Characterising Centre-Hinterlands: Transition Design as a Framework for the Assessment of Urban Futures

Type of the Paper: Full Paper

Track title: The city is an object and a city is in transition.

Characterising Centre-Hinterlands:

Transition Design as a Framework for the Assessment of Urban Futures

Michael Louw ¹, Daniel Elkin ² and Gerhard Bruyns ³

1 The University of Cape Town; Michael.Louw@uct.ac.za; ORCID ID 0000-0002-7137-3643

2 The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; dkelkin@polyu.edu.hk; ORCID ID 0000-0003-3295-6552

3 The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Gerhard.bruyns@polyu.edu.hk; ORCID ID 0000-0002-4468-6505

Abstract: This article discusses recent urban development in two cases, Imizamo Yethu, South Africa, and Tai O Village, Hong Kong, within transition design frameworks. The article builds on contemporary theories that suggest categorical distinctions between urban population centres and that less dense hinterlands support adverse normative relationships in the context of continuous economic, administrative, political, and other transitions. It introduces the premise of “centre-hinterlands,” to describe conditions where hinterland conditions are found within the centre and where researchers can construct provisional, administrative, and economic difference as inequity. The article presents research in Imizamo Yethu and Tai O that elaborates this description. The main methods applied in Imizamo Yethu include a morphological study and field observation, and the key findings in Imizamo Yethu include the gradual loss of distinction between “formally and informally” developed parts of the settlement in morphological character, developmental model, and administration. The main methods applied in Tai O Village include stakeholder workshopping, conducting a survey and interview, and a short-term pedestrian traffic monitoring project. The key findings in Tai O include economic and behavioural patterns that economically and socially entangle the village with the surrounding region. The article concludes with a discussion of transition design frameworks’ relationship to potential for radical change in each development case.

Keywords: Centre-hinterlands; Transition Design; Cape Town; Hong Kong

1. Introduction

Cities’ development is not limited to the expansion or contraction of urban edges of peripheries (Brenner, 2016). Cities within cities and places nested within larger settings exhibit different realities and, as such, conflicting rationalities (de Satgé & Watson, 2018; Watson, 2003). These manifest radical differences in urban morphology, ecological processes, financial cycles, and politics surrounding the former.

Such “nested sites of difference” challenge environmental and spatial discourse in two ways. First, they disrupt the methods and registers through which we assess the environment, as applicable rationalities transition at territorial boundaries, leaving contextualised decision-making and administrative processes to compensate. Second, socio-technical processes blur the territorial discreteness of a city’s material and spatial conditions, meaning researchers must appraise material locality within radically transformative frameworks. This may highlight the importance of mechanising a transition design framework based on vision, theories of change, mindset and posture, and new ways of designing (Irwin, 2015). According to Swilling and Annecke (2012), adversity produces localised shifts and innovations that can contribute to what they call just transitions. These require acknowledgement that local action interrelates to global change.

To position transitional frameworks’ impact upon design implementation in the built environment, this paper compares two transitional development settings, Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town and Tai O Village in Hong Kong, by discussing how each site has dealt with transitional drivers, in spatial, social, and material senses. By seeking links and differences between African and Asian approaches from both these highly distinct socio-spatial place-characteristics throughout disruptive moments, the paper explores the theme of the city as a transitional object. It suggests transition design as a framework for assessing responses to the future challenges of urban environments in the global South.

