6
Models of the Self: ‘Model’ Cottages, Slum Clearance and the Garden City Movement
As part of The Argus newspaper’s Modern Homes Exhibition in 1933, a ‘model’ house was constructed on the stage of the Cape Town City Hall at full scale.1 Occupying centre stage of Cape Town as it did, the house gained an exhilarating ideological charge. More significantly, the exhibition was opened by the flick of a switch in London which lit this particular house up, throwing its light around the City Hall. Apart from the symbolism involved in this particularly English en-lightening of the Cape, it is easy to acknowledge the currents of power running from the metropole to the outposts of the Empire being directly activated by this event. But these were ideological currents too, connecting this house on centre stage with a long line of ‘model cottages’ running all the way back to another exhibition, the Great Exhibition2 of 1851 where Prince Albert placed his own ‘model cottage’ on display near the Crystal Palace. The English had a penchant for cottages, but more importantly, for cottages as models for living – especially for the working class. With the flick of a switch then, we find the agents of Empire in South Africa charged with the task of fulfilling this lineage.
Tellingly, Prince Albert’s model cottage was a fine specimen on public display only a few years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Both offered strong positions on the impact that the physical environment has on ‘species,’ whether working horse or working class. Certainly, the notion that the environment had a fundamental effect, good or bad, on an individual was present throughout the age of Empire and its endless production line of ‘model’ cottages. Environmental determinism flipped between the negative influence of the slums and the wholesome world of imagined ‘model’ dwellings and villages where buildings were considered instruments in the process of proper socialization. From the factory-village housing of Bournville and Port Sunlight to the Garden City Movement, the weight of expectation of building a better society began to be increasingly loaded onto the framework of buildings themselves, testing the very foundations of architecture. The strength and development of ‘the Nation,’ the eradication of crime, instructions in ‘civilization,’ as well as civic duty and moral character, were thought to be formed through the dwelling and environment. Even innocuous ‘beauty’ – perhaps the originating disinterested sponsor of architecture – was co-opted into the service of the common good with the belief that it could transform and ‘uplift’ the sensibility of the poorer classes and bring them in line with ‘normal’ bourgeois values.
The intentional effort to socialize people through specific building arrangements and environments is best summarized by the word ‘instrumentality’ which had, in this case of Imperial Cape Town, the desire to universalize and normalize the values of the English middle class. Exactly how this was to be achieved, as we shall see in the examples below, ranged from the notional to the specific; from written representations and graphic visualizations to imagining Otherness away and literal plans structuring the erasure of Otherness. Replaced, of course, by the values of Englishness. Standish Meacham, in Regaining Paradise,3 investigates the way a vision of Englishness informed the products of the Garden City Movement – its Arts and Crafts cottages and medieval villages – and the way those products themselves were intended to strengthen a sense of Englishness. One of the key points he makes is that the Garden City Movement proponents, through their social reform program, were instrumental in the establishment and reinforcement of an English identity that was particularly anti-urban.4 Not only did the Garden City Movement valorize the English rural landscape, but it tended to valorize a pre-industrial landscape in the vein of the historicist visions of Pugin. Again, in Regaining Paradise, Meacham argues that precursor Garden City Movement projects, such as Port Sunlight and Bournville, presented a ‘sanitized and Romanticized version of life as it had been. In their governance and, probably more important, in the way daily life was dominated by the presence of their beneficent founders, they longed for paternalistic hierarchical relationships from the past.’5 With the advent of the Garden City Movement the working classes of England had begun to find themselves the ‘victims’ of a strange vision of modernity that looked to the English medieval past for models and methods – a ready-made social-spatial order – aimed at curtailing their libidinal energy and co-opting them as role-playing extras in the anachronistic scenographic pageantry of Englishness.
