Paper short abstract:

Based on long-term ethnographic research, this paper discusses the concept of the “meantime” as a temporality of precarity. The “meantime” is a common denominator for architecture initiatives that work on imagining housing alternatives in Cape Town.

Paper long abstract:

Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, colonial and apartheid infrastructures persist, making Cape Town one of the most segregated and unequal cities in the world. The city’s majority black working class remains in a meantime limbo—suspended on obscure housing waiting lists, in precarious land and building occupations, and in flood- and fire-prone informal settlements with insecure tenure. Against this backdrop of ingrained spatial inequality and segregation, this paper introduces the concept of the “meantime” as a pervasive temporality of precarity. Drawing on long-term ethnographic and collaborative research with community architects, residential communities, housing activists, and other built environment professionals, this paper explores how these groups mobilized various participatory designs, pedagogies, and visions—such as public housing upgrades, adaptive reuse models, and incremental building typologies—to reimagine Cape Town’s most rigid housing landscape. Working and designing with and in the “meantime” was a common denominator for their design and activist initiatives. The paper discusses whether these “meantime” initiatives functioned as tactical stopgap interventions to imagine and negotiate pragmatic alternatives to South Africa’s long-failed, exclusionary public housing standards or whether they perpetuated a postcolonial political ecology that indefinitely maintains precarious housing and living conditions.