2. Theories and Methods

Urbanisation cannot be regarded solely through the delineation of geospatial agglomeration, and contemporary frameworks contest generalisations of urbanity as a universal type (Brenner, 2016; Brenner & Schmid, 2015). Vast differentials in terms of measurement data, morphology, demographics, and scale challenge descriptions of “the city,” when defined in comparison to hinterlands as separate entities. By disputing the binary conception of traditional classifications of urban and rural, Brenner argues that the hinterland should be part of our understanding of the urban. However, this paper shows that the inverse is also true where areas within territories classified as urban are, through differentiated access to resources and opportunities, assigned place-definitions under categorial norms. The inversions of meta-categories, e.g., center-periphery, exterior-interior, or global-local (Bruyns & Read, 2006), compound urbanisation models and expose hinterlands within the centre. Differential urbanisation means areas like Imizamo Yethu in Cape Town and Tai O Village in Hong Kong, in stark contrast to their surroundings, can be regarded as centre-hinterlands. These areas, like other hinterlands, have been operationalised for exploitation as labour pools, tourist attractions as political objects, and in some instances, for ‘shackfarming’ and other politically complicated commercialisations. In contrast to their surroundings, they have significantly lower property sizes and values, there is tenure insecurity, there are substantially lower service levels, there is poorer transport connectivity, more unemployment, less opportunity, and higher vulnerability to natural disasters, amongst other issues.

Figure 1. Imizamo Yethu (left) and Tai O (right) are posited as centre-hinterlands within their highly urbanised macro-contexts. Source: Google Earth, 2021. [Online] Available: https://earth.google.com/web

This type of uneven spatial development is a macro-trend of urbanisation, which is “emerging through a contradictory interplay between rapid, explosive processes of urbanisation, and various forms of stagnation, shrinkage, and marginalisation, often in close proximity to one another” (Brenner & Schmid, 2015: 152). As a spatial legacy of apartheid, Imizamo Yethu is a clear manifestation of uneven development as Figure 2 demonstrates. But this condition is by no means unique: Tai O is also an example of this trend, although perhaps less starkly visible in terms of physical proximity. However, it exhibits another macro trend identified by Brenner and Schmid, namely the mutation of capitalist urbanisation geographies where governments “prioritise economic growth, property-led investment in flagship mega-projects, urban renewal and gentrification over job creation, social distribution, equity, and participation” (2015: 153). This raises several ethical questions that are rooted in conflicting rationalities (de Satgé & Watson, 2018; Watson, 2003), especially where governments attempt to insert regulated larger-scale development into what is referred to as “informal” development.

Figure 2. The change in morphology between Imizamo Yethu and the neighbouring suburb of Tierboskloof in Hout Bay. Source: Johnny Miller, 2016. [Online] Available: https://unequalscenes.com/hout-bay-imizamo-yethu. Used with permission.

Figure 3. Tai O Village as seen in the 1972 aerial census, showing the stilt house districts and nearby shop houses. Source: Hong Kong Government Information Resources Department. Used with permission.

Brenner and Schmid (2015) note that these types of conditions make it exceedingly difficult for agencies and actors to influence space and policy. They go on to say that the methodological positions of postcolonial urbanism might be most productive if they are seen as “interim moves” in anticipation of more long-term visions for the urban conditions in the global South. This paper argues that transition design can be implemented in the global South to facilitate long-term visions that acknowledge the natural environment as a broader context, are place-based, and are oriented towards the quality of life of communities. Further, transition design frameworks’ radicality may be a key characteristic of response to stasis conditions emerging from categorising normative policies. Irwin positions transition design where “speculative, long-term visions of sustainable lifestyles fundamentally challenge existing paradigms and serve to inspire and inform the design of short- and mid-term solutions” (2015: 231). These solutions are influenced by a wider and perhaps more radical socio-ecological transition, differentiated from the social innovation (social design) approach that is centered on solutions for emerging paradigms (ibid.). Within the brief synopsis possible here, transitional design engages directly with wicked or seemingly non-solvable and fluid problems. Wicked problems present challenges that require a move away from a mechanistic approach to design and spatial planning, as a linear process to both assess, as well as develop, viable outcomes to complex issues. Application of a transitional design framework allows for the cross comparison between seemingly similar settings through different means, or strategy formation. The influence of spatial, socio-political, and environmental dynamics become emergent possibilities to a range of interventions, that may account for circularity linked to health issues or spatial challenges linked exclusively to agency.

