Hey!

Finally some time to update my blog again!

I hope you are all doing fine??? We are very busy, a lot of work for university, but it's very interesting! Especially our research visits to Mamelodi. Last week we visited Mamelodi 4 times! We talked a lot to the people, went inside their houses to see how they lived, ... Sometimes the situation is really poor, we visited for example a hostel complex which was completely built with asbestos panels...

On the other hand you also have many people living in matchboxes (by way of speaking) and they are very happy with what they have, because most probably they lived in the informal settlements before.

Our site for our design project is very interesting. It's a transport node on the border between the 2 townships Mamelodi and Nellmapius. Only the link has never really been established and the environment has never been developed. So now we actually just finished designing an urban framework for the site in which we established several links on different levels (physical, educational, residential, transport, industrial, heritage) wich makes it quite interesting!

Now we need to design a housing development whithin this framework. So basically we choose 1 block of the framework which we will fully design.

I chose to establish a new pedestrian tunnel under the tracks as a physical link, which is also used as a sort of history museum/architectural walk and which incorporates some existing nice buildings that aren't being used momentarily, except for some homeless people who are living in there. How I will link that to housing is still a big question mark, but we'll figure it out. In 2 weeks time the design must be finished anyway so not too much time to think about it anymore.

2 weeks ago we visited downtown Pretoria again. This was very interesting. We visited a Mosque and a Hindu temple. It was interesting to see how they were pulled out of their original context and just implemented in the urban framework of the city of Pretoria (which is very American).

Well that's all again for today folks!

Hope to hear from you soon!

Bye!