Reshaping colonial cities, African architects reclaim history – and the future

For decades, crammed neighborhoods of matchbox houses and tin shacks lined the edges of South Africa’s cities like grand human filing cabinets: places the white government could store the vast quantities of black labor it needed to keep the country going.

When these "townships" of workers – forbidden from living in the cities proper – got too crowded, too diverse, or too revolutionary, the government would often simply tear them down and start over.

Today, however, these architectural afterthoughts have become the sites of some