Transition design may, in the context of centre-hinterlands or landscapes deeply nested in environmental settings that are captured by globalisation and neoliberal processes, deliver a differentiated take on the normative stances of ‘static’ design methods. In our view, prioritising socio-economic development and forms of agent-agency for change may present greater opportunities for long-term future-oriented outcomes. When considered in the contexts of the global South, transition design frameworks should prioritise equity and social impact to work towards just transitions (Swilling & Annecke, 2012).

To explore these theories, the paper presents case studies in Imizamo Yethu and Tai O Village, each investigating the relationship between these centre-hinterlands and surrounding population centres. The following section explores the hypothesis that each setting is historically and/or politically differentiated from its surroundings, while still exhibiting economic and social entanglements. In addition, our motivation for choosing both sites is based on the sharing of behavioural and built environment entanglement traits, with less distinct edge conditions and environmental integration. These entanglements allow us to construct difference in administrative power, infrastructural resources, or development opportunities as inequities. As surrounding or nested administrative bodies manipulate these locales as political objects, we discuss how change in each development market relates to categorical and policy norms that support strategy and administration. First-principle methods for investigating this hypothesis in Imizamo Yethu include a literature review, interviews with community stakeholders, long-term in situ observation, and morphological study from aerial photography. We present historical literature, results from stakeholder workshops, and results of an electronic monitoring project to discuss Tai O Village’s case.

Although both cases share operational qualities, nestedness, and transformational traits, the postulation of a single methodology remains impractical. Instead, situating the question of agency as driver in both settings opens other potential for environmental change. The differentiation between environmental stasis and action of stakeholders, the manifestation of different agendas in both settings through leaders and role players, linked to the distinct use of interior (Tai O) and exterior (Imizamo Yethu) spaces to facilitate changes renders the uniqueness of transitional design in centre-hinterlands. Still using the first-principle materials (morphological footprints, social ethnographic compositions, and intervention assessment), the linking of these factors to agency shifts attention to different rationales. Through these studies we suggest that, first, urban conditions complicating container categories separating urban and rural, or formal and informal, exist; second, that these conditions display economic and political entanglement with population centres presented in contrast such that difference can be termed inequity-dependent upon historically-present normative categorisation; and, third, that despite inequity, stakeholders and actors in these conditions present contextualised rationalities which transition-oriented design research works to support or represent.

3. Results

The urban condition is interconnected, and boundaries are ambiguous. However, the methods and registers of spatial assessment are disturbed at the physical edges of centre-hinterlands like Imizamo Yethu and Tai O. This section will explore how these nested sites of difference have dealt with transitional drivers, in spatial, social, and material ways.

3.1. Imizamo Yethu, Cape Town

Imizamo Yethu (IY) means “Our collective struggle” in IsiXhosa and was established in the early 1990s with the provision of serviced sites for approximately 450 families. In contrast with the wealthier, predominantly White, neighbourhoods surrounding it, IY is inhabited mostly by poorer, predominantly Black, residents and according to a 2012 report (CoCT, 2012) it was, along with Monwabisi, one of the two most poorly serviced neighbourhoods in the City of Cape Town at that time.

Morphological analysis of IY over a period of 20 years using drawings based on aerial photography, supported by input from local community members and NGOs, desktop research, and Author 1’s own observations through involvement in IY for the past 10 years, shows alternating conditions of change and stasis. Intermittent aerial photography renders certain transitions invisible unless their existence is familiar to the observer, and is informed by knowledge about key transitional drivers over time.

Table 1 shows morphological transitions across several registers over five specific years that highlight the effects of specific transitional drivers: 1. In 2003, the Niall Mellon Trust built 150 houses that resulted in a substantial shift in the “formal” register; 2. 2010 marks the commencement of the Imizamo Yethu water platform project by the University of Cape Town as described by Louw (2016); 3. IY is regularly affected by fires, but the 2017 fire influenced a number of registers and had a devastating effect on the community; 4. At least four “formal” structures are destroyed because of arson attacks; and 5. The last four years mark the construction of several schools and a new ring road, which will lead to further transitions over the next years.

