- Title
- Productive Heterotopias as a Conceptual Basis for the Design of Sustainable Low-Income Housing within the Cape Town Inner-City
- Creator
- Van Niekerk, Neil
- Subject
- Productive life span
- Subject
- Low-income housing -- Cape town -- City
- Date Issued
- 2020-04
- Date
- 2020-04
- Type
- Master's theses
- Type
- Thesis
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10948/58805
- Identifier
- vital:60123
- Description
- Lasting colonial and patriarchal spatial strategies have resulted in South African cities characterised by vast inequalities and unsustainable patterns of development. These include explosive low-density sprawl, fragmentation, separation and a city-wide pattern of core and periphery. Housing justice for the urban poor is a critical component in addressing this, however, numerous studies have found that low-income housing projects have in the majority of cases ended up perpetuating these socially, economically and environmentally unsustainable patterns of development and reinforcing existing spatial injustices. For this reason, design research into more sustainable and productive architectural design strategies for low-income housing appropriate to the South African urban context is particularly important and forms the central concern of this treatise. To be more specific, this study questions how the theoretical idea of productive heterotopias and reimagining the role of the architect as that of a spatial agent could be used to generate a practical low-income housing strategy for a site in the Cape Town inner-city – one that is socially, economically and environmentally sustainable. To achieve this, a critical theoretical lens was adopted in conducting the research and a range of open-ended qualitative research methods were employed to gather, analyse and synthesise data. Because of its particular appropriateness to design research, data analysis primarily relied on abductive reasoning. This study is valuable in that it provides an exploration into the application of critical theory to low-income housing design in South African cities and demonstrates the architectural understandings gained within a set of design scenarios and architectural prototypes. This study argues that any low-income housing strategy in South Africa needs to recognise the complexities of the housing process, make use of time as an important building material and advance the right to the city of the urban poor, i.e. finding a balance between structure and agency that allows greater freedom for ordinary people to have a hand in co-creating the city through spontaneity, improvisation and incremental development, for that strategy to be truly sustainable and productive, as well as to assist in cultivating positively performing and equitable urban environments. In particular, this study rejects the top-down housing methods employed within mainstream development practice in favour of finding an alternative approach that will result in a more supportive housing project. Finding this new supportive approach involved investigating co-operative forms of organisation, methods for allowing community participation, sustainable building materials, simple construction methods and incorporating urban farming as a strategy for supplementing income. Additionally, this study argues that the chosen site for the design, namely Harrington Square, functions as a public urban square at the centre of a larger shared space while simultaneously supporting the proposed housing intervention.
- Description
- Thesis (MA) -- Faculty - School of of Architecture, 2020
- Format
- computer
- Format
- online resource
- Format
- Format
- 1 online resource (203 pages)
- Publisher
- Nelson Mandela University
- Publisher
- Faculty - School of Architecture
- Language
- English
- Rights
- Nelson Mandela University
- Rights
- All Rights Reserved
- Rights
- Open Access
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | van_Niekerk_Neil_214289206_treatise_document.pdf | 46 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |