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Future Johannesburg recently spoke with Tariq Toffa, South African architect
and lecturer in the architecture department at the University of Johannesburg.
He shares the main challenges for urban planning in South Africa and some of
his current projects.
The focus of your articles at URB.
im has been on the empowerment of
communities and local entrepreneurship.
How does this relate to your work this
year?
The iconic Mandela days, the ‘new South
Africa’, the ‘rainbow nation’ – these ideas
probably seem to many now as distant
and somewhat naïve. And it only took two
decades for these – our noblest ideas – to
become historical ones, dropping almost
completely off the map of priorities, and
typically conjured up formulaically for
political expediency or opportunistically
for branding. But the rounds of xenophobic
attacks in Johannesburg and many other
incidents around the country that have
captured news headlines where difference
and othering is synonymous with abuse and
violence have returned the older project
to the forefront with a vengeance. Other
instances around the globe, like Ferguson
in the US or the deaths of desperate African
migrants to Europe, highlight many similar
issues in other contexts.
In conceptual terms I call this the ‘softer’
project of democracy, and in spatial terms
I think of it as building ‘discursive spaces’,
because I am interested in architectural
thinking and practice that participates
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in, contributes towards, and develops a
discourse of society. It is a slow, deliberate
and persistent project that needs greater and
consistent focus intellectually, imaginatively
and experimentally; and that perhaps is
its failure, because it is often and easily
overtaken by trends and novelties. This has
always been a silent but consistent current
running through my own work but, given the
current local and global social climate, needs
to be reasserted and re-centered.
Through your experience and
work, what are the main difficulties
when proposing a new idea or plan to a
community, and fostering these discursive
spaces?
Whether as a practitioner, student or educator,
my work thus far has been diverse; but always
with a societal, public or humane focus. For
me ‘the community’ is not disenfranchised
groups and localities only (where this term
typically tends to be employed) while the rest
of the landscape remains unchanged; it is not
quite as localized or isolated as that. Rather
our challenges are very much interrelated,
and while communities in South Africa may
be radically diverse in some respects they
can still be engaged through a broader ethical
imagination for the kind of society we wish to
build.