Table 1. The intermittent morphological changes in Imizamo Yethu over 20 years with a few key transitional drivers as highlighted in yellow (1. Houses built by the Niall Mellon Township Trust in 2002; 2. The beginning of the Imizamo Yethu water platform project; 3. The fire in 2017 which influenced all the categories; 4. Arson attacks on three community leaders’ houses and local ANC offices; 5. Construction of a new ring road and the completion of several schools and day-care facilities). Source: Michael Louw, 2021, with base information from Google Earth.

The devastating fire of 2017 caused a sudden rupture that set off a series of events and agency conflicts. Figure 4 shows the condition of the “informal” portion of IY two days after the fire swept through the area. At least three people were killed, 3,500 homes were destroyed, and from 6,100 to over 15,000 people were affected or left homeless according to various sources that cite governmental spokespeople (De Villiers, 2017; Evans, 2017; Mafolo, 2020). The City of Cape Town established a temporary relocation area on the IY sports fields and initiated a re-blocking process together with nonprofit organisations and the private sector. Local residents began rebuilding their homes on their own at a rapid pace shortly after the fire, while re-blocking proceeded on the lower parts of IY. Conflict ensued between various parties, including residents who supported the re-blocking and residents who did not, which led to arson attacks on local political offices and the houses of community leaders in support. These conflicting rationalities are often based on ‘fundamentally different worldviews and different value-systems’ (Watson, 2003: 396), and are not made visible on individual maps. Assessing the morphology before and after 2017 in isolation belies the major upheavals during that period.

Figure 4. The devastation recorded two days after the 2017 fire in Imizamo Yethu. Parts of the mountain are still smouldering in the background, while residents are already rebuilding their homes in the foreground amidst the rubble and salvaged material. Source: Michael Louw, 2017.

By crafting an overlay of the ‘informal’ register in Table 1, subtle changes in the footprints of dwellings in the upper portion of IY can be seen. Regular fires, rebuilding, densification, government interventions and other drivers cause regular shifts, but there is often a return to the status quo despite attempts at so-called ‘regularisation.’ Space is contested and negotiated and interestingly, key routes and circulation patterns remain over time. In contrast, “formal” areas within IY, besides eventual vertical extensions, are rapidly densified through the introduction of backyard dwellings and other “informal” additions. These tendencies challenge binary categorisation of the formal and informal.

Figure 5. Overlays of successive morphological changes in the fabric of Imizamo Yethu highlighting how key “informal” movement patterns are retained despite regular transitions during the 20-year period of analysis. Source: Michael Louw, 2021.

3.2 Tai O Village, Hong Kong

Tai O Village is a historically Tanka ethnicity fishing settlement in Hong Kong. It was established prior to the Qing Dynasty period and persisted through the Colonial and Post-War periods as a salt-production, commercial fishing, and marine policing outpost (Wong, 2000). In the early 21^st Century Tai O took on an increasing role in regional tourism, especially after a regional ban on trawl fishing in 2012 (Cheung, 2012). Tai O’s agglomeration of pang uk stilt house architecture has seen increased visibility to regional and international tourism audiences.

The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region codified this attention, and associated incentives for related commercial development, into planning strategy in 2017 with the Sustainable Lantau Blueprint (SLB). This document designates Tai O as an ecological and cultural tourism centre (Civil Engineering and Development Department, 2017). Coupled with Government Department constraints on development in stilt house districts (Lands Department, 2021), this document arguably places Tai O in a manipulable position as a resort, categorised as a ‘rural idyll.’ As discussed in Brenner and Schmid (2015), the strategic and media promotion positioning Tai O as a rural setting belie interrelationships on behavioural, infrastructural, and administrative levels, and more closely position Tai O as peri-urban or, as with IY, a centre-hinterland. Workshops and survey with stakeholders in Tai O indicated high incidences of commuter work between Tai O Village and nearby transit centres in Tung Chung and Hong Kong’s central business district. Stakeholders’ voiced frustration with insufficient bus and other transit services points to the fluidity of Tai O’s boundaries, as Village residents are liable to forthcoming tourism development strategy, but perceive its benefits as slow in coming, especially through requested investment in leisure space and a sports facility development.

Furthermore, stakeholders voiced concern regarding increases in Village traffic due to tourist attention. They were unable to substantiate this perceived trend as bus and ferry companies were unwilling to share ridership data. A researcher-initiated pedestrian traffic monitoring project in Tai O quantified this tourism strategy impact as shown in Figure 6 and Table 2. Traffic monitoring reported average passages on weekend days, and days closest to weekends, at increased standard deviations from combined averages. This statistically proves the perceived increase in traffic on weekends during the monitoring period, and suggests that Tai O’s economy remains entangled with surrounding population centres.

Figure 6. Locations for pedestrian traffic monitoring data gathering in Tai O Village. Monitoring location numbers correspond to data in Table 2. Source: Daniel Elkin with background aerial photography by Google Maps.

Table 2. Pedestrian traffic monitoring data from monitored locations in Tai O Village. Source: Daniel Elkin.

The Government’s acquiescence of stilt houses to “natural wastage” (The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 2019), gives background on these demographic and economic impacts of its strategy, despite concurrent acknowledgement of pang uk districts as significant historical and cultural resources, as well as functioning housing stock. Whether this continues the patterns of, “tolerance, neglect, and resumption” Alan Smart (2001) documented is discussed among stakeholders surveyed. There is evidence of recent investment in Tai O that is arguably tourism related. Researchers have documented new investment in cafes, restaurants, and souvenir shops, along with renovations to some stilt houses occuring during the pandemic. This may indicate local response to increased tourism development orientation in Tai O in spite of COVID-19. As discussed below, we suggest this implies commercial rationalities in Tai O that contest the Government’s casting of Tai O as a rural idyll, a construction which continues based on categories established in the colonial period. Instead, Tai O is more characteristically an urban settlement, in which we can construct the slow pace of provisioning and response to stakeholder concerns as inequitable provision and administration.

4. Discussion

The urban is not only about form, type, or boundedness. Instead, the urban is a process, and urban configurations are prone to “relentless churning” (Brenner & Schmid, 2015: 165). Brenner and Schmid observe how “Apparently stabilised urban sites are in fact merely temporary materialisations of ongoing socio-spatial transformations.” This is clearly demonstrated in IY where singular mapping or aerial views do not register change unless local conditions are understood, monitored over time, and where this knowledge informs overlaid morphological studies that can surface transitions that are invisible to some. IY reflects relationships between the legacy of apartheid, current land use policy, government, nonprofit organisations, and the community. It is bounded by lower-density high-end residential fabric and Table Mountain National Park, but it is socially and politically entangled with these surroundings and while community-driven socio-spatial transformations within IY are sometimes rapid, the longer-term socio-spatial transformation of IY is agonisingly slow.

In Tai O, we can argue that the exoticising preservation narrative around the village reflects relationships between colonial history and land policy, survey, and censuses through power. Policies that regulate development in Tai O’s stilt house districts descend from the Crown Lands and 1890 Squatters Ordinance. The British Colonial Government enacted this policy through census and survey to, we suggest, fix the territory as a static object, delineated by racial and political boundaries. The 1972 aerial survey and Squatter Structure and Occupancy Surveys in 1982 and ’84 reinforced these policies, which transitioned into the contemporary period through the Government Lands Department. Despite the Government’s efforts to cast stilt houses and their owners as static cultural artefacts, thereby subject to strategy, research respondents in Tai O evidence acutely responsive decision-making by capitalising their space. Entangled as Tai O is with surrounding urbanity, these investments, sometimes statutorily prohibited, serve as a form of social adaptability. In the absence of radical decision-making to untangle colonial anachronisms, this remains an arguably conservative, if significant, permutation within the Region’s political economic, “hegemony,” (Lee & Tang, 2016).

