Paul Andrew, who has died in Cape Town at the age of 84, was an architect with a passion for development planning. He championed the then revolutionary idea of upgrading informal settlements rather than demolishing them, as was the norm.
After having major heart surgery at 60 he concentrated on painting watercolours.
While working as a provincial planning officer in Zambia in the late 1960s he helped design a large-scale squatter settlement upgrading programme in Lusaka which was implemented with a $40-million loan from the World Bank.
It was the first project of its kind in the world, and Andrew became internationally recognised in the field of low-cost housing.
After returning to South Africa he helped start the Urban Problems Research Unit at the University of Cape Town in 1976 to address issues of social justice and the need to restructure South African cities.
Using his Zambian experience, he played a leading role in the design of an upgrade for Crossroads outside Cape Town, the earliest and largest informal urban settlement in the country, which the apartheid government was determined to demolish.
The Urban Foundation, led by "Lang Dawid" de Villiers QC and Jan Steyn, used his research and technical arguments to persuade the government that informal settlements could be upgraded into livable places, and that informal jobs done by the residents of these settlements were essential to the economies of developing countries.Andrew worked closely with Crossroads residents, who responded by naming one of their streets after him. He pursued his efforts to upgrade Crossroads and incorporate it into the life and economy of Cape Town while the government sent in bulldozers to demolish it.
In the first confrontation of its kind on South African TV he took on the combative minister of housing, euphemistically called "community development", Marais Steyn, and spelt out with full chapter and verse the shortcomings of the government's approach to urban settlement and renewal.
Andrew was also involved in fighting Group Areas Act removals. One of his biggest successes was helping to prevent the removal of the Paternoster fishing community on the West Coast.
He would drive to Paternoster after work, 150km from Cape Town, engage with the community, do his research, develop his arguments, and drive home at midnight.
He found that government ministers with a vested interest in the area wanted them out so that they could convert their homes into expensive holiday accommodation.
He drew up detailed arguments showing how expensive it would be for them to service this project.
He admitted later that he had exaggerated this somewhat, but it worked and Paternoster lived on.
Typically, he was interested in practical solutions based on extensive research and solid technical arguments that could be implemented and change people's lives.
Apart from achieving results, this was in large part why, although his phones were constantly tapped, he managed to avoid being arrested.
He certainly took chances, however.
He and his wife, Bosky, who lay down in front of the bulldozers at Crossroads while he concentrated on more technical solutions, hid members of the ANC underground who they'd got to know in Lusaka, at their home in Constantia.Andrew was born in Bloemfontein on October 17 1933. He matriculated at Germiston Boys' High, where one of his classmates was the future world bantamweight boxing champion Vic Toweel.
He studied architecture at UCT and development planning at the Graduate School of Ekistics in Athens.
Between 1964 and 1967, he worked in the UK as an architect and urban planner before taking up a position as a provincial planning officer in Livingstone, Zambia.
He spent much of his time in private practice on upgrade strategies for informal settlements, projects for the hostel dwellers' association and writing books and articles on strategies for low-cost housing.
In 1993, following a triple bypass, he returned to his first love, watercolour painting, and exhibited in places as diverse as Constantia Valley in Cape Town; Hampstead, London; and Nieu-Bethesda.
He developed an international reputation as a landscape artist. His ideas were informed by the ancient art of geomancy and contemporary parallels of the Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is a living organism and we are mere extensions of it.
He is survived by Bosky, the daughter of Murray & Roberts construction company founder Andrew Roberts, and four children.
1933-2018..