This dissertation follows a process of research and design. The project research is defined in the first section of the dissertation as a conceptual duality of raw vs refined. The study of a raw heavy materiality of architecture, in comparison to a delicate refined light weight architecture, where a link is developed presenting light, experience and embodiment of materials as the common denominators. The design is then developed and revealed throughout the next section. The final outcome of this project is a Resource Centre (carved into and added onto the park) to facilitate after hours' life of school children in Woodstock, Cape Town, chosen to actively involve and integrate the community with the park. The year began with a group investigation into a section cut through Cape Town. Starting at Devils Peak, moving down through District 6 and Woodstock, ending at the harbour. This presented a rich base of knowledge for this particular strip of land. Although my individual study was into rock – the upper portion of the valley section, I chose Trafalgar park as my site. It was chosen for its rich historical value and positioning in the city, with beautiful views of the main geological landmarks in Cape Town, namely Table Mountain, Lions Head, Signal hill and the ocean. The focal point and what drew me to this site was the solidity of exposed rock seen in the remnants of the 18th century defence system in the form of a redoubt. With old trees hinting at the existence of this wall, marking either side of exactly where it used to lie. The surrounding land forms a beautiful parkscape with many changing levels presenting great opportunity for intervention. Frequent visits to site allowed me to understand how the park and neighbourhood functioned, and how people used, or rather, underused the park in its existing state.

This research dissertation employed critical research approach and postcolonial theory to investigate and expose the ways in which post-apartheid township space has been imagined and created for the black lives that twenty-one years ago emerged from the long dry season of apartheid hegemony. The dissertation used Delft South township as a case study for the reason that it carries the notion of a post-apartheid township and as a result it has been imagined as such. In its creation as a 'new' kind of township, Delft South was stipulated in terms of section 3 (1) chapter 1 of the Less Formal Township Act, 1991 and imagined through the 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme and as well in the 1994 Housing White Paper and later expanded in the 2004 'Breaking New Ground': Comprehensive Plan for Housing. The development of housing in Delft South was adopted in 1994, followed by its physical construction in 1995. Through studying this township, it became apparent that the ways in which the post-apartheid township has been created for the black poor did not challenge the notion of township, as we know it, under the apartheid racial regime. Paradoxically, it has been found that the post-apartheid neoliberalised housing policies that promotes inclusion has exercised exclusion in the housing development and provision of low income houses to the urban black poor. Moreover, in reading what the post-apartheid statecraft has created (making of place) it became clear that the post-apartheid state to follow Achille Mbembe is not 'an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively.' But that which is stammering to find its way out from the world of masks, of repetition to the recreation of a new community of life, of collective dreams and healing. Therefore, the creation of Delft South like any other post-apartheid township without doubt, has come to epitomize the manner in which the post-apartheid state asserted itself in the making of place and also, how it has come to create itself defectively after apartheid.

This dissertation is about addressing the need to make township centres a more socially and economically inclusive space for the majority of the inhabitants. It is about transforming the current status of a township from a dormitory or residential zone that simply repels its inhabitants to look for a sense of wellbeing and livelihood elsewhere to a township with an active centre that retains its people through promoting and supporting context specific socio-economic opportunities of the place It has become evident in many South African townships that there is an entrepreneurial activity that supports the livelihood of people within the settlements yet this activity is largely unsupported in legislation and in built infrastructure. The entrepreneurial activity is mainly found in the informal and formal small scale, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) and the neglect of this mainstream township economy, is reflected in its spatial exclusion from central business districts within cities around the country and within the township centres themselves. The Khayelitsha Business District is a township urban centre that finds its SMME economy operating on the centre's periphery while large scale enterprises, coming from outside the township dominate the built half of the business district. It is precisely this lack of representation of the formal and informal small scale, medium and micro enterprises within the Khayelitsha Business District that this dissertation seeks to address and provide a suitable architectural and urban intervention. It seems intuitive that through infrastructural interventions, that promote active social and economic participation of the majority of the population, can one seek to create spaces of socio-economic inclusion. Appropriate urban planning strategies, such as those suggested by professors David Dewar and Fabio Todeschini in their book "Urban Management and Economic Integration", and architectural examples, such as the ancient Greek Agora, will be analysed and used to equip me in imagining an inclusive vision for the further urban development of the remaining half of the business district and in designing a building that celebrates the aspirations and needs of the SMME economy. It is my hope that such an urban scheme and building will contribute positively to the ideal of an inclusive urban centre.

