Tariq Toffa

From the ‘Introduction’ to the volume by the editors:

“What is or should architecture and architectural research concern itself with in a globalized, contested twenty-first century? This question drives Tariq Toffa’s architectural pedagogical practice at the University of Johannesburg. Chapter 3, entitled ‘How to draw a line when the world is moving: Architectural education in times of urgent imagination’ by Toffa, argues that architecture’s contemporary purpose is to produce agency rather than products. Arguing that globalization neglects the social, Toffa contends that an ethical imagination in drawing is needed to generate new visions and voices. Drawing from Arif Dirlik’s argument about the inseparability of the aesthetic and the social, Toffa exposes the power relations inherent in Euro-American-centric ‘visibility’ as having a significant influence on architectural design pedagogy and spatial designers. Through speculative, mixed-media drawing work, promoting a dialectic method and working explicitly with difference, Toffa’s studios explore research inquiries and conditions informed by methodological tactics of ‘voicing’, ‘multi-modality’, ‘siting (surfacing)’, ‘spaces of publics’, ‘territory’, ‘perspective’ and ‘reflexivity’. Noting the recent shifts in sociology and art history, where ‘sociological reflexivity’ is used as a research tool (d’Oliveira-Martins 2014: 193), the aim of Toffa’s and his students’ pedagogic work is to refocus an ethical imaginary that transcends and re-writes disciplinary and racial conventions through site-specific actions. Drawing can make social power relations visually tangible and Toffa’s essay makes an original contribution by presenting new drawing practices for research that decolonizes and emancipates space and architectural education.”

(Troiani & Ewing 2021, Introduction: Visual research methods and ‘critical visuality’, in Troiani, I. and Ewing, S. (Eds.), Visual Methodologies in Architectural Research. Intellect publishers, 2021.)

In the chapter I explore and enunciate on how deeply and inseparably imbricated the built environment disciplines have been, and remain, in their long historical construction as colonial, imperial and ‘western’-centric formations, and why there remains a lack of self-critique of the nature of architectural thinking, practice and agency on a fundamental level.

In the South African context, the architectural mainstream typically displays a thinly-stretched emphasis on designed objects, with relatively marginal attention directed toward a deeper understanding of the social and cultural field out of which these emerge, the discourses upon which these are based and the positionality of the authorship which shapes it. Without the intellectual work required to understand (post)apartheid–colonial conditions at a deeper level, and consequently how built environment disciplines may chart ‘an-other’ way, one effect of the marginalisation of more critical scholarship in favour of a notion of design process and product is that both have suffered.

In the chapter I argue that disciplinary spaces of education have a responsibility much broader than conventionally understood. New, integrated forms of theory are necessary not only for disciplines to understand the (post)colonial societies in which they exist, but likewise to also understand themselves. This may assist them not only to be more capable of speaking to their society, but also to not continue reproducing the worst of it as falsely-conceived islands of excellence. Architecture like many other disciplines in the academy cannot remain resistant or indifferent to this because they are already implicated – whether this fact is acknowledged or not. What is therefore required of the disciplines is not to shy away from social fissures discretely and incoherently and consign them to a zone of taboos, but rather the reverse: to more deeply understand the ways in which these are sustained and reproduced in other (educational, professional and disciplinary) forms, and to develop ethical and imaginative counter strategies.

Little of the above is possible, however, if there is not a parallel process of developing human agency and authorship. In other words, ‘transformation’ (as agency) on the one hand, and ‘decolonisation’ (as knowledge and praxis) on the other, are intrinsically linked though frequently treated separately or as unrelated. Operationalised, such strategic processes (i.e. ‘transformation’ and ‘decolonisation’) unavoidably meet systems of power – and hence inevitable resistance – at virtually every level.

Through a case study of colonial-era Islam in South Africa, the chapter argues that 'other' authorships are critical to both reestablish marginalized histories and, perhaps more significantly, what those very marginalized histories, ontologies and methodologies have to offer in restoring greater justice, humanity and compassion in a troubled world. Specifically, the chapter explores forms of
empowerment and feminism that fall outside of those normally associated with modern feminist formations.

It has been over two decades since the demise of apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s, yet many academic disciplines have failed to significantly transform and to redefine their relevance, and remain deeply imbricated within a colonial/apartheid matrix of power, knowledge and forms of self-reproduction. The 2015/16 country-wide student protests in South Africa highlighted these failures in a 'decolonial' moment. While the political and economic understandings of 'decolonisation' have been a feature of discourse in the postapartheid public sphere for decades, the 2015/16 protests also posed significant questions about the lack of epistemological transformation. This has pushed academics in their respective disciplines to be more responsible for how they locate themselves in the broader field of power; to self-reflect in terms of ethics and, relatedly, engage the ontological and epistemic foundations of their disciplines.

