Tom Quoin : Architecture
Our deurmekaar country is filled with maddening contrasts. None more stomach- churning than the bald differences between the spacious settings in which planners and politicians live and the crushed layouts they’ve dumped on most of their fellow citizens. Though each rises on the same scattered suburban pattern — single plots for single houses — what we find on the ground is grotesquely dissimilar.
Suburbs: middle-class dreams imported from early Victorian Britain where they were longed-for escapes from the poverty, disease, violence of industrial cities.
That’s something like the past and present hopes of our local privileged. Here, though, we’ve also imposed a distorted form of the vision to areas beyond tidy suburbia. The not-quite-rural bliss of 19th century Europe has become the hard reality of the townships.
Finding that they could not easily (ie, cheaply) reverse the miseries of industrialism, members of the rising middle-classes took flight from thrusting urban centres like London, Manchester, Glasgow. They scrambled for romantic retreats at the leafy edges of their sprawling cities. They rushed to large family houses in private gardens and smooth lawns, among ample shrubs and trees.
There, they found pure water, space, quiet, semi-rural beauty. For those who made it, the living was good — untouched by foul air, street prostitution, child labour, riots and similar threats. Their family- centred homes, set in broad cared-for grounds, reached a new spaciousness. They offered a relaxed privacy; one that slipped easily into the aloof isolation which then, as now, came to mark comfy suburban life.
So, the new settlements played their part in the depoliticising processes that spread as swiftly as the suburbs did. Intensely private, they lacked the close spatial concentration, the ready social co- operation, the alert variety, shock and constant jostle of dense urban settings. Increasingly, more people lived more divided lives: home split firmly from work, public entertainment from family recreation, production from consumption.
Then sections of the lower-middle and “respectable” working classes were allowed in on the act. Relying on developing forms of transport — mainly local railways — they moved to their own privatised, segregated areas. These were sub-suburbs: a few essential shops, smaller homes, less space and greenery, much less clean water and air. Less of most things.
This, with the whole suburban ideal, invaded southern Africa. Here we added a distinctive touch: townships that had been banished to the outer orbits of city and town life. We saw to it that space and greenery were further reduced, that water, sewers and other services were even less evident.
And, most disheartening, this is where our resources still go — to servicing the well-nursed myth that “my house on its private plot is my castle”; to providing wastefully over-stretched electricity and water supplies, roads, rubbish removal, postal and similar service systems.
An unsuitable pattern has been adopted as the model for millions of South Africans who yearn for well-serviced homes — quickly, inexpensively, near job opportunities. And this despite our older, more compact, housing traditions; like row or courtyard houses and clusters around communal open space.