So it is not surprising to read in the administrative archives of the City of Cape Town strongly anti-urban, paternalist and hierarchical attitudes in the instrumentalist housing projects orchestrated by the agents of Empire aimed – particularly, but not solely – at the city’s Coloured population. Certainly the desire to produce, through the instrument of housing, a class of people approaching some of the values of the English middle class was a matter of self interest; the notion of ‘class raising’ could help secure a stable labour force and also increase the level of commodity consumption in the population. As the then Archdeacon of Cape Town, Sidney Lavis, noted ‘… a decently housed, physically fit, morally developed coloured community cannot be otherwise than an economic and social gain to the state.’6
Similarly, the Union Government’s Secretary for Labour noted his desire in a letter to the Town Clerk to have the Coloured population of the Peninsula properly housed
with a view to promoting conditions which will tend to raise it in the scale of civilisation. It is the belief of the Council that the coloured population, if not throughout all sections, at least in a good many sections, has in it the makings of a good class of citizen, and that all sections can be definitely raised under more favourable conditions of housing and other social and educational considerations.7
‘More favourable conditions of housing’ indeed. In 1925 the Woodstock magistrate declared: ‘Crime in the Peninsula was largely due to bad housing,’8 and went on to state that: ‘I am certain that healthy housing has saved many a youth from being inoculated with a virus which has led to his becoming a charge upon the criminal administration of the State. By permitting the contrary, we are sterilising better stocks, increasing low types, and impoverishing national fitness.’
Notwithstanding the imperatives of ‘enlightened self-interest’ the tinges of eugenic ‘sterilizing’ in the magistrate’s tirade brings the ‘housing question’ out of simple instrumentalist ambitions and back into the realm of Englishness and the play of identity politics. As I have shown in the previous chapter, parts of Old Cape Town were considered places of disorder and a threat to the emerging racial order of South Africa. As the ‘mother city’ Cape Town had long had a reputation as a cosmopolitan town with supposedly9 liberal attitudes to race, largely, due to the close relationship between Coloureds or its creole population and the original colonizers. But the territorially-embedded history of these people within the space of the city undermined the agents of Empire’s hardening taxonomies of race and order. The literal and figurative proximity of places such as District Six, and its racially mixed inhabitants, to the centre of Cape Town threatened the tenuous dominance of the colonizers and the hierarchically-ordered project of Empire. The city’s Others needed to be reorderd into a state of being more in alignment with the coordinates of Englishness, into a state less threatening to the values of Englishness. And the city itself needed to be dismantled and reconstructed into a set of suburbs in alignment with the taxonomies of race and order.
What follows is an exploration of how the anti-urban values of Englishness were inscribed into the surface of the city in projects both real and imagined. Our closing engagement with these values of Englishness is an investigation into what constituted – and what did not constitute – the models of the Self and, most importantly, their impact on the remaking of the domestic space of Cape Town into suburbia and thence the remaking of the city’s Others into a more neutered Same.
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE HOUSING PROBLEM
Of course I am not underplaying how issues of health were used to legitimize the early racial segregation of cities in South Africa10 initially with the plague in 1901 and the Spanish ’flu pandemic in 1918. These events punctuated a growing sense of unease for the agents of Empire that there was a threatening Otherness, as signified through the ‘slums,’ festering from within.
Prior to the early 1920s, the domestic space of Others had indeed entered into public debate and concern,11 but it was only in the 1920s that it became a major, if not the, social issue of the time. Aside from Ndabeni – Cape Town’s first spatially segregated housing ‘location’ for Natives – the early years of Imperial Cape Town show a somewhat limited interest in housing and slum conditions, even though cities in England had begun to focus on these problems through the implementation of the Housing and Working Class Act in 1890. Not forgetting the Dutch East India Company’s slave lodge of the 1600s, the Workmen’s Metropole on Prestwich Street, built in 1896 for 200 (Coloured) labourers was the first City Council housing project in Cape Town.12 Apart from this, and a rejected proposal in 1904 for two tenement schemes in Lion and Roeland Streets,13 there is little evidence of public funded housing projects during the Imperial era until the end of the First World War. The projects of the 1920s are generally thought to have their impetus in the country- and world-wide influenza epidemic of 1918 following which a combination of self-interest and philanthropy are thought to have led to public support for slum removals, better housing and the Housing Act of 1920. This support was due to a combination of first-hand experience by middle-class relief workers and journalists visiting the slums in an attempt to investigate and understand the causes of the outbreak.14 Even though the influenza epidemic had the effect of bringing housing and slum questions to a head, prior to this epidemic there had been an increasing official interest, concern and investigation of the living conditions of various communities and places within South Africa and the Cape Peninsula.