This design dissertation aims to explore the Cape Town Station as an opportunity to support the social evolution that is on our doorstep. For this I chose to explore the balances in the concepts of culture, society and identity; and consequently the ideas of typology and programming within the infrastructure of a major railway station/public transport node. Individual and social identity is an omnipresent topic in the architectural discourse. Countless theories exist that attempt to understand the composition of identity; the lack thereof; the origin; the contestation and the evolution of what makes us US: a unique and conscious being that belongs. Navigating this vast topic of architecture + identity is not an easy task, and it is easy to attach to existing discourse within the larger field of discussion of aestetic and imageability. This dissertation therefore will approach the problem from a completely different angle, and will use the issue of identity in a post-apartheid South Africa as a basis to explore method of design that is appropriate for the Post-Apartheid context in South Africa.

As in many other places, socio-spatial production in modern Namibia has been a top-down practice approached in professionalised and standards-oriented ways, focused on outputs. 'Participation’ or involvement of 'beneficiaries’ has over time been added to the repertoire of such practices, but this remains driven by a one-dimensional definition of what’s 'better’. Even when the modernist and centrally-controlled practice of Apartheid is generally condemned, its ways with regards to spatial production remain largely unquestioned and, by consequence, preserved and expanded. At the same time, the urban transformation that Namibia has seen in recent decades has been astonishing. These changes expose the limits of previous approaches and at the same time lay bare new openings for socio-spatial production. There are various practices that have been part of this urban transformation, but they remain largely undocumented. Furthermore, even when they are approached, they tend to be assessed in terms of their outcomes; relegating the ways of the process as a matter of lesser importance. My research accounts for three practices of socio-spatial production in three urban areas in Namibia today. These spaces have been the result of a considerable number of iterations, and have been made possible through the contribution of a wide array of participants; many of them performing beyond their 'main’ role. I have documented these practices from their beginnings up to the point in which they are today. My research is structured as a case study. Within it, I have undertaken semi-structured qualitative interviews with participants, and also employed maps, official documents, and photographs to triangulate the accounts. I have then brought these together with debates on co-production and autogestion, exploring whether the practices can be understood in these terms. Other subsidiary debates fundamentally related to these two are those on state and civil-society divisions; the nature of grassroots associations ('social movements’); and on-going and long-standing debates on land and housing. My analysis suggests that, while the way in which the practices take place varies greatly, they can be considered the sites of various kinds of innovation. I have also found that the 4 ways of the grassroots, while having legitimacy and equality as strong values, show new options in terms of representation. I have found that co-production, as understood in the more recent literature, is a useful way to understand the practices, particularly if a variety of strategies is recognised. Autogestion is a useful term to keep in mind, and although such term has some overlaps with the recent concepts of autogestion, only some understandings of the term stemming from practice enable a reading of the cases I document. The division between civil society and the state today consists of a constellation of parties not necessarily fitting in these two categories. The practices stand also as the more recent evidence within a trajectory of production of space undertaken through a social process involving the grassroots in Namibia, one in which visibility and participation are no longer the only aims, but where negotiation and some degree of autonomy is sought. Lastly, land ownership (real or perceived) emerges as a powerful force in making the process collective and enabling socio-spatial development. Land rights are exercised throughout, often irrespective of the degree of de jure tenure at stake. Housing becomes a devise for savings and resource mobilisation, as well as an income-generating activity sometimes enabling further livelihoods. My study adds to on-going debates on co-production, and to some extent to those on autogestion. For the first, it expands on earlier observations that brought the term to the socio-spatial realm and provides new openings for the term to establish bridges to other debates. It also contributes to the archive of socio-spatial practices in Namibia, and to the pending project of a socio-spatial history of the country. It provides new insights for those engaged in socio-spatial production of what are the experiences and the openings for a new kind of practice that moves away from the assumptions that have placed us in the urban crisis that characterises our times.

This thesis confronts the spatiality of farm worker communities in the Breërivier, in an attempt to find a programmatic intervention that will create collective community space. It thus turns to its context, the landscape and the farming that embraces the site as a generator of form and language. In essential, the thesis is hoping to find a new critical "vernacular" that responds to the ruralscape.

Includes bibliographic references.

