Investigating aspects of rapid urbanisation and densification in Sub-Saharan Africa and the effect on the physical morphology of selected suburbs in Johannesburg

Abstract

This study examines the transformation of the South African version of the bungalow from a free-standing house into a courtyard form of building – seen as a bungalow ‘compound’– due to the significant change in occupancy. It focuses on two lower-income inner-city neighbourhoods of Johannesburg, Yeoville and Rosettenville. Both were created at the beginning of the 20th century, on either side of the city’s mining belt. After the political changes in 1990, these neighbourhoods have been almost completely re-populated with immense socio- cultural changes – and intensely densified. This radical change has, however, been kept hidden behind the boundary walls of the private properties. There has been little attention and very limited evidence concerning the alterations to the properties despite them being widespread. The research brings a new understanding of the ‘transformed house on the plot’ and its life forms as part of wider city-making processes. Although based on a typological approach to reading the change of the domestic spaces over time, this is analysed in-depth vis-à-vis social, economic, juridical, and political entanglements and highlights the need for transdisciplinary knowledge transfers. The study examines the bungalow compounds through innovative design research, applied via a Case Study approach, to a particularly complex category of ‘as built’ documentation. It investigates the outcome as a form of re-description of a part of the transforming African city – rather than the standard sterile service instrument of spatial administration. In this context, the pattern book and the notion of type are revisited to develop an alternate catalogue of properties based on more than thirty detailed case studies. Methodologically, the research considers the bungalow compound as an epistemic object that can manifest as a problem space across multiple themes, scales, and contexts. In doing so, the study addresses the misconception of architecture as a finished product and appropriates essential incompleteness as a device to locate relevant knowledge(s). It considers the inevitable lack of complete evidence as an opportunity to understand the documentation of these emerging dynamic ‘house worlds’ as readings of what is and what could be.