BREMNER L. [Reframing Township Space. the Kliptown Project]

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Reframing Township Space: The Kliptown Project

Lindsay Bremner

Public Culture, Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 521-531 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

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Reframing Township Space:The Kliptown Project

Lindsay Bremner

n 1955, the African National Congress (ANC) held its historic Congress of the

People to ratify its liberation manifesto, the Freedom Charter. This event took

place in Kliptown, on the outskirts of Soweto (fig. 1, above), at a site that came to

be called Freedom Square in honor of the occasion. Today Freedom Square is an

open, windswept tract of land, lying between a shack settlement, a railway line,

and a taxi rank and bounded by the back facades of warehouses and wholesale

stores. The trees that once lined its edges, providing shade for local traders andcommuters, have mostly died, and the farm that once cultivated the land around

it has long been abandoned. Remarkable today only for the tapestry of footpaths

marking its surface, tracing the movement of people who traverse it in the course

of their daily lives, Freedom Square has an auspicious history.

This site in Kliptown was chosen for a meeting of what became known as the

Public Culture 16(3): 521 531Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press

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Congress of the People simply because it lay outside of municipal jurisdiction,

was big enough to accommodate the expected ten thousand attendees, and had

functioned many times before as the site of civic gatheringsreligious services,political and trade union meetings, and cultural and sporting events.

On June 2526, 1955, nearly three thousand delegates and seven thousand

spectators from all over South Africa assembled on the site and, surrounded by

members of the South African Police, ratified a document that had taken two

years to prepare. This process had been inaugurated by Z. K. Matthews of the

ANC, not yet a banned organization. His vision was to gather, from across the

country, popular demands for a free society. Volunteers from the ANC and itsalliance partners collected statements and petitions in church halls, at political

rallies, on buses, and in trains. Shortly before the historic meetings, a committee

crafted these into a draft charter. This was presented to the delegates at the Con-

gress of the People, amendments were proposed, and delegates voted on its word-

ing, clause by clause. A year later, after it had circulated through the branches of

the ANC and its partners, this document was signed by Chief Albert Luthuli,

chairperson of the ANC. The Freedom Charter became the manifesto of the lib-eration movement, symbolizing its vision and dreams of a free South Africa.

Today Kliptown is home to approximately thirty thousand people, many from

neighboring Soweto or Eldorado Park but also from the rural hinterlands of

southern Africa, Lesotho, and Mozambique. These multiple geographies are

mapped via the names given to its component neighborhoodsCharter Square,

Mandelaville, Chris Hani, Swaziland, Tamatievlei (Tomato Marsh), Geel Kamers

(Yellow Rooms)its superimposed spatial stories about political affiliations, kin-

ship networks, places of origin, and landscape features. Kliptown is a virtually

invisible place, folded into and through the myriad of geographies its residents

occupy and the stories they tell.

The singularity of this place called Kliptown lies in this seeming invisibility, in

this unlocatedness or, rather, in this condition of being located in many places

simultaneously. Kliptown is not singular but rather multiple: a locale of teeming,

undisciplined practices and trajectories of people whom, for all intents and pur-

poses, have been excluded from or by the regulatory discourses of spatial plan-

ning and social administration. Kliptown is a community of surplus people living

in a leftover space.

Kliptowns history is indistinguishable from this condition of being unincor-

porated, leftover, or outside of. Its origins lie in the eradication of a Johannesburg

inner-city slum yard in the early 1900s. When pneumonic plague broke out in1904 in the downtown neighborhood known as Coolie Location, its entire popu-

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Reframing Township

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lation was relocated to a site on the Klipspruit River outside the city limits, close

to where Kliptown now lies. The former mixed, slum-yard populationdestabi-

lizing to notions of fixed identity and status, of modernity and civilizationwasrendered, in effect, invisible and inconsequential. Remaining outside the bound-

aries of any municipality until 1970, Kliptown survived as a neglected, hybrid

space, not least due to the confusing and often mutually contradictory, overlap-

ping bureaucracies under whose jurisdiction it fell under apartheid lawthe

Peri-Urban Areas Health Board, the Group Areas Board, the Department of

Community Development, the House of Representatives, the South West Man-

agement Committee, and so on. It was one of the few places in the city wherenon-Europeans could engage in trade or own their own businesses, where cou-

ples in racially mixed marriages could live with impunity, or where pass law

offenders could hide.1 In short, Kliptown was a place where people experimented,

through undisciplined, hybridized, and frequently illegal encounters, with change,

exchange, and fusion. For authorities, the way to deal with Kliptownsite of

activities marginal and illicitwas to simply ignore it.

