Former affiliates
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Emeritus Professor Alan Mabin
Alan Mabin is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits and is a long-serving member of the CUBES advisory board. Together with others he co-founded Planact in 1985. Working with three colleagues in the then-departments of architecture and of town planning, Alan established the predecessor of CUBES (then named Centre for Development and Built Environment) in 1995. He directed CUBES between 2005 and 2010, and retired from Wits at the end of 2013. Alan holds degrees from Wits and from Simon Fraser University, Canada. His research explores a wide range and diverse scales of urban subjects, and he has participated in several CUBES projects. His recent publications can be seen at www.alanmabin.org. -
Prof. Christoph Haferburg
Christoph Haferburg has a background in urban, political and social geography. His doctoral thesis at the University of Hamburg focussed on (de)segregation in Cape Town. At the University of Erlangen, a study on urban governance in South Africa (in the context of mega-events and beyond) constituted his post-doctoral qualification. Recent projects focus on sustainable urban mobility, and on urban development through a socio-political lens. Christoph Haferburg is based at the University of Hamburg and has been teaching inter alia at the Universities of the Western Cape, Erlangen, Bayreuth, FU Berlin, Wits – with an affiliation to the last as a Visiting Associate Professor since 2013. -
André da Vila
André is a master’s student in metropolitan governance from Sciences Po Paris, who is interested in researching the use of public-private partnership as instruments to govern informality in the context of urban regeneration projects. He did his fieldwork in Johannesburg for studying the role of City Improvement Districts in the governance of street trade. He also has experience working in a policy analysis consultancy, in the São Paulo state government, in Brazil, and in the evaluation of urban waterfront projects in India.Email: andrealmeidadavila@gmail.com
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Katrin Hofer
Katrin Hofer is a PhD Candidate at the Spatial Development and Urban Policy Research group, ETH Zurich, Switzerland. During her research stay at CUBES, she conducted research for her dissertation project, which explores people’s perspective of public participation in local infrastructure and housing provision in urban South Africa. Building on an in-depth case study analysis, she conducted group interviews with residents of a low-income residential area in Johannesburg, as well as expert interviews with local leaders and city officials. -
Polly Winfield
Polly Winfield is an ESRC-funded doctoral researcher at the University of Bath and Researcher on the Horizon-2020 project Disputed Territories and Memory (DisTerrMem). Looking to interdisciplinary frameworks, her PhD research employs a participatory methodology to explore the ways in which discourses of Apartheid and transition can be (re)produced, recognised or resisted through artistic and spatial representations in Johannesburg, South Africa. Most recently, she has been Teaching Assistant at the University of Bath and Associate Lecturer at the University of Exeter. -
Natasha Ansari
Natasha Ansari is a MCP and incoming PhD student at MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. During her time at WITS. As an intern in CUBES June-August 2022, Natasha was engaged in exploratory research towards her master’s thesis on the implications for planning theory vis-a-vis the intersection of profound disability and informality. She was interested in seeing how individualized conceptions of autonomy are challenged by profound disability, and what examples of interdependent relationality might come into foresight by homing in on examples of it, especially in a living context which is not rigidly defined by individual property rights, ownership and thus hard boundaries. Thanks to the valuable pre-existing network of trust developed over time with Slovo Park’s residents and community leaders by Marie Huchzermeyer and Neil Klug, through their important long-term engagement with upgrading work there, Natasha was able to access the community to explore her research questions broadly. -
Lakshmi Gangamreddypalli
Lakshmi Gangamreddypalli is a Master in City Planning student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Her studies focus on governance, policy, service delivery and infrastructure development in the Global South, particularly in India. Prior to graduate studies, as an architect and urban practitioner, she worked in the areas of urban informality, low-income housing, construction technology for self-build housing, and vernacular architecture and design. During her research internship at CUBES in 2022, she studied the blockages in implementation of the Upgrading of Informal Settlements Programme in Slovo Park through an analysis of the Slovo Park Task Team meetings’ minutes. -
Dr Raffael Beier
Raffael Beier is a postdoctoral researcher who works on housing, displacement, and resettlement. Trained as an urban geographer in Grenoble and Bochum, he holds a joint-PhD from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, The Netherlands, and Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. During his stay at CUBES, he worked on his recently published edited volume “Urban Resettlements in the Global South” (2022, Routledge) and did research on people who rent out or sell their ‘RDP houses’ in Gauteng. -
Dr Temba John Dawson Middelmann
Temba Middelmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Western Cape on the Off-grid Cities project. His research interests include energy transitions, public space, local histories, social cohesion and contestation. He completed his PhD at Wits SoAP on public space and spatial justice, furthering his public space research and writing during a postdoctoral research position at CUBES. Currently based in Canada, Temba is continuing research and writing as well as his visual art through painting, drawing, photography and land art. -
Dr Lené Le Roux
Dr Lené le Roux works in the City of Oklahoma City Planning Department, in the United States, as an associate planner in the Housing and Community Development Division. She holds a PhD in (urban) Geography from the University of Oklahoma, with a Masters Degree in the Built Environment (Housing), and a Professional Degree in Town and Regional Planning from the University of Pretoria (UP). Lené was an intern at CUBES throughout 2020 while conducting her doctoral research in Jo'burg. She assisted with the Faces of the City Seminar Series, which had to be taken online due to the Covid-19 pandemic. She also assisted with CUBES with compiling research that students had carried out on homelessness. My doctoral research was on understanding the configurations of placemaking and place theory in southern cities, by researching the everyday logics, practices and urban systems of car guards, street vendors and security guards as people who live and work on the streets of Jo'burg. -
Dr Jeanne Bouyat
Jeanne Bouyat was first accommodated as a research intern at CUBES in 2015 while she was conducting her Master's research on attitudes towards foreignness among high school learners attending low-income schools in Johannesburg, during which she assisted with updating the PSUG website and coorganising events. During her PhD, she dedicated herself to exploring forms of xenophobia and anti-xenophobia in the schooling institution with a focus on low-income high schools in Johannesburg. She was a member of the PSUG research group between 2016 and 2019, and was regularly hosted as a visiting researcher at CUBES. As of 2023, she is a postdoc at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation (CERT) at the University of Johannesburg, after a period as a postdoc at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) at the University of Oxford. -
Professor Astrid Ley
Astrid Ley is Professor for International Urbanism and course director of the master program Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design (IUSD) at University of Stuttgart. Before she was urban researcher and lecturer at Habitat Unit, TU Berlin and responsible for the cooperation with Wits. She presented at various Faces of the City seminars her research on housing and urban governance. In 2006 CUBES hosted her during her PhD research and with an urban design studio in Bertrams. In 2010 she was visiting researcher at Wits actively involved with the Yeoville Studio. In 2012 she was also involved at CUBES supporting the fundraising and the conceptualizing of its relaunch.