feeling less than hopeful. This evening, though, I’ve been cheered up by an spirited sms from Nathi asking how the meeting went and whether we had got permission!

Uneasy

We arrived in a cooler, over cast Kwa Thema a bit later this morning. We had spent the morning planning our next move. Yesterday we attended another Council meeting, a follow up to the one we had last Thursday. It was amazing how little can be accomplished in an hour long meeting. Most attending just don’t seem to listen to the issues at hand, and we were confronted by a very difficult council member who seemed to want to block our path at every opportunity, he was rightly ignored and after lots of random, not really focused questioning, the meeting ended.
So we were in Kwa Thema today to hand out pamphlets advertising our aims to the community and also calling for assistance from some residents. We really need to find welders, electricians and artists. There was a very strange vibe in Kwa Thema today, almost a hostile feeling in the air, most of us seemed to feel it. This might have been down to the crisper weather or the two dead dogs we found on our site, we just didn’t feel at ease. Catherine and I split from the group and spoke to a very interested take away shop owner, and a woman who has lived in the township from the beginning. Later on in the day we had lunch at the library and drove off to stick up the latest newspaper. This was great, discovering interesting artists and a very slick bar owner along the way. We then left for Johannesburg.
We have lots of work to do for a presentation next Thursday, and then we start building. It’s amazing how much time has passed, and how quickly the construction part has sprung on us. Let’s hope we’re prepared to attack it head on, and as successfully as possible.

Interview Sound Clips:
http://web.omnidrive.com/APIServer/public/z6wuGYW3nhTkLJbpd8agz2yP
Sparks (Ekasi Owner) - drinking in the 60's
Joseph Cindi and Stanley Sibanyoni - Beer hall memories

We love Fischer!

This morning Hilton, Nabil and Hannah talked to the whole class on their sources of inspiration in architecture. Among other things – such as beaches along the side of the Seine – Hannah showed some of Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds which we should really look at in connection with our project. At 2pm we had a terribly inefficient session with Rat in the CAD lab demonstrating how to upload blogs. Before we upload any, though, she is going to provide us with a list of keywords according to which we classify our blogs so that they can be searched that way.

We left the session early to go with Hannah to see Kerry at Fischer, a client of hers whose building on the Troyeville side of Ellis Park she has just refurbished, in the hopes of getting a donation of fixing materials and some advice – Fischer makes bolts and fixings, including things such as chemical mortars. We sat in the boardroom and described our needs for fixing the balustrade, swings, abacus etc and Kerry miraculously pointed to the right fixing products for the job. He showed us express anchors for fixing the balustrading and specified that we needed two, spaced at least 130mm apart. He proposed a brilliant solution for the abacus which involved drilling two holes into the brickwork – one deeper than the other – so that the round bar could be slid in to place and then chemical mortared. Hannah also joined in, designing off the top of her head a bracket for the swings that used the same tectonic language as the c-sections of the balustrade. When Kerry left the room, Hannah said to us that all we needed to do was to ask him for a donation now! – but in fact he’d intimated as much earlier in the proceedings, when she’d been elsewhere. When he returned, she in fact popped the question and he agreed! We were overwhelmed by his generosity which included not only donating all our fixing equipment, but promising to try to source other material such as steel and cabling from his contacts at Mac Steel and Rope Reconstruction, and making up the bracket for the swings. Kerry also said he might be able to put us in touch with someone at Sika who could advise us on repairing the spawling concrete as he’d just done some similar work on part of his building. After admiring Hannah’s work on the building and a bit of a wait for Kerry to give us swanky Fischer brochures, we left, exhilarated. Now we need to finalise all the quantities of material and get back to him as soon as possible.

rain and reflections

it had been raining. everything was wet and soggy and seemed more dirty. the red earth was muddy and puddles reflected the pale sky. the council had been back and seemed to have cleared a section of the ground floor. only a small section though.

the volunteers seemed less excited. we did too i guess. we knew we could never achieve what we wanted for the space. too little time and too little money! we sat in a circle on the upper floor and talked. mr cindy and stan were there and nodded at our proposals. with our ideas in mind and our structure at hand, things seemed they might work out as planned after all.

after a woolies lunch at the library, catherine, guy and tom squashed into hannah’s palio and went to benoni to meet the ever-reluctant and even more inefficient council.

we stuck up issue 0 of the kwa thema pages. people were so intrigued. they stared and wandered over to read. one or two were not accommodating but a stick-and-run seemed to work better than the more diplomatic approach! the children at the school were ecstatic – not about our posters though. all they wanted was for us to make them famous. so snap snap snap…

red tape

This morning we put up the wallpapers in KwaThema and did the first design crits. The scope of the work at the two big sites is clear, and so, now are the research topics. The smaller projects less so.

