Design (Govern)mentalities: Implications of design and/as governance in Cape Town

Design is enmeshed in power relations and hegemonies, political regimes and ideologies. These political dimensions are more explicit in architecture and its histories of service to states and empires, democracies and dictators. Political analysis has also to some extent entered into design through concepts such as ‘governmentality,’ a vein of Foucauldian thought that exposes and unfolds how government and policy literally touch and control people through designed forms of governmentality in everyday life. The current rapid expansion of design within and for government, however, is rapidly outpacing political analysis of its forms and implications.

In this research, I am interested in how design operates in terms of governance and governmentality. For example, how does design provide new understandings of – and capacities to manipulate – the interface between the personal and the state?

To explore this in action, I turn to examples highlighted through the World Design Organization’s designation of Cape Town, South Africa, as the World Design Capital of 2014. Specifically, I examine the ‘Violence Prevention through Urban Upgrading’ (VPUU) initiative in the township of Khayelitsha. VPUU is a case that reveals several layers of design in the context of governance today. First, as spotlighted within WDC Cape Town, it can be understood as part of ‘design policy,’ that is, as illustrating a claim or directive about South African and Cape Town government and policy for a local and global audience. Secondly, it is an example of modern forms of governance – in this case, security policy conducted in a ‘networked’ and ‘interactive’ way through an assemblage of stakeholders, local and global financing, models and (govern)mentalities – in which design is increasingly instrumental. Lastly, and the main focus of this article, VPUU is an example of the varied, designed and politically-loaded forms and forums through which governance is conducted in and beyond government today.

In addition to more traditional and tangible forms of design, recognized as part of strategies to control and steer people and populations, design within government and doing governance beyond government also includes less tangible and as yet less scrutinized forms and forums. Tracing this expansion of design, concepts such as ‘governmentality’ can also be expanded for analytic purposes in order to better understand the role and agency of design in government and governance. Physically and politically functioning as ‘governing matter,’ design policy, workshops, environments, infrastructures, organizations and processes should be understood and studied not (or not only) as objects but as instruments or “agents of government.”