Early in my year of work at Jakupa, I got involved in the sketch development stage of the Nolungile Public Transport Hub project, commissioned by the City of Cape Town and Transport for Cape Town. Nolungile is an existing 55 000m² informal transport hub within Khayelitsha Township. It is a huge thoroughfare for minibus taxis, pedestrians and informal traders. At present, the health and safety conditions of informal trade within the hub are highly concerning and the organisation of the pedestrian and mini-bus taxi networks, highly hazardous.
I attended consultant workshops, participating in the discussion of a framework to re-structure the hub. The aim was to consolidate pedestrian-oriented public space and to support efficent taxi operations, with the view to ultimately incorporating existing informal transport means into formal city Integrated Rapid Transport networks. We also wanted to to create conditions to stimulate existing informal trade and to solve health and safety concerns through adequate servicing.
I would bring sketch proposals to our internal meetings to be further workshopped. The diagram to the right shows one proposal that emerged from one of these workshops. I drew up this framework in AutoCAD based on our discussions. It is a ‘conservative’ option in which the existing location of the taxi rank is retained. I developed my understanding of urban scale through this translation of sketches to precise drawings.
Road width calculations.
Some of my sketches to understand taxi movement patterns.
I made a small contribution to the Cape Town Stadium Rezoning Framework that Jakupa was responsible for. I built up a base map on CorelDRAW. The base map was later used in creating diagrams to illustrate propopsed future developments for the stadium precinct. Through my limited engagement with the project, I gained insight into the restructuring role that large scale infrastructure can play in a city. Also key was being exposed to phased urban design approaches where a project implemented for a specific event (in this case the FIFA World Cup), is transitioned into new roles for the long term.
A diagram from the framework looking at the massing conditions of the stadium precinct in relation to surrounding urban areas.
My base map of the stadium precinct.