Thirteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to prompt new urban thinking around ordinary people’s living conditions generally, that thinking will include the proposals of the last twenty years or so, which are seeking to harness the informal housing, urban planning and livelihood innovations. This study draws from the interview and secondary research materials collected from the Gauteng, North-West, and Western Cape Provinces of South Africa to reflect on the architectural and spatial planning initiatives by the state, urban practitioners, and ordinary people. The paper shows that the responses by local managers and urban practitioners to ordinary people’s housing, planning, and livelihood initiatives are diverse, ranging from repressing such resourcefulness to buttressing them, depending on the kinds of local and external forces being mediated. Those responses that back ordinary people’s activities, including various forms of state support, contribute to the creation of an egalitarian city – a city that enhances ordinary people’s socio-economic gains and their adaptability to health, environmental, economic, and political crises.