Transformative infrastructures: retrofitting the apartheid city

Abstract

This dissertation is a speculation on the role of infrastructure in shaping the city. By reimagining infrastructure in terms of its social, economic and topographical effects rather than purely on functional terms, the project proposes a method of intervention that transforms the city by ameliorating the negative spaces of existing infrastructure, bridges spatial divisions, and provides physical and social services to underserved communities. The dissertation is founded on an understanding of Cape Town's twentieth-century planning and development as a modern, infrastructured city and simultaneously a segregated apartheid city. The modernist preoccupation with separation is demonstrated to have dovetailed with apartheid policy to produce a functionally, economically and racially segregated urban landscape, with infrastructural projects used to carve up these discrete land parcels. The proposal is a hybrid spatial intervention that simultaneously adopts and subverts infrastructural processes to produce a more holistic approach to structuring the city, dealing with the issue of infrastructure at three levels: re-imagining existing sites of infrastructure to mitigate their divisive spatial effects and turn them into an urban resource; providing infrastructure to communities in need of basic services; and broadening the scope of what constitutes 'infrastructure' to include not only mobility and services but also social and educational facilities, landscape, recreation and access to information. The result is a device for reconfiguring the urban landscape to encourage economic opportunity, social mobility and urban liveability, suggesting a route to a more integrated city.