Immersion: Interfaces between gendered spaces and the Yeoville market precinct : a reproductive health clinic and womens complex

Abstract

There is minimal research on the importance of a pan-African approach to architectural feminism in African urban cities. To explore the relationships of gendered and contested spaces in African public realms; I began research in the Yeoville Market (a buzz of small-businesses run by a substantial amount of non-native women) and its surroundings. Johannesburg continues to reveal the historical and multiple codes of power that makes up the city and how these regimes reinforce gender specific power in unpredictable ways. Having started as a mining town, where the number of male migrant labourers exceeded women, suggests the complexities in how African women enter and have a relationship with the city. Since the end of apartheid, the demographic profile has shifted, suggesting that most new entrants to the city are women. Layered with cultural, economic and gender structures present in the CBD, Hillbrow, Berea and Yeoville. Johannesburg’s migration hubs. These structures have direct and deep relationships to Architecture, which emerging projects continue to ignore. The study learns from existing spatial arrangements and networks created by women, using the Yeoville Market as a case study and visiting, observing and interviewing people in Yeoville. Identifying where parallels can or cannot be drawn to principles of architectural feminism. A pan-African approach to a women’s centre and clinic is explored, in multiple scales of architectural design. Concluding on lessons, to be applied in designing for marganalised groups & spaces in Urban African cities. That integral to the African context, architectural feminism is breaking away from colonial structures, the grid and allowing “architecture” to dismantle itself into lived spaces.