Collaborative Engagement in the Making of Healing Environments

Introduction

“Buildings do not merely provide physical shelter… In addition to housing our fragile bodies and action, they also need to house our minds, memories, desires, and dreams.” (Pallasmaa. J, 2013)

We see our primary function as making people feel at home in their worlds. We approach built and natural landscapes as concrete psychology, with a desire to facilitate a sense of deep attachment for people going about their everyday lives in the spaces we co-create. Our intention is to address feelings of exposure, isolation, and vulnerability that many of the users of the environments we work in experience.

"Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." (Health and Well-Being - World Health Organization, 2024).

This is often impossible in many disadvantaged South African communities.

In our attempt at making healing spaces, we have identified a need for a high level of engagement and facilitation between the users, designers, and contractors, as the complexity of the various informants requires negotiation and accommodation. It is often an exercise of looking for what goodness is already present, but presently hidden or forgotten – both ecologically and socially.

We also work at establishing a strong dialogue between inside and outside without prioritising either of the two realms, with the intention of creating shared spaces which offer the possibility of interaction and attachment. It is a continuous and iterative conversation with no known outcome as we start to engage. Our projects are the result, not of one hand mimicking the other, but rather the result of the shared encounter between two disciplines.

Landscape and Social Context

The context in which we work – Cape Town, South Africa remains an extremely inequitable society for many, negatively impacting the quality of the built environment. The fragmented nature of our ecological and social landscape adds to a sense of dis-ease for Cape-tonians.

In South Africa, urbanisation is situated within a legacy of apartheid planning which marginalised communities according to race, placing the poorest communities far from the urban centre. (Anderson et al., 2012v). Two of these affected communities are Khayelitsha and Delft, located within a seasonally wetland coastal plain, exposed to a high water table in winter and saltladen winds in summer.

Engineered during apartheid to house black urban communities, both townships were planned using infrastructure and geography as a divisive means of separating and controlling communities. They are further separated from the surrounding communities by buffer zones of undeveloped open spaces. Lack of adequate infrastructure and opportunities create and support a cycle of poverty, resulting in areas rife with antisocial behaviour and a high crime rate.

In developing these townships, the existing natural systems and processes were disregarded, and existing fauna and flora habitats were obliterated, leaving behind a series of sandy, windswept neighbourhoods.

The dislocated communities within these exposed environments, exacerbated the sense of isolation and separation which cascades from the scale of the city to the street. This contrasts sharply with the leafy, nurtured suburbs of the more priviledged on the city's mountain slopes.

Lack of safety remains an overarching design informant as many projects are situated within an environment that has the highest murder rate in the city, apart from other vulnerabilities. A major issue for children is accessibility to drugs and gangsterism, as they are often left unsupervised for many hours of the day.

In looking for a methodology for the regeneration of the natural and social landscape, along with providing opportunities for green, healthy spaces, our practices embed the projects within the local context of the Cape Flats.

The Design Process

Our interrogative tool is collaborative workshopping. The process enables iterative conversations and shared drawing, collaging and modelling with the view that this leads to creating a platform for communication and evoking ideas. This process begins well before brief definition and continues beyond the project completion - a potentially a messy and open-ended process, but which holds the possibility of sharing ideas between collaborators. As part of this process, we have established key design informants listed below:

Case Studies

Our collaborative design response to these emotions, informants and desires is explored through the making of thresholds between inside and outside, as illustrated in three selected case studies below.

1. The Nex for HOPE Cape Town in Delft, Cape Town, 2022

HOPE Cape Town is a Non-Government Organisation (NGO), who have been in Cape Town for the last 20 years, specifically within the informal settlement in Delft, providing a holistic development approach, addressing Health, early Childhood Development, Youth and Education. We were part of the VPUU team (Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading (Krause et al., 2015)) contracted to design and implement the new project.

Design informants of inclusivity, visibility, and orientation were developed as an idea that worked both ways. From inside the buildings, one can see into the made land-scapes and the streets beyond, and from outside the passers-by experience the garden/ landscaped spaces as an invitation welcoming them into the precinct.

The softening of the edges of the precinct presents an invitation to enter a nurtured, cared for environment, which culminates in the central court as a holding space. This is achieved with actively engaging with rainwater flows on the site and a continuously flowering seasonal wetland at the entrance to the precinct.

The therapeutic value of, and engagement with gardens and gardening was a fundamental informant in the designing and making of the Hope Project, allowing inhabitants to experience a more complex relationship of being held by the buildings and landscape, while becoming caretakers of the gardens.

Quotes from community members illustrate this:

“I love all the big windows and the light, the different views from each of the buildings, and all the shades of green from the indigenous garden.”

“Who could believe that in the middle of Delft is this garden where we can pick the fruit off the trees and eat it?”

Developed design informants of refuge, embrace and protection were created from the harsh environment (both climatic and social) through thick built walls and natural thresholds that offer shade and gradation of scale and privacy.

