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Showing posts from April, 2011

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 physical mobility available to get