Kliptown still does not exist, at least not officially. On maps, it appears as aloose grouping of portions of the Klipriviersoog farm. Freedom Square is a col-

lection of small, vacant properties owned by both public authorities and private

individuals. The people of Kliptown live in shacks or in dilapidated houses, many

without electricity, and with only rudimentary servicesportable chemical toi-

lets, communal standpipes, and refuse collection from designated communal sites

in the area. Kliptown has a police station but no schools, clinics, or other public

services (e.g., library, community center). The spaces that anchor its social prac-

tices, however, are rich and multiple. People live overlapping associational lives

between the shebeen (bar), the church, the stokvel (collective savings society), the

funeral society (mutual aid organization for the bereaved), the youth club, the

street, the home. During the day, everyone is out. To stay at home is to miss out

on the life of the street. Private space is small and cramped; things spill out. The

prized vantage point is the streeta place to watch, view, greet, sell, and drink;

to produce and reproduce the life of the collective.

Since 1999, Kliptown has been targeted for redevelopment by the Gauteng

provincial government, under whose jurisdiction it now falls. While this initiative

1. The notorious Native Laws Amendment Act of 1952 required that all black South Africans

carry a labour passportor passin urban areas. Those without this document were required to

remain in their designated tribal homeland.


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includes the rehabilitation of the adjacent Klipspruit River, improved bulk infra-

structure, the building of seven thousand new houses, and the provision of ser-

vices to its shack yards, the fulcrum of this project which absorbs more than 33percent of its budgetis the commemoration of the signing of the Freedom

Charter through the redevelopment of Freedom Square.

In 2000, the provincial government decided to include the development of

Kliptown on its list of high-priority economic development projects (others

include such megaprojects as a rapid rail link between Johannesburg and its air-

port and the development of the Cradle of Humankind paleoanthropological site

as a UNESCO-recognized World Heritage site). This reawakened interest in theneighborhood owed little to a sense of benevolence, responsibility, or redistribu-

tive justice on the part of the provincial government but rather to a new concep-

tion of tourisms significance for economic development.

Gauteng is an inland province with few exploitable natural resources. It is

urban and industrialized with a landscape shaped historically by the booms and

slumps of the gold mining industry and by the banality of apartheids spatial

planning. Tourism strategies, in this context, have focused on two areasshop-ping (malls, hotels, restaurants) and the township. The township has been recon-

ceptualized as one of the provinces few tourist attractionsas an image of

apartheids legacies of racial segregation and poverty, a site of ethnic and cultural

identity, and the locus of idealized or aestheticized political struggle. The Hector

Peterson Museum in Soweto, erected on the site of the shooting of thirteen-year-

old Peterson during the student uprising of 1976, has drawn thousands of local

and international tourists since its opening in 2002.

The idea of an architectural competition for the redesign of Freedom Square

was conceptualized within this imaginary. In commemorating the events that took

place in Freedom Square, the redesigned space was meant to resonate with the

visions and dreams of a free South Africa (Johannesburg Development Agency

[JDA] 2001: 9); to represent the ideals of the Freedom Charter to an international

community so that it would support struggles for freedom and human rights

wherever this is required (JDA 2001: 11); and, at the same time, to deal with a

range of specific community needshousing, retail space, library, meeting rooms,

local government offices, sports hall, taxi rank, bus stops, and so forth. In other

words, architects were asked to mediate between, on the one hand, the near

order (Lefebvre 1996: 101), that is, direct relations between persons and groups

interacting in a space, producing and reproducing themselves, and, on the other

hand, the far ordersocietys significant ensembles and institutions of power,

propelled, in this instance, by notions of freedom, democracy, and human rights.

