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.