This mapping of conditions began in earnest with the Tuberculosis Commission of 1914, which considered the effects and conditions of dwelling space on the spread of the disease. The impetus for, and debates around, the Public Health Act of 1919 and the abandoned Unhealthy Areas Bill c.1920, also illustrate the importance that the Union Government attached to housing conditions prior to the influenza epidemic. In Cape Town itself, in May 1917, an Overcrowding Sub-Committee had been formed out of the standing Special Committee, a year before the influenza epidemic hit the city. As we shall see, this Sub-Committee had been formed almost exclusively to deal with the fairly dense area in Old Cape Town that was known as Wells Square. This Sub-Committee went on to become the Housing and Estates Committee in 1919 and was the main Council organ responsible for the housing programmes of the city.
Apart from the influenza epidemic of 1918, there are other reasons as to why issues of identity concerning housing and slum conditions may have come to a head in the early 1920s. The growing interest in living conditions prior to the influenza epidemic indicates an awareness of the pressure on the existing housing stock due to the increase in population living in Cape Town. This population increase was thought to come from two sources, namely the immigration of Natives to the city following the limiting of tribal land by the Natives Land Act of 1913, as well as an increase in the number of ‘poor whites’ from rural areas due to the effects of drought. By 1922 the increased visible presence of Natives in the space of the city was such a pressing issue the Cape Times stated that ‘there are streets in Cape Town which already resemble Kafir locations of the very worst type.’15 This increase was due to the Ndabeni location – explored in greater detail in the next chapter – reaching its saturation and magistrates refusing to turn Natives out of overcrowded lodgings on account of there being no alternative accommodation for them.16 This period also coincided with the end of the First World War during which little construction had occurred and during which many former dwellings had been converted into stores and offices or demolished for development.17 What houses had been built were largely for the middle class leaving little new infrastructure for immigrants.18 The possible co-habitation of members of different races and the threat to the unity of an emerging White national identity added further complications and impetus to the slum and housing ‘questions.’
The provision of housing – once the dalliance of religious men and philanthropists in England and Scotland – became a state obligation in the UK thanks in part to the Tudor Walters Report of 1917; the First World War had directed the supply of building materials and activities away from speculative housing developments and the lack of housing for demobbed soldiers raised the spectre of Bolshevism as a threat to established social order. In the early part of the twentieth century, the Union Government and the municipality of Cape Town followed the lead of English housing legislation and housing programmes – for example, in the establishment of the Central Housing Board – aimed at dealing with similar housing concerns in the city. And the Spanish ’flu epidemic of 1918, which correlated contagion with spatial density, had the effect of bringing the housing problem to the public at large. It all meant the question of where and how people were to live became a major part of popular and architectural discourse in South Africa at the time.
THE ‘HOME’ AND THE ILLEGITIMACY OF ‘OTHER’ DWELLING TYPES AND BUILDING MATERIALS
During the 1920s, the increasing development of blocks of flats in cities around the country was a noteworthy phenomenon. But more so, it was a cause for alarm, especially evident in the reports prepared by the Architect, Builder & Engineer which were largely generated around social rather than aesthetic concerns. Quite simply, blocks of flats were considered unable to support and cultivate ‘a family life.’19 Exactly why that should be was never explicitly stated and was perhaps thought to be too obvious to need any further explanation or analysis. The lack of a private garden no doubt played a major part in this perception. Perhaps the spatially-compressed transition from public to private realms was recognized in the patterns that flat-dwelling produced and was seen as problematic. Or perhaps flats lacked the litany of rooms fundamental to the activities of homemaking, as we have noted in the previous chapter.
