Recombinant urban DNA connectivity through adaptation in Diepsloot

[摘要] 70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. Cities aregrowing faster than can be designed. Townships and informalsettlements are becoming a common site within cities around the world.South African cities are ill and require healing. It has inherited an intrinsicgenetic flaw, apartheid’s social and spatial planning. This urban DNAstructure encouraged weakness in the connectivity systems and wasdesigned to prevent people from connecting and contracting. It is Postapartheidtimes and this weakness continues. Therefore the location ofinterest is Diepsloot, a disconnected post apartheid township. Over 400000 people reside in this township which is located between two majorcities in Gauteng.The conceptual framework is based on the analogy of the RecombinantDNA applied to how urban design unfolds. The scientifically engineeredprocess of healing through sharing, recombining, accepting and adaptingis a strong methodology to adopt into the urban design process andmethodology.The theoretical framework looks at Peter Calthorpe’s New UrbanNetwork is based on reorganising transport networks into a hierarchywhich assists in increasing connectivity and improving the quality of theurban network. While Complex Adaptive Systems theory is understoodthrough Sanders’ five complexity-based observations about cities andurban environments. David Grahame Shane’s explanation of the theoryof recombinant urbanism involves the theory that cities emerge fromarmatures, enclaves and heterotopias which are all constantly combinedand re-combined.In addressing spatial inequalities and disconnectivity,three bases of literature have been reviewed. The literature reviewincludes Compact City and Decentralised Concentration, New Urbanismand Transit Oriented Development – Urban Network System. The workresearched and developed in these design movements and approachesare vast. This study touches on the essence of the design movements andapproaches. The challenge is the application of these strong designapproaches or movements into a local context.The hypothesis says that it is possible to develop a design methodologythat works from a parallel system of both bottom up and top downdesign processes. It is possible to extract a strength in the current organicstructure of a township development, and incorporate it into formalurbanism design tools. This is to ensure that the formal designintervention is adopted into the current system, or study area, andadapts and grows incrementally. Similar to the process of how the hostwould accept the recombinant DNA of the antivirus.The aim of the design intervention is to apply local lessons learnt in theexisting spatial context and link the strengths found with contemporaryurban design principles of transit oriented development that encourageconnectivity and intensity of development around intermodal facilities.This approach demonstrates a design methodology that employs aparallel system of bottom up and top down processes. The approachdeveloped is specifically, a design and a physical built morphologyanalysis and does not include the arm of social interaction in the form ofpublic participation, etc.The findings demonstrate that connectivity and density is a criticalcomponent to healing the city. This discussion is held within the TransitOriented Development model. The study analysed the level ofconnectivity Diepsloot exhibits from a regional scale, to a district scaleand finally to a neighbourhood scale. Healing the weakness of disconnectivity requires tackling it from all scales.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand