Pool Culture in Crisis

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Professor Jessica Helfand’s design practicum course at Yale School of Management focuses on the water utility infrastructure and policies in Cape Town, South Africa in the context of the 2018 water crisis.  Through lectures by specialists and tours of local utility plants, the first half of the course prepares us to think about water utilities as both physical infrastructure and coordinated policy.  The second half of the course entails field work onsite in Cape Town and an independent project about a given typology.  I focus on the suburbs along the Atlantic Seaboard and their relationship to pools, historically and currently, both public and private.  Using face to face interviews, onsite observation, archival and academic research, mapping, digital modeling, writing, and prototyping, I examine what the pool means in the context of the water crisis and how it may be retooled to address new and changing needs of suburban residents.  The course asks us to think of the city at every scale — regionally as an area with certain climate conditions and agricultural and civic needs; municipally as a distinct zone of discreet governance; locally as a district with particular residents and patterns of consumption; block by block as sets of individual residences; and personally as a human beings with lifestyles, behaviors, and motivations.  It deals immersively with urban issues.

My project took shape in two parts.  The first examined the pool as a site of hygeine, recreation, and leisure in a historical context.  Begninning with saltwater baths and public pools that were built for white families and later designated white-only zones, the research showed that water has been racialized since colonial occupation of Cape Town in the late nineteenth century.  I traced the emergence of the private backyard pool to the moment that apartheid policies of segregation were lifted, prompting white residents to retreat to their homes instead of use integrated public pools.  This history inflects current pool policies, which have caused many public pools to be shut down in the water crisis -- many in historically disadvantaged communtiies.  This work was formatted as a lecture given in Dr. Siona O’Connell’s “Curatorship and Local Issues” seminar at the University of Cape Town and published as an editorial in the Cape Argus, one of Cape Town’s leading daily newspapers.

The second part of the project is a proposal for flipping pool cuture in Fresnaye, the suburb I studied all semseter.  The pool is ripe for reinvention in the context of the water crisis, so the project outlines how it could be converted into a water storage container for use in the event of Day Zero or to power graywater or potable water systems in the house in the service of becoming water independent.

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