Locating Spatial Practice Within the Post-Post City

Jhono Bennett

The Bartlett School of Architecture

Supervisors: Professor Peg Rawes & Professor Jane Rendell & Professor Lara Schrijver

South African cities remain among the most highly unequal urban areas in the world. The tacit logics of their designed and built form play a significant role in how these inequalities manifest even after decades of social and political reform that sought to undo the legacy of the Apartheid and colonial systems. The socio-spatial city-making practices that led to these asymmetries were not an impassive by-product of centuries of segregated development; they were conceptualised, drawn, designed, and implemented by built-environment practitioners – individual spatial designers who were socially, historically, politically, technically, and ethically situated in South Africa. This observation highlights an important and only marginally explored dimension of agency between the individual practitioner and their positionality, the disciplines, and the socio-spatial systems. Such inter-personal dynamics require more situated explorations of spatial practice to understand the tacit nature of their multi-scalar relationship. In response to this observation, the dissertation aligns the study’s approach to the growing efforts of Southern scholars in developing more locational and theoretically contextualised forms of urban research and engagement.

The study is positioned at the disciplinary intersection of architecture, urban studies, and art-practice. A situated design-research methodology is being developed to guide this Southern approach creatively, ethically, and iteratively. For instance, the study will work with a community of contemporary local practitioners through a series of ‘engagements’ around the nature of spatial design practice as well as a practiceoriented interrogation of the author’s own work across South Africa over the past decade. Ultimately this inquiry will attempt to locate and reveal the various ‘tacit values’ embedded in ’the how’ of socio-spatially focused post-Apartheid South African spatial design practice. Furthermore, it seeks to contribute an additional partial perspective to the ongoing conversations around Southern Urbanism by developing and documenting a practice-oriented design research methodology that focuses on the situated nature of spatial design in Southern Cities.

Image: Spirit of the Order: Series 2 (Author: Jhono Bennett)