Space, power and the body - the civil and uncivil as represented in the Voortrekker Monument and the Native Township Model

The relationship between space and power in pre-democratic South Africa was deliberately inclusive of some and excluded the other through its nature, location, ordering and limits. The thesis has as its focus this process as it pertains to two projects of the mid-20th century South African urban environment: the Voortrekker Monument and Native Township Model. Conceived in 1938 at the centenary of the Great Trek, the Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, designed by Gerard Moerdijk, was inaugurated on 16 December 1949. It was built to serve as a reminder to coming generations of the history and significance of the Great Trek it also served as a shrine of the Afrikaner nation. A year later the Group Areas Act of 1950 became the decisive law to lay down the principle of racial division and isolation and the Minimum Standards of Accommodation were accordingly racialised when, in 1951, they where modified for non-European housing, thereby establishing that a different minimum standard applied to the white and non-white population. In response the National Building Research Institute developed the Native Township Model as a response to the urban native housing problem. Kwa-Thema, developed by the Municipality of Springs, was the first black township based on this model. This thesis aims to define, investigate and understand the elationship between the concepts of space and power through a theoretical framework developed from the intersection of architecture, philosophy, cultural theory and social theory. The reading and representation of the Voortrekker Monument and Native Township Model as spatial works/histories, when examined through this theoretical lens, allow for their location/re-interpretation. The study puts forward new knowledge on the relationship between conceptualisations of space and power and their practical applications in architecture: how power worked through space within the political period of apartheid and how space was made an object of the exercise of power. It contributes to the post apartheid discourse on apartheid architecture and planning in the South African public domain