Three decades after the end of South Africa’s apartheid regime, Cape Town remains a deeply fractured city with little prospect for transformation or systemic change. It is still one of the least integrated and most segregated cities in the world. Based on long-term ethnographic research conducted in Cape Town between 2018 and 2024, this dissertation examines how architects, housing activists, and other built environment professionals have developed alternative designs and participatory initiatives to address the urgent needs of residents living in flood- and fire-prone informal settlements and occupations. Designing in and with the meantime was a common denominator in many of these architecture initiatives. While liberatory promises of the post-apartheid era have been repeatedly deferred, the “meantime” emerged as a temporal horizon for alternative designs, including public housing upgrades, adaptive reuse models, and incremental building typologies. By emphasizing small-scale, imaginative, and participatory models and upgrades that negotiate alternative urban futures and improved infrastructural conditions, this dissertation complements anthropological research on architecture, infrastructural temporalities, and housing struggles. Through an analysis of various “meantime designs” and their characteristics in each chapter, it also contributes to a deeper understanding of design interventions that may reflect potential urban futures yet perpetuate South Africa’s most exclusionary housing landscape.