Category: Saving Schemes

The urban palimpsest: Part 4, writing the lessons

17 November, 2009 (11:55) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation |

 [Continued from yesterday's Part 3 and the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]    By: David A. Smith   It’s taken three days’ worth of posting to describe the three days’ worth of disaster-recovery reblocking that occurred at Joe Slovo township in Cape Town, and like the reblocking, we weren’t quite done in that interval.  [...]

The urban palimpsest: Part 3, building the grid

16 November, 2009 (11:07) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation |

[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]   By: David A. Smith   Within twenty-four hours of a fire that destroyed more than 5900 homes in the Cape Town informal settlement of Joe Slovo, more progress had been made in community redevelopment than had been accomplished in the previous fifteen years’ of [...]

The urban palimpsest: Part 2, gridding the vision

11 November, 2009 (14:17) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation |

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]   By: David A. Smith   As we saw yesterday, for fifteen years Joe Slovo had been an informal settlement in the Cape Flats that resisted all attempts at structural improvement.  One night, that all changed:   Joe Slovo, March 2009   (A large set of pictures is here, from [...]

The urban palimpsest: Part 1, wiping the slate

10 November, 2009 (12:39) | Cape Town, Formalization, MEEs, Networks, Saving Schemes, Slums, South Africa, Speculation |

By: David A. Smith   The best thing to happen to the informal settlers of Cape Town‘s Joe Slovo township began with a spark:   March 9, 2009 On 9th March 2009, a fire razed 500 shacks to the ground, and left 1,500 homeless.    (Unless otherwise captioned, all photos are from iKhayalami and cover [...]