In the afternoon, a meeting with the officials of Ekurhuleni Municipality. The meeting I’ve asked for since February. I’ve brought along three students and three community people, and Tseleng. The meeting is at the Benoni museum. A brick building with a swiss feeling. Inside, the taxonomy of the new South Africa. A room with a display of the desk of the late O.R.Tambo, exile leader of the ANC. Posters in intense yellow and green with the story of his life marching along the walls around. Another room with paintings from sixty, even eighty years ago, gentle oils, foreign scenes with different light. Traditional craft room. Different histories with no sense of intersection.

Our meeting room has no data projector so we use a laptop. There’s no visual thread to run through the story. And no clear excuse for giving them the facts so late, even if its their lack of interest. My sympathies are split between the officials, trying to do this delivery right, and the recipients of their slow services.

Its strange to be on the wrong side of the law here, suggesting simple and obvious procedures and being told to wait, to let this process and that process happen. There’s mention of other proposals that may or may not exist for the beerhall site. The potential danger of the damaged structure. The community representatives put their points across, describe their interest in taking over the running of the projects and their frustrations at waiting for someone to come and clean up the tip that surrounds the beer hall.

And Tseleng makes the point that as a KwaThema youth, he feels inspired by the energy they are bringing to the project and worries about it being bogged down in red tape.

I offer the council three scenarios. They can block the project, we can implement it on the understanding that it is temporary and outside their processes, or we can do it and then accept they will force us to remove everything later. We agree instead to meet with the councilor next week and the relevant departments, in KwaThema, to see what we could proceed with.

We all feel grim going out. I halfjoke should we go for a drink.

It feels like a strange reversal of apartheid roles, we’re the populists with the support of the community for our ideas, waiting for the officials to deign to help. All we can trade on is their appreciation of our directness. Someone mentions guerilla architecture; we can make all our stuff offsite and assemble it overnight.

We drive back past the Bloemenhof Park project, something a team of us worked on a long time ago. Similar scenario, trying to get things done quickly and directly, being blocked by council. Its just been restarted, after ten years. The lights, benches, mosaics are still good.

Then we pass the upgrade to the Harrow road offramp, mosaics and cleaning up. Five minutes later the Greenhouse project, a timber framed centre for urban ecology. Straight on to the Gautrain station site. We’re living in a building site. It seems impossible not to join in.

The Blank Canvass

Today marks a week since my first visit to Kwa Thema, the place already seems so common and normal to me, Robyn mentioned that we were home, as we drove through the Library gates. We met our volunteers at the beer hall, they were eager to get work done, but we were there on a kind of design feasibility assessment. It has been raining for the past two days, and the build up of rubbish has washed all over the site, and has begun to smell. These kinds of conditions, central to communities, and especially where children play, are completely unacceptable, how the residents can calmly dump their household garbage across a green strip of land so easily is plainly disgusting, and the fact that the council has left it there is even more troublesome. We had a productive morning trying to visualise our design ideas, and budget constraints.
We are designing an intervention which would make the building an extension of the public space around it. A safe facility which could harbour many community functions. A blank canvass for human performance. We see it being activated in a similar way that a park is activated by children, a place where kids play, parents watch. A tourist or educational element will be included where we would like to paint important parts of Kwa Thema’s history on the building’s soffit and columns. The largest intervention will be the balustrade, a preferably light element, resting gently between columns. A basketball, soccer, sports area will be included in the main volume where the patrons of the beer hall once sat, spectators will be able to watch the participants from the upper level. The volunteers seemed very happy with these ideas, now we just need to be meticulous and sort them out.

