South Africa: Re-imagining the Inner City at Africa’s premier urban cultural festival

Memory & Resilience
From 3 to 5 May the conference WeTheCity: Memory & Resilience, hosted by the South African Institute of Architects and the University of Pretoria (UP), dealt with issues of design and practice concerning environmental potential, (shared) cultural heritage and human settlement world-wide. At the request of the UP, Marieke Kuipers (Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands/Delft University of Technology) presented a paper and participated in a panel discussion on urban heritage strategies.

Exhibition on Pretoria Inner City
The conference was accompanied by the exhibition Pretoria Inner City: Formation and Transformation, partly funded by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Pretoria, and displaying a selection of rare architectural drawings from the UP faculty's archives. The drawings illustrate the complex layered history of the Central Business District centred around Church Square, for which various Dutch-born architects have made designs. A large-scale 3D-printed model of 24 city blocks was also presented.

Masterclass
No less than 70 participants of the associated Masterclass ‘Re-imagining the Inner City’ considered future possibilities for the adaptive reuse of (shared) built heritage. They received an intensive crash course (partly based on the experiences of the Dutch) on detecting shared heritage values as a guide for designing for an integrated and inclusive urban development.