Abstract
IV
The mandate that comes with a contemporary clinic completely ignores the natural
abilities of a woman’s body to deliver a child as expressed by Dr Grantly Dick-Read
in his philosophical explorations of birth in his piece No Time For Fear, written after
moving to South Africa in 1948 where he continued to conduct extensive research on
birth inspired by multiple African cultures. The contemporary clinic does not support
motherhood beyond the birthing room located within the heavily institutionalied clinical
setting arah ckwellmith describes the pain that comes with labor as
a real physical pain, that for many years has resulted in an ideology of labor rooted in a
fear of childbirth his ideology has given rise to medicalied childbirth processes stripping
women of the very power they possess to give life and posing negative impacts
on their prenatal and postnatal mental health. Bec Jenson further expresses this in her
study establishing a guide towards birthing spaces and clinics that are “motherhood”
centered. She also states that a safe and satisfying birth experience depends, in part,
on the level of stress experienced by the birthing woman enson ,
My proposal will focus on whether the urban Johannesburg able to host a mother prior
to and post her moment of eection reflux hat facilities or infrastructure exist within
the city that can support a mother and help her navigate with ease? What facilities exist
city that aid mothers to achieve a healthy motherhood within the city scape? Does
Johannesburg have facilities that will help women understand and navigate life after
birth?
The work proposes to leverage architecture, urban landscapes, and the spaces encompassed
therein as a tool to trouble the notion of medicalied birth and to uestion a
received understanding of motherhood as difficult I intend to create a place where
women can exercise agency in caring for a child after pregnancy and comfortably
make decisions concerning their future, including sexual and reproductive health,
school completion and/or income generation, and care giving for their babies. In looking
at the ackson womens health organiation building designed by the Irish architect
Yvonne Farrell, where the exteriority of the building becomes the biggest contributor
to the making of the buildings social culture. She explains in an interview that the
goal is not to create autonomous and separate spaces for women but to think about
the intersections between people and user spaces. As I look to the city as host for
motherhood, I seek to explore notions such as “exteriority” and the culture contained
therein as expressed by arrell y proect will focus on an exploration of
urban elements such as pavements, buildings, programme, transportation networks,
infrastructure, and existing health care facilities as aiding factors towards an effective
motherhood-supporting infrastructural cityscape.
The project’s site of interest and intervention is within the inner city of Johannesburg
focused on loff street as a point of investigation I look at the , from imones
perspective of a truncated process of moderniation his approach suggests and
highlights the notion of pragmatic opportunities that may contribute to formulating
an ecological growth of the city. Transportation and mobility are a key part of my
investigation, marking a place of arrival from local and farfetched communities;
drawing from personal experience, traveling and being mobile can be the most
dreaded part of pregnancy. In choosing a site, I imagined a heavily pregnant woman or
a mother navigating the city with a toddler, a mother trying to find a day care for her
threemonthold baby after maternity leave has expired and a mother suffering from
post-postpartum depression, just wanting a break. I look to explore ideas of access,
availability, exclusion, and security within the city. In choosing the inner city as my site,
I look to utilie the iomedical expectancy rate for a pregnant woman or
mother as a tool granting mothers autonomy by providing entities and programs that
allow them a freedom.
The research is conducted primarily through literature reviews, cartographies mapping
of the city and indexes that reveal the navigation and formation of the city in
the eyes of a mother. I intend to use cartographies to highlight the displacement of
women especially black women by the apartheid urban planning policies, to iterate
the impacts of spatial design on access, comfort, and inadequacy. In addition, cartographic
mapping of the urban city becomes very important in my project to illustrate
positional relationships of a mother and the available infrastructure at an urban scale.
My work borrows from James Corner’s invisible cities methods of collage making and
other mapping methodologies utiliing contemporary cartography to uncover both
intimate as well as urban scale relationships with infrastructure. He uses collages that
illustrate different hierarchies between different users and show how certain elements
within an infrastructure are set to inconvenience others. The secondary focus of my
project investigates performance and scripting, towards giving visual language to the
embodied nature of birth and mothering in the cityscape as informed by the Bapedi
tradition. I reference methods of collage and montage as depicted in Natalie Bannard’s
photographic series Birth Undisturbed, in this work Bannard brings the physiology
of birth into narrative photography. In addition to collage making, I look at Jennifer
Bloomers way of drawing that challenges the gender of creativity by drawing analogies
between the construction of a structure, which is thought to be a tidy act of control
and precision, and the mess of birthing. Bloomer developed a critique of the sterility
of the architectural design process through her unclean drawings and assimilation of
components of the female body breasts, milk, fluids, blood, hatching, udders into
architecture. Through this methodology, I aim to visually explore and represent the
spatial relations within a birth room and beyond the birth room.