Occupied Futures: Co‐Design, Repair, and the Struggle for Housing in Cape Town

ABSTRACT Since 2017, social housing activists from the Reclaim the City movement have occupied and repaired a formerly abandoned, apartheid‐era hospital in Woodstock, one of Cape Town's rapidly gentrifying central neighborhoods. In the face of recurring threats of mass eviction and a lack of affordable, well‐located social housing alternatives, it has become Cape Town's most prominent and politically contested building occupation. This article focuses on a co‐design initiative that has emerged from within the occupation, in collaboration with allied community architects and civil society facilitators. In the article, I argue that the initiative added another negotiating tool and layer of resistance for creatively opposing vilification, discrimination, and displacement. Foregrounding the initiative's co‐designed architectural models, collective imaginaries, and operative scales, the article critically interrogates how the movement's co‐design initiative complemented ongoing repair practices, and how and whether these complementary activist repertoires could create viable avenues for improved living conditions within this politically hard‐won activist space. The article contributes to urban anthropological research on architecture, design, and movement practices aimed at the broader goal of rebuilding and repairing existing communities in the context of Cape Town's historically most divided socio‐spatial segregation. Throughout the article, I discuss “design” and “repair” as urban political sensibilities, distinct yet connected modalities of creative resistance, that operated as complementary tactics in defense of the occupation.