70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. Cities are
growing faster than can be designed. Townships and informal
settlements are becoming a common site within cities around the world.
South African cities are ill and require healing. It has inherited an intrinsic
genetic flaw, apartheid’s social and spatial planning. This urban DNA
structure encouraged weakness in the connectivity systems and was
designed to prevent people from connecting and contracting. It is Postapartheid
times and this weakness continues. Therefore the location of
interest is Diepsloot, a disconnected post apartheid township. Over 400
000 people reside in this township which is located between two major
cities in Gauteng.
The conceptual framework is based on the analogy of the Recombinant
DNA applied to how urban design unfolds. The scientifically engineered
process of healing through sharing, recombining, accepting and adapting
is a strong methodology to adopt into the urban design process and
methodology.
The theoretical framework looks at Peter Calthorpe’s New Urban
Network is based on reorganising transport networks into a hierarchy
which assists in increasing connectivity and improving the quality of the
urban network. While Complex Adaptive Systems theory is understood
through Sanders’ five complexity-based observations about cities and
urban environments. David Grahame Shane’s explanation of the theory
of recombinant urbanism involves the theory that cities emerge from
armatures, enclaves and heterotopias which are all constantly combined
and re-combined.
In addressing spatial inequalities and disconnectivity,
three bases of literature have been reviewed. The literature review
includes Compact City and Decentralised Concentration, New Urbanism
and Transit Oriented Development – Urban Network System. The work
researched and developed in these design movements and approaches
are vast. This study touches on the essence of the design movements and
approaches. The challenge is the application of these strong design
approaches or movements into a local context.
The hypothesis says that it is possible to develop a design methodology
that works from a parallel system of both bottom up and top down
design processes. It is possible to extract a strength in the current organic
structure of a township development, and incorporate it into formal
urbanism design tools. This is to ensure that the formal design
intervention is adopted into the current system, or study area, and
adapts and grows incrementally. Similar to the process of how the host
would accept the recombinant DNA of the antivirus.
The aim of the design intervention is to apply local lessons learnt in the
existing spatial context and link the strengths found with contemporary
urban design principles of transit oriented development that encourage
connectivity and intensity of development around intermodal facilities.
This approach demonstrates a design methodology that employs a
parallel system of bottom up and top down processes. The approach
developed is specifically, a design and a physical built morphology
analysis and does not include the arm of social interaction in the form of
public participation, etc.
The findings demonstrate that connectivity and density is a critical
component to healing the city. This discussion is held within the Transit
Oriented Development model. The study analysed the level of
connectivity Diepsloot exhibits from a regional scale, to a district scale
and finally to a neighbourhood scale. Healing the weakness of disconnectivity requires tackling it from all scales.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/18341 |
| Date | 02 1900 |
| Creators | Nair, Simona |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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