Simone le Grange
Tekton
Tekton: Volume 12, Issue 1, June 2025
pp. 08 – 33
Simone le Grange is a South African Architect and Urban Designer, with almost thirty years of experience in teaching and practice. Simone has always viewed her work as political. She is interested in the ways in which architecture and urban design can do more than meet the needs of an initial brief, and where innovative spatial design is not dependant on budget. Through her work she is concerned with the social project of architecture. She is based at the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
simone.legrange@uct.ac.za
ABSTRACT
Cape Town, South Africa is known globally to be one of the most naturally beautiful cities in the world. Yet looking more closely, it is an Apartheid city, and it is a postcolonial city. Understanding the architecture and urbanism of Cape Town in terms of displacement and dehumanisation, two terms theorised by Frantz Fanon, helps to locate the urban problems of Cape Town in the postcolonial discourse. South Africa has undergone over three hundred years of colonialism and then a further fifty or so years of apartheid, in some ways a crueller and more intense form of colonialism. Thirty years after the first democratic elections, the gap between rich and poor has increased, and displacement and dehumanisation seem to be permanent fixtures in the urban experience of most Capetonians. Some hope can be found in the inter-disciplinary work of architects, advocacy groups and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), their work has begun to produce results. But without substantial governmental support, this progress will remain small and slow.
KEY WORDS
Social Change, Spatial Justice, Architecture & Social Change, Cape Town
