Serah-Ingrid Calitz
Design as Politics
Sino-African Counterpoints
Sino-African Counterpoints presents an alternative to the copy-paste deployment of China financed Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in Africa. In the business of creating urbanity ex nihilo the SEZ demands the emptying of context, of contingency. Thus, for every Special Economic Zone there exists a Special Sacrifice Zone: a messy prelude marked by environmental destruction and enforced resettlement.
The development of the Bagamoyo Mega Project in Tanzania threatens to displace 11 600 villagers. In response this project asserts the most fundamental of rights: to stay home. It proposes the strategic implantation of three architectural footholds for collective occupation. Each foothold is an exercise in negotiation. Its configuration negotiates the confrontation of village and master plan, its form the typological transformation of the traditional Swahili house and its articulation of individual and collective identities.
Issues of authorship, aesthetics and control are negotiated in an academic process that, by embracing a decentred design methodology, welcomes the contributions of another architectural concept, architecture and architect.
As both architectural method and proposition, Sino-African Counterpoints establishes a framework for territorial negotiation and inclusive planning vital to the future of the Sino-African development paradigm.