Culture in the Open Designing for publicly accessible cultural spaces

As goes a string of letters sewn together to capture one of Africa’s most significant cultural moments in written form. The speech embodies the sentiment that common ground and shared space create a unified identity and bond.

“The fragrances of nature have been as pleasant to us as the sight of the wild blooms of the citizens of the veld.”

It was by no mistake that the then deputy president Thabo Mbeki opened his 1996 ‘I Am an African’ speech with a visual of himself, and of all of us, identifying as Africans because of our connection to and interaction with natural elements of the landscape – because it is our unified grounding. This speech 25 years later is still chilling and encourages a sense of belonging that designers of public spaces aspire to inspire in users.

There exists a connection between the speech given in 1996 and the current disposition that we have to public spaces in modern day South Africa, and Africa – especially publicly accessible cultural spaces. The speech clasps the sentiment often promised within or leading up to a cultural public space; a sentiment awakening: pride, a sense of belonging and a conscious awareness of the gravity of the present moment. However, a respectfully iconoclastic observation is that many cultural spaces today would be lucky to awaken even half this sentiment only after a user has read a textbook on why this space is important.

Why is this? Why is it that in a country with such a rich history placed on the tip of a continent with a diverse story, it is not effortless to awaken gravitas through an array of cultural spaces? And why does this hinder the designing of publicly accessible cultural spaces? I share my opinion on this through three sub-questions: What is culture? Where has culture gotten us now? Where can we still go?

According to the online Oxford Dictionary, culture is:

“The way of life of a people, including their attitudes, values, beliefs, arts, sciences, modes of perception, and habits of thought and activity. Cultural features forms of life learned but often too pervasive to be readily noticed from within.”

On our modern tongues, the word culture is often mummified to mean something of the distant past to be framed as a societal touchstone. The magnificence of the Oxford description is it recalls that culture is also what you and I consciously and unconsciously create today.

Referring to the ‘I Am an African’ speech’s significance; it is freely available to read, easily and safely accessible and alive. What the latter point means is that there is no serious need to read textbooks to understand the significance of the speech, you already know the struggles of society and what your personal inflictions have been – so this speech is set to soothe a raw and unsolved aspect of our society which forms part of our live culture.

Just as the speech, you contribute to a live cultural evolution daily and a denial of this within our cities restricts its necessary involvement in the design of public spaces.

Being based in Pretoria, for this section, I will mainly refer to spaces in Pretoria.

Three types of cultural spaces we sit with include: museums (such as Pretoria National Museum and Freedom Park); open parks (such as Burgers Park and Venning Park) and open destinations (such as The Union Buildings Gardens and Mothong African Heritage Trust and Village).

Having these categories indicates that we must have, or have had, some culture of utilising common spaces for recreation, for historical and cultural preservation, or for political commemoration. This is echoed when we study the timeline in which public spaces were developed within the city and suburbs.

From 1905, the now named Springbok Park was conceived as a part of the Hatfield layout; then in 1913 both the Union Buildings

with their gardens and Venning Park with its rosarium was completed, then in 1964 then the Pretoria National Museum was completed – the path of development led towards a city with open access. Finally, in 2007, the completion of Freedom Park commemorated South Africa’s first democratic election and fullundistorted history.

The unfolding of Pretoria from 1905 to 1964 as laid-out above, shows a city developing a culture of dependence on open spaces and public access to cultural spaces. The development of 2007 highlights an architecture as a flag of democracy. The former era indicates a live cultural adaption into public space – but one that is un-evolving to the growth of its city, and the latter one that needed to hold historical culture above live culture. Both arguably may have needed their place in history, but it seems we are now stranded in an era unable to consolidate these open spaces and continuously focus on historical or political culture when creating public spaces.

We can encourage the manifestation of live culture and contextual/regionalist cultural expressions through architecture and design in public spaces beyond solely the celebration of political history or the museumification of ancient culture. On the masterplanning level, this may entail the linking of existing and new cultural nodes through the city to act as a passage through cities and suburbs which both incorporate a live culture and combat our historical spatial layouts of exclusion.

On the landscape architectural level, we could avoid the delusion that traditional culture and ancient culture are the only cultures that exist and have clients encourage landscape architects to explore the consequences of live culture on how spaces are used and how product design should come together to create socially comfortable, secure, and inclusive public spaces. and anyone who answers this with a simple answer is not giving the question it's fair weight. Whether designing for access to traditional, cultural, ancient, or live cultural spaces – each of these require an unveiling of how space is used before any pen is put to paper to generate a pretty or environmentally conscious design. It is not an easy feat, but it is an exercise worth carrying out to answer a question worth its effort.

As Thabo Mbeki said:

The question of how to design for publicly accessible cultural spaces is wildly complex,