Browsing by Author "Holmes, Lawden"

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    Incremental support structures for housing and urbanisation
    (2015) Holmes, Lawden; Silverman, Melinda
    South Africa is experiencing unprecedented population growth due to rapid urbanisation. This growth often overwhelms the current planning and developmental capacities of city-regions acutely impacting informal settlement areas. As a result the city's most vulnerable citizens experience poor service delivery and poor living conditions. This project proposal challenges the current approach to housing delivery and the upgrading of informal settlements in urban areas of South Africa. It is positioned within a complex informal housing environment with poor basic infrastructure and high exposure to the risk of fire and flooding in winter. Based on the research of this project, the Barney Molokana Section in Khayelitsha was selected as the conditions above were evident in this informal settlement. The project comprises three parts; the first is a proposal for an infrastructural intervention aimed to act as a settlement organisational device, the second is a public amenities building that promotes an active public interface and a didactic architecture and the third a series of support structures that further promote the concept of incremental housing development. The process learnt from existing spatial configurations and transformations within informal settlements allowed the working backwards to discover the minimal elements or support structures from which a settlement can grow incrementally.