Understanding Cascoland

Hannah le Roux
University of the Witwatersrand

“If we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.” Michel Foucault

What does Cascoland mean?

The casco seemed Italian, maybe from cascare, to fall. Something tumbling, as in a circus, or the consequences of something being dropped, with pieces ending up scattered around a place. This image evokes a process of chance, even an accident, then the pieces landing, somehow configuring a place. But casco, the noun, has developed more specific associations: in Italian it means helmet; the English word cask shares the roots, and in Dutch, it’s the word for the hull of a boat.

How does the context of Johannesburg’s inner city align with the meaning of Cascoland? Johannesburg is a landlocked site. This city uniquely lacks any river of its own. The only water comes from the sky, in the drenching summer thunderstorms. There’s a nice line about Joburg: “it has a reef, of course, but no diving”. The reef of gold that gave the means to the city has long been built over.
Perhaps the nature of Cascoland as an amphibious object is illuminating. If the hull is something designed for movement over the sea, what happens when it comes inland? This object that is migratory, that shelters, holds, forges ahead in a situation of flux, that contains the bounty of its trip – what happens when it comes out of the water to land on a site?

The site of Cascoland in Johannesburg is at the heart of the densest part of the city. The project provided some sort of urban life raft, and it took diverse groups of survivors from this very tough city on board. Amongst these are the people in the highrise surroundings of the Drill Hall site. Others came from a more usual art audience, curious to leave the suburban calm. One could imagine Cascoland, then, not as something land bound, but as a vehicle for escape. The very image of Cascoland seemed like a deck scene. Boatlike, but unspecific: cruise liner images crossing with those of overloaded ferries. The underground pool, the flapping flags, the siren sounds, the bars and movies. The queues of kids, the chains hanging on the periphery, the life-preserving tyres.

The association of a boat with a project initiated in the Netherlands, which has unfolded at two South African sites, is appropriate enough. In 1652, in a first contact of hull to land, three Dutch ships landed at a bay in the south of Africa, so beginning the colonial settlement of Cape Town. The boats brought settlers, farmers who began the task of establishing a garden, the builders of a fort, and administrators who brought a system of recording and protecting land rights, Roman Dutch law, that remains in force until today.

And so this first casco-landing tied spatial practices from Holland with sites in Africa. The settlers cut lanes of oak trees through the dense fynbos, establishing the first lines of an urban grid. Canals were established to lead water to the gardens and reservoirs. And plots were demarcated, registered, and owned. The consequence was the establishment of a highly controlled spatial order, in which there was no common land, no really free space, and hence no escape from the rule of the state or the owner in the act of settlement.

Over four hundred years later, the system has spread to the whole of Southern Africa. The rigidity of Roman-Dutch land rights had become enmeshed with another system, that of apartheid. From 1948 onwards, the ruling National Party systematized the loose racial segregation in most colonial settlements into an almost absolute order. The right to reside in, or own land in a certain area was determined by race.

Inner city areas like Doornfontein, close to the Drill Hall, became White Group Areas. The effect was to displace many poorer black residents, whose choices are to return to rural homelands, to apply for the limited amount of state owned rental housing on the urban fringe, or to establish their own unsanctioned settlements. At the end of apartheid, the Group Areas Act was abolished, allowing people to buy and live in an area of their choice, regardless of race. But the ownership of the city was out of reach to the urban poor. The 1940’s to 70’s had been a period of speculation in the inner city, so there were many flats to rent, but the costs were high. Nonetheless the demand was great, no only from black South Africans, but increasingly from immigrants, mainly from other African countries including Mozambique, Zimbabwe, the Congo, Nigeria and Ethiopia.

People are living in tough conditions in the inner city. Flats are often subdivided, families each taking a room. And many jobs are found on the streets, mainly retailing goods, sometimes making and repairing things. But there is a constant threat to these arrangements by local government, the absolute owner of public space. At any moment people can be evicted, their goods confiscated, and their very selves imprisoned for repatriation.

