Abstract
The vast majority of city planning literature on informal occupations has focused on how residents occupy vacant and peripheral land, developing informal structures to address their basic needs. A smaller body of work, but one with much purchase in South Africa, explores the informal occupation of existing formal structures and how residents infuse these emergent places with social and political meaning. Across this work, occupations represent a dominant mode of city-building in the Global South. Contributing to this debate on city-making and occupations, this paper departs from an unusual case of South African occupation. We explore how displaced people have occupied a multi-storey vacant hospital building situated close to Cape Town’s city centre. Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’. We show that, through processes of repairing, repurposing, and renovating, dwellers have retrofit an institutional building, previously designed by the state for a very different use, to meet their needs and desires. As cities become more densely built and vacant land more peripheral or scarce, the retrofit of underutilised buildings, particularly through bottom-up actions such as occupation, will become an increasingly important mode of urban development. Not only are the practices of material transformation useful to understand, so too are the ways in which occupations reflect significantly more than simply survivalist strategies, but also care and meaning-making.
Highlights
Most of the literature on informal occupations focuses on why and how residents occupy vacant land, incrementally developing shelters to meet their basic needs (Ahmad, 2010; Hidalgo et al, 2010; Lemanski & Oldfield, 2009).1 In this literature, land occupations have, and continue to be, a dominant mode of city-making in the Global South
Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’
Using documentary photography and interviews with residents, we reflect on how residents make homes. We argue that this occupation reflects a logic of ‘retrofit city-making’
Summary
Most of the literature on informal occupations focuses on why and how residents occupy vacant land, incrementally developing shelters to meet their basic needs (Ahmad, 2010; Hidalgo et al, 2010; Lemanski & Oldfield, 2009). In this literature, land occupations have, and continue to be, a dominant mode of city-making in the Global South. While some scholars are critical of the ways in which structural inequities are reproduced through practices of retrofit and extension, there is important work which examines how urban socio-spatial relations are reimagined through replacing, that is, through the re-inscription of a building’s history and identity (Lehrer, 2006) Another growing body of work considers how such processes are infused with care, solidarity, and resistance – progressive and even radical social and political practices (Lemanski, 2019; Silver, 2014). We draw attention to the emergent and inscribed meanings awarded and show how meaning-making is inextricably bound to the material reconfiguration and use of these places (Mattern, 2018; McCann, 2002)
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