Modernity and Modernism in Everyday Life – South Africa and Australia in the Twentieth Century

How do we live? How does our immediate infrastructure work, as house, and home? The worlds we inhabit have older historic contours, but much of our lived world today is made by postwar modernism. We speak easily of Fordism, in public life, but there is also something parallel, like domestic modernism, in the home. In this project we seek to compare cities like Cape Town, Johannesburg and Melbourne, looking to discern patterns of urban and suburban development, but also looking inside, indoors. These patterns include project housing, following the template of Levittown, and raise various issues including the nature of racial and security regimes, as well as matters of aesthetics and habitus, the way we actually use space.