As a result, these new residents make urban interventions that by their nature are light and temporary. Without the security of tenure and no way of entering into ownership, they remake the city with informal, ad-hoc arrangements of goods and their own presence. Activities with their roots in both township and rural practices have come to animate the city. Apart from the trading and small businesses, there are social events like funeral society meetings, churches, choir practices and swenkas.

These practices are not a-spatial, they are not merely urban lifestyles. They make profound changes to the visual images and sounds of the city. Their space in the city is found in a fugitive way, and so the making of it draws on the quickest and most immediate material at hand: people’s own bodies, their movements, their dress, their voices, and their capacity to carry, unfold, and occupy spaces.

Cascoland, which engages and celebrates these lively practices, and uses them as urban materials, has inverted proper urban renewal. In the way it considers the city not as the hull, the container, and by not even sticking to the map, the project represents a sort of urban piracy. This much is clear from the frustration with the stifling municipal bureaucracy, the decisions to force open the locked public toilets, to spill over events onto the pavements, and to paint crossings through the impossible rush hour traffic.

Once, in Venice, outside the workshop where they make gondolas, a friend pointed out the ambivalence of a landed boat. While the floating boat is suspended between earth and sky, when it is pulled ashore, and turned over, a reversal occurs. Not only does the hull become a sort of shelter – and there are many places where the roof is formed from the ribs of the boat – but the sky becomes the water, a blue mirroring blue.

Has the meaning of Cascoland been to draw attention to the social fluidity of the city that lies above and around its site? The acts of piracy represents a sort of inversion, where the usual order, of space controlling behavior, is replaced with a more spontaneous and socially engaged practice, in which a space is set aside to nurture fragile and human interrelationships. This is not a case of space merely representing public-ness, or of social practices merely happening. It is rather a situation where both the container and its content are engaged in the creation of an exemplary alternative to the difficulty of everyday urban life.

In this sense, Cascoland is, and perhaps remains, utopian. And adrift, and certainly stateless. Not tied to any fixed processes, and not even strategically directed to any specific destination. But like Foucault’s ship, it operates on the level of the imagination, prompting recognition of what might otherwise be unthinkable in its context.

For me, Cascoland allows us to imagine a city where the borderlines between ideas such as informal and formal slip away. In this city, people’s rights to public space contest, overlap and even erase the rights of the defacto owner. The processes of urban change shift from the building of infrastructures towards the deployment of a host of engaging and lightweight technologies. The traders benefit from new markets of potential customers and a range of economies that condense at a site as leisure, consumption, politics and creativity overlap. Social barriers are erased, and the rights of marginalized people, specifically children, are celebrated.

Going back to the etymology of casco, there is a suggestion that the thing that is broken, that makes the curved shards of the helmet and hull, began as something round. A pot, or a skull. Is the casco, then, a memory of the whole, an indication of the lost potential of some kind of urban sphere that has been fragmented into systems and spaces that somehow are at odds with each other, each holding functions that fail to seamlessly overlap?

After considering all of this, I was let in on the last meaning of casco. In the Netherlands people can buy the shell of a house – a house hull, a casco – and finish it with their own labour using do it yourself - DIY - technologies. It’s been this use of the word that Fiona and Roel have worked from in conceiving their projects. The commercial idea at the heart of this sort of casco involves joining two delivery processes – one fast, multiple, market driven, and the other individual, slow, ad hoc and hopefully cheap. There are other promising aspects to this dual approach, not least of which is the highly personalized outcome of the complete process, and the way that it allows people to overcome the limits of the market, or the state, to provide housing, by exercising their own agency and choices.

So in closing, what does Cascoland really mean?

The meaning seems to lie outside any permanent physical trace: it was a shortlived event. The urban poor are still crammed in their flats, the suburbanites have gone home behind electric fences. Can something so short and fragile have any lasting meaning? Perhaps the record of this publication, along with the memories that small children have of the week that Cascoland came to town, is enough.
It reminds me of something Labelle Prussin has written, after studying the pots and fabrics, palanquins and rituals of African nomads: “a movable structure is not necessarily temporary. What is seemingly transitory and ephemeral, processual and only a body of images, if often, by its illusion of stability, more durable than our eroding stone monuments”.4

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