Dirt, Garbage, Water, and Steel: Architectural Entrepreneurship in South Africa

The profession of architecture (and its academic counterpart) has an exquisitely designed building for most problems—including those insufferably prefigured by climatologists. Few would consider such a fault—for the production of the built environment appears to occupy a center of gravity within our human ecosystem that gives it a coincidental relationship to nearly everything. It is pertinent to most challenges like few other forms of production. This alone affords architects (along with architectural educators) heightened relevance within the cohort of agencies addressing climate change. As such, architects are dutifully educating themselves on the matters of ecology, sustainability, and climate change. However, the professional paradigm remains awkwardly burdened by its necessity to offer an architectural solution, no matter the problem. Architecture is no small part of climate change. But architects interested in addressing the broader complexity of environmental, social, and economic sustainability may find greater effectiveness by assimilating the entrepreneurial paradigm.“Entrepreneurship is a process by which individuals…pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently control.”1 This alone explains architecture’s sub-entrepreneurial approach to sustainability. Architects “control” the resources employed in building, and as such, leverage building resources when addressing sustainability. Another commonly cited definition of entrepreneurship frames it as the process of creating value by bringing together a unique combination of resources to exploit an opportunity.2 Architects are plenty adept at uniquely combining resources in creating value through opportunity—so long as the resources are bricks and mortar, the value architectural, and the opportunity a well-funded client. Certainly the opportunities offered by conventional design, practice, and pedagogy are relevant, if not critically important. But their associated limitations are no less so.This paper, and the coursework that informs it, imposes the entrepreneurial mindset on an otherwise conventional architectural paradigm. Entrepreneurship and Architecture is structured as an interdisciplinary course in which students collaborate on projects of a post-architectural nature in a distinctly challenging context. Most recently, students of architecture, agriculture, construction management, journalism, and entrepreneurship proposed design interventions in the dynamic social, political, and environmental climate of subtropical South Africa. The student investigations of soil conditions, waste streams, water quality, climate change, and other contextual forces at work in the black townships of Mthatha allude to a productive re-orientation of practice that befits the problematic future foreshadowed by recent trends. Rather than preparing students to find a problem for their architectural solution, future practitioners are confronted with a dynamic and complex environmental context to which they must respond with a fitting intervention of some form—architectural or otherwise. Dirt, garbage, or steel—their proposals for soil management, waste stream harvesting and industrial up-cycling allude to a promising future for an engaged and entrepreneurial profession.1. H.H. Stevenson and J.C. Jarillo, “A Paradigm for Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial Management,” Strategic Management Journal, no. 11 (1990): 17-27.2. H.H. Stevenson and David E. Gumpert. “The heart of entrepreneurship,” Harvard Business Review 63, no. 2 (March 1985): 85-94.

Volume Editors
Anthony Abbate, Francis Lyn & Rosemary Kennedy

ISBN
978-0-935502-90-9