Much more telling was the way in which flat-dwelling was recognized as a direct threat to Englishness itself. The journal noted: ‘In the first place, one of the most disturbing results of the flat-dwelling habit has been to discourage home building, while it also tends to destroy much of that atmosphere of family life which one has been taught to regard as so essentially British.’20 Exactly what phrases such as ‘home building’ and ‘atmosphere of family life’ meant is up for interpretation. They may point to an idea of the quintessential English cottage – a space occupied by individuals involved in quiet activities such as needlework and reading, with the tick-tock of the grandfather clock, and wistful wisps of smoke out of the chimney. Whatever the mental image conjured, what was being implied was that to live in a flat was to assist in the destruction of values that can be considered essentially English21 whereas to live in a single-family detached unit was to continue the essence of being English. To construct the Self as the identity of Englishness, to construct a home required the correct physical backdrop, the correct building type. And the flat was not it.
Another explanation explored in the article was that flats were attractive to members of the middle class who had no family or children and were consequently to be viewed with much suspicion. The Architect, Builder & Engineer saw fit to comment on the increasing claim of flat-seekers that they had ‘no children’ (so as to more easily secure leases) with the following judgement: ‘It does seem extraordinary that in South Africa, a country crying out for settlers of the right type, there should be any tendency or encouragement to check the natural growth of its own middle-class population.’22 The ‘logic’ operating here was that if there were no flats to encourage solo living or couples without children, there would be more English middle-class, child-rich families living in Cape Town. Or the corollary of the statement would be that, were potential flat dwelling and childless members of the middle class to live in single-family detached dwellings, the dwelling type would, perhaps by some necessity of its ‘family-ness’ and garden, give rise to a house brimming with offspring. The article goes on to demand that architects and town planners use all their influence in the development of the city ‘on the right lines for the moral and physical comfort of future generations of citizens.’ Being professionally involved in the development of flats was cast as being involved in something potentially immoral and threatening to the very safety and security of the middle class (read, White and English) in South Africa. And, again, the corollary sentiment would be that to develop and produce freestanding cottages would be to strengthen morality and bolster the dominance of the middle class.
Flats were also, quite simply, considered the very basis for the development of the world’s slums. The Cape Times reported on the 1910 International Town Planning Conference in London that ‘American experts [had] attributed the growth of slums and unhealthiness of many of their cities to the baneful system of flats.’23 As a possible ‘solution’ to the emerging housing problem then, the flat as a typology was unacceptable. As the Durban correspondent of the Architect, Builder & Engineer put it, ‘one of the first principles of a healthy municipality is to house its population well and a community of flat dwellers cannot by any means be considered well housed.’24 Whilst considering flats to have been born out of necessity during a time of limited housing stock, the author went on to predict, somewhat wishfully, that they ‘would die a natural death as time goes on.’
The biggest and possibly most significant condemnation of the development of flats came from the Union Government’s Central Housing Board. As we shall see, it assisted the Municipality of Cape Town in providing funds for the development of a block of flats in District Six in the early 1930s, but considered that to be a special circumstance whilst confirming that ‘generally the Board does not favour flats.’25 To support their position on the matter, the Central Housing Board, which originated out of the 1919 Housing Commission, made the point that ‘The trend in Great Britain is entirely against flats and in favour of separate dwellings and garden plots.’ This deference to the norms and trends of ‘home’ not only illustrates the reality of England as the reference point and source of ideas but that connections were continually being made actively re-inscribing an English identity in South Africa. As a final deference to the authority of the metropole of Empire, the report quotes extensively from Raymond Unwin:
Sir Raymond Unwin, Past President of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an outstanding authority in the world on town planning, states inter alia:-
‘The steady trend of housing progress in this country for forty or fifty years has been towards more open development and less crowding of dwellings. Starting with the pioneer work at Bournville, Port Sunlight, Earswick, Letchworth, and other places, the conviction rapidly spread to all interested in housing that the cottage home with its garden is not only the best form of dwelling for the people generally, but that it is the most economical, and that its general provision is practicable.’
