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The South African Informal City Exhibition : Photography by Dennis Gilbert courtesy of 'Working in Warwick: Including Street Traders in Urban Plans'. -
The South African Informal City Exhibition : Photography by Dennis Gilbert courtesy of 'Working in Warwick: Including Street Traders in Urban Plans'. -
The South African Informal City Exhibition : Photography by Dennis Gilbert courtesy of 'Working in Warwick: Including Street Traders in Urban Plans'. -
The South African Informal City Exhibition : Photography by Dennis Gilbert courtesy of 'Working in Warwick: Including Street Traders in Urban Plans'. -
The South African Informal City Exhibition : Hundreds of informal recyclers pull their trolleys through the suburbs, collecting reusable paper, plastic and bottles. Many store their goods where they live and exchange the materials for cash on a weekly basis. Photo by Tanya Zack. -
The South African Informal City Exhibition : “Mealie sellers and peanut sellers burn coals in braziers and carry these to the inner city pavements where they roast and sell their wares. This has given them the title of ‘firewalkers’ in Johannesburg.” Photo by Tanya Zack.
The South African Informal City (SAIC) exhibition, a showcase of our country’s most relevant and innovative design and research projects at the heart of urban migration, is now open.
The South African Informal City Exhibition is one of the Technical Site Visits offered by the Local Government Programme for COP17, during the United Nations seventeenth Conference of Parties, which runs from 28 November to the 9 December 2011 in Durban. The exhibition itself will be held from 11 November to 11 December 2011 at the Bus Factory in Newtown.
The showcase features twenty projects in five categories: Inner City Informality; In-situ Upgrading; Catalytic Projects; Un-built Projects; and Backyard Interventions.
Karen Eicker, Director of the Architects’ Collective, says the aim is to “open up dialogue and discussion around the critical issues of informality and urban development, in order to further cooperation, information sharing and positive action between policy makers, practitioners, academics and civil society involved in this field”.
“The exhibition will provide opportunities for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, and for existing research and realised projects to become part of a greater public debate.”
Part of the exhibit will comprise of an exceptional collection of photographs that were commissioned for the book ‘Working in Warwick’ by the architect Richard Dobson, and research fellow Caroline Skinner.
The photographs, on loan from the Durban Art Gallery, constitute a unique record of Warwick Junction (a dynamic inner city area in Durban) that visually celebrate street traders’ lives, the role they play in city life, and their contribution to the economy.
Photographer Dennis Gilbert’s approach describes the architecture and the infrastructure in which the traders operate, with the intention of revealing the rigour and intrigue of their daily lives. Lifted out of the book, the photographs inspire interest in the possibility of integrating street traders into urban plans in a way that adds to the vibrancy and attraction of cities.
The SAIC Exhibition is an initiative of the Architects’ Collective, and has been made possible with the support of the Johannesburg Development Agency, the Neighbourhood Development Programme (National Treasury), the South African Cities Network, the NRF Chair in Development Planning and Modelling, and Asiye eTafuleni.
More information: here
