Design-led innovation brings city together in solving urban issues
• New training institute puts lessons learned in Cape Town into practice
Many people think that Cape Town, where I live and work, does not feel like an African city. This is because there are two Cape Towns — one framed by Table Mountain straddling the peninsula, sandy beaches, fashionable design quarters, the waterfront, Long Street bars and restaurants, and luxury seaside and mountain-hugging suburbs.
The other Cape Town stretches away from the shadow of the mountain into the sprawling sandy plains of the Cape Flats, which are dominated by informal settlements and highdensity populations.
The unAfrican feel of tourist and suburban Cape Town is largely a legacy of apartheid design and planning, which was very successful in achieving its goals of dividing citizens along racial lines and excluding black communities from access to the resources concentrated near the mountain and harbour.
This apartheid legacy is reflected in the continued spatial separation of communities and disparate levels of access to services and opportunities.
Its consequences are still felt in the service delivery protests that flare up in the townships and the continued contestation around land.
During my three years as a director of design-led innovation in the city administration (from 2012 to 2015) we attempted to change the legacy left by apartheid planning by adopting a process of co-design and cocreation, to help ensure that the city’s plans and delivery took better account of the needs and experiences of all its citizens.
This process leveraged the city’s annual allocation for independent ward improvements to each of its 111 wards throughout the metropolitan area. Our design-led innovation team worked with residents of 81 wards over 18 months, to conceptualise improvements in their areas.
We held design thinking workshops with more than 1,500 residents, more than 500 city officials and designers from all over the city. Residents, officials, politicians and designers worked together to understand the issues that people faced in the contexts in which they lived and to generate ideas for solutions from all participants that responded directly to the real needs and issues expressed by people. The value realised from residents feeling they were listened to, and heard, was palpable.
The process culminated in 116 concept designs that would guide future budget allocations and spend. Most of these related to improvements to parks, public spaces and vacant sites.
They included urban upgrade projects, urban agricultural initiatives, public transport interchange designs, and facilities for arts and culture and sport and recreation. There were also plans for economic development interventions like skills training and trading facilities.
More important than these design concepts was the designled innovation template developed for engaging citizens meaningfully. When implemented, this process can help realise collaboration between citizens and the government to advance a more equitable city in which all residents have opportunities for development .
City administrations have traditionally focused on a “hard city” perspective — the building of infrastructure, roads, electricity, water, transport and so on.
However, the workshops in Cape Town highlighted the importance of the “soft city” aspects — the people who live there and the intrinsic link to the “hard city”.
Cities are made up of people — it is not the buildings, roads or bridges but the people who are its pulse and heartbeat. Developing a city without its inhabitants’ perspectives and ideas is terribly short-sighted.
What became evident from the workshops in Cape Town was that the city administration cannot divorce the soft and hard city needs. In some ways, administrators are aware of this, but they struggle to find the tools and frameworks to practice it.
The key is to create platforms where citizens and officials can engage; where there is a shared understanding that the challenges faced by the administration can be balanced with those of the residents who live and work in the city.
The biggest takeaway for me, as well as for officials who participated in the workshops, is that there is an approach called human-centred design, or what we reframed in the administration as “citizen-centric design”. It comes with tools and frameworks that can move planners from complex conversations into tangible inclusive solutions (something they had struggled to do in the past). This should be the new form of public participation when developing cities.
This kind of participatory work with communities and citizens requires a 360-degree shift from the top-down “Big Man or Woman speaks to the masses” engagements that have been a feature of government imbizos and community consultative forums.
Working with the people as opposed to for the people requires empathy and a deep understanding of community members’ lives and concerns. It also demands an interrogation of the role of those deemed “experts” who are often in charge of government or NGO policy, planning and execution.
Politicians, officials, consultants and other experts’ familiarity and relationship (or lack thereof) with the local community might constrain their ability to understand the contextual challenges and opportunities, and their world-views might limit their capacity to act in the interests of the people affected.
In July 2015, I left the city administration to start the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town (d-school), established to make this humancentred, problem-solving training available to African postgraduate students, government officials and businesses.
The objective of the d-school is to train and capacitate students and professionals in design thinking as an enabler of innovation and new outcomes that can meet the needs of users in complex sociopolitical and economic contexts.
Training in design thinking at the d-school develops competencies in design-led innovation and practice in working in inclusive and diverse multidisciplinary teams.
Participants in its training programmes are exposed to collaborative empathy in multidisciplinary teams; core design thinking processes and methodologies; reflective practice as a continuing learning process; methodological approaches to exploring complex problems; abductive reasoning for creative problem-solving; and design of human-centric solutions.
The d-school at the University of Cape Town is the first design-thinking academic institution in Africa, following in the footsteps of similar schools at the University of Stanford in the US and the University of Potsdam in Germany.
Design thinking has the potential to transform cities where there is widespread inequity in access to services and resources, like in Cape Town and SA in general, if the experiences, understanding and agency of local people are taken seriously and their participation in the development of solutions is facilitated. The philosophy underpinning our design thinking methodology is that innovative solutions to complex challenges are sparked by the creative teamwork of a diverse range of people from across the spectrum of race, class, gender, discipline, experience, expertise, skills and perspectives.
Taking our programme participants through our designthinking process harnesses this diversity and unlocks the creativity necessary for generating new solutions and outcomes. Students learn to understand the challenges from the perspective of the people most affected and learn, through empathy, to anticipate and evaluate the potential effect of any prospective solutions.
These issues are vital considering the myriad complex challenges faced by African cities that have experienced a rapid pace of urbanisation second only to Asia. Cities’ infrastructural and economic development have not kept pace with the urban influx, creating a considerable challenge for African city administrations.
The pressure for service delivery and equal economic opportunities makes it even more urgent for city administrations to co-create and collaborate with citizens to understand and address their needs.
Future-ready African cities need design thinking or designled innovation with its strong human-centred approach to ensure that people and their needs are at the heart of any solutions.
CITIES’ INFRASTRUCTURAL AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT HAVE NOT KEPT PACE WITH THE URBAN INFLUX
● Perez is the founding director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design Thinking at the University of Cape Town (dschool) which launches on Thursday.