‘Visitors from other countries where the tenement or skyscraper types of housing prevail envy England her cottage habit.’
‘The English people retain their love of individuality for themselves and their family life which springs largely from their cottage homes.’
‘They dislike the “herd” life and the “herd” mind which tenement existence is liable to foster.’
‘No one who has compared life in a tenement block with that in a cottage, with its little garden, in which the children play and where the elders find pleasant occupation and escape from the many occasions for embarrassment and irritation which must arise in cramped domestic life, can for one moment rank life in a flat – however modern in construction and up-to-date in equipment – as comparable to that in the cottage for its value as a dwelling place.’
‘Much may be done undoubtedly to improve the conditions in flats and tenements. The securing of a small open-air balcony as a necessary attachment for every flat would of itself be an enormous boon as would the arrangement of the blocks so that there is, in addition to a place for children to play, some little patch of common garden where people can sit and enjoy a little natural beauty and variety.’26
The report ended with the bald statement that ‘the South African race will not be built up in flats’27 – not forgetting that ‘the South African race’ was the newly represented White race group. This was not to suggest that the single-family detached dwelling was considered to be the sole province of the White ‘nation’ as a way of wresting the recently urbanized poor Whites from the dangerous heterogeneity of the slums; flats, quite simply, were considered abhorrent to any ‘normal’ or ‘decent’ way of living, and this sentiment cut across the emerging racial lines at the time, albeit with differing outcomes.
A report on Herbert Baker’s paper on ‘Town Planning,’ at the Conference on Imperial Health held in London by the Victoria League in 1914, sums up the particularly English sentiment against tenements:
The British people have one fortunate tradition in their favour. This is the principle of the ‘one house one family’ – the cottage instead of the tenement unit – enshrined in their boast that ‘Every Englishman’s house is his castle.’ Fortunately a sound British prejudice has prevented its introduction to any serious extent into the colonies.28
A middle-class prejudice, that is to say. Some 15 years later Cape Town City Councillor, Mrs Horwood, in considering a fledgling scheme for subsidized housing for the poorer classes, requested that the type of dwelling needed to be stipulated in the application as ‘it was not desirable that subsidies should be granted for the erection of tenement buildings.’29 However, two years later, and despite general opposition from other members of the Housing & Estates Committee, she came out in support of a tenement scheme for the city centre30 – albeit on the condition that municipal housing schemes in general needed to be managed and controlled on site by a council employee. This emerging ambivalence over the need to accommodate flats as a typology can also be noted in the communications of the Citizens’ Housing League (hereafter CHL). Perhaps realizing the real insistence of the inner-city poor for dwellings near their place of employment, the Housing Committee received a letter in July 1927 from Bishop Lavis requesting the chance to secure a site from the municipality on which to conduct an experiment involving a two or a three storey tenement containing ten flats or houses. A little more than two months later the CHL reported to the Housing Committee that they were ‘strongly opposed to any form of tenement building.’31 The reasons given were that there was an ‘instinctive dislike … universal among the poor’ as well as the notion that ‘privacy, individuality and home feeling cannot be obtained except in a separate house.’ The intention to impart values of Englishness through housing cannot be more clearly spelt out.
