Studying resident repurposing permits an understanding of urban planning that foregrounds the power of residents to shape the production of space. This dissertation is an extended case study of resident-initiated planning alternatives in the former ‘Bantustan’ capital city of Mmabatho (present-day Mahikeng), today a South African secondary city. Apartheid officials planned Mahikeng through racial-modernist principles of ‘separate development’ as a receiving site of forced relocation and racialized dispossession of Black South Africans. Historical and archival research, semi-structured interviews, and personal communications with planners, public officials, activists, and residents uncover the historical roots of repurposing in apartheid-era contestation to planning marked by elite profit and graft.
Through in situ analyses of 80+ built sites, 60+ of which have been repurposed, I propose specific types of repurposing in Mahikeng: official and unofficial land-use changes; symbolic and aesthetic innovations; ephemeral or pop-up activations; and institutional reformulations of former ‘Bantustan’ buildings. Case studies of select built sites—and case studies of select local neighborhoods and their experiences of political-geographic change—enable me to propose that repurposing has proceeded in a dynamic cycle that includes contestation, destruction, and (re)invention. Various “key ingredients” enable repurposings to be successful, including actors, tactics, and institutional arrangements. To explain why residents repurpose, I consider actors’ motivations and find that repurposing is driven by wide-ranging and varied autonomous interests, including economic survival, human dignity, and meaning-making.
The consequences of repurposing are profound: it helps meet residents’ basic needs and gestures toward an alternative planning imaginary in the city, one marked by an incremental vernacular approach to planning. This study raises critical questions broadly relevant to planning and urban policy, including: how do afterlives of racial domination affect the production of space, viewed through residents’ repurposing? How do repurposing and vernacular planning unfold in different local geographic and sociopolitical contexts? How should urban policy account for residents’ self-initiated city-making? And what roles should self-initiated city-makers (repurposers) play in shaping planning and urban policy? While the conceptual label of repurposing may echo globally, distinctive to Mahikeng is how contemporary repurposing is historically and institutionally grounded in solidarity: contestation to apartheid planning.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/yq6y-8380 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Chavez-Norgaard, Stefan Peter |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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