[Design Indaba conf] Making our spaces more humane

Architect Mokena Makeka believes designers need to find a way to make design service the world. Cities are in crises and design can be part of the solution to creating more sustainable environments.

Accessible

Makeka calls for public spaces to use architecture that makes these buildings and their environs accessible to the people who should benefit from them. He cites as an example a rail police station he was commissioned to build a few years ago.

He received a handbook from Government on the requirements for the building of such a police station and this included using small windows, powerful iron bars and fencing. The station had to be in face-brick "so people don't see when it gets dirty”. Toilets had to remain basic as they tend to get vandalised.

Makeka decided a police station needed to be more humane than the handbook prescribed. He painted it white - if it's dirty, clean it - take responsibility for your workplace, he argued. He put in large windows, and a braai area where officers could take smoke breaks, and decent toilets.

He didn't put up a fence, as the building exists within a community and should be part of the public domain. The interaction between the building and its workers, and between the officers and the visitors, all needed to be changed by becoming more humane. Public spaces, he argues, needs a sense of civic pride, if you expect the citizens to feel likewise.

Be more tolerant

Marc and Sara Schiller of the street art blog Wooster Collective urged cities to be more tolerant of street art, arguing it often changes city spaces for the better. They have found that street artists often produce their art to beautify ugly spaces, as a statement about the proliferation of advertising in the public space; they themselves use it as a form of mass media to comment on issues they believe relevant and to simply make people smile.

Why do we tolerate millions of billboards, banners and street pole ads but not public art, they rightly asked?

The Schillers showed delegates lots of work from Europe, the States and some work from South America. They talked a little about “rage” but I didn't notice any in the work on display. It was urbane and smart.

Breath of fresh air

Local street artist Faith47 was a breath of fresh air, if a nervous speaker. She believes street art is an honest reflection of society and believes street art speaks for the people.

"Street art is for people that doesn't go to galleries," says Faith. Her work, ironically, can also be viewed in galleries.

But, for her, street art is about the interaction between people and spaces that often challenges stereotypes. Juggling multiple worlds, as we all do, makes her art more honest and vulnerable than it might otherwise have been. And her message all the more relevant to our mother city.