Narratives key to influencing design of a ‘living’ city

Rory Williams

If someone asked you what you’d like to eat with your tea, you wouldn’t say “flour, salt, sugar, butter, eggs and strawberries”, but “toast and jam, please”. You don’t choose your food for the ingredients, but for how it tastes and smells, the texture or lingering delight that you get from the experience of eating.

Of course, you do want to know if it’s healthy, and as a responsible citizen you will also want to know if there are consequences of where it’s sourced, the resources that go into it and the waste that is produced.

But we can’t all be experts on the economic and environmental impacts of food production, so we have to trust the experts and go with what feels right.From there, we move on to the culinary experiences we choose.

And living in a city is an experience, like eating. We are looking for the urban equivalent of bobotie or samp or chocolate pudding. But when we talk about cities, and what kind we want Cape Town to be, the debate quickly shifts to the recipe: how the city is a system of networks (roads, pipes, wires and such), buildings and open space.

How factories, shops and houses receive the services that keep the city running. How the poorly considered arrangement of these things can create a sprawling metropolis that results in a less equitable and accessible city.

These issues matter immensely, and the more people are informed about them, the better – particularly as trusting the experts has resulted in a city that doesn’t do everything the way it should. But it is easy to get lost in the language of planning and design before we’ve even figured out what kind of lives we want to live.

The city is like a giant kitchen, or laboratory, and there are lots of experiments going on around us. They are the daily decisions we all make.

Like cooking, defining a great African city is personal – and even emotional – as certain flavours and aromas evoke memories and associations, good and bad. It’s more than a recipe or theory; it’s life. As we move beyond the kitchen and decorate our living rooms and paint our houses and plant in our gardens and use our streets, we are creating our personal city, block by block.

We are not all activists, but we are all creators as we interact with the city’s spaces. We design them, just by using them, because design is not just the physical construction of space and objects, but also the context of how we behave and adapt the things that are there for us.

And sometimes we find ourselves at odds with the formal rules and standards that are set to make sure the city works safely according to plan.If we look around our city, we see that in fact the formal plan doesn’t work very well for most residents.

While the professionals push ahead with their designs, we continue to go about our informal ways of filling the gaps in the formal system. In fact, much of what makes African cities ‘African’ is the informal ways we use them.

Shacks occupying undeveloped land, minibus and ‘cockroach’ taxis ignoring formal regulations, street traders setting up shop where they see opportunity... These are examples of filling gaps in the formal system.

The challenge for Cape Town is deeper than simply finding ways to formalise the informal. Most of what we see out there is just one layer, like icing on the cake, that can appear ‘under control’ while hidden layers of activity continue in their idiosyncratic ways.

But one thing people usually want, other than a city that works for them, is to be heard. We use our personal stories to build identity, and our stories brought together make the living city what it is. That is the ingredient that turns raw structures of concrete, steel and brick into community.

As our stories evolve, the city’s identity evolves, too. Stories help us find our place in the city; and seeing ourselves in relation to place, we can begin to see our hand in creating the city as a continually changing home. We can see the humanity behind terms like “urban decay” and “regeneration”, and see our part in it. The challenge is first to gain that awareness, then to adapt accordingly. l @carbonsmart