Designing for Dialogue - Cape Town's blueprint design challenge
Can design change the world? In South Africa, design entrenched apartheid. Our town planning was carried out on a design brief of isolation. That was the apartheid blueprint. Cape Town is splendid in its design dysfunction. Freeways and train lines divide neighbourhoods and isolate us into language groups; common recreation areas there are none; in a city surrounded by the sea, some of us have never even seen it! That is how isolated and immobile we are. To enable the city, to undesign the trenches - metaphorical and physical - that divide it, we need design for dialogue. Design for dialogue - design that transforms physical spaces in a way that brings people together who otherwise would not be able to. In coming together we are able to discover how similar - rather than how different - we are, and we discover shared resources. In these discoveries we are better equipped to act on opportunity. And if the design is right, there is the physi...