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Elad Kirschenbaum, owner of SideStreet studios in Woodstock (Charley Locke/TYG). ties, the property developer of Old Biscuit Mill and Woodstock Exchange, summarizes the move bluntly. “We’re not building [places like Woodstock Exchange] to pander to people on the street who can’t afford it,” he said. “We’re not there to try to do something nice. It’s not about having sayings that incorporate street kids and hobos who can’t afford to buy bread.” As part of a creative movement that frequently credits itself with Woodstock’s “upliftment,” Ferguson’s statement seems out of place. To many, the problem is one of representation. Hassan Khan, CEO of Cape Town’s Haven night shelters and vice-chair of the Cape Town Partnership, is optimistic about Cape Town WDC 2014. Still, he said “I don’t think there are sufficient black people — in South Africa black people are people who are not white — participating at that level of creating a new environment. What we have in the creative industry here are liberals — nice people — but designing for someone else […] is not likely to connect to the beneficiaries nearly as fully as it could.” “I look at some of the key players of WDC 2014, their creative team is [almost] all white,” he continued. “And they are a minority in the city of Cape Town. That’s daft. It means we are perpetuating the problems of the past. It means poor people are again becoming the victims of the success of their neighbors.” Kent Lingeveldt echoed Khan’s sentiments. “The thing that bums me out is a lot of the street art around here is done by these main international artists. There’s a lot of local talent in Woodstock, but they’re not given the opfall 2013, issue 1
portunities. […] My vibe is that for someone new and local coming in, if you don’t have the right connections, if you’re not the right skin color, or if you’re not their token person of color, then you’re not going to make it.” While Lingeveldt admitted that he loves “being able to be in a space and a suburb where creativity is thriving,” the lack of local inclusion leaves him with doubts about authenticity. “A lot of this isn’t real creativity. It’s just hipsters looking at blogs. Like all these European and American delis? It’s copying and pasting.”
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asked many Capetonians about the future of Woodstock — skinny-jean-clad shoppers in Neighbourgoods, shop owners along Albert Road, local artists. They all said something similar: it will be a shopper’s paradise, a “bumping” suburb, a much sought-after, upper class neighborhood. The benefits of renewal thus far are already abundantly apparent, if not in the business brought to Woodstock, then in the suburb’s drastic reduction in crime. “If kids are for the first time playing in the streets without guns, we’ve made their lives better,” Kirshenbaum pointed out. But the costs are seldom talked about. As Khan aptly noted, “The cost of [gentrification] will not be seen, because we will have displaced the poor further from the city.” As rental costs increasingly price Woodstock’s poor out of their homes, many are being pushed into neighboring suburbs, including Salt River, whose lack of an improvement district has also made it a recipient of much of Woodstock’s former crime. This socioeco-
nomic displacement is eerily reminiscent of Cape Town’s history under apartheid’s Group Areas Act, which evicted more than half a million black and colored South Africans from their homes and businesses between 1950 and 1984, pushing many out of Cape Town altogether and into its neighboring townships. Chrischene Julius, who considers such displacement on a daily basis as Collections Manager for Cape Town’s District Six Museum, points out the injustice of crediting creatives with upliftment. “Landlords start kicking [residents] out, turning a property into a slum by not looking after it, and then all of the sudden you must be grateful that young creatives are putting the spotlight on Woodstock and regenerating it. And you just feel very angry, because all of a sudden people and families who have lived there don’t matter.” For those Woodstock residents that remain, displacement may cause the tightknit character of the community to fade rapidly. “Black South Africans in particular don’t coexist well in [private, distant] circumstances. We like our neighbors to greet us,” Khan told me. “And if our neighbor’s child is in the road when he should be at school, we twist his ear — because that’s our child.” When I asked Kirschenbaum about his Woodstock neighbors, he opted for a respectfully distant approach that seemed to confirm Khan’s concerns. “I get out of bed in the morning, say good morning to the lady [neighbor], ask her son why he’s not in school and walk down the street,” he tells me. “I’m a lot more comfortable to just be and let others be and see where we cross over.” This seems to be precisely the dilemma embodied in Woodstock — “nice liberals” designing for someone else, creativity that astounds but fails to include, artists who beautify and simultaneously drive up rent, neighbors who greet but remain at a distance. There fails to be a clear right and wrong when it comes to Woodstock’s residents and their approach to its spaces. For a suburb with the strong legacy of having resisted the Group Areas Act à la Walmer Road, however, there does seem to be a clear right in maintaining the same sense of community that once defied the dividing lines of apartheid as South Africa navigates its youth as a free and integrated democracy. After all, creativity seems to be Woodstock’s newest child — and it takes a village. Katy Osborn ’15 is an anthropology major in Branford College. She can be reached at kathryn.osborn@yale.edu.
