Research Units

The School is has a strong reputation for research, and is the host of two specialised research units: • The Centre for Urbanism and Built

Environment Studies (CUBES) • The South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning

SARChi)

CUBES The Centre for Urbanism and Built Environment Studies (CUBES) is a platform for urban research, learning and civic engagement located in the School of Architecture and Planning. CUBES leads research that considers how urban citizens and marginalised people are affected by the material realities of cities, built environments at different scales, access to urban goods and spaces, and contestations over urban physical and political orders. CUBES values critical reflection on existing practices of development, planning and architecture, which are often at risk of excluding the poor in their quest to maintain order and formalize contemporary cities. CUBES’s three integrated activity areas are: • Grounded research • Education and mentoring • Civic engagement and activism

These activities include institutional and community partnerships, and research programmes that engage students of different degree programmes. Communityoriented City Studios are core activities which link research, engagement/activism and education. CUBES also organises conferences, exhibitions and the weekly Faces of the City Seminar series, run jointly with the NRF Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning, the Gauteng City Region

John Moffat Building SA Architectural Record Nov 1959

Observatory (GCRO) and the Wits City Institute. For more information, see: https://www.wits.ac.za/cubes/

SARChi The South African Research Chair (SARChi) in Spatial Analysis and City Planning is a National Research Foundation funded research chair located in the School of Architecture & Planning. The Chair was established in 2010, and seeks to engage with the challenges of rapid urbanisation in the Global South, and especially the development of large and complex cityregions that pose considerable dilemmas for planning and urban management.

The Chair seeks to undertake research that supports, develops and promotes forms of development planning that will contribute to making cities in poor and middle-income countries more livable, sustainable, efficient

Public lecture; photo by P. Santos

and equitable. In doing so, it undertakes both scholarly and policy research and seeks to build bridges between these two sectors.

The Research Chair also has a host of other activities that include: • contributions to local and international scholarship; • the mentorship and supervision of emerging scholars; • the development of research partnerships with agencies in the public and private sectors; and • the establishment of forums for communication, dialoguing and exchange, that include Urban Labs,

Colloquiums and discussions

For more information, see: https://www.wits.ac.za/sacp/