POINTING THE BONE

SONG LINES FOR DISTRICT SIX

Ruben Mowszowski

Has a city or a district planned on a drawing board and built in one go ever developed the kind of vibrant street life and community ambience such as existed in District Six and still exists in Greenwich Village, the left bank of Paris and other districts which have evolved organically over time?

British new towns don’t have it. Nor does Corbusier’s Chandigarh, Niemeyer’s Brasilia, and Mitchell’s Plain which was designed according to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City principles is a hub of gangland crime. Some social housing in the USA has even had to be demolished because it was so dysfunctional. The conclusion is inescapable. We might know how to make museums, but we don’t know how to make cities.

Any attempt to design a place such as those that that have evolved naturally through thousands of individual decisions bypass that process is doomed. Like the mad biologist’s attempt to create a living human, it will turn out to be a soulless monster. So what are we to do with District Six?

Rebuild it exactly as it was, is one architect’s suggestion. The same type of buildings, the same type of cobblestones. (It’s the Warsaw solution; demolished by the Nazis, Warsaw was rebuilt identically by the Poles.) The problem is that there is now a 1970s technical college in the middle of District Six and broad suburban-style roads. A well-known modernist architect has a different view. One should not let nostalgia drive the redevelopment, he says. Start with urban planning. The ‘bombastic’ architecture and scale of the Technikon, he admits, are a problem.

Urban planner Peter de Tolly is Director of Special Projects for the City of Cape Town. His office is in the Civic Centre; Cape Town’s monument to authoritarian control, centralised planning and vision of the state supreme. The view of the Cape Flats and what used to be District Six from his 18th floor window is a suitable one for any planner in the Howard Roark (planner-as-God) role. According to Tolley, postapartheid planner tend rather to interact with users and communities.

In the case of District Six, there are eight hundred families scheduled to take up residence but other voices have yet to be heard. About 40 hectares are available for redevelopment and the eventual population might be somewhere around 20 000 people. He shows me a set of outline plans prepared by urban planners Roelof Uytenbogaardt and David Dewar in 1991. These, he says, should be the starting point for any dialogue. Uytenbogaardt’s plans capture a lot of kinetic energy. His Wertmuller Centre in the Cape Town suburb of Claremont, with its abandoned diagonal ramps and inner streets going nowhere, reminds me of a J G Ballard story about a place frozen in time.

Something is missing, strangely. It is as if he has determined how people move and then locked them into paths they would take if they were free to choose, but what they have lost is the choice. The plans link the Technikon

along a spine road into the city and there is a grid of new roads within which are car courts and housing clusters. It looks to me like a traditional master plan with a certain latitude for building types and layouts. But isn’t the ethos of District Six at odds with the very idea of centralised planning? I ask De Tolly. What guidance is there in the literature of town planning for a situation which calls for less rather than more planning?

Christopher Alexander’s humanistic book about architecture, A Pattern Language, is in my mind when De Tolly pulls out a slim book A New Theory of Urban Design. It is by the same author. For the next two weeks I will be carrying this book with its revolutionary message around with me wherever I go.

The organic city, Alexander says, is created out of the present by an impulse towards wholeness. It grows piecemeal; bit by bit. The final result cannot be predicted, but we can recognise wholeness by the fact that it is coherent and has the power to move us. He calls for a process in the making of urban spaces by which each new act of construction is related in a deep way not to a master plan, but to what has gone before. If we wish to create a district with the qualities that we so fondly remember from the places we loved as children, we will have to change the way we design them. This means abandoning the notion of a master plan and designing incrementally, bit after bit, with the same attention to each part as we give to the whole place – in the same manner, it seems to me, as when we speak or write music.

Anwar Nagia is one of the principal political figures in the struggle to prevent the apartheid-era redevelopment of District Six. From his house in Walmer Estate, he tells me what the new District Six will be.

‘There will be four models put to the community. Uytenbogaardt and Dewar’s plans, he says, were done without community participation and with different priorities. They will not be part of it. His own preference is to keep cars to the perimeter.

