Abstract

At the intersection of design practice and social science scholarship, this collaborative project is used to work with diverse parties to design, construct, and study a prototype early childhood development centre (i.e., a crèche) that would start to tackle the biggest challenge to the delivery of early childhood development education in South Africa for those most impacted by colonialism and apartheid: Infrastructure. We along with our partners notably seek to start to undo the spatial inequalities inflecting the delivery of early childhood development education for Black children in South Africa. This un-doing—with our interlocutors who are at the centre of what is going on in ECD in South Africa—starts to shift design and political practice towards consensual and sustainable approaches to doing design, politics, and policy as well as helping to forge new alliances and coalitions in design, politics, and policy. Which is not at all to say that this new politics will do what it is intended to do. With full research ethics approval, and funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), project outputs are as follows: permit drawings prepared with local architects; an article in a practice-based publication; a publication in a peer-reviewed journal (international); one forthcoming book (peer-reviewed). Partners for the project--linked by a series of MOUs--includes South Africa's national government, a large ECD NGO with a national and international reputation, a municipality, a township community. The project is generously funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), an agency of the federal government of Canada.