Cruel Opportunities in the Apartheid City: Meantime Designs and Public Housing in Cape Town

As one of the most ambitious national public housing programs in the world, post-apartheid South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) produced millions of standardized, non-participatory and non-adaptable, freestanding brick houses, to all known as RDP houses. Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, it has become most apparent that RDP housing has perpetuated apartheid’s monofunctional urban environments, and that formerly disenfranchised black communities were at no stage given a chance to negotiate and participate in the design and construction process of the RDP model. Although largely silent, absent, or sidelined from public housing policy and design discussions, architects and other built environment professionals and activist collectives have not only strongly criticized RDP’s minimal and fixed design and standard housing model, but have also proposed and circulated alternative visions, imaginaries, and spatial practices to challenge South Africa’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. By researching how architectural professionals, academics, activists, and residents viewed and evaluated the RDP house, and aimed to move beyond it, this talk not only contributes to understanding the microhistories of South Africa’s housing programs but also to how professionals and urban dwellers are rethinking the critical potential of design worldwide, and how they are addressing this challenging 21st century moment that desperately demands new socialities, housing designs, and resource distribution. To address the urgent housing needs of Cape Town’s most vulnerable communities, who continue to be caught in a state of meantime limbo, this talk introduces the notion of “meantime designs” that functioned as social and political counter- imaginaries, and as negotiating devices to discuss concrete alternatives to South Africa’s long failed and exclusionary public housing standards. “Meantime designs,” however, not only challenge but also run the risk of further perpetuating spatial inequalities and exclusionary housing politics.