1955 Research
Our areas of research include exploring the cultural and social values in the organised and self-built environments of Johannesburg’s shack communities, how these relate to larger systems of infrastructure and how this can inform in situ upgrading and appropriate service provision and improve social justice.
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our current research
The role of land in social justice, architecture and community upgrading
Nkwanyana, T., Kornienko, K. and Maape, S. (ongoing research and project development)
Abstract
Nkwanyana, T., Shai, R. and Kornienko, K. (ongoing study in Kliptown)
Abstract The socio-physical fabric of a community contributes greatly to residents' wellbeing, contributing to social capital and livelihood efforts. Recent decisions to replace informal dwelling/stand housing types with formal multi-story flats has been met with an outcry by residents of a loss of space (and therefore ability) for everyday and celebratory cultural practices. To date the understanding of these cultural practices within these neighbourhoods is anecdotal, in response, this research does not intend to judge cultural value but rather to document cultural practices in informal settlements, producing a body of data to allow for better informed decision making throughout informal settlement upgrading practices.
Experiences of Everyday Urban Life: Exploring Boundaries of Fear
Kornienko, K. and Nkwanyana, T. (ongoing research)
Abstract The premise of the study is that despite the end of apartheid’s spatial control, much of the urban patterns of human flow and development remain entrenched. This study asks the question, how does the human experience of urban boundaries of fear inform ideologies/values and thus our social constructs of our own and shared realities? This focus on meaning points to the notion of boundary as symbol which opens the doors to both past and future. Because the study makes fear its cornerstone, I will largely purse threads of colonial/apartheid legacy and post colonialism, but at the same time the study will not be blind to the evolving influences of climate change, shortages, and urban resiliency.
our publications and presentations
Kliptown
Solidarity Kliptown Style - A story of freedom amidst Covid lockdowns
Nkwanyana, T. (5 October 2021) Solidarity Kliptown Style: a story of freedom amidst Covid lockdowns. Voices from the Frontline, International Centre for Climate Change and Development’s (ICCCD).
Kliptown superheroes take up fight against Covid-19 in service of the people
Nkwanyana, T., Shai, R., Mahlamvu, G. and Kornienko, K. (2020) Kliptown superheroes take up fight against Covid-19 in service of the people. Daily Maverick, June 3. Retrieved from: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-06-03-kliptown-superheroes-take-up-fight-against-covid-19-in-service-of-the-people/#gsc.tab=0.
Bottom-up “Slum” Upgrading: Defamiliarising the Global Neighbourhood Aesthetic
Kornienko, K. (2016) Bottom-up “Slum” Upgrading: Defamiliarising the Global Neighbourhood Aesthetic. In Attia, S., Shabaka, S., Shafik, Z. and Abdel Aty, A. (eds.) Dynamics and Resilience of Informal Areas: International Perspectives. Springer, New York City.
Abstract Grappling with South Africa’s processes of participatory urban development and bottom-up in-situ upgrading of informal settlements raises questions around the perception of neighborhoods. At the root of these questions is what has value, or is given value, in today’s climate of “desirable” urban landscapes. On the one hand, worth is added to (often imported) urban character which is deemed to foster the current trend toward globally competitive cities. On the other, worth is withheld from seemingly untidy, unsafe, unhealthy “slum” communities. This dichotomy becomes the core from which to explore the nature of aesthetic and its role in defining neighborhood within the context of urban in situ upgrading of informal settlements. This paper’s underlying argument is therefore the need to defamiliarise the notions of both neighborhood and slum in the urban development process.
Social Justice
Recovering the gathering table, bringing cosmopolitics into conversation with architecture
Maape, S., Kornienko, K. and Nkwanyana, T. (submitted abstract) Recovering the gathering table, bringing cosmopolitics into conversation with architecture at the 3rd Annual International Conference on Social Justice, Stellenboch University 11 October 2022.
Abstract In this work we use the metaphor of conversation around a table to reinvent the relationships between architecture and the beings with whom our practice engages. A conversation that expands social justice to cosmos justice. Critical to this exploration is the understanding of cosmos drawn from Stenger’s (2010) notion of cosmopolotics, that all things - human and nonhuman - are beings with whom we share our perceptions of life experience. We see the relationality of these beings becoming a practice, or dance, aligned with what Robbert and Mickey (2013: 1) describe as ‘Cosmos becomes attached to politics by means of the many associations continually forged and broken between humans and nonhumans’. At our table, rocks and minerals, fish and animals, grains and trees are not the pie to be divided in a drive for capital gain. Instead, they are the guests, we are the guests. Uppermost is the topic of relations, how do our ecologies of being value each other and how does or could this play out in the world we share? As we look around the world today, our human ecologies continue to be defined by narratives which historically framed, and now prop up, the social scaffolds of white (male) supremacy, “capitalist sorcery” and dominance. For some the repetitive familiarity of the logics of those scaffolds carry with them the habits of security, for others precarity and violence, and for still others only the imaginings of well-being. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) this practice of repetition becomes the milieu or what defines our human experience of place. But what about the diverse understandings of place across unique human and non-human cultures of existence? This study is rooted in a skatepark project along the Klipspruit River in Kliptown, Soweto and its entwined ecologies of ghetto and polluted river. Can the beings of these two work together to restore each other? We build on the practice of land acknowledgments (Robinson et al, 2019), using critical methodologies of drawing, truth telling and shifting narratives to embody altered understandings of self and of relations to the cosmos that reinvent our sense of place and practice in the built environment.
