UTT Empower grows shacks into safe and vibrant terrace housing in South Africa

Non-profit company Urban-Think Tank Empower has completed a development in the South African township of Khayelitsha, creating a triangle of terraced housing that it says provides a model for how to build in the country's informal settlements.

Completed on a site called BT-Soweto in Site C of Khayelitsha, just outside of Cape Town, the development is the company's first using their Empower Upgrade model and includes a public open space, community centre and playground as well as 72 homes for 428 residents.

Khayelitsha is one of several suburbs that was started by the apartheid government from 1950 to 1994 as a site to forcibly relocate Cape Town's non-white population and enforce a policy of racial segregation.

Since then, the populations of these townships have continued to grow, and many residents live in shacks that they have constructed themselves from tin, wood and cardboard, without basic services like running water and sewerage.

Urban-Think Tank Empower (UTTE) aimed to create a financially and ecologically sustainable community-focused model for developing these areas while addressing some of the deficiencies of the post-apartheid building programme, which has focused on relocating residents to new low-cost mass housing.

"Typically, because informal settlements are hard to develop, seemingly impossible, you relocate people to where there's empty land, or people relocate themselves," UTTE architect Benjamin Kollenberg told Dezeen.

"We're saying, would it be possible to safely, adequately house people in a dignified manner on the same site that they're already living on, within their existing communities?" he continued.

"So there's these social networks in place and community ties and family support."

The model the architects ended up developing keeps all of the same residents on the site but replaces the shacks with two-storey row houses.

This not only gives each of the residents more floor area than they had previously, but by pushing housing together, unlike with more common freestanding homes, it opens up room on the site for amenities and public spaces.

In addition to the 72 homes at BT-Soweto, there is a community centre with a rooftop garden, a public courtyard, a playground, space for businesses and a formal road, providing access for emergency vehicles that was previously blocked.

UTTE built the development in six phases, each lasting three to six months, during which time the residents either stayed with friends or family or were housed by UTTE in reusable temporary accommodation.

The completed terrace houses include bathrooms, kitchens, toilets and water points, and there is significant diversity in the size and internal layouts, with the smallest homes having a footprint of 38 square metres and the largest 86 square metres.

Existing neighbourhood dynamics are maintained, such as grown-up children living next to their parents.

The other key components of the UTTE Upgrade model include comprehensive community participation and an economic inclusion strategy that sees local labourers employed in the construction and a commitment to activate the development with businesses, restaurants and shops.

The BT-Soweto development was built with readily available materials – concrete block cavity walls, corrugated sheet facade cladding on a timber substructure, and insulated high-performance composite roof panels – so as to build skills among the community labourers that they could reapply.

Since starting work on BT-Soweto 10 years ago with the participation of just one resident, the team has grown enough interest and trust across the townships of the Cape Peninsula that they now have 14 other developments in the works, most of them instigated by the communities themselves.

UTTE relies on complete buy-in from residents, which includes a 10 per cent monetary contribution to the cost of the housing, financed through microloans. The rest of the funding comes from a mix of government subsidies and charitable giving.

Kollenberg said that the UTTE Upgrade model is not intended to be an alternative to the government housing programme, previously called the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and now called Breaking New Ground (BNG), which has delivered millions of homes since 1994.

"We're not an alternative to the RDP, because the RDP builds at such scale that we could never build," said Kollenberg. "We are almost an additional model thrown into the mix. They really prioritise quantity over quality."

RDP homes have been criticised for their identikit construction and low quality, which Kollenberg said has seen them fall apart in a matter of decades.

"It's understandable but it's not actually acceptable, if I'm being perfectly honest," he said. "I think the execution has been lacking in certain fundamental areas."

He said the approach by UTTE, which is a local non-profit subsidiary of the international company Urban-Think Tank, is about slower, more tailored development.

"The Upgrade model is the integrator of economic inclusion, of the humanitarian response to a housing crisis, and to creating resilient and sustainable communities," said Kollenberg.

Addressing the legacies of apartheid is a key challenge for South Africa's architects. Elsewhere in Cape Town, architecture firm The Maak has taken a cautious and community-focused approach to building in District Six, a once-flourishing neighbourhood that was demolished and its residents forcibly removed to townships like Khayelitsha.

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