This project began with an encounter with a place, an ambivalent place of disjunction between a mountain and a wasteland in the city. The subsequent uncovering of untold stories, traces of memory, about that place, reveal a site laden with a history of a deep connection between a people and their natural surroundings. Ensuing events of disjunction and displacement has indented into it layers, which has left it a severed site of strange contradictions. This paper explores the fragmented nature of the memory of a place; that it cannot simply be recreated, and in fact should not be. Rather, the dissertation research looks at ways in which art and architecture are manipulated to disrupt the way think we perceive a place and reframe our presumptions, such that latent layers of an existing place can be awakened and brought into presence in a new way. The project departs from the position that the disjunctions of a place can in fact be the site of shifting perceptions and unexpected connection, as is asserted by Stuart Hall in "Maps of Emergency: Fault Lines and Tectonic Plates": ..."Of course, fault lines… are also productive. Those escaping the vertical lines of force forge new lateral connections. New formations appear where older ones disappear beneath the sand. Borders, which divide, become sites of surreptitious crossing. Separate and inviolable worlds meet and collide. Where only the pure, the orthodox, were valorised, a new universe of vernaculars and creole forms comes into existence." This particular design process was one of actively harnessing all the layers of the site, past and present, strange and ordinary, connections and disjunctions, to bring about a new, shifted experience of the place.

An interest in abandoned and derelict landscapes as environmentally appropriate spaces for architectural interventions led my dissertation research to the theoretical concept of terrain vague. The terrain vague sites found within the City of Cape Town revealed that it is the edge condition which differentiates these spaces as being outside the realm of the normative city. The unravelling of the edge from a state of order to disorder took my research to the historical fortifications of Table Bay and specifically, the Settlement's eastern boundary demarcated by the French Lines. A combination of redoubts and connecting rampant walls which marked the boundary between the order of the European settlement and the wilderness beyond. The Central Redoubt is the only remnant of these structures and is located on Trafalgar Park in the suburb of Woodstock. Trafalgar Park is surrounded and fragmented by a variety of boundary conditions and controlled access which results in the Park being severely underutilised. The dissertation design project looks at re-activating Trafalgar Park through the manipulation of its various edge conditions. The transformation of boundaries into pedestrian routes and public space around points of interest aims to improve accessibility and encourage connections between the Park and surrounding context. The Swimming Pool Precinct was chosen as the site for the architectural intervention as it is an impacted site that offers the opportunity to increase activity and improve the connection between the north and south of the Park. The interrogation of the boundary condition between architecture and nature through the design of edges and thresholds is the driving concept behind the architectural design. The dissertation design project aims to demonstrate that appropriate architectural interventions are able to increase activity in public areas within the City of Cape Town without the need for fences and controlled access.

Transport is the network that moves people between places. It provides a means of access and opportunity. Transport routes in Cape Town have become expansive due to urban sprawl. There is an unjust spatial economy due to modern and apartheid planning. Poorer urban residents live far away from places of opportunity and are forced to travel long distances and spend a high percentage of their income on transport. Minibus taxis are the mode of transport best able to provide a flexible and on-demand service within this sprawling urban form. Public transport interchanges remain largely undeveloped and undesirable places. The concept of transit-oriented development (TOD) has the ability to transform these undesirable places into neighbourhoods of intensified mixed-use development, offering convenience, access and amenities to people who use the transport interchange or live nearby. The project involves the analysis of the transportation network in Delft, a rapidly transforming settlement 21 km from the inner city of Cape Town. Although the settlement is located far away from the historic city core, its main road follows an important desire line connecting Khayelitsha, a dense working-class neighbourhood and Belville, an important economic node. This has led to significant densification along Delft Main Road and people turning their homes into shops. Some 600 minibus taxis service the area because there is no high capacity train line or bus rapid transit (BRT) route. The project is sited within an important civic node in Delft and is well located to the R300, N2 and Symphony Way (regional roads). Taxis currently hover on the side of the street due to the people count in the area. The design is a public transport interchange and mixed-use - retail, residential and commercial - hub, which adopts transit-oriented development principles. The design proposal suggests an urban design framework that responds to the existing context, and a predicted idea of what the neighbourhood could become. lt aims to link the existing civic node to the new shopping mall development in a series of streets and active building edges. It responds to the life of the taxi by providing loading, holding, parking, servicing and washing areas. The taxi world evolves around the existing Caltex petrol station and Delft Main Road. The architecture responds to the current socio-economic context of Delft and how people currently inhabit space. The live-work unit provides flexibility for tenant and occupation mix, whilst contributing to the necessary density of the project. The dissertation explores how transportation can contribute to city building, economic activity and resi dential densification in an existing underserviced low-income suburb.