This afternoon I attended a council meeting with Hannah, Tseleng, Catherine and Tom. It was a very interesting experience, which demonstrated the layers of control which could be placed on us. Hannah did a good job in trying to explain to the meeting why our proposal should be considered differently, as it was a completely alternative way of doing things, we need to design and build like those who live in Kwa Thema, freely, inventively, intuitively and spontaneously. The meeting seemed to understand some of that, and scheduled another meeting for next week. City engineers will be there, in Kwa Thema, to inspect our building, I don’t think this holds much hope for us as no engineer would go out on a limb and proclaim it a sound building, it’s just too risky. The real achievement of our work so far, if an achievement at all, has been giving the community a form of a voice and a representation in a council meeting, which they would normally just not get. Perhaps our project will soon take on a far deeper meaning as an intervention of defiance and anarchy, breaking the rules, proudly.

Guerilla architecture?

Looked into the practical aspects of each intervention on site today, trying to figure out how they would actually work. The two gentlemen from the community Mr Cindi and Mr Sibanyoni were there waiting for us, when we arrived. There seemed to be only a few volunteers, though we were late, so I guess we could’ve lost some. They seemed a bit baffled, I suppose because nothing solid is happening yet, just talk. The scholars decided to go back to school after a while. Anyway, we worked out some quite useful things to do with balustrades and stairs. Hannah pointed out that swings on a concrete slab were pretty dangerous so we came up with the idea of covering the slab with old car mats. The rain had made the site feel really grim and I felt daunted and overwhelmed, picking my way between the rubbish and dead rats. As Guy pointed out, the rubbish is thoroughly embedded in the earth around the beer hall, not simply lying on the surface, and is going to be really hard to remove properly. There were pools of water in the covered area which hadn’t drained and the crumbling concrete work looked even less likely to hold up in its damp state.
The council meeting in the afternoon was quite fascinating. The collection of officials didn’t seem at all unified and each seemed to come up with his own series of complex potential objections and bureaucratic processes to send us through. As Hannah pointed out, the fact that we had three community members with us helped – especially when they started suggesting that we hadn’t consulted the community. I left with a sense that we shouldn’t be bothering with the council, that we should just be go ahead. In Hannah’s words, that is the way building happens in townships, ad hoc, and without planning permission. Another approach would be to see it in a more temporary light, without worrying about whether it endures, though this might not be fair to the community? And Nathi did come with a question – presumably from his father – about whether we’d got council permission. According to one of the officials, a council engineer had previously said that the structure was not viable and that the stand could only be sold if the building was demolished, which does not augur well.

Good day

This was my third day in KwaThema, exactly a week since my first visit. We met early in the morning and drove straight to the library to meet the volunteers that would be helping us at the beerhall site.

Today was a very good day for me because we started to work out the issue of how we can work out some of the details of our intervention ideas and how we could possibly get them to work. This for me is interesting because the interventions that we do design will soon be built by us and I really started getting excited for the project. I can’t wait to get building!

I met Mr Cindi and Stan for the first time today- what good guys! They are so friendly and so willing to offer their help to the project. I am completely overwhelmed by the willingness of the community to get involved in the project- I think this says a lot about the success of the project. I feel that if there is community involvement from the beginning the community will take ownership of whatever comes out of the structure and will look after it in the future.

its miller time

we went back to our site. its miller time again. it was still as prevailing and prominent as before, but not nearly as romantic as i had made out in my imagination. it seemed dirtier and more run-down. more litter and the intense stench of rotting rats. i noticed the sky – so blue and clouds so wispy and high. the wind was blowing quickly.

the council had begun the clean-up but seemed to be running on african time. we were not convinced that they would finish on time.

children gathered to play – the skeleton animated into a jungle gym. they turned everything into a game. climbing, hanging, summersaults, down, climbing, balancing, hanging… younger children brought their kites to the open tract of land on the east. they were homemade: black bags, dowel sticks and a huge ball of knotted-together-bits-of-twine and wool rolled around a pencil crayon. the wind was perfect. the kites clapped and swooshed across the sky, occasionally crashing into the burnt earth giving rise to a little poof of dust.

the gymnasts braved our group. they said they wanted a swimming pool in the building! they “jived” for us and afterwards we left for johannesburg.

16.04.2007

Today we got to Kwathema and had a light lunch and a briefing at the library before we left for the Chess Park. At the briefing I finally got to see how much work we have ahead of us and the limited time we have. All I can say is, its going to be a close call! Well, with this new understanding of the magnitude of the project and the up coming presentation, once we got on site, it was all business. We mapped out and gathered all the information we are going to need to start designing our interventions.

Tom, Anthony and Gift on the chess park site about to start mapping.