The spatiality involved here needs to be made explicit. With the physically separate house comes the mediation of a separating space that produces in its isolation the possibilities of privacy and individuality. The gate and the garden fence are the real threshold of the house. The tenement, on the other hand, with its stairwells and its spatial proximity of units, was more likely to produce an immediacy of contact, working class solidarity, and communal interaction. As a White national identity was being wrested from the bulk of local history, the possibility of tenements to increase miscegenation and interracial interaction would potentially undermine a unified White ‘nation.’ Even as sentiment began to change regarding the need for tenements, the single-family detached dwelling still won out on account of its segregationist possibility. At a meeting to consider the Central Housing Board’s proposal for subsidized housing, the Mayor was minuted as being
not in favour of the erection of tenement buildings as conditions in Capetown could not be compared with those overseas where there was not a mixed population to contend with. He suggested that for the present no proposals in this direction should be considered at all.32
In this sentiment he was not alone. At the conclusion of Housing Week in 1929, the Cape Times asked the question: ‘Are the slums going to be replaced by model dwellings?’33 Notwithstanding the fact that it reported the successes of higher density housing developments in Europe it suggested that the Garden City approach was ‘more suitable for our population of mixed races and colours.’ Although no explanation was given, it can be assumed that the possibilities of ‘contact’ would be greatly reduced in the isolationist space of the Garden City. The tenement, on the other hand, presented, through its compression of space and closer adjacencies of neighbours, the potential for chance interaction across colour lines and the possible forging of a non-racial working class.
The density and communality that tenements or flats were thought to foster was particularly worrying for the agents of Empire and generally thought to foster slums. Even single storey row-houses or terraces were considered problematic. Although there had been an unbuilt proposal for terraces for the working classes by the Council in 1905, this kind of accommodation had long been considered problematic as a housing type for the working classes by a variety of people. This is borne out in the Presidential address of the CIoA in 1907, wherein Parker urged architects to get more involved with the design of working class houses.
If one were asked what is the worst kind of building we have in the city to-day? I think the answer would be ‘The dwellings of the labouring and working classes.’ This class of building has never received proper attention in this town, and the demand for houses of this kind, during the recent time of prosperity, created whole rows and streets of them, very little better than the old style of houses.34
Before leaving this section on the flat, the tenement, and the terrace as the ‘wrong’ model for the Self, note that the antipathy toward any dwelling that was not in some general sense a replica of the English cottage and its low density extended to the use of building materials and construction techniques in general. Again, that Cape journal of architectural Englishness, the Architect, Builder & Engineer, flew the flag of Empire in an article on Chinese houses. Here George Cecil found it curious that the Chinese had not ‘been taught a lesson’35 and taken up European designs and methods given the immediate availability of the European examples in Hong Kong and elsewhere: ‘The houses in the treaty settlements show the latest in Western architecture; those which form the adjoining native quarter might have been built six hundred years ago.’36
This antipathy to strange building types and construction techniques was especially true of those materials considered to be ‘temporary’ – notwithstanding the aesthetic crime perpetrated by corrugated iron users. Another excerpt from an article in the Architect, Builder & Engineer – un-ambivalently titled ‘Freak Houses’ – is a good illustration of this:
Recently there has been some discussion in the Press, both overseas and here, of cheaper methods in building houses, and someone has put forward the suggestion of adopting a Japanese idea of erecting paper houses; to make them more or less weather-proof they would have to be oiled. This scheme seems to have a certain amount of popular fancy, and the result is there are all sorts of amateurs bringing forward suggestions for cheap houses, varying from brick to pise and in the intermediate stages are glass, wood, iron, tin, asbestos, oiled silk, etc., almost varying from the present state to the snow hut of the Eskimos. There is no getting away from the fact that wherever one may go there are oddly built houses, but they do not conform to any idea of stability. Whilst they may meet a present need or a hollow pocket they are not buildings in the true sense of the word, even though they may conform to an architectural setting as far as the surrounding background is concerned. To any one who has visited Bakoven, Clifton, and Melkbosch Strand and one or two other seaside resorts, it is really appalling to see the weird erections and they are likely to last for some time before they are pulled down. All credit may be given to the owner for doing the best he can on a limited purse, purely from an artistic and serviceable view-point, but the fact remains that many of these buildings are solely temporary, and may therefore be classed as freak houses.37
The quote illuminates some of the values associated with Englishness and architecture. For example, the title ‘Freak Houses’ and the notion that they were held in ‘popular fancy’ echoes the suggestion that there was a certain fascination with these Other building materials. Yet it also hints at a kind of repulsion at their deformities, the reflection of the Home disfigured – in line with the fascination Englishness held for the deformities of London’s ‘Elephant Man’ and other East End horrors. The hierarchical arrangement of building materials, from the most ‘stable’ brick to the most ‘unstable’ mud, is particularly interesting given the general association of mud with Native dwellings – indigenous building techniques were obviously not valid answers to the housing question. The phrase ‘buildings in the true sense of the word’ is perhaps key in the above quote because it captures the polarity of legitimacy and illegitimacy that operated within the value judgements made of all dwellings. This was not to say that the idea of experimenting with new or old technologies was not actively considered, as it was in the housing programmes underway in England.38 Indeed, the Central Housing Board occasionally made overtures to that effect, yet always condemned materials other than ‘solid’ brick, and occasionally, allowing concrete into the mix.
