THE ‘GUSHESHE’ NEIGHBOURHOOD

Incremental infrastructures are visible across the gusheshe neighbourhood a centrally located neighborhood characterized by a mix of older, colonial era buildings and new shack type informalities, together with poor, overcrowded and often insecure conditions for residents. These conditions of socio-environmental marginalization prompt urban dwellers to reshape the house or compound to provide new material arrangements that can support households through daily struggles, and to intervene in the electricity grid to adjust flows of energy. Such interventions can incorporate redirecting power through clandestine connections, building a new roof more resistant to extreme weather or creating new domestic spaces for distant relatives arriving from outside the city.

These constant and ever-shifting infrastructural configurations can thus be understood as incremental, in that they reveal a spatial imaginary of a dialectical nature between ongoing conditions of poverty in the neighborhood and the material responses, interventions and strategies of survival unfolding each day in multiple built environment forms

Object Inventories

objects