About white resident’s fears that property values would go down, he says, ‘it just tells me that they have not smelt the coffee. They haven’t transformed themselves yet.’ He deflects the question of what the place is going to look like, but he says they will be considering all and any ideas that come up. He mentions the casbah a lot. ‘It will be an integrated development. We are not going to plan District Six on a piecemeal approach. There will be no private houses. People will have to rub shoulders with other people who they may regard as belonging to a different class. ‘If they don’t like it, they can leave.’

Abdulkadir Ahmed Said is a Somalian filmmaker who lives and works in Kalk Bay, a fishing village that somehow escaped the grip of Apartheid and has the feeling of a village that has developed organically over the centuries.. My meeting with him is in a narrow cobbled street - the kind slows down the car, and civilizes the driver. Negotiating one’s way with a car coming toward you in a street wide enough only for one vehicle is a collaborative and elegant manouvre which involves eye-contact with the person in the other car. Conventional town planners would never design it that way.

Said tells me about Stone Town, the thousand-year-old pedestrian city or casbah in Zanzibar. The casbah (the word means ‘to live together’) is a labyrinth where the occupants are all one family and the stranger is easily recognisable. (In suburbia, by contrast, everyone tends to be a stranger) It is in effect one big house, constantly under surveillance, where the intruder and the criminal are immediately detected. But here is a strange thing. Because the courtyards of the houses have doors from one to another, there are many different routes through the casbah, and these change according to the way relationships change, through the opening or closing of interleading doors. The casbahs in Zanzibar, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, are all identical, all multicultural, he says. They have the same form and the same aesthetic. ‘You will find internet cafes, a workshop, library, an art gallery, restaurants, a bookshop. The casbah is a shop, a running conversation and a playground for children. It is a house with many rooms and many passages.’

Alexander says that if the first increment contains all relevant values then the city will be whole. This is the opposite of the master plan approach.

It occurs to me that with its intricate regulating system the casbah has no need for centralised control. All residents in it play some part in the way the whole is constituted. It is therefore a model for a participatory system. Centralised planning on the other hand always involves social engineering. Life’s fine nuances and mystery are beyond our present understanding so any master plan has to be a subtraction from our humanity. If we want to incorporate the values and aspirations of the people who are going to live in District Six into the development, we need a community process rather than it being imposed on them in an attempt to recreate the past.

Peggy Delport is the curator of the District Six museum, the custodian, as it were, of the soul of District Six. She describes the museum as ‘a multi-layered space where the voices and memories of District Six have been converted into an aesthetic language which is constantly changing, constantly being added to.’

The memories and narratives given by people are nurtured and sustained, she says, through conversion into an aesthetic language which speaks on many levels. It reminds me of the way the aboriginals of Australia sing their landscape into existence. Could these be the song lines for a future District Six which will rise out of the rubble? Architect planner Lucien le Grange tells me his approach while we walk along a street recovered from under the rubble. The grass had recently burned down, revealing the cobble stones.

His starting point, he says, would be the churches and mosques that remained standing in District Six and the original roads and pathways. He would let the development be guided by the topography and the grid of old roads under the rubble rather than by any predefined plan. The roads, he says, are part of the history, the patina of the place. They have become an integral part of the memories of displaced residents. It occurs to me that the creation of a new and poetic language for our cities – the kind of work being done by the District Six museum and done naturally by the young child – is what might bring our urban landscapes back to life. This is not something that can be left to town planners, architects or city administrators. To bring our cities into mythic existence – for them to come alive within us– we need to find our place in them through the interaction of memory and legend with their buildings and streets. It seems to me that narrative structures of an old worldview with their emphasis on control rather than participation, are coming to an end. There is a much bigger and more exciting place for us to go to and it is the child – the child within us - rather than the adult who can take us there.

First published in The Sunday Independent as ‘How to let District Six come to life again.’