West street cemetery (est. 1848) remains. The gridded city of Durban springs from its soil and at their intersection, we see potential. This spatial condition consists of many lives whose livelihoods are dependent on its unique existence. The city is characterised by its geographical and metaphysical siting in relation to the world. Durban,at the fringe, signifies a place of beginnings rather than an end. The ebbing & flowing relationship between the dynamic sea and the static land illustrates this fluctuating threshold. Durban is - the fringe city.

From racially segregated areas beyond the city & across Kwa-Zulu-Natal, people exist at this threshold. Warwick Junction (WJ) is a smaller city fringe. Here, the demonstration of ebbing & flowing intersections and moving lives between the dynamic city and the  cemetery creates the potential for a threshold of the extraordinary.

 

As a place of commemoration, West street cemetery is the remaining fertile ground, upon which the rest of
the city around it is built. A symbol of the departed and a foundation for the potential of new life and growth.

 

Here, we generate new spatial possibilities for the lives and livelihoods currently operating at its periphery. This is not an attempt at problem solving, but a spatial critique of the current condition of the greater Warwick precinct. Joseph Nduli Street is a public space that became strangled between the vehicle and the cemetery. The death of the public realm dictated by the exclusivity of the motorcar predicts a rebirth of the space for pedestrians and the lives they bring. Joseph Nduli Street harnesses this fertility for new growth, bringing together fragments of a collective public life.

 

The city fringe is now a place of enabling life and livelihood. Lives that previously negotiated this space, are given their right to own the city and its streets at the living edge. Commuters stir the fertility of the living edge, exchanging life with those livelihoods modulated along the periphery of Joseph Nduli Street and through the cemetery. The new ground above the cemetery, rooted in the fertility below, generates new possibilities for access to life in the city.