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Reframing Township

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They were asked to imagine how a democracy of populist origins, represented in

the Freedom Charter, could be transformed into a spatial or, rather, an urban

democracy.

What follows is a discussion of several entries to the competition, chosen from

the thirty-three submissions, that can be seen to dramatiz[e] . . . possibilities for

a different urban form (Minkley 1998: 218) and, in so doing, expand the archi-

tectural terrain.

For architects and urban designers from StudioMAS, the competition pre-

sented an opportunity to completely re-vision not only Freedom Square and Klip-

town but also the entire greater Soweto area and to position it at the heart of thenation (fig. 2). They constructed a metanarrative for the space, transforming an

apartheid buffer strip (including and extending a portion of Freedom Square

itself [bottom of fig. 1]) into a three-kilometer-long public boulevard lined with a

three-story colonnaded megastructure that connected the wetlands of the Klip-

spruit River to the west with the citys sewer works and the Orland Dam to the

east. This nineteenth-century beaux arts set piece formed the backdrop to a series

of squares: from Freedom Square to the west (top of fig. 2), patterned with agiant replica of local artist Willem Boshoffs artwork, to a forecourt to the

national houses of Parliament, relocated from Cape Town, to the east (bottom of

fig. 2).

The scheme appropriated a number of easily recognizable symbols of power:

the conical towers of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, the colonnades of ancient

Rome, the light columns of Hitlers Nuremberg stadium, and the underground

vault of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The Freedom Charter itselfwould be laid to rest inside a truncated cone, in which, at midday on June 26 each

year, observers would be able to watch the sun briefly light up its surface, before

it receded once more into the shadows of history.

By contrast, though also broad in its scope, Kate Otten and Charles van

Bredas entry connected the shack yards to the west with the stretch of open

ground to the east using a strategy that deferred the making of form almost

entirely. Otten and van Breda simply created platforms of intention, or precincts

of activity, based on spatial practices observed at the site. These included a place

of gathering or celebration (what they called a platform of endeavor) bridging

the railway line and increasing the access of shack dwellers to the site; a market-

place; a transport plaza; a community square; and an urban park. Within this

civic framework, unforeseen subjectivities, both individual and collective, would

shape or appropriate spaces of significance.

My own proposal, formulated together with Mashabane Rose Architects,


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made use of an analogous relationship between memory,

as portrayed by an image of the crumpled papers pinned

to the podium at the Congress of the People (fig. 3), and

contemporary social practicethe manner in which sec-

ondhand clothes are daily laid out for sale in Freedom

Square, effectively clothing the earth. The inclusive pop-

ulism of the Freedom Charter was connected with cur-

rent modes of economic and associational life and spatial

practice. We crumpled and folded the earth to contain an

oral history museum and archive, while allowing themicronarratives of everyday life in Kliptown to carry on

undisturbed. The events of the Congress of the People

were minimally reenacteda single cable of electric

lights, a raised podium, and rows of benches served as a

series of mute and almost invisible markers at the inter-

section of history and lived spatial practice. Space was

thus suspended between past and present, a site of nego-tiation between a multiplicity of times and uses.

Hannah le Rouxs response to Kliptown read it as a

fragmented web of spatial relationships. Foregoing the

temptation to order, unify, or tidy these up, she chose,

instead, to create resources at points of potential inter-

section between tourism and local need. So, for instance,

she transforms one of the existing buildings backingFreedom Square through a coupling of the programmatic

Figure 3

Figure 2

Figure 4


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527

requirements of a museum and a movie house; she constructs a new connection

between Freedom Square and the shack settlements to its west and marks this

movement route with a monumental linear scaffold for exhibiting posters, one of

the most effective and popular mediums of mobilization during the antiapartheid

struggle (fig. 4). In a similar, though more abstract reference, Ivan Kadey, David

Barkham, Wilhelm Hahn, and Harold Poliak (American architects, two of whom

are formerly from Johannesburg) draw on the modernist (in this case working-class) imagery of industrial spacesteel girders, electricity pylons, sports stadia,

and billboardsin their reframing of Freedom Square as a site for ongoing polit-

ical dialogue. Their scheme makes no claims on the wider urban field, construct-

ing instead a single figure around which the fragmented space of the township is

clustered.

