Abstract

Xivandlahina (Our Space) is a landscape architecture project set in the heart of Polokwane’s Central Business District (CBD) in Limpopo, South Africa, a place defined by vibrant economic activity, cultural diversity, and infrastructural inequality. The proposal responds to the everyday realities faced by women in South African cities, where the legacies of apartheid planning, socio-economic marginalisation, and inadequate public infrastructure continue to shape spaces that often feel unsafe and exclusionary. The project asks how an Afrocentric, women-centred design approach can reimagine public space as a civic infrastructure of care, identity, and ecological renewal.

The aim is to create an inclusive urban landscape that addresses both the tangible and intangible dimensions of safety, visibility, belonging, economic opportunity, and the pressures of time and care work, while also restoring the city’s ecological systems through nature-based solutions. Here, safety is reconceptualised as more than protection: it becomes a condition of dignity, comfort, and opportunity shaped by everyday experience. The proposal translates this idea into a coherent urban framework that balances unity and diversity, repetition and variation, openness and enclosure, to support both orientation and delight. Women’s lived experiences are translated into spatial strategies that make room for movement, gathering, trade, and cultural expression. Programmatic elements such as shaded market spines, storytelling plazas, and learning corridors invite everyday acts of presence and participation, strengthening women’s visibility and agency in public life.

The project builds on lessons from co-created, nature-based prototypes developed in Mabopane, Tshwane, which showed how collaborative design can foster stewardship and adaptive management. The resultant insights shaped both the technical and social strategies in Polokwane, ensuring that participation and ecological care are embedded within the design process itself. The design proposal covered in this report weaves together water-sensitive infrastructure, climate-responsive materials, and culturally grounded spatial typologies into a system that is as functional as it is symbolic.

Here, Afrocentricity is understood not as a style but as a way of reclaiming spatial agency, designing from within local culture, knowledge, and rhythm, within an African city. Women are not seen as passive beneficiaries but as central actors in shaping and sustaining urban life. In this way, the proposal offers a framework for inclusive transformation, positioning landscape architecture as a restorative and emancipatory discipline, one capable of aligning social justice, ecological performance, and cultural belonging within South Africa’s evolving urban fabric.

Keywords: Gender-inclusive design, Afrocentric urbanism, Cultural identity, Co-created nature-based solutions (NbS), Ecological urban regeneration