The reconceptualisation of state infrastructure to maintain a productive and progressive equilibrium in the Sandton business district
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Date
2019
Authors
Kollenberg, Benjamin
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Abstract
City centres exist not only to facilitate the people working in air-conditioned offices, but also
those cleaning and protecting them. This infrastructure should, in fact, prioritize the general
majority over the wealthy minority as a means to propagate a balanced power dynamic within
the city. The proposed Civic Centre will be inherently antagonistic to the existing order of the
privatized, central business district of Sandton, to facilitate productive and progressive future
development. This report begins a dialogue with the resultant architectural trend of “Form
Follows Finance” and aims to utilize the Sandton “Society of Spectacle” to manipulate these
ideals for a post-capitalist democratic future.
Sandton’s inequality manifests in an exclusivity such that a vast majority of the population’s
potential is perpetually disregarded. Although there are a number of innovative transportation
proposals of an increasingly informal nature, these primarily function to provide a service to
the Sandton white collar workforce. However, there is as yet still no vision to provide a civic
destination point, or sense of belonging for these many servicing layers of Sandton society.
The proposed intervention of a new infrastructure of movement is therefore twofold; firstly,
through the recognition and celebration of an informal transport mechanism of minibus taxis
and public buses, and secondly as an inclusive business interface for an evolving workforce. An
architectural dialogue of potential urbanity lies in blurring the lines between the movement of
people and ideas.
The proposed site sits in the physical and ideological centre of the rapidly developing CBD, as a
“super-basement” for a mixed-use precinct envisaged, but never realised, above. The basement
is already partially built and currently houses the Gautrain station. However, the mixed-use
precinct and buildings above exists as a speculative landscape – having been planned almost
ten years ago but currently locked in a political “tug of war”. The proposed intervention seeks
to take control of both of these contexts, working within the structure, to break away from the
current design model and formulate a comprehensive alternative proposal to unlock the site’s
inherent potential – sociologically as well as economically. This new cumulative context will offer
an invaluable opportunity for a meaningful insertion of a multiplicity of new urban players into
the existing fabric of possibilities – physical and conceptual – in order to unlock the potential of
the many missing layers.
A new collective infrastructure of movement in the agglomeration of Sandton has the potential
for radical social change as well as accelerated economic development throughout the city. A
development which no longer ignores inequality through the Sandton spatial constructs as it
has come to a point where this neglect is no longer feasible