Place of fire: a fire station and cooking park in Soweto, Johannesburg

Abstract

Shack fires in townships have been a prevalent issue within Johannesburg, especially as the Emergency Management Services are under strain due to a lack of fi re service amenities. A significant cause of these fires includes utilizing paraffin stoves for cooking in a high dense population. This is specifically relevant to the Soweto Township in Johannesburg and results in a large number of vulnerable residents. Research aims and objectives include uncovering a new typology for Johannesburg fire stations. This typology will aim to successfully integrate the community in order to simultaneously support the community in the event of shack fires as well as educate the community in terms of safe cooking, fire prevention and fire management. This typology might become a step in the right direc on in order for fire stations to evolve into non-bureaucratic architecture which blurs with functions that will create a 24-hour opera onal mixed-use building. Furthermore this will provide a sense of security to the surrounding community. Numerous fire stations in Johannesburg were visited in order to investigate how the current and conventional fire station typology integrates into the Johannesburg context, if at all. These visits included interviewing firefighters and volunteers who are employed at the stations by means of semi-structured informal interviews. It was discovered that the architectural typology of a fire station is in essence fluid and not fixed, it evolves with society. This is evident as the various fire stations studied in Johannesburg as well as international precedents have been blurred with educational, commercial, hospitality, cultural and even private upmarket residential programmes. In Soweto it was discovered that the three existing fire stations are all small and isolated from the community. Furthermore there is no centralized or main fire station in Soweto. This is needed for training facilities but more importantly to have a centralized control room which in turn will optimize response mes to all emergencies in the en re Soweto. Fire sta ons which created a sense of awareness and belonging to the community generally had lower fi re incident rates as ci zens were aware of the dangers of fi re (CSIR & DPSA, 2012). Fire policy initiatives within Soweto and the City of Johannesburg should thus engage all stakeholders. This especially includes educating and training community members in order to potentially have a network within the community which will fight fires in conjunction with the Johannesburg fire brigade. The proposed fi re sta on in Orlando West in Soweto thus includes a public market in a public park which sells equipment and fuel for safe cooking at discounted rates should you a end the educa onal seminars in the outdoor amphitheater which doubles up as a mul -functional space. Other areas of the park will be a food market. This will result in the inversion of the current bureaucratic architecture that we often encounter with fire stations.