Kites

On Friday we agreed to Hannah’s proposal that the initial project sites be reduced to two big projects, the beerhall and the chess park, with five small interventions (connected to our research areas) like acupuncture points along the route between. We formed two groups of five and five groups of two. I was glad to have got to be in the beerhall team as the chess park seems to be very restricted by pre-existing ideas and wishes. Our visit today was, all in all, productive. Our ideas are beginning to emerge quite fast but the practicalities – which we haven’t even begun to consider properly – are daunting. There’s a sense that our intervention might end up being insignificant and not making any impact or difference. Khula and two of the volunteers measured up the building very efficiently so we should be able to start sketching our ideas to scale.

At the end of the afternoon the group sat on the upper level in the sun and talked through ideas, though people were somewhat reticent. One thing I think we are agreed on is that the structure should, to as great a degree as possible, retain its permeability. This goes against Tseleng’s ideas for securing the ground floor, which is tricky because he is clearly deeply invested in the building, but we probably wouldn’t have had the budget for roller shutter doors there anyway.

We had a lovely time with the small boys who were flying kites in the park and who moved onto the structure while we were talking. Jabu, who had an amazing kite made of a black dustbin bag, was inveigled – with Wandile translating - into helping us somehow incorporate kites into the launch – we thought perhaps we could have a kite building workshop and fly hundreds of kites from the building. Then Guy videoed the group of boys ‘jiving’! Still not sure whether we should be roofing a portion or keeping the building open to the sky entirely.

The Team

We returned to Kwa Thema today, a meeting with our volunteers had been organised, we have since been divided into two groups, one dealing with the chess park and the other (mine) concerned with the beer hall. I’m very happy being involved in the beer hall, its ominous presence and bad karma is in dire need of some sprucing up. The volunteers were divided into the respective groups, and those helping us seem wonderfully determined and generally fantastic in their enthusiasm and knowledge. We walked over to the skeletal structure and sat on the upper floor for a while, contemplating and discussing our ideas, working through possible interventions. Our time here was really productive, and it served to reinforce why the beer hall should be fixed in the first place – what an incredible place to sit and talk the afternoon away.

Broken Glass

This was my second time in KwaThema. We left Wits University at about 13h00 and took a slow drive and got to KwaThema at about 14h00.

We met up with some of the volunteers that we had met the previous Thursday. We were familiar with some of them but introduced ourselves to the people that we hadn’t met on Thursday. Khula and myself walked to the beerhall structure with Lawrence, Wandile and some of the other volunteers. I chatted a little bit to Lawrence on the way to the beerhall and found out a bit about him- he was born and raised in KwaThema but lived in Cape Town for a few years whilst studying Chemical Engineering at Belville Technical College. He is back in KwaThema now until he figures out his life path.

Arriving at the beerhall, we all climbed the stairs to the first floor of the structure where we sat and started throwing around ideas regarding our design. My first impression of being up on that upper floor that day was that the structure was very unsafe. There were children using the structure as a giant piece of playground equipment which disturbed me in a way because of the poor safety of the building- it is covered in bits of broken glass and the first floor is completely open to the ground floor and it would be very easy to fall of the structure and get hurt.

Children have really taken ownership of the building. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that it does resemble a piece of playground equipment. Children are oblivious and sort of fearless of the fact that there is broken glass scattered all over the building and that they could be badly hurt if the fall but they don’t have the same reservations that an adult would have. They just use the building for fun. I really want to see this space being safer for children as well as drawing older youth and adults into the space.

13.04.2007

This afternoon we met as the members of the Chess Park team; Kasia, Sifiso, Tom, Karabo and me, in the architecture parking lot. We drove up to Kwathema together, and met the rest of the Kwathema Project people at the Kwathema Library for lunch. From there the volunteers were split up between the Beer Hall and the Chess Park teams, Gift, Gugu and Phindile joined our group. Today the group really just looked around the site and observed what actually happened, basically how the people used the site as it is. To be honest we didn’t really get that much done today, I think we were a bit overwhelmed and didn’t know where to start!

First impressions

Thursday 12 April 2007
Back from Kwathema, dusty and sunburnt after a long day, but feeling very positive about the project. We met the volunteers and then traipsed inefficiently from site to site, and, over the course of the day, started making connections with each other. I was surprised at how serious about the project the volunteers seem; they are mainly high school and college students and all seem to have incredible direction in their own lives. The discussion exercise at the end of the day was amusing and rewarding, with almost everyone in our group – Gugu, Nathi, Wandile, Sifiso, Tom and Kasia – participating very enthusiastically in the brainstorming and roleplaying. The township itself has a friendly, cared-for air – the scale is small with narrow, intimate roads, though there are some stretches of roadside (along the bigger roads?) which are bare. Everywhere the school kids wore fully accessorised school uniforms and even the pre-schoolers carried little satchels. I think a lot of us have concerns about the impact of our interventions, given their scale, and their capacity to endure once these six weeks are over. Hannah’s plan, though, seems to be to extract from the exercise a way of working which will be able to inform future, larger scale interventions in other townships. The three sites which stand out are the chess park, beerhall and cbd.

KwaThema Works

Today was my first trip into Kwa Thema, a place I had heard a lot about, but had yet to experience. After a surprisingly quick journey from Johannesburg we arrived in a place which on first impressions seemed amazingly dense and layered. After a morning briefing and a quick name swapping, we hit the streets. I found the experience really interesting, Kwa Thema seems (most probably due to its age, or perhaps its stringent planning) to work. The incredible density of living and socialising along the street, and the wonderful human scale of the area was something which I haven’t ever really experienced. Kwa Thema seems completely different to any township I have ever visited, it almost feels contained, experimental, but has this great feeling of success which was hard to ignore. Sure many opportunities exist for the improvement of the infrastructure and general built fabric, but the feel of the place is very positive. I feel ridiculous saying this, but I’ve never felt as secure (hopefully not falsely) in similar environments. We were warmly welcomed by the eager volunteers who seem very excited to get their hands dirty for the upgrade of their community. Their drive and direction is astounding. The spaces chosen for our project are very different, but each seem to demand a similar approach, upgrade and improvement for the community together with a certain memorial, historical element to educate visitors and residents. I was particularly interested in the incredible history of the Beer Hall, and its demolition. The idea that a municipality would set up these facilities in townships really got to me. I find it amazing how those in charge often seem to impose their rule by subduing the ‘lesser’ cultures in a pool of alcohol. This seems to be a global phenomenon with North America and Australia and their indigenous cultures as an example. I therefore find it particularly potent that students uprising against Apartheid would choose the Beer Hall to bear the brunt of their frustrations. After a talk with Tseleng it became clear that the Beer Hall must have symbolised a form of control and perhaps oppression, and of course the story of the students revolting because their parents drank away their school fees is legitimate, I just feel that the anger was directed at the government and not perhaps the students’ parents. Anyway, it’s an ominous structure in the landscape, a concrete mass punctured with framed views through and out of. A skeleton whose flesh has been gnawed away, awaiting some sort of solution.

I think the project will be lots of hard work, I’m exhausted after a day of walking in the sun, can’t wait to see what a day of working in the sun will do! I’m excited for the construction of our interventions, but also quite nervous of the amount of work to be accomplished in a relatively short time. The whole process will be very interesting, and I look forward to it!

12.04.2007

Today was our first day in Kwathema, we started off at the library where we met the volunteers. It was interesting meeting all these different people and finding out why they had volunteered themselves for this project. We then walked to the Chess Park, were we met Anthony Shoba. I thought it was interesting to see how much Anthony had already thought about the Chess Park, he even had a plan already drawn up! We then proceeded to the Indaba tree, and from there we went to the Beer Hall. The Beer Hall looked interesting and the history behind it was inspiring, but all the same I would prefer to work on the Chess Park. From there we went to other various places around Kwathema, Tseleng our liaison leading the way. Overall I am happy I chose this elective because at least at the end of the day we will leave something behind that hopefully the people of Kwathema will find of use…. I am a bit concerned about the budget though doesn’t seem enough to do everything?!

Our first day in Kwathema. Catching up after the tour through Kwathema

First day

This was my first time in KwaThema. Getting there was quite a mission and we ended up getting quite lost. We had to stop and ask for directions on numerous occasions as we were really battling to find the rendezvous point- the KwaThema library. Eventually after a brief phonecall to Hannah we were on track and arrived at the library a few minutes after everyone else.

