The 2024-2026 City Studio critically engages the enduring and deepening South African challenges of urban inequality and spatial injustice, seeking to understand their reproduction and intensification and collaboratively searching for ways to change this course.
The City Studio focuses on a 1-3km radius around the Marlboro Gautrain Station, 20km north-east of the Johannesburg CBD.
The City Studio involves a collective of staff and students across Architecture, Planning, Urban Design, Urban Studies and related fields including geography and governance, that has built a relationship with local actors and organisations within the City Studio area in the hope that we could learn from one another and make a lasting contribution. In a selection of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, students are exposed to real life themes in the City Studio area through fieldtrips, transect walks, studio projects. A deeper level of engagement with the area occurs through collective field mapping, design-build initiatives, supervised undergraduate and postgraduate research and postdoctoral study.
The area, in particular the Jukskei River with related challenges such as wastewater management, flooding and relocation, has attracted university researchers over the past decade and more, providing a valuable knowledge base of the shifting socio-spatial environment. The City Studio builds on these studies and, through empirical engagement, draws extensively on local knowledge. The City Studio is also attempting to create an archive of this knowledge that will be accessible to the local community.
Through collaboration with the Gautrain Management Authority, the City Studio uses the Marlboro Station parking area, a venue that is easily accessible to local residents and actors, as a space for workshops and discussions. Through these engagements, we initially sought to support students, local communities and actors at various levels to realize an innovative, realistic and transformative vision for the diverse areas surrounding the Marlboro Station. As our understanding of the area and its complex dynamics deepens, we have become more attuned to the challenges local actors navigate and have become more measured in what we believe the City Studio may achieve.
To facilitate the initiatives mentioned above, we have relied on a variety of funding sources, mainly within Wits University. Our attempts to tailor the City Studio to large donor’s interests were not successful. In the absence of a large grant on which to deliver, the City Studio has evolved in a far more flexible and agile way than anticipated. Small funding opportunities, though administratively onerous, have allowed us to follow evolving suggestions from within local, community-based organisations. Through a partnership with the South African Cities Network, we were able to assist the Stjwetla community with gazebo-type shelters that the Stjwetla patrollers use during night patrols. The process of creating the shelters, which included a workshop with architecture and planning students alongside local artisans, is documented through a report and video clip.
While overlapping with many of the other themes listed, Marie Huchzermeyer’s ‘work package’ within the Kelvin-Alexandra-Frankenwald City Studio seeks a grounded understanding of the shifting spatial and material reality in the neighbourhoods of the City Studio. She applies critical and comparative lenses to make sense of the unfolding reality. A further dimension is to relate understandings of the neighbourhood change to activities in political and representative community-based organisations and local government.
City Studio postdoc Dr Paulo Moreira’s research investigates the concept of reciprocity in architecture and urbanism, with a focus on how spatial practices can cultivate mutual exchange and collective agency within contexts marked by inequality and fragmentation. Grounded in decolonial and critical urban theory, this theme centres on Stjwetla examining how residents navigate and reconfigure reciprocal relationships among people, materials, and urban infrastructure, despite systemic marginalisation. Through participatory design-build interventions, the research explores how architectural practice can both draw from and contribute to situated forms of knowledge, care, and solidarity, positioning reciprocity as a methodological and ethical principle in place-making.
Safety Shelters, Johannesburg. Video directed by Paulo Moreira, filming and editing by Noel Chikonga, funded by South African Cities Network, Johannesburg. Click here to watch.
The Kelvin-Alexandra-Frankenwald City Studio is directed by Prof Marie Huchzermeyer, who is also part of the City Studio Steering Committee together with Aneri Heukelman (coordinator in 2024), Nomonde Gwebu and Paul Devenish (Architecture representatives), Muhammed Suleman (Planning representative), and Dr Paulo Moreira (Centennial Postdoctoral Fellow).