In this chapter, I consider the 'ethical turn' occurring in the design fields in relation to questions posed by the 'decolonial turn' occurring especially in philosophy, theory and critique. I therefore centre epistemology together with a deeper and more expansive understanding of ethical practice, namely the ethical imagination. I argue that multiple disciplinary 'sites' of intervention in the architectural discipline are necessary, particularly in those with epistemic valency such as architectural/design history and theory, which - as a set of interrogations, propositions and assumptions - has a profound influence on teaching and learning in architecture and related fields such as design. In this chapter, I i) study the structure, hierarchies and relationships of disciplinary knowledges in architectural education in order to identify possible sites of epistemic intervention; ii) explore sites where non-'western', 'non-disciplinary' knowledges from the Global South could be receptively introduced into the status quo; and iii) explore how such knowledges could take root more widely across the discipline toward a 'new normal'.

In the South African context these questions extend postapartheid notions of social justice and redress
with ‘epistemic’ or ‘cognitive justice’, orientated toward building rigorous and relevant knowledge for a
qualitatively more humane society.

The paper is an inter-disciplinary study of the making of race, landscape and the South African city.  Spanning three centuries, it reveals key historical moments where ‘landscape’ was radically reimagined. It argues that a similar radical imagining is necessary today, to transform an untransformed city and social landscape.

The paper was delivered at the conference, "In whose place? Confronting vestiges of the colonial landscape in Africa" (20-21 May 2021) (Session 2 - "Re-imaginings"). The conference was a collaboration between the 'History Workshop' and the 'School of Architecture & Planning' at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

The conference presentation is available at:
http://tariqtoffa.co.za/imagining-south-african-landscape-three-centuries-of-landscape-and-society-in-cape-town/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ehVHMZpgZk

The Dutch (VOC) trading empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought with it to South Africa not only the world of powerful merchant capitalism, but it would also construct a new imaginative geography and order of the land to that which had been known by its ancient inhabitants, wherein the very idea of the land would be rewritten.

Through visual sources, the study analyses firstly the discursive, imaginative, and physical appropriation of landscape as represented in Dutch and British colonial-period maps and pictures in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Secondly it explores the representation of colonial ‘others’ who are depicted therein, and to what extent it may be possible to recover some aspects of marginalised narratives and spatial practices.

Notwithstanding the global similarities among gated settlements, there are also many nuanced local realities. For affluent households, gated communities may result from fear of crime, privatization or exclusivism; but within segregated areas affected by poverty there is conversely also the desire to open up to wider linkages. Gated and ‘ungated’ communities reveal that notions of safety, sustainment of life, and inclusiveness can translate very differently in different contexts.
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With their theoretical underpinnings in American models of inner-city management and development, how relevant are "City Improvement Districts" to the social lives of Southern African cities? Unless such models can become more inclusive of informality and heterogeneity and create places of safety and opportunity for all, they may ultimately only further enforce fragmentation and tension in civil society.
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Understanding the challenges of modern cites as resulting from complex and inter-related factors, the key innovation of Joburg's 2040 vision is to move away from a narrow sectoral approach toward a more thematic one, to which all targeted City interventions can aim. But high-level frameworks alone can never bring such a complex conceptual map into being. Enabling environments must be supported on a number of levels, as they filter knowledge both 'upwards' and 'downwards', build interdisciplinary capacity, and value creativity and spatial thinking.
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Cape Town, like other cities in South Africa and globally, has begun speaking a discourse around 'sustainability'. The renewable energy industry in South Africa is already one of the fastest-growing in the world, but increasingly a balance will need to be struck between returns for the private sector investment required and the needs of the broader society. If left unchecked, 'green' ventures may well turn into a new kind of hegemony, justifying further investment in the wealthiest areas at the expense of the poorest.
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Th e Dutch (VOC) trading empire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought with it to South Africa not only the world of powerful merchant capitalism, but it would also construct a new imaginative geography and order of the land to that which had been known by its ancient inhabitants, wherein the very idea of the land would be rewritten. Many aspects of this new geography would be refl ected in representation during VOC rule in the Cape colony, in its maps, pictures and drawings. Within this picturing of the land, the rival indigenous presence as well as the colony’s non-settlers inhabitants—both of whom formed colonial ‘others’—would also be depicted; although typically this visibility would be carefully measured and managed in complex ways in both offi cial and popular artistic representation. While offi cial colonial and apartheid archives in South Africa lack suffi cient, meaningful representation of marginalised groups such as blacks, slaves, Muslims, and indigenous pe...