Today, faced with global energy challenges, climate change and a growing financial crisis, the biggest challenge facing architects, designers and planners alike, when entering into an uncertain future, is to rethinking current urban models and build cities that are sustainable and sensitive to natural resources and the environment.
Departing from the position that people, who live and work in cities, rarely have a say in the planning of how public spaces are designed and used, the non profit-organisation Dala, zulu verb for creation, concerns itself with an ongoing pursuit for innovative approaches for creating more humane and livable cities.
Today, faced with global energy challenges, climate change and a growing financial crisis, the biggest challenge facing architects, designers and planners alike, when entering into an uncertain future, is to rethinking current urban models and build cities that are sustainable and sensitive to natural resources and the environment.
Departing from the position that people, who live and work in cities, rarely have a say in the planning of how public spaces are designed and used, the non profit-organisation Dala, zulu verb for creation, concerns itself with an ongoing pursuit for innovative approaches for creating more humane and livable cities.
Founded by Rike Sitas and Doung Anwar Jahangeer, jointly sharing backgrounds in art, architecture, social sciences and activism, the establishment of the organisation, they explain, came about as a response to the growing need for ‘sustainable space’.
Confronted with the dysfunctional cities of the current South African democratic, 'cities need to forge new parameters for transforming how citizens interact with cities'. Dala aims to implement a spatial philosophy that embraces the notion of a creative city. A city where there is room for a re-conceptualisation and re-appropriation of public life – where citizens reclaim the use and responsibility for urban spaces.
The CityWalk project (established 2001 and still running today) is an exploration, as well as an allegory, on the infinite complexities of spaces and timings in the city of Durban. Bringing into focus the ‘urban issues and the related “illness” of lost space’ - Dala taking their definition of lost space as “the undesirable urban areas that are in need for redesign: anti-spaces, making no positive contribution to the surrounding”. From an urban design perspective, examples include such spaces as parking lots, spaces underneath freeways and grey field sites.
Local writer Neil Coppen, after a five hour ‘meander alongside this urban Shaman and his (Doung’s) torrent’s of inner-city insight’, claimed in the One Small Seed magazine, despite having lived his whole life in Durban, to have felt like he had just returned from ‘visiting a new country’. He described his experience as an ‘unsettling wake-up call; one that tends to highlight the apathy with which we engage our seemingly everyday’.
The CityWalk tour begins by pointing out buildings and walk-ways that are built for use in a particular way, but eventually end up being transfigured by the environment and community around them. Unused walkways surrounded by beaten-into dirt paths, man-made cement roads where, miraculously, glimpses of grass break through, to the homeless man using the pavement’s concrete pot plant holders to grow his own tomatoes. Doung’s background in architectural training, guides us along a “vision of questioning”, exploring structures and hierarchies, and how we break them every single day.
In a similar project, ‘Walking the PinkLine’ (2007), Doung proceeds to highlight an informal network of pedestrian paths, which the city council had previously refused to acknowledge. Explaining that pedestrians have woven their own pathways for an array of reasons such as reducing the amount of time and energy lost commuting to and from work, keeping safe distances from the roadside for security measures or simply making an emotional connection of wanting to feel the soft earth, rather than hard concrete, under their feet. Doung challenges the City council, not to simply take the stance that this behavior manifests from a lack of respect within the public domain, but rather to look within and address public space planning with a more sustainable approach to civic creativity. The city paths in question were illuminated with a pink powder used as traditional Zulu medicine for cleansing.
The questions surfaced and vision presented by Dala applies not only to the South African urban context, but to the future urban development paradigms throughout the continent – even extending to the rest of the world. This will mean challenging and shifting the normative perceptions of space-scapes, working together with the city citizens, the municipality, the corporate sector, non-profit and non-governmental organisations, and creative practitioners to engage in building “healthy” cities which connect with daily human functions.
Dala imagines such a city for our future.
http://www.dala.org.za/
