The spatial legacy in South Africa has resulted in fragmented urban environments and development in peri-urban areas, such as Mamelodi, which is often implemented with a top-down approach. The focus of development tends to be on connecting these hinterlands to the cities with affordable transportation and trying to satisfy needs for basic services and amenities as quickly as possible. This has resulted in the implementation of solutions that are not place specific but instead tend to be generic models implemented on a large scale. The danger therein lies that projects implemented might not be appropriate to communities and could become dysfunctional and underutilised. Part of the process of developing a solution should be the acknowledgement of the everyday in a specific community; the way in which space is appropriated, everyday rituals and natural development patterns.

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The intention of this dissertation is to reconceptualise what an arts centre could be in the context of Mamelodi West, the historic centre of Mamelodi. Through an understanding of the everyday, what is generally considered a monofunctional program is re-imagined as a diverse mixed-use intervention which integrates the arts into everyday life. The diverse programs relating to the primary end-user client, the Mamelodi Arts and Culture Forum, are interspersed between the various trading and retail spaces and the different residential typologies. The intervention uses an understanding of the street as the primary successful social space and develops a module which allows for boundaries to flex and be negotiated. It manifests as a modular skeleton organised in different configurations across the site which is animated by the incremental infill development and everyday appropriation and activity. The final intervention captures one possible manifestation of growth over time whilst the system and implementation reflects one of many configurations to stitch together fragmented urban environments and retaining the energy traditionally extracted.