IY and Tai O, despite clear contextual differences, exhibit similarities in their rate of response to change. Communities in both are able to react quickly to sudden disturbances, and while government responses have been efficient in some instances, ineffective or conflictual policy and localised conflicts tend to result in long-term stasis. Change in these spaces cannot be traditionally controlled in a top-down manner, but can be catalysed. It is clear that more effective and longer-term transitional pathways are required in territories such as these. This paper posits a transition design framework to address visions for transition, theories of change, mindset and posture, and new ways of designing (Irwin, 2015).

5. Conclusions

Centre-hinterlands like IY and Tai O Village arguably demonstrate conditions where provisionally driven models for science and management of cities fall short, due to normative categorisations that support them, as well as logistical and operational demands. First, in both cases, development conditions which seem contradictory under dichotomies between urban and rural, formal and informal, or contemporary and vernacular, emerge from the rational decision-making of actors responding to their immediate contexts. The implicit necessity for provisional techniques to scale and to universally suit conditions within an administrative boundary arguably depends on categorical distinctions of this type, and therefore must face shortfalls in their comprehension of urban conditions and responsiveness of its administration. Second, we suggest that Brenner, Schmid, and Irwin’s framework for evaluating such conditions depends on radicality because its alternative, often resulting in stasis conditions like IY and Tai O, relies upon normative categorical relationships. To varying degrees, these normative conditions can have ethical implications such that just transitions may necessitate radical change in the same way that difference may imply inequity. Centre-hinterlands, therefore, may emerge in cases where the categorisations used to distinguish these settlements effectively evolve into normative assertions against equitable inhabitation of the city.

In IY, as a centre-hinterland that emerged out of apartheid, rapid community-driven transitions based on immediate need often create an illusion of stasis. At the same time, government- and NGO-driven interventions are able to generate visible transitions, but they are often forced into stasis by localised conflicts. In Tai O, the collaborative monitoring research detailed above arguably emerges from shortfalls in administrative resources applied to this centre-hinterland. This is despite the Hong Kong Government’s evidencable enthusiasm for monitoring and other Smart City initiatives. The stasis persisting since the 1970’s will, we argue, require administrative and ownership structures that acknowledge stilt house owners’ desire to participate in the highly commercialised property market of Hong Kong, of which Tai O is a part. The emergence of differentiated types of spatial, social, and economic agencies renders both IY and Tai O as transitional spaces marked by internal and external conflicts. The contextualised rationalities suggest that engagements with these spaces require more radical approaches, moving away from normative or expected outcomes (spaces, infrastructure or economic integration). Moreover, change facilitators may reside in the premise of multiplicities of groups, collectives or individuals that exert change as they see fit, either through a range of technologies or actions, requiring the coordination of – rather than structuring of – such initiatives. This paper argues that using transition design frameworks in centre-hinterlands like these could foreground issues of social justice and equity to contribute towards just transitions.

Contributor statement

Conceptualisation: Authors 1, 2, and 3

Data curation: Authors 1 and 2

Investigation: Authors 1 and 2

Writing – original draft: Authors 1, 2, and 3

Writing – review and editing: Authors 1, 2, and 3

Acknowledgments

Imizamo Yethu: The community of IY and in particular Kenny Tokwe, students and staff from the University of Cape Town who have been sharing the learning in that space, all the sponsors who contributed towards the water platforms, and Johnny Miller for his generous use of the Imizamo Yethu aerial photograph.

Tai O: We gratefully thank Drs. Chi-Yuen Leung, Norah Wang Xiaolu, and Markus Wernli as members of the Tai O Village Living Lab research group. We also thank Mr. Leslie Ho of the Tai O YWCA Community Work Office for serving as community liaison. We additionally acknowledge the contemporary efforts of social enterprises and community activists in Tai O Village, including but not limited to the Tai O Fei Mao Li, Mr. Eddie Tsai Kit, and architect Gary Yeung, who documented the stilt houses in Tai O.

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