During the design process, the circulation spine developed across the line of the prevailing winds, each reiteration of the building footprints resulted in a relocating and refinement of the edges of the route. The habitation of the external spaces, the need for privacy and a sense of safety informed the final positioning of the buildings. It became apparent that a cranked spine would achieve the desired sense of safety, privacy, and embeddedness.

Quotes from community members illustrate this:

“This place is my second home; I feel safe here to be me.”

“When I am here it feels like I am with my family. It’s a welcoming space, it makes me happy.”

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2. St Joseph’s Home for Children in Montana, Cape Town, during 2016.

Run as an Non-profit Organisation (NPO), this facility was begun in the 1950’s in the heart of Apartheid. The organisation's mission was to care for all very sick South African children. Because of the law of racial segregation, the home was built as a series of wards to separate children of different races. Our role became that of shifting the character from a segregated facility to a comfortable and inclusive home.

Design informants of delight, choice and inhabitation shifted the emphasis from ‘wards’ with beds in rows to connected ‘rooms’, where bays were created. Low windows scaled to the child with thick edges connect to new landscaped gardens and green courtyards. High level windows let sunlight into the previously deep and dark wards and allow children to lie in bed and watch the clouds and stars. Safe fireplaces were put in each space so that the flicker of flames and warmth provide comfort on cold winter nights.

3. The Harare Precinct, Khayelitsha, Cape Town, 2010

The library and surrounding precinct form part of a broader intervention under VPUU in Khayelitsha. The design informant of sustainability was developed using locally sourced materials as well as natural resources such as water and electricity, as is the case on all of these projects. Our focus here is on social sustainability. The resources of the library programme offers excellent opportunities for this. For example, the various mosaic murals are part of an extensive skills transfer program throughout the Harare project.

A measure of the success of this program is that some of the artists were tasked with creating mosaic murals along the Fan Walk for the Cape Town 2010 Soccer World Cup. Informal traders are accommodated in the square under trees with low walls for sitting and displaying products.

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The blurring of thresholds allows for a non-binary way of entering and occupying the space. A simple move of pulling the red brick from the square into the library carries a sense of democratic entry deep into the building. From the many community engagement workshops, the need for spaces to read, study, look for work and read a newspaper was apparent, (bearing in mind that families of up to eight live in 40sq.m. houses with little access to functioning public spaces).

Assessments of the Three case Studies

Having revisited the three projects on numerous occasions and specifically through the lens of this paper, we conclude that the measure of success of each project is specific and varied. Our understanding of the measurable value or change that the designs have made are currently anecdotal, and not easily quantifiable.

1. The Nex, HOPE Cape Town, Delft

Surveys and questionnaires are regularly conducted with the residents of Delft as well as visitors, both local and international with the most rewarding feedback being face-to-face conversation. HOPE Cape Town employees engage with all individuals and groups who enter the campus and have documented the following feedback:

“Last week I was contemplating suicide, now this place has shown me how much I have to live for.”

“I know, and I tell my family, all the neighbours and the people at my church – if you want to improve your mental health, go to the HOPE centre.”

“It’s an oasis in the heart of this poor community.”

“This is not just a social place or centre of learning, it’s a place of healing. It’s so peaceful here, I am at peace when I am here.”

2. St Joseph’s Home for Children, Montana near Delft

The evaluation of this project is best demonstrated through the response from the director at the time:

"It has been a wonderful journey for my management team and I. We have learned so much from the project team with regards how to think big, not allow constraints to prevent us from dreaming and of course, that light, warmth, and scale are essential to the wellbeing of people. Throughout the three-and-a-half-year project we have enjoyed an excellent relationship. The project grew from strength to strength and as the donors’ confidence grew in what the team produced so did the donation…. This in itself triggered a host of initiatives from other smaller donors which allowed us to further enhance the Home. This spinoff could never have been foreseen and we have ended up with a world-class facility! Our old home has been transformed! We now have a beautiful, modern, child-friendly and safe home for chronically ill children. It is a light-filled, warm, containing, cheerful environment - essential elements for the healing of children. It is an oasis for the most vulnerable in our society in amongst the harsh conditions of our Cape Flats.” (Thea Patterson - Director 2013)

3. Harare Precinct, Khayelitsha

The VPUU model integrates evaluation and research. Statistics indicate that opportunistic crime has reduced in this area significantly, attributed in part to the blurring between the external public square and internal spaces, which facilitates passive surveillance through eyes on the street and well-lit spaces.

The City of Cape Town (CoCT) Library and Information services have recorded that the Harare library has the highest number of subscribers and visitors across all ages in comparison to the other libraries in Khayelitsha. The library is anecdotally referred to as the ‘living room’ of Khayelitsha. The lack of a fence around the library, which is the norm for public libraries in the townships, blurs the threshold between public street and public facility, inviting one to enter.

Conclusion

These three projects illustrate how the process of engagement with the project team and the particular environment has facilitated the making of healing, interdependent internal and external spaces. Design interventions speak to notions of being held, comforted, grounded and protected, with the intention of addressing the feelings of exposure, isolation, and vul-nerability experienced by many of the users of the environments within which we work. Our hope is to, in time, move beyond this to the making of environments that will “house our minds, memories and dreams”.