Other approaches to the space of the township saw its incorporation into the

market system as a guarantee of freedom. During the apartheid period, township

space existed outside of this logic; it belonged to the state. For Gadija Bux (who

submitted jointly with MGB Draughting and Design) and Feral Gathoo, two

nonarchitect participants in the competition, the generalization of exchange

across the space of freedom would lift the burden of constraint and misery under

which residents had lived for so long and would allow them to participate in con-

temporary urban (conceived of as economic) life. A trading space bearing the

names of liberation heroes Oliver Tambo, Dr. Dadoo, and Lilian Ngoyi and a

Figures 5 and 6


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hotel named after Nelson Mandela distinguish this place of commerce from any

other (figs. 5 and 6).

Thus we see a number of approaches to the reframing of township space,

responses to the admission of the township into the arena of postapartheid archi-

tectural discourse. These range from refusal, eradication, and displacement to

incorporation and an unsettling of disciplinary boundaries.StudioMAS, which won the competition, saw the township as a not-yet-urban,

incoherent, dependent periphery. Marked by poverty and a lack of resources, its

space is impoverished and urban life is experienced as no more than a burden

of constraints (Lefebvre 1996: 79). For StudioMAS, the commemoration of a

founding myth of the new democracy, the Freedom Charter, enabled the invest-

ment of resources in monumental urban spaces as stage for celebration and spec-

tacle. Dramatic and exaggerated forms created the image of a possible new city,

a new morphology for urban life.

Yet, argues Henri Lefebvre (1996: 114), in the construction of the urban, the

formal morphology of the city cannot be separated from social practice. By

whom, one wonders, can this formal morphology be construed a city? For, in a

single gesture, all traces of the existing site and its peoples have been erased.

Mannequinsbeautiful, happy, young, and black have instantaneously popu-

lated the newly formed spaces (fig. 7). Kliptowns motley, creolized community

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Figure 7


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Reframing Township

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of outsiders and their meandering narratives have, yet again, been displaced.

They have been rendered invisible by an architecture anxious to redeem a space

that has been shaped historically by its outsider status, its dislocation, its fluidity.

Otten and van Bredas work, on the other hand, admitted the social and spatial

practices of Kliptown into architectural discourse as potentially unsettling to its

procedures and received forms. For them, architectures role in this space is to

establish new connectivities an inclined plane bridging a railway line, an under-

pass under a roadto facilitate movement and human interaction. Apartheid

planning segregated, fragmented, and dispersed; postapartheid planning con-

nects, stitches, and centralizes. Otten and van Breda sought to defer to residentsand to refrain from overdesigning the space (not always successfully)to facili-

tate rather than dictate. The users of the space, would, in time, construct places of

identity and valuethrough singing, dancing, drinking. The architect, displaced

from the center, opened architecture to its outside and admitted a less colonizing,

less binary set of questions, positions, and procedures.

My own work with Mashabane Rose, like that of Otten and van Breda, con-

ceived of the space of Kliptown not as one of eradicated urbanity but as a uniqueand open-ended place of the possible (Lefebvre 1996: 156) that, having evaded

the modernist social project, exists as a place of simultaneity, gathering, and con-

vergence, a place of encounters and multiple narratives. In addition to the specter

of the Congress of the People, a new figurethat of the touristwas about to

make its presence felt. Our approach was to fold this new presence into the field

of Kliptown through a modification of the groundthrough layering, digging,

burying, pushing, shifting, raising, encircling, and extending, thereby reterritori-alizing its space. Building became not landscape but topographya continuous,

folded surface of experience (cf. Deleuze 1993). An oral history museum was

inserted under the surface of Freedom Square, the micronarratives that traverse

it thereby reformulated. Our approach to architecture was anthropological. We

attempted to observe spatial practices from an ethnographic not a panoptic point

of view (the position usually assumed by the architect) and to admit other spaces

(the spaces of the other) into the discourse, but we nevertheless reserved for

architecture the prerogative of poetic interpretation.

Le Roux sought to realize ideas articulated in a previous theoretical piece,

Undisciplined Practices: Architecture in the Context of Freedom (1998). In this,

she had begun to map emerging tendencies in postapartheid architectural practice.

In her work, space is hybridized, becoming a site of negotiation among a multi-

plicity of users. She argues that, in environments such as Kliptown, the construc-

tion of a community of users takes priority over the construction of form, and


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given that communities may be simultaneously unified and dispersed . . . the

appropriate architectural responses may be fragmented and arranged across a

broad territory, contrary to the conception of architecture as form enclosing dis-

crete spaces (Le Roux 1998: 355).

While in other contexts, Kadey, Barkham, Hahn, and Poliaks modernism

might appear nostalgic, it has specific resonances for the South African township.

Jo Noero (1999), winner of a previous competition for the design of an apartheid

museum in Red Location, a township outside Port Elizabeth, explains his choice

of an industrial aesthetic based on the significance of the factory as the only truly

civic space during the apartheid years. The factory, through the trade unionmovement, was one of the few spaces in which visions of an alternative society

were mobilized and lived.

Finally, the designs by Bux and MGB Draughting and Design and by Gathoo,

like that by StudioMAS, began from a reading and possibly the experience of

Kliptown as a space configured within an economy of lack. By reprogramming it

with fast-food outlets, fitness centers, sports shops, movie houses, cell phone sup-

pliers, banks, and other accoutrements of consumer society, its incorporation intoan economy of plenty would be signaled to the world.

This representative sample of plans submitted to the competition indicates some

of the ways that architects and designers gave shape to the idea of an architecture

of freedom in Kliptowna place, like many others in the country, still bearing

the marks of apartheid neglect. All claimed to both represent the ideals of the

Freedom Charter and, at the same time, contribute to the development of local

peoples lives. All interpreted township space and proposed alternative modalitiesfor architecture within it. In doing so, in constructing new imaginaries for the

space of the township, they introduced some difficult and unresolved questions:

What are architectures conditions and possibilities in a place like this? What are

its purposes and procedures? To whom is it accountable? Who are its subjects?

What are its references? If architecture is to have a role in constructing a new

urban democracy in South Africa, these are some of the questions it will be

required to address.

Lindsay Bremneris chair of architecture at the School of Architecture and Plan-

ning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of Johannesburg:

One City, Colliding Worlds (2004) and coeditor ofEmerging Johannesburg: Per-

spectives on the Postapartheid City (2003).

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References

Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The fold: Leibniz and the baroque, translated by Tom Con-

ley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA). 2001. Freedom Square precinct ar-

chitectural competition brief. Johannesburg.

Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on cities, selected and translated by Eleonore

Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. London: Blackwell.

Le Roux, Hannah. 1998. Undisciplined practices: Architecture in the context of

freedom. InBlank : Architecture, apartheid and after, edited by Hilton Judin

and Ivan Vladislavic. Rotterdam: NAi.Minkley, Gary. 1998. Corpses behind screens: Native space in the city. In

Blank : Architecture, apartheid and after, edited by Hilton Judin and Ivan

Vladislavic. Rotterdam: NAi.

Noero, Jo. 1999. Red location: A cultural experience. South African Architect,

June, 19.

Figure 1

Aerial photograph of Freedom Square, 2000

Figure 2

StudioMAS, plan

Figure 3

The Freedom Charter

Figure 4Le Roux, photomontage

Figure 5

Feral Gathoo, drawing

Figure 6

Feral Gathoo, drawing

Figure 7

StudioMAS, perspective

All images property of and used with the permission of the Johannesburg Development

Agency.

BREMNER L. [Reframing Township Space. the Kliptown Project]

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