COMPETITIONS, EXHIBITIONS, MODELS AND PUBLIC EVENTS
On Saturday 12 August 1929, a lorry and a motorcar were driven through the streets of Cape Town (Figure 6.1). The lorry, carrying a ‘dilapidated tin hut’39 culled from the wilds of the Cape flats, was a point of ridicule and shame. The motorcar, on the other hand, was re-crafted into a kind of twee cottage-on-wheels with the Afrikaans phrase ‘Wat Die Volk Nodig Het’ (what the people need) painted on the side. Despite the choice of language, the spectacle was all about staging Englishness. The Cape Times ran a caption interpreting the Afrikaans phrase as ‘What Many Need – A Model Cottage’ – a conviction much stronger than the flimsy board the model of the ‘model’ was made of; the ‘flimsy’ corrugated iron shack was ironically more solid and real than the ‘brick’ cottage draped over the sides of the car. Both were part of a parade, part of the ‘Housing Week’, organized by the City Council who had turned the interior of the City Hall into a spectacle of horror and hope. Charities and other interested organizations decked the interior of the City Hall with depictions of slum dwellings painted on canvasses. Films of slums and slum life ran constantly. Although the City’s Public Health and Building Regulations Committee (PH&BRC) had been promoting Health Weeks during the 1920s (keeping in line with themes generated in London),40 this was the first event focused specifically on slums and housing. The Housing Week, given much credence at the official opening ceremony by the attendance of Princess Alice and Dr Malan – the Minister of the Interior and Education and apartheid South Africa’s first Prime Minister in 1948 – pointed to the perceived seriousness of the housing problem in ruling circles. Yet again, the cottage as ‘model’ was the star of the show.
6.1 Cape Town Housing Week parade – from shacks to model cottages
6.2 Central Housing Board, Report dated 31 December 1920, plan Type 1, three-roomed semi
In as much as the ‘model cottage’ floated around the streets of Cape Town in parades, it also haunted other representations and contexts such as the Central Housing Boards’ first annual report of 1920. Here, as Annexure C of the report, was a set of model plans for adequate house types prioritized for funding (Figure 6.2). They were not exactly blueprints for municipalities as much as models against which municipal engineers and architects might evaluate their own designs before applying to the Central Housing Board for financial assistance.
These were sent to all municipalities in South Africa in a memorandum.41 The plans were all semidetached dwellings – a minor compromise by the Board over the cottage as the ‘correct’ way of living – specifically restricted to single-family units with a minimum of three rooms. The labelling of the plans scrupulously prescribes activities and functions as an antidote to the motley undifferentiated character the official gaze ascribed to the domestic space of Others.
But it was in competitions for ‘ideal’ or ‘model’ homes, often sponsored by newspapers and journals, that the ‘model cottage’ was established as the ‘correct’ manner in which to live. Newspapers even sponsored garden competitions.42 The winning entries are all single-family detached units and the designs tend to be focused on achieving this ideal without undue financial and cultural compromise.
One of the earliest was the Cape Argus