Abstract
This proposal is founded in my personal lived experience of moving from a small town to a big city. I grew up in the town of Margate on the south-eastern coast of South Africa, and I moved to Johannesburg to study when I was 26 years old, and it is here where I currently reside. In the current age of mass migration, I use this lived experience as a way of understanding the forces that create and conditions that result from this act of migration. I draw from the experiences of those who traverse the city of Johannesburg, who have migrated from places outside of the city and are marginalized within the city. In this study, I view Johannesburg as the centre and the places outside of the city as the margin. Additionally, I question the erasure and absence of particular histories and the continued marginalisation of certain cultures within this centre. Central to my study is the female figure. My story is a reflection of my mother’s story when she moved to Johannesburg for the first time and it is also a story that reflects the experience of many other women who moved to Johannesburg for better economic opportunities. My Major Design Project (MDP) aims to explore the physical and non-physical edges and boundaries such as the spatial program of a building, building materials, language and different cultural backgrounds as a way of questioning why people negotiate their traditional values when they move from the margin to the centre. The active inhabitation of the edge space brings to mind the controversial slaughtering of a sheep on Clifton Fourth Beach in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018. During the ritual one of the protest leaders, former Rhodes Must Fall activist Chumani Maxwele, exclaimed: “We are going to untie the sheep and walk it to the ocean to waken Nxele’s spirit. …Today, the dignity of the black people has been restored. This is an offering to our ancestors. The sheep will be slaughtered here and eaten here” (cited by Philani Nobembe 2018). This act occurred on the edge of the land where it meets the ocean, but it was also located in the centre of privilege, wealth and status, creating non-physical boundaries on the ritual practice. The act of slaughtering animals in this manner represents a process of cleansing and it is an offering to allow the ancestors to inhabit a place, an act which is normalized and acceptable in the margin but seen as offensive or an act of cruelty within a westernised public space. In this example, the condition of marginality is not expressed as a separate or specific place, or to be forgotten once moving into the city. Public transport is one of the great “commons” of current society. It empowers the right to movement and is part of enabling a fair, open and supportive society along with access to public healthcare and education. In South Africa, our primary public transport is the minibus taxi. This transport moves the majority of SA inhabitants, moving the domestic labour forces and shuttling between home/s (urban and rural). From margins to the centre. The transport hub is the mediator between these places of origin and arrival, where the margin and the centre meet and the boundaries blur. As a Black South African, the minibus taxi and the related infrastructure of taxi-ranks, transport interchanges, taxi queues, and similar, are all reminders of a condition of marginality. My Major Design Project (MDP), Library on the Margin: Architectures of Resistance, is located in the inner city of Johannesburg at the newly constructed Johannesburg Intermodal Transport Interchange a long distance and cross border transport hub located between the existing Bree Taxi Rank and Park Station on the corner of Gwigwi Mrwebi and Simmonds Street (Figure 1). The transport hub is the mediator between these places of origin and arrival, where the margin and the centre meet and the boundaries blur. Through detailed site observation and mapping, edges of the building, the property, user groups, and activities will be identified as possible sites of intervention. The American author, professor, feminist, and social activist bell hooks writes about the “the politics of location”; and suggests an alternate way of thinking about the margin as a “space of radical openness, a profound edge” (1989:4). Seen in this way, the margin is not a place one wishes “to give up or surrender as part of moving into the centre - but rather a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (1989:5). In this work, I propose that the margin is a space for the transformation of not only our present and future, but also our past - an act of resistance to the powers of colonization. Another American author and feminist Donna Haraway frames this in the context of the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch which is characterised by mass extinction, climatic crises and climatic migration with multi-species refugees. She sees the potential of the edge condition as a site of rehabilitation and making livable again, “sustainability amid the porous tissues and open edges of damaged but still ongoing living worlds” (2016:33)...
M.Tech. (Architecture)