Manenberg negotiated: answering questions communities are not asking
type: CreativeWork
description: Within the global South, the public realm is often characterised as a territory of intense accessibility and spatial claims, equally enabling and constricting citizens to shape and reshape an inclusive place within the informal city. The contemporary African city has been central to the discourse around the rapidity of urban development and influx, producing a global narrative of the inability of a frail postcolonial metropolis to support this growth. What is emerging, however, is the resulting improvisation of the city's inhabitants to reimagine their contrasting, everyday environments for the city's negotiation and daily navigation. Often, the global discourse omits the finer, more nuanced informality of life that the African city's marginalised users employ in the everyday to innovatively sustain their livelihood. Central to this imagination, is the Designer's role to spatially represent all citizens within the urban arena; achieving this through the People's City design approach. This participatory, incremental approach produces innovation outside the preconceived idea of a design product; rather, pursuing the process over the product. If more than half the city is marginal, the role facing practice should be framing solutions from the perspective and design of citizen/community majority. As Hamdi observes, the integrity of developing an inclusive approach in design, is through the collective voice and experience from within the community context itself; “practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible - expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense... It is about getting it right for now and at the same time being tactical and strategic about later” (Hamdi, 2004). Manenberg, Cape Town, provides insight into the negotiation of community spaces; where form-making operates outside of the regular and explores how previous areas of exclusion contribute to an emergence of a more flex…
abstract: Within the global South, the public realm is often characterised as a territory of intense accessibility and spatial claims, equally enabling and constricting citizens to shape and reshape an inclusive place within the informal city. The contemporary African city has been central to the discourse around the rapidity of urban development and influx, producing a global narrative of the inability of a frail postcolonial metropolis to support this growth. What is emerging, however, is the resulting improvisation of the city's inhabitants to reimagine their contrasting, everyday environments for the city's negotiation and daily navigation. Often, the global discourse omits the finer, more nuanced informality of life that the African city's marginalised users employ in the everyday to innovatively sustain their livelihood. Central to this imagination, is the Designer's role to spatially represent all citizens within the urban arena; achieving this through the People's City design approach. This participatory, incremental approach produces innovation outside the preconceived idea of a design product; rather, pursuing the process over the product. If more than half the city is marginal, the role facing practice should be framing solutions from the perspective and design of citizen/community majority. As Hamdi observes, the integrity of developing an inclusive approach in design, is through the collective voice and experience from within the community context itself; “practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible - expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense... It is about getting it right for now and at the same time being tactical and strategic about later” (Hamdi, 2004). Manenberg, Cape Town, provides insight into the negotiation of community spaces; where form-making operates outside of the regular and explores how previous areas of exclusion contribute to an emergence of a more flex…
author: Hedley, Phillippa A
keywords: Urban Design
date published: 2019
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:22:44Z
provider: University of Cape Town
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/40708