Creating Connections in the City: From road to street; and buffer zone to landscape: Residual highway space as a tool in stitching segregated neighbourhoods into the urban fabric

The fractured form of the post-apartheid South African city, created by city planning laws based on racial segregation, sustains inequality. Under apartheid, neighbourhoods were designed to exist in isolation. This isolation was created and reinforced by infrastructure and large areas of open space. This project recognises that residual space created by the highway could be an opportunity to stitch together the urban fabric. The project aims to address these spaces by using program to create connections. It finds its program in a sports centre on the border between Bonteheuwel and Langa. By understanding how our cities came to be fragmented globally, and its impact in South Africa, this project unpacks case studies that have created connections, extracting strategies that are useful and can be adapted in the South African context. It reviews literature that highlights new thinking about the city and the shift in the planning agenda from separation to integration. The project aims to address the separation between the two neighbourhoods of Bonteheuwel and Langa. It does this by transforming a road that divides, into a connective street; and by inhabiting the buffer zone with program in order to create an active landscape. The strategic choice of site is at an intersection of a new connection made into Langa, and presents the opportunity to address both these conditions of road and buffer zone. By creating an active street edge, the urban fabric becomes continuous between Bonteheuwel and Langa. The precinct has been designed so that the landscape offers the potential of connection by being programmed with urban agriculture, sports facilities and recreational space. These two predominant ideas prompted the conceptual understanding that the building becomes the transition between urban edge and landscape. A ramp is used as a mediating device to negotiate level changes both from inside to outside, as well as navigating the internal topography of the building. By recognising the opportunity of these residual spaces alongside the highway, these sites can be used to stitch together the isolated neighbourhoods in our city.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• de Beer, Christine Caryl

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Fellingham, Kevin
• Fraschini, Matteo
• Silverman, Melinda

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/18175

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/18175