Alfredo Brillembourg – UTT Global Founder / Empower Housing Design Architect; Delana Finlayson – UTT Empower Managing Director; Benjamin Kollenberg – UTT Empower Director & Architect; Frederic Levrat – UTT NY Director & Architect; Khristian Ceballos – DisLocal / Empower Associate Architect; Alexander Creem – UTT Empower Associate Architect; Hugo van Aarde – UTT Empower Director & Quantity Surveyor; Matthew Mann – UTT Empower Energy Director; Ben Nkuna / Andy Bolnic – Ikhayalami Deputy Managing Director; Phumezo Tsibanto – Sikhona-Nathi Community Leader; Danie de Wet – De Villiers & Hulme Consulting Engineers, Structural Engineer; Jeffrey James – Associate Architect & Sculptor; Tashreeq Jaffar – STBB Senior Associate.
The Social Housing Empower Shack project found a home in Khayelitsha through the partnerships of the local NGO UTT Empower and Ikhayalami. The concept is to develop a new open-source housing prototype and urban plan, which could be a model for informal settlement upgrading across South Africa.
Using the existing footprint of the shack and working closely and transparently with residents and city planners, structures are built creating homes, not just houses. We have successfully built 73 homes to date and are hoping to build many more.
We continue to search for support to keep building houses, and hope you can see the innovation and help make Khayelitsha a more vibrant community and culture hub with programmes to develop children and the youth through culture as well as support local artists, arts organizations, and initiatives.
The architecture demonstrates that it is possible to make a space where local and international collaborations can add to the liveliness of the settlement and bring economic development and jobs into the area.
Our design responds to the Townships of the rapidly growing South Africa. The shifting geography of precarious houses are noticeably incremental in nature. Our Incremental housing can be understood as an urban system in the making, undergoing constant adjustment and reconfiguration through testing and experimenting as urban dwellers seek to shift urban materiality to shape future possibilities. These incremental infrastructural conditions across both formal and informal typologies generate both important questions and reveal insights into unfolding forms of urbanism.
Today people are affected by humanitarian crises, particularly those displaced and/or living in camps and camp-like settings, are often faced with specific challenges and vulnerabilities that must be taken into consideration when planning for readiness and response. Urban Think Tank has three points of focus for Re-thinking informal housing that come together within an urban spatial framework:
- From a humanitarian standpoint, re thinking utopia demonstrates how spatial and physical factors create, reinforce or contribute to issues of displacement and migration;
- From a theoretical standpoint, it can serve as a critical lens for understanding the topic
- From a design point of view, it is a condition of complexity, in which patterns of habitation overlap, intersect, and mutate in unexpected ways.
The Empower Shack is an approach that holds the potential to have a great and positive impact on the future of cities globally by transforming informal settlements. To get involved contact us at info@uttdesign.com, we need your support to succeed with this transformation.
