Writer, editor and recent Cape Town convert Judith Browne attended TEDxStellenbosch to engage in intellectual debate around the future of African cities. Here are seven big ideas that captured her imagination.
TED – a global movement as part of which leaders, movers, shakers and opinion makers give the talk of a lifetime about their “idea worth spreading” – manifested itself locally at Spier, Stellenbosch last week Friday. The theme of the event: CityAfrica.
Event speakers and attendees at TEDxStellenbosch were invited to participate in a grand thought experiment: Think of the African continent as one mega city, made up of neighbourhoods with intertwined fates.
Give that the World Design Capital bid is about rebuilding, reconnecting and repositioning Cape Town as a more sustainable, inclusive and liveable African city, I couldn’t resist participating in the experiment and passing on what started cooking in the ideas lab.
1. Africans as co-producers of their environment
Mark Swilling, academic director of the Sustainability Institute in Stellenbosch, spoke about the implications of rapid urbanisation in Africa in terms of who dictates a city’s urban development policy: Where 40% of Africa is currently urbanised, this number is going to jump to 60% by 2050 (that’s a leap to 1.2-billion people in less than three decades). Furthermore, 62% of urban dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa currently live in slums.
Drawing on the work of Shack Dwellers International in Kibera, Kenya and Lilongwe, Malawi, and illustrating how the poor are coming up with innovative solutions to their own housing challenges, Swilling argued that it’s the right of all Africans to co-produce their environments, not just a mandate that falls to African governments.
2. Public space as vital performance space
Acclaimed author Jonny Steinberg, drawing on the story of a Liberian tailor who loved soccer, spoke about city ownership and identity, arguing that those who live in a city, its townships and slums, need to feel like they belong: “If what you do is locked up in your neighbourhood, then the way you express yourself is through violence.”
His thesis: Public space is vital as a performance space for identity and a sense of self; it is the means by which people begin “imagining the path from themselves to the world”.
Steinberg closed by making an example of the area where the Athlone Towers once stood, saying how he’d love to see it connected via pedestrian bridges to the communities of Athlone, Pinelands and Langa, turned into a mixed-use area and “the sort of public space that allows people to come in and perform who they are.”
3. City planning for all species
Author, environmental attorney and governance expert Cormac Cullinan spoke about symbiotic cities – cities as organisms, places of becoming – where urban development shifts from its anthropocentric take on the world. Many development models place humankind at their centre, viewing the earth and its natural resources as at our ready disposal. Cullinan instead argued for a more symbiotic urban development model that sees ourselves and our species as one among many, our fate as indivisible with that of our planet. Cities are not just for people, he argued, but for nature too.
(His invocation to “free the rivers” trapped under city cement resonated with me in particular given Reclaim Camissa’s work in Cape Town. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Watch this video from TEDxCapeTown)
4. The city as the classroom of the future
World Design Capital bid committee member and architect Mokena Mokeka spoke about cities in the context of Africa’s challenges, specifically education: Social infrastructure and mixed-use space are a kind of urban acupuncture, he argued, key to addressing the social issues we face, and by investing in urban spaces, we invest in democracy. In this way, designers are leaders.
He then showed us his bold vision for an iconic building and institute in Cape Town that fosters creative excellence and innovation, a place to catalyse the region’s creative industries. The name of this facility? MoDILA: The Museum of Design, Innovation, Leadership and Art.
5. Data dashboards for cities
Joshua Kauffman, a designer-entrepreneur who works at the intersection of technology and society, spoke about how the value of data – how the accumulation and analysis of information can help cities grow and develop. New technologies help make data visible and usable, he explained, giving us a view of previously invisible patterns.
Kauffman went on to speak of how many international researchers are in Africa, gathering information. Why? Because Africans are the new consumers. And the more you know about your consumer, the better you can tailor your services, your product, your marketing campaign. The trouble, Kauffman argues, is when this kind of data is collated, but not returned to the communities from which it is drawn. A close mapping of a community – a data dashboard – that shows at a glance everything you could want to know about a space, from cellphone penetration to access to sanitation, returned to the community it maps, could do wonders for growth and development.
6. Internet access as a basic human right
Mobile impact evangelist at mLab Southern Africa Steve Vosloo spoke convincingly about connectivity and clustering, saying that Africa’s streets are “already a hotbed of innovation” (quoting Jan Chipchase), but that the cost of telecommunications is the greatest single impediment to innovation: On average, Europeans spend 1% of their monthly salary on mobile. Africans? As much as 18%. And the higher the cost of doing business (and therefore the higher the cost of failure), the less drive there is to innovate. He spoke not of one Silicon Valley in Africa, nor one Silicon Cape, but of a series of ghetto labs on our city streets, enabled by free internet access.
“I believe that if access to mobile and internet were free, or at least genuinely affordable, that it would make the single biggest contribution to social and economic development on the continent. South Africa should follow the lead of Finland and the Netherlands, and be the first African country to declare access a basic human right,” closed Vosloo.
The full transcript of Vosloo’s presentation can be found here.
7. World Design Capital by tackling waste and water
Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership – the coordinators of the city’s World Design Capital 2014 bid – took audience members on a whirlwind trip of African design, starting in Mossel Bay some 164 000 years ago (and Curtis Marean’s findings there, that potentially rewrite theory around the emergence of human creativity).
In the context of this long continental commitment to creativity and design, Boraine challenged all present to tackle one of Africa’s most basic challenges: sanitation. In Africa, an estimated 62% of urban dwellers now live in informal settlements. In Cape Town, 28% live in approximately 350 informal settlements, many without adequate water and sanitation. “If we can design better delivery systems, and particularly better water and sanitation management and maintenance systems, we will see a rapid improvement in levels of health, education and safety in these communities,” Boraine argued.
It’s by solving our sanitation challenges by design that Cape Town really becomes worthy of the World Design Capital title. There’s a thought – and an idea well worth spreading.
Photos are courtesy of Johann Swart and TEDxStellenbosch