Acknowledging the land in architecture
Maape, S. and Kornienko, K. (submitted abstract) Acknowledging the land in architecture. In Landman, K., Makakavhule, K. and Nay, E. (eds) Decolonization and the Built Environment: Process, product and pedagogy. Routledge: New York.
Abstract Land acknowledgments are becoming a more common custom in some circles and found wings through Zoom calls due to Covid lockdowns. However in a broader sense acknowledging the land remains a political topic primarily constrained to high-level discussions. In global discourses of architecture, land, either through acknowledgments, restitution or in curriculum reform and practice remains almost entirely mute. Furthermore, the custom and content of land acknowledgement, though a valuable starting point, tend to remain in the context of meeting formalities instead of embodying self-reflection and engendering real change. Left as such threatens that they become transactional statements of peacemaking that reinforce reframed existing power arrangements and singularity. In an effort to leverage this newly adopted custom as a decolonizing process, we explore ways of acknowledging the land by suspending western knowledge systems and using drawing as a ritual practice. The intent of this ritual is to counter the instruments that have (and do) define, measure, and delineate land framed as terra nullius to colonial and capitalist ends. Adopting a drawing method that enlivens, animates, and names the land, has brought us to a deeper form of acknowledgment in which we experience the land as having its own agency. The foundational centrality of land in architecture and its intrinsic presence in practice emerged through collaborations in virtual cross-cultural sketching school and panel discussions focusing on decolonizing practice and education, coordinated by the Global Studio at the RAIC Centre for Architecture. Our findings discussed in this chapter argue the necessity to amplify land’s presence in architecture and the built environment. We discuss the spiritual and political notions of land acknowledgment, and then contextualize this within architecture. We then outline our proposed method of drawing and conclude by discussing this technique and its potential for developing deeper forms of land acknowledgment in colonised and other contested places.
drawing by Sechaba Maape
Acknowledging the land in architecture
Maape, S. and Kornienko, K. (2022) Acknowledging the land in architecture presented at the Gauteng Institute of Architecture
“I think the question you should be asking is what you can do for you.” (Rankine, 2019: viii).
Abstract This work positions the practice of land acknowledgement not as a transactional reframing of familiar arrangements of power or towards singularity, but rather a critical self reflection challenging one’s own position in the immoral narrative of the colonial dispossession and relationship breaking with the land. Rankine’s quote above (Black woman’s response to White male heroism) echoes James Baldwin’s (2016) demand that white people examine their own need for supremacy. Here, we explore the lived reality of sterile separation from earth as mother to both of us as coloniser and colonised, unveiling the vulnerability of an aloneness which in turn manifests in the violence of power structures. Rooted in the act of drawing, animistic imaginings of relationship between human and the land tell stories of past, present and future. This storytelling challenges land acknowledgement, looking beyond apology towards its potential to crack open a ‘wound’ creating the possibilities of reckoning and accountability in historic legacies and contemporary realities.
Dr Sechaba Maape, PhD is the founder of Afreetekture, an experimental design practice that aims at establishing a practice based on indigenous knowledge systems. He is also a Senior Lecturer at the Wits School of Architecture and Planning and focuses on teaching design and history of architecture through the lens of indigenous knowledge systems and decolonisation.
Other
Kornienko, K. (2017) Waiting, Hope, Democracy, and Space: How Expectations and Socio-Economic Rights Shape a South African Urban Informal Community, Journal of African and Asian Studies, 52(1) 34-49.
Abstract This paper draws from two case study informal settlements and their recent Constitutional Court litigation to explore the connection between informal living spaces, democracy, and housing. The temporal element of this development dynamic is examined through the erosion and building of hope resulting from the political actions of the state and the political agency of the poor. This engagement of time as an element of space is considered through residents’ expectations manifested in social processes reflecting either the criticality of hope as a catalyst for bottom-up developmental agency or waiting as a fortification of the top-down status quo.
Finding Hope and Spatial Kimensions of Human Rights in Urban South Africa’s Informal Vernacular
Kornienko. K. (2014) Finding Hope and the Spatial Dimensions of Human Rights in Urban South Africa’s Informal Vernacular. SLUM Lab, 9.
Abstract Shack dwellers have long pursued legal avenues to consolidate housing. A recent case demanding interim basic services for an informal settlement, however, was as much a demand for dignity, equality and visibility – citizenship – as for toilets, taps and lights.
Kornienko, K. (2013) Engaging Informal Settlements as Landscapes of Place: Reconceptualising Urban Communities in the Struggle for In Situ Upgrading. PhD Thesis, University of the Witwatersrand. INTERNET: http:// wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/13640.
Abstract This study investigates the role of space and place in urban informal settlement upgrading. The key aim is a better understanding of the character and functionality of informal communities through their social processes. There is a large body of literature on the social, economic and spatial consequences of informal settlement’s ongoing role of housing the urban poor. This study uses an ethnographic approach to investigate the spaces and places which result from the need based social relations and political agency of the informal residents. This genre of need reflects Lefebvre’s description of the tangible and intangible necessities that contribute to individuals’ livelihood and well-being.
The study explores the philosophical thinking around spatial production and the meaning of place. It builds on the works of Heidegger, Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari who attribute value to everyday social process and its role in producing space. Deleuze and Guattariʼs relational language is used to articulate the fluidity with which informality engages formality through the rhythm, refrain, milieu and territorialisation of daily use, leading to a rethinking of boundary and edge. Critically, the study also draws the historic and present elements of time as it relates to space for this group of thinkers. The time/space dynamics of hope lost through waiting for upgrading and hope gained through impatience, political agency and action, add layers of complexity to these spaces. Implied in the first dynamic is an acceptance of the status quo, passive inclusion into South Africaʼs democratic society through the eventual provision of housing. The second is an insurgent demand for socio- economic rights and societal transformation as guaranteed by the Constitution (Holston, 1998).
The resultant qualitative data from two informal settlements in greater Johannesburg unravels the logic behind informal spatial production via relational connections which articulate space as a product of informal residents’ social actions. This spatial understanding suggests a shift away from current spatial models employed by the State in its formal provision of subsidised housing. At the same time, it strengthens informal communities’ role in the upgrading process by giving value to the social qualities of place in existing living environments.
our film projects
Ways of Moving: everyday experiences traversing a fragmented cityscape
Nkwanyana, T. and Kornienko, K (2021) Ways of Moving: everyday experiences traversing a fragmented cityscape [documentary film]. SMUS 1st International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability. University of Botswana (Virtual), 23-25 September 2021.
Abstract In Private Moments, Private Wastelands, V.S. Naipaul, describes ‘South Africa with its many groups, its many passions, its biding tensions’. Locally, he eloquently articulates the layers of differing values and ideologies of the seemingly disparate individuals within Johannesburg’s society. Somewhat disparaging of Soweto, he leaves his visit to the city unresolved as to what holds her together, offering only flagging hopes hung on the images of Mandela. This study considers Johannesburg’s transit infrastructure as a system of threads traversing the city. The premise, that despite the end of apartheid’s spatial control much of the city’s patterns of human flow and dysfunctional development remain entrenched. For people travelling, whether to and from work or play, these patterns reflect boundaries and are defined by systems of road and rail that are at the same time both disjuncture and interconnection. The starting point of this study is Soweto and the ongoing consequence of apartheid’s spatial distancing. The work is a visual exploration of human experience with the infrastructures of transit through the physical and emotional relationships to these structures of (dis)connection. The portraits become a collaborative process that reflects the diverse knowledges and experiences that Thabang and Kristen bring together to focus on the everyday human consequences of boundary in Johannesburg’s retained legacies of extraction, colonialism, apartheid, post apartheid - capitalism.
This study asks the question, what is the reciprocal human experience of such urban boundaries as fear, distance, decay, cost, exploitation and how does this inform ideologies/values and thus the social constructs of our own and shared realities of the city? This focus on meaning points to the notion of boundary as symbol which opens the doors to both past and future. The study seeks to challenge perceptions of place and people, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary in such contrasts as the Metrorail and Gautrain.
Solidarity? Revealing the everyday lived reality of Covid-19 in Kliptown, Soweto
Nkwanyana, T., Kornienko, K., Shai, R., Mulhamvu, G. (2020) Solidarity? Revealing the everyday lived reality of Covid-19 in Kliptown, Soweto [documentary film]. Southern African Cities Studies Conference. Johannesburg, South African (virtual), 31 August - 4 September.
Abstract The film will be preceded by the distribution of the written story of the early months of our 1955 Kliptown Covid-19 initiative (attached). The documentary film then critically challenges the government’s absence in Kliptown during the Covid-19 response and its consequence to the everyday. Our seven years of collaborative, activist research into the character and cultural use of space, housing and basic service delivery within this community adds a deeply rooted complexion to the film’s storyline. We further draw on Steve Biko’s argument for the critical connection between community and culture, and his commitment to a form of activism that manifests in real life community development projects responding to community needs.
The character of the film’s narrative reflects the historic lineage of theatre’s role in South African civic discourse and its shift from protest theatre to a theatre of resistance. In this way it taps into today’s Covid-19 moment. A moment which has shone light on the decades old, unaddressed issue of inadequate taps, toilets, electricity and high density in Kliptown, all of which have lead to ongoing general poor health and made compliance with the protective Covid-19 health guidelines impossible for the residents to meet. Through visual creativity and street corner theatre the film draws together the residents’ fears, vulnerability, anger with the compelling action of a few to change their own situation.