Sustaining the Future
By Sophie Grais
Interpreting “sustainable design” in the South African context.
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garage door — when closed, the canvas of intricate graffiti — opens into the light, airy studio of Cameron Barnes, an independent furniture designer based in Cape Town’s upand-coming Woodstock neighborhood. The usual suspects line the walls: power tools, test pieces, woods of various hues and tones. Here, though, something stands out: Barnes selects only local alien species of timber for his work — nothing indigenous, nothing imported. His reasoning is part of his core business principle: sustainable construction. The term “sustainability,” especially in the United States, can bring immediate connotations and a laundry list of buzzwords: solar panels, LEED certification, organic food. Often dismissed as implausible, expensive, impractical, it seems in some ways a surprising trend in South Africa. Nevertheless, the country’s movement toward sustainability in energy, architecture, and other areas has recently gained considerable momentum. In 2007, South Africa joined the World Green Building Council, an organization of 92 member countries that advocates for sustainable architecture in corporate building. In 2014, Cape Town will be the World Design Capital (WDC), home to a year’s worth of events related to architecture and design. The theme “Today For Tomorrow: Sustainable Solutions for People and Planet” will be the backdrop for many of the WDC events and projects. Not only planet, but also people — indeed, a more holistic view of sustainability would acknowledge its vast social implications. Green building could bring significant changes to both the physical and socioeconomic South African landscape. Despite the common American perception, sustainability need not imply fancy materials or high-cost measures, Barnes explained in his studio on a quiet afternoon. He highlighted
Solar panels cover a market near the Victoria and Albert Waterfront in Cape Town, South Africa (Sophie Grais/TYG). the different lenses through which sustainability can be seen: most notably, its social dimensions and its relationship to issues of socioeconomic inequality. “It’s easy to understand, in some sense, why all the high-tech stuff gets more coverage. It’s a lot flashier, it’s a lot more different… The face that sustainability should take, in broader terms, is always choosing what’s site-appropriate, or what’s appropriate for that immediate area,” he said. These considerations would include availability and abundance of the materials in question — local materials that meet these criteria are often much cheaper to use than expensive, fancy imports. But sustainability also carries great social influence: in areas of high unemployment, the selection of labor-intensive construction materials could provide more people with work and the opportunity to learn valuable skills. “Rather than just giving someone a house, you could be teaching them how to build a house or providing a material palette that works in that immediate area,” Barnes continued. With South Africa’s immense need for affordable housing, these social dimensions of sustainability prove especially valuable. In 1994, its fledgling post-apartheid democracy established the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) to address the great disparities in wealth and services across the country, including the availability of affordable housing. A 2009 report published by the South African government stated that at the time, 12.8 percent of South Africans lived in RDP homes or other housing subsidized by the state. Any discussion of implementing sustainable architecture on a national scale, then, must acknowledge what psychologist and Harvard professor of engineering sciences Beth Altringer calls “the equality question.” Altringer received her Master’s degree in architecture at the University of Cape Town and worked on a
housing upgrading project in a South African township with ARG Design, a South African company. “The South African government had promised everyone a house. We [had] that budget, which is tiny, and the goal [was] moving people to safer, cleaner, more dignified housing.” She emphasized the need to consider the site-specific needs of residents and the larger social questions inherent in sustainable construction. “Before people were using the term human-centered design, that’s basically what we were doing, going into the community and really understanding what their needs were instead of making the assumption of what their needs might be,” she said. Projects like Altringer’s generally happen independent of the South African government; for the most part, the RDP and other government programs have their own familiar methods of building. Barnes explained that these habits would be hard to change, that “they have the ways of building in place, they’re rolling things out, and so the motivation to change at this point isn’t great enough.” The complicated politics of South Africa’s young democracy leaves much for consideration, including possible hope for the future. “There’s still a lot to figure out and a lot of it comes down to financing and politics. There is a lot more wealth in South Africa and if that wealth can be allocated at least in part to making steady progress on this, then that I think is the degree to which that will change,” Altringer said. The movement toward sustainability, then, is just one lens through which to see the potential for progress in South Africa: greater equality and distribution of wealth and resources, the changes still to come. Sophie Grais ’14 is an English major in Silliman College. She can be reached at sophia.grais@yale.edu. www.tyglobalist.org