This dissertation aims at motivating a redevelopment of the Wynberg Precinct which includes reconnecting the western and eastern fabric of the precinct which has been initially divided due to the installation of a train station. Wynberg is located in the southern suburb of Cape Town and is a highly active transport interchange which includes a train station and 3 taxis ranks with an estimated average daily density of 21,000 commuters. Subsequently, the high density of commuters transiting daily through the Wynberg precinct has consequently generated the opportunities for informal traders - street traders - to appropriate open spaces and street edges within the precinct to develop their micro enterprises. Associated together, the transport interchange, the street traders and commuters, had overtime shaped the character of the precinct and stimulate the public realm. This dissertation is also motivated by the current 'informal trading and mass commuting' phenomenon arising within the Wynberg precinct. The precinct is an arena for contest for spaces and spatial inclusivity between the street traders, commuters and taxis. The planning and configuration of the Wynberg precinct has predominantly been driven towards the integration of the train station and the taxis ranks but not much considerations have been placed on the integration of the street traders in the precinct. Consequently, as a result of such planning attitude, traders contest for space to trade, pedestrians contest for clear sidewalks while Taxis contest for clear streets without any obstructions. Furthermore, the dissertation also aims at reconnecting the commuter's routes between the transport facilities. There is a discontinuity in the commuter's routes from one transport facility to the other. Commuters are required to find alternative routes - using the street itself - to have access to their respective transport facilities since the street traders in the precinct occupies the sidewalks. Subsequently, using the street as a pedestrian route holds a further impact on the vehicular flow around the precinct.

Dating back to the late 1700's from the skirt of Devil's Peak down to what used to be the shoreline of Cape Town, this once walled off city has undergone plentiful re-inscriptions of the landscape till today. Remnants of the old French line fortifications remain along the slope of Trafalgar Park, disregarded and lost in the city 'scapes. The reading and re-tracing to pre-existing and existing layers of the precinct has been developed through blackout art methods of incisions and insertions to acknowledge the pre-existing and the existing in order to create a new narrative for this land without a landscape. In establishing the character of the narrative and the architecture thereof, the imagination of the space transcribed from archetypes - people - from the surrounds and what could be their ultimate feeling for what should be placed forms the landscape and how their individual expectations meet with others. The narrative is split twofold, the one is that the moments along the Bigger story is the park intervention - traces of the incision old fort wall - strung into the city block and the other is the pedestrian insertion armature which cuts through the site, providing for a short cut to the train station. The path aims to take the pedestrian through a series of spatial experiences through the site. These experiences are shaped by the tectonic expression. The architecture of the new is at constant dialogue with the existing, playing on a series of incisions and insertions. The cross pollination of the varying programme in the precinct facilitates this dynamic spatial experience through the link.

The following dissertation will attempt to establish an approach to dealing with the issue of waste contamination and water conservation in the natural and urban landscapes of the riverbed, its rivers' edges and its man-made peripheries. This research locates itself at the northern boundary of the city of Windhoek along a stretch of polluted riverbed in the Kilimanjaro Informal Settlement (KIS) where public environments are undefined, unhealthy and in many ways disconnected from the greater metropolitan areas. In the creation of an architectural approach 'urban acupuncture' will be explored in an attempt to create Architecture that has the potential to influence areas beyond its physical boundaries and which can re-establish and re-imagine the value of the river for its unseen influence in shaping the city as rapid urbanisation is taking place. In this section of the city, particular aspects of environmental degradation, water conservation and lack of basic infrastructure form a basis of inquiry to which an urban framework has been proposed. Drawing on theories of landscape urbanism, this urban framework acts to establish an alternative and more efficient infrastructural system which collects, stores, recycles and reuses wastewater for both drinking and irrigation purposes. Seen as the bi-product of this urban framework, the KIS Agricultural Learning Centre has been proposed which provides the necessary link between this infrastructural insertion and both the public and social constructs of the Kilimanjaro Informal Settlement.

South African cities have a complex social and physical post-Apartheid layering. The historical legacy, referring here specifically to the inadequate roll-out of public facilities in areas and uprooting as well as separating of communities, have resulted in under serviced environments that can lack social cohesion and often struggle with poverty. Public institutions play a catalytic role within a community. To this end, health care portrays the government in a legible 'provider' role and is, in some ways, an obvious way to make citizens feel valued in comparison with other public institutions. Health care institutions impact the community in a unique way due to the combination of specificity of service and the emotive way it is experienced by the individual. This dissertation aims to research, define (and ultimately) test a strategy that aims to stitch together the fissure between community and institutions, by rethinking the urban interface of generic primary health care facilities. This research is structured around themes of theory, policy, the continuum of care and physical environments; each in order to better understand what and how the 'gap' between health care institution and community is constructed. Programmatic and/or spatial ideas that inform the architectural design. This dissertation asserts that providing 'traditional' generic institutions sustains rather than improves the life of the community. The research suggests that existing health care facilities can be more effective as public spaces by introducing new programmes, disaggregating the formal interface, redefining and activating a new urban threshold and providing meaningful open space. The design ultimately aims to act as a new skin or threshold through which institutions relate to the community.

My interest this year was an architecture based on experience and how the architect rationalizes the complexities of the ineffable. With experience being such an intangible phenomena, whilst architecture is such an intransigent material, the process became about how to translate the one to the other through the process of drawing. By using Table Mountain as a site for exploration, the intangible experience of dwelling on the mountain was studied as an experience to be translated into architecture. This was explored through a process of cognitive and architectural drawings; ephemeral to tectonic details. The disser tation follows the process of landing on site, experiencing the space subconsciously through the intelligence of the body, and reflecting thereupon through cognitive drawing. The exploration follows the translation of these cognitive drawings into architectural drawings, in a way that returns to the experiential quality that which they originally depicted. Translating two-dimensional paper into three-dimensional imagined experience, which is embodied all the way through to the tectonic details. The process informs an architecture which allows the user 's mind to drift to the memory of the mountain, re-orientating themselves to their natural surroundings and enhancing their dwelling experience.

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 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.

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.