We met outside the library in a small outside covered meeting area where Hannah gave us a brief description of the project and then introduced us to a number of volunteers from KwaThema who would be helping the Wits students out. At this point I was very unsure of what this project was about but I was very pleasantly surprised to see the turnout of volunteers- no matter what this project involved, I was pleased to have community support.

We then embarked on a walking tour of various sites in KwaThema. The first being the chess park owned by Mr Anthony Shoba. This was a really great place for children to learn to play chess. I was so impressed with Anthony’s vision for the land adjacent to his small container that housed his chess academy.

Moving on towards a quite little park area where the Indaba tree stood, I really had a good feeling about this township. It had a really cool vibe about it and it was a place that I really felt comfortable in. I passed numerous locals who were very friendly to me… this was a place I could really get used to being in. The site for the Indaba tree was a very secluded and tranquil one. It was so calm and serene here, far from the hustle and bustle of the busy streets. This site really appealed to me for some sort of an intervention but later thought to myself that the site is actually very special on its own. It would take a very sensitive touch to transform or add to this space.

We then moved on to the civic centre which was an area alive with activity. The streets were lined with hawkers selling their various wares raging from clothing to meat. I was later told that this street market was not an everyday affair but that the reason they were all present today was because it was the allocated day in the month for pensioners to collect their pension cheques from the civic hall.

It was now time to walk back to the library for a very welcome lunch. I’m not used to all this walking and it was really draining me.

After a short lunch we walked to the Masimini Beerhall. This was a structure that was burned down by students in 1976 in protest against their parents spending all their school tuition money on drink in the beer hall. This structure has been completely gutted by what I would assume to be the fire and theft. The exposed concrete structure is very beautiful and full of possibility.

welcome

it was not my first time there – i felt welcome again. unthreatened. i could see on the volunteer’s faces that we were. these people were refreshing and innovative, i mean mattress springs as fences! amazing. gas bottles as balusters. people seem so proud of the little that they have; so neat and clean.

it was a windy day – dusty, hot, dry. there seemed to be such vastness and an infinity of undeveloped space bound by train houses on one hand and flat, sprawling landscape on the other. everything so low and horizontal and squat.

green grass was sparse – little oases scattered around trees and besides the over-waked paths that cut into the earth. winter was coming.

we walked the sites, quiet and contemplative. from the chess park to the infamous indaba tree to the civic centre to the beerhall and to the houses.

there was a huge and obvious juxtaposition between the well-kept yard and the abandoned, littered shells of ruins. post-apartheid i guess…

Prologue

In 2003 I met the first Wits architecture student to come from Kwa-Thema. Tseleng Phala knew KwaThema backwards but was unaware of the canonic status that this township enjoyed in South African architectural history as the first racially segregated neighbourhood planned along modernist principles, and used as a testing ground for the rational housing types developed by the CSIR. We have began to work together in developing ways to research the township, while finding ways for reciprocal exchanges to take place between people there and in the university.

The Kwa-Thema Project aims to research, in the first place, through archival and oral historical methodologies, the ways in which two different forms of power came to bear on the same physical site. Following this process, the Project will become a performative one, in which designers and residents are asked to reflect and act upon small areas within the township. The process will be documented and presented in a web site and reflected upon in an essay that will become the core of a book proposal.

The specific issue that the project intends to identify is the nature of negotiations that take place between the extremes of planning and violence. Planning here is understood in the sense that it was used within modernism, in the use of physical layouts to create and perpetuate spatial hierarchies. Violence, on the other hand, is exemplified in the expression of anger towards oppressive power structures through the destruction of life and objects. Both planning and violence are forms of power, and they might act on the same space; their differences lie in their closeness to the space and subject itself. Where planning distances, violence penetrates the subject, if only momentarily.

Kwa-Thema was formed and transformed through these powerful extremes. But what is of interest in this project is not so much the histories of these specific forms of power as the way in which in a subsequent period, in a different political climate, this site continues to change. It could be said that an accommodation has been reached between extremes. The logic of planning has been abandoned, but its products have created a framework for action. Similarly, the impetus for extreme violence has gone, but the culture of agency and self determination that underscored it is manifest in a creative, undisciplined set of spatial practices.

The final outcome of the project, then, is to identify and support moments of interaction between the traces of planning and violence, and, respectively, their form and reason. The project will do this through engagement with real sites. It will suggest that the way to move forward around questions of the relationship of design and power lies within a culture of engagement, located in the tensions that real space and uses construct.