Michelle Provoost
The Openheid State. From closed to open society in Cape Town. It is hard to conceive of a country where contemporary city planning has had a more negative impact on society than in South Africa. In this country, the ‘makeable’ world and social engineering were so ‘successful’ thanks to the apartheid regime that the potential of city planning to shape society has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. In Cape Town, apartheid is set in stone and poured in concrete. District 6 in the sixties before it was demolished (left source: outofafrica2010. wordpress.com, top right photo: Ian Huntley, bottom right source: suemtravels. wordpress.com).
The principles of city planning that shaped the open society in Western Europe had a huge impact all over the world in the twentieth century. The ramifications are reflected in shifting constellations in every country, under every political regime, in every mode of urban architecture. However, there is no other country where these principles have been expressed so perversely. Rather than building an open society, they have been used in the black townships to impose separation and segregation.
After its introduction in 1945 by Karl Popper, the significance of the concept of an ‘open society’ took on a life of its own. While Popper viewed social engineering as a pernicious evil, the open society in Western Europe was in fact a product of such engineering: it was the model used to build the social-democratic welfare state after World War II. In large-scale, top-down operations, the governments of Europe erected countless new neighborhoods, building entire New Towns in some cases. Those towns share many characteristics: an open-plan design with modernist social housing in boroughs, neighborhoods, and city districts structured according to a concept of local communities. The underlying aim was to create an open society, based on the egalitarian ideals of social democracy, with opportunities for personal development, emancipation and social progress for all. These neighborhoods offered a sense of stability to each individual family, but also divided the city into clearly structured units, each with its own public facilities: shops, neighborhood center, churches, schools and sports fields. Each neighborhood was clearly separate from the next, delineated by a strip of greenery or by infrastructure. The internal grid of roads was efficiently linked to through-roads according to the principles of modern city planning and traffic management in order to guarantee the accessibility of the neighborhoods. All these spatial elements can also be identified in the formal structures in the urban
With the legacy of apartheid etched deep into every neighborhood, particularly in the sharp separation between the neighborhoods, the question in Cape Town today is: how can city planning contribute to a sea change in this reality that it first helped to create? How can the infinite sprawl of the segregated city be unified, opened up, woven into a coherent tapestry? Can the closed neighborhoods be cracked open, thus ‘unmaking’ the spatial consequences of apartheid? The Density Syndicate aims to contribute knowledge, designs and practical solutions in pursuit of this goal.
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