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Tag: Constructing Future Cities

  • Combining art and city-making

    Future Cape Town takes on a transdisciplinary approach to research and urban living. In the spirit of this they put together the project Constructing Future Cities and selected 5 female artists who operate within the built environment to re-imagine cities led and designed by women. This involved a short trip to Durban and a week in Cape Town, with the official endpoint being an exhibition and panel discussion at the end of May. I interviewed the artists about their experiences as part of the project, and to find out more about the works they put together for their final exhibition.

    Masters student Michelle Mlati looks at the intersection of art and solar power as a way of re-imagining the future sustainability of African cities. “Constructing Future Cities has enabled a space to explore the aesthetic possibilities of what these things look like, which is still an ongoing project,” she explained.

    For the exhibition she mapped out a nuclear fusion reaction on canvas with solar powered lights [nuclear fusion is the energy source that powers the sun]. This is particularly relevant with increased global conversations around nuclear power programmws. While advocating for the use of solar energy, her work also critiqued the idea that we might be attempting to re-create the sun through the nuclear fusion route. Most importantly, her motivations for using solar power was to try to “de-mystify” these kinds of technologies. Her work Solar Rhythms embraced this aim. Photovoltaic cells [the essence of solar panels] were displayed on canvas, allowing people to touch the work, showing them that “this is not as alien as a lot of people might perceive it to be.”

    Thozama Mputa, a Masters student in landscape architecture, saw the project as an opportunity to integrate all three of her passions; film photography, painting and architecture. With her painting of people and places she had seen throughout the course of the project, she demonstrated that cities can be captured beyond blueprints. The life of cities can be imagined with line, form and watercolours. In this way she was able to speak back to established understandings of city-making.

    Sumayya Vally, Sarah de Villiers and Amina Kaskar from Counterspace also took assessing ideas around city-making as their point of departure. Looking to recent events and demonstrations that have happened in cities, such as #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall protests as well as  xenophobic attacks, their approach was to analyze how these affect how cities are made. Understanding that these have brought in a new kind of urbanism, where people actively engage in the interpretation of policies, Counterspace took the opportunity to show that these “insurgent practices”  play a part in the way that cities are laid out. With this focus on short-lived moments of disruption within the city, they worked within the digital realm “because we felt that we could access an ephemeral explanation very quickly that way.”

    They combined images of protests and religious practices with different types of aerial view landscapes that are recognisable in South Africa, making their discussions and thought processes visual. This allowed them to take seriously the ramifications of these events to create an idea for future city landscapes.

    Even though each artist worked on individual projects, the feedback and input they received from one another helped to gel the exhibition together, creating a collective energy that flowed through the exhibition space between the works, connecting them together.

    The team at Future Cape Town hope that this will be the beginning of multiple projects that combine art and city-making.

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’

  • Constructing Future Cities // imagining cities led and designed by women

    Future Cape Town is a leading platform on re-thinking future cities. Through its online presence, research and projects the organization works towards the creation of more democratic, visionary and inclusive cities. I spoke to the founder of Future Cape Town Rashiq Fataar about their Constructing Future Cities project.

    Research increasingly demonstrates that women are occupying leadership positions in business and cities around the world, and yet  the voices of women remain largely absent in the way our cities are designed and planned. In light of this, Mr. Fataar explains that their goal with Constructing Future Cities is to “use artists to give expression to what women think, feel and hope future cities could be. To provoke ideas and interesting possibilities for approaches to cities if they were entirely conceived by women, particularly young women.”. He situates the importance of these conversations within the broader urbanization process rapidly accelerating on the African continent and the gender inequality within the built environment sector. This project as a continuation of the work done by Future Cape Town, recognizes the need to challenge traditional approaches to understanding urban living and planning for the future. “What we have found is that cities of the past have been quite male-dominated in their planning and using a number of unsuccessful modernist-led planning approaches. What this has done is perpetuate inequality, and produce economic systems, justice systems, health systems and environmental systems which do not improve the quality of life for millions of people. We are at an important departure point where we need a new generation of visionaries who will re-imagine cities in a way that addresses the current challenges but also thinks about the future”.

    Future Cape Town’s approach to research includes new informants and mediums to engage with these complexities. This has been put into motion through the Constructing Future Cities project where five women artists were selected to open up the discussion on re-imagining future cities. Choosing to work with artists follows on from their transdisciplinary approach to research and urban living. “It is essential that in this complex, intertwined world where we have been working in silos, where we have been limiting ourselves to our particular fields or professional education, that the future city will require people to grapple with working with new people. And we find that art and artists play a critical role early on in the process to challenge that way of working,” Rashiq explains. The artists they are working with include architecture graduates Amina Kaskar, Sumayya Vally and Sarah de Villiers from Counterspace  (an architectural firm based in Johannesburg), critical spatial practitioner Michelle Mlati and current Masters student in Landscape Architecture Thozama Mputa. Although they approach city-making from different perspectives, their work demonstrates passion for making the city a space for dialogue. These artists have been invited to create work that capture visions for cities, drawing on input from women in Durban, Cape Town and London.

    Image by Thozama Mputa

    The first phase of the project took place in Durban where they visited various parts of the city and hosted a workshop where a panel of 30 women from various sectors convened to discuss the role of women in re-imagining the city. Conversations revolved around the contemporary issues women face as a point of departure for looking at future cities. These issues included the education of women and the limitations that women face in the workplace.

    The next phase of Constructing Future Cities will take place in Cape Town from 22-26 May. They will host another workshop, but the focus of this week will be on the artists putting their work together for the final day’s exhibition, to be held alongside a panel discussion.

    Rashiq reflected on the the relationship that has emerged between Future Cape Town and the artists through their collaboration, emphasizing that their research has been enriched by working with women artists. “We see this part of the programme as more of a catalyst, and we hope to deepen our engagements with these artists and other artists to continue to push forward the idea of the SA city of the future led and designed by women.”.

    To find out more about the Constructing Future Cities programme visit the Future Cape Town website.

    Image from Counterspace

     

    ‘This article forms part of content created for the British Council Connect ZA 2017 Programme. To find out more about the programme click here.’