Emergence and complexity: Designing a fire station for informal settlements

Abstract

Though South African apartheid has been over for almost thirty years, the effects of systemic discrimination and government corruption have continued into the present, as hundreds of thousands of people live in informal settlements, unplanned and unincorporated areas of the city that do not comply with local planning and building regulations.

The territory covered by informal settlements brings its own unique issues regarding the health and well-being of the community, especially when it comes to the spread of deadly fires. Makeshift houses made of corrugated metal, wood, and plastic are packed together with no running water, haphazard electric lines at overcapacity, and open containers of gasoline that power many of the inhabitants' stoves. Combine these fire hazards with community mistrust of local fire responders from days' past and the inability for responders to reach the jungle-like conglomeration of metal shacks, and you have a dangerous risk of unstoppable fire spread. Every year fires destroy parts of the informal settlements, killing hundreds and sometimes thousands of people and displacing thousands more.

To address these issues, a design for a new fire station was requested for the area of Orlando West in Soweto, a township of Johannesburg. The needs of the fire station were two-fold: first, to reduce the ignition and spread of fires by not only responding to fires after they are started, but also by teaching fire safety within the community, and second, to cultivate a collaborative relationship between fire responders and informal settlement inhabitants. This was no easy task, however. A fire station that can achieve these goals needed a design which was highly efficient and functional, responsive to needs both within the fire station itself but also the settlements at large, and most importantly, open and welcoming to the community it plans to serve.