6 May 2025
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CEST

Cruel Opportunities in the Apartheid City:
Meantime Designs and Public Housing in Cape Town

LAURIN BAUMGARDT
Rice University

Respondent: Jessica Ilunga, Keio University

As one of the most ambitious national public housing programs in the world, post-apartheid South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) produced millions of standardized, non-participatory and non-adaptable, freestanding brick houses, to all known as RDP houses. Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, it has become most apparent that RDP housing has perpetuated apartheid’s monofunctional urban environments, and that formerly disenfranchised black communities were at no stage given a chance to negotiate and participate in the design and construction process of the RDP model. Although largely silent, absent, or sidelined from public housing policy and design discussions, architects and other built environment professionals and activist collectives have not only strongly criticized RDP’s minimal and fixed design and standard housing model, but have also proposed and circulated alternative visions, imaginaries, and spatial practices to challenge South Africa’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. By researching how architectural professionals, academics, activists, and residents viewed and evaluated the RDP house, and aimed to move beyond it, this talk not only contributes to understanding the microhistories of South Africa’s housing programs but also to how professionals and urban dwellers are rethinking the critical potential of design worldwide, and how they are addressing this challenging 21st century moment that desperately demands new socialities, housing designs, and resource distribution. To address the urgent housing needs of Cape Town’s most vulnerable communities, who continue to be caught in a state of meantime limbo, this talk introduces the notion of “meantime designs” that functioned as social and political counter- imaginaries, and as negotiating devices to discuss concrete alternatives to South Africa’s long failed and exclusionary public housing standards. “Meantime designs,” however, not only challenge but also run the risk of further perpetuating spatial inequalities and exclusionary housing politics.

After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. My dissertation studies the impact of aerial photography on urban design and architecture in the first half of the 20th century, with the Swiss aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer as its central figure.

By tracing Mittelholzer's life and oeuvre, the doctoral project delves into the multifaceted aspects of his contributions to urban planning and the documentation of urban development. Through the exploration of his meticulously captured images of Swiss industrial complexes, towns, and infrastructure, I investigate the role of aerial photography as a tool for urban planning. By analyzing the intentions behind commissioning aerial photographs and their subsequent use in planning practices, the research project seeks to elucidate Mittelholzer's impact on shaping the Swiss self-image and contextualize the Swiss developments internationally. Furthermore, it scrutinizes Mittelholzer's agency as both an author and aeronaut, examining his relationships with contemporaries and industrialists as well as the public reception of his work.

The examination of Mittelholzer’s aerial photographs proceeds from two opposing directions: his diaries, notes and travel reports (the documentation and conception) on one hand and contemporary publications on architecture and urbanism (the reception) on the other. Selected case studies will exemplify my investigations and archival findings.

In addition to analyzing the impact of Mittelholzer’s photographs, I contextualize his figure internationally by comparing his activity, his impact, and his reception with the ones of his contemporaries. In conclusion, my research documents Mittelholzer’s aerial photography as a catalyst for urban planning and modernization in Switzerland. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of aerial photography in shaping urban landscapes and national identities during the inter-war period.

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In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed two men in a dry field holding a bedsheet behind an ascending row of maize plants in Mexico’s Central Valley. On the left stands a student from one of the region’s Indigenous communal farming villages; on the right, India’s ex-pat and México’s first geneticist, Pandurang Khankhoje. One of fifty images recently bequeathed by Dr. Savitri Sawhney to the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca, México, this little-known work by Modotti, Teozinte (Euchlaena Mexicana), (1928), documents a series of experiments in which decolonial Indigenous agricultural science and art activism were made one. Each newly bequeathed image marks an uncharted moment in Mexico’s scientific, aesthetic, and political postrevolutionary development: namely, the emergence of thirty Free Schools of Agriculture. Supported by Mexican modernists Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and Modotti, and run by First Nation’s teachers, the Free Schools were an educational organization that centered Indigenous land restitution goals via demonstrations of agricultural abundance, self-sufficiency, and what we now call environmental justice.

Too often seen as a passive eye documenting the work of others in the Mexican avant-garde who tokenized ancient First Nations aesthetics, this paper argues that with the addition of Dr. Sawhney’s collection both Modotti and her photography emerge as protagonists championing a complex visual politics of living postrevolutionary Indigenous agency and thriving. As such, Modotti’s work with the Free Schools of Agriculture necessitates a rethinking of the photographer’s oeuvre, as she leveraged her lens, published photos, and circulated prints to reclaim the image of the region’s First Nations from the photographic categories of discrimination they had endured in the press, while celebrating each community’s stake in México’s modern future.

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