Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
Design instrumentation in Participatory Practice –
The case of the Training for Self Reliance Project
(TSRP), Lesotho.
Iain Low
School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics African Centre for Cities
University of Cape Town
1
The prospect of development in any situation
is fundamentally linked to that of social justice.
In a country such as South Africa this must
necessarily be linked to service delivery. Given
the legacy of apartheid and its spatial agenda,
delivery in the built environment remains an
abiding priority. Recent policy evolution has
shifted this imperative from a quantitative to
a qualitative concern. The challenge to built
environment professionals, and designers in
particular, is to interpret this policy through the
creation of new approaches to both design and
delivery. By engaging the breadth and depth
of new policy, one should reconfigure the
arrangements that inform spatial production
to provoke new spatial conditions that links
quantitative and qualitative dimensions to
radically transform the lives of the marginalised.
Participatory Practice is an instrument that is
often deployed in engaging with communities.
Its interpretation is however frequently a
reductive one that seeks to gain concensus
from user groups in relation to their needs and
wants. Failure in this realm is more frequent
than is generally supposed and maybe
ascribed to the failure of process to genuinely
interface with communities. On the one hand
facilitators abrogate professional responsibility
to the detriment of higher order concerns,
and on the other designers lack the capacity
to interpret competing community needs and/
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or to translate them through the application of
speculative design imagination.
The potential of design is to engage
Participatory Practice as an open
representation in responding to society’s
challenge. When responsibly applied, design
can mediate between policy/planning,
community needs, spatial transformation,
local economic and sustainable development.
One productive domain for sponsoring such a
design dialogue is the realm of technological
innovation. Mediating between modernity and
tradition this approach permits the development
of situated approaches to tectonic problems
that entail tremendous possibility to capacitate
local communities. This principled approach
to design making is not necessarily sector of
project based, but is capable of interpretive
replication across multiple sectors and sites
giving added meaning to participatory practice.
In his seminal publication, ‘The Coloniser and
the Colonised’ Albert Memmi [1965] proposes
the loss of